Title: The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain
Author: Twain, Mark
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain" ***
WORKS OF MARK TWAIN ***



                     BY MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL CLEMENS)



PG EDITOR'S NOTE:
This is a compilation of all the works of Mark Twain in the Project
volunteers over a period of many years.  Any of the individual works
may be found in much smaller size than this "entire" file at:


As additional works of Mark Twain become available the present file will
be updated to include them.  The bibliography of Twain by Albert Bigelow
Paine has been used in organizing the major works in this collection in
the order of the date of their first publication; however many of the
short stories, speeches and other shorter works are not in chronologic
order as they were originally included as part of major works of much
different publishing date.
                                        D.W.



THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
MARK TWAIN'S (BURLESQUE) AUTO-BIOGRAPHY
     FIRST ROMANCE.
ROUGHING IT
THE GILDED AGE (with Charles Dudley Warner)
SKETCHES NEW AND OLD
     MY WATCH
     POLITICAL ECONOMY
     THE JUMPING FROG
     JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE
     THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY
     THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY
     A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE
     NIAGARA
     ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS
     TO RAISE POULTRY
     EXPERIENCE OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP
     MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE
     HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK
     THE OFFICE BORE
     JOHNNY GREER
     THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT
     THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER
     DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY
     THE JUDGES "SPIRITED WOMAN"
     INFORMATION WANTED
     SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS
     MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP
     A FASHION ITEM
     RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT
     A FINE OLD MAN
     SCIENCE vs. LUCK
     THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
     MR. BLOKE'S ITEM
     A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE
     PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT
     AFTER-DINNER SPEECH
     LIONIZING MURDERERS
     A NEW CRIME
     A CURIOUS DREAM
     A TRUE STORY
     THE SIAMESE TWINS
     SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON
     A GHOST STORY
     THE CAPITOLINE VENUS
     SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE
     JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK
     HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER
     THE PETRIFIED MAN
     MY BLOODY MASSACRE
     THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT
     CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS
     AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN
     "AFTER" JENKINS
     ABOUT BARBERS
     "PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND
     THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECANT RESIGNATION
     HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
     HONORED AS A CURIOSITY
     FIRST INTERVIEW KITH ARTEMUS WARD
     CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS
     THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"
     THE WIDOW'S PROTEST
     THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST
     CURING A COLD
     A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION
     RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR
     A MYSTERIOUS VISIT
THE CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR AND OTHER WHIMSICAL SKETCHES
     THE CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR
     A MEMORY
     INTRODUCTORY TO "MEMORANDA".
     ABOUT SMELLS
     A COUPLE OF SAD EXPERIENCES
     DAN MURPHY
     THE "TOURNAMENT" IN A.D. 1870
     CURIOUS RELIC FOR SALE
     A REMINISCENCE OF THE BACK SETTLEMENTS
     A ROYAL COMPLIMENT
     THE APPROACHING EPIDEMIC
     THE TONE-IMPARTING COMMITTEE
     OUR PRECIOUS LUNATIC
     THE EUROPEAN WAR
     THE WILD MAN INTERVIEWED
     LAST WORDS OF GREAT MEN
1601--CONVERSATION AT THE SOCIAL FIRESIDE OF THE TUDORS
THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CONNECTICUT
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON AND OTHER STORIES
     THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON
     ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING
     ABOUT MAGNANIMOUS-INCIDENT LITERATURE
          THE GRATEFUL POODLE
          THE BENEVOLENT AUTHOR
          THE GRATEFUL HUSBAND
     PUNCH, BROTHERS, PUNCH
     THE GREAT REVOLUTION IN PITCAIRN
     THE CANVASSER'S TALE
     AN ENCOUNTER WITH AN INTERVIEWER
     PARIS NOTES
     LEGEND OF SAGENFELD, IN GERMANY
     SPEECH ON THE BABIES
     SPEECH ON THE WEATHER
     CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
     ROGERS
SOME RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION
THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT
A TRAMP ABROAD
THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER
LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT
THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT
EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY
IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY
FENNIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENCES
ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET
     WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
     A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
TOM SAWYER ABROAD
THE TRAGEDY OF PUDD'NHEAD WILSON
THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS
PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC
TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE
FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR, A JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD
THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG AND OTHER STORIES
     THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG
     MY FIRST LIE, AND HOW I GOT OUT OF IT
     THE ESQUIMAUX MAIDEN'S ROMANCE
     CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY
     IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?
     MY DEBUT AS A LITERARY PERSON
     AT THE APPETITE-CURE
     CONCERNING THE JEWS
     FROM THE 'LONDON TIMES' OF 1904
     ABOUT PLAY-ACTING
     TRAVELLING WITH A REFORMER
     DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES
     LUCK
     THE CAPTAIN'S STORY
     STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA
     MEISTERSCHAFT
     MY BOYHOOD DREAMS
          TO THE ABOVE OLD PEOPLE
     IN MEMORIAM--OLIVIA SUSAN CLEMENS
WHAT IS MAN AND OTHER ESSAYS
     WHAT IS MAN?
     THE DEATH OF JEAN
     THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE
     HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK
     THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION
     A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY
     SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY
     AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER
     WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
     ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT
     A SIMPLIFIED ALPHABET
     AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY
     CONCERNING TOBACCO
     TAMING THE BICYCLE
     IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND OTHER STORIES
     THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
     A FABLE
     HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY
     THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM
A DOUBLE BARRELED DETECTIVE
THE $30,000 BEQUEST AND OTHER STORIES
      THE $30,000 BEQUEST
      A DOG'S TALE
      WAS IT HEAVEN?  OR HELL?
      A CURE FOR THE BLUES
      THE ENEMY CONQUERED; OR, LOVE TRIUMPHANT
      THE CALIFORNIAN'S TALE
      A HELPLESS SITUATION
      A TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION
      EDWARD MILLS AND GEORGE BENTON:  A TALE
      THE FIVE BOONS OF LIFE
      THE FIRST WRITING-MACHINES
      ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER
      ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR
      A BURLESQUE BIOGRAPHY
      HOW TO TELL A STORY
      GENERAL WASHINGTON'S NEGRO BODY-SERVANT
      WIT INSPIRATIONS OF THE "TWO-YEAR-OLDS"
      AN ENTERTAINING ARTICLE
      A LETTER TO THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY
      AMENDED OBITUARIES
      A MONUMENT TO ADAM
      A HUMANE WORD FROM SATAN
      INTRODUCTION TO "THE NEW GUIDE OF THE
      CONVERSATION IN PORTUGUESE AND ENGLISH"
      ADVICE TO LITTLE GIRLS
      POST-MORTEM POETRY
      THE DANGER OF LYING IN BED
      PORTRAIT OF KING WILLIAM III
      DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD?
      EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY
      EVE'S DIARY
A HORSE'S TALE
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN
IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?
ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING
GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN
HOW TO TELL A STORY AND OTHER STORIES
     HOW TO TELL A STORY
          THE WOUNDED SOLDIER
          THE GOLDEN ARM
     MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN
     THE INVALIDS STORY
MARK TWAIN'S SPEECHES
     INTRODUCTION
     PREFACE
     THE STORY OF A SPEECH
     PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS
     COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES
     BOOKS, AUTHORS, AND HATS
     DEDICATION SPEECH
     DIE SCHRECKEN DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHE.
     THE HORRORS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE
     GERMAN FOR THE HUNGARIANS
     A NEW GERMAN WORD
     UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM
     THE WEATHER
     THE BABIES
     OUR CHILDREN AND GREAT DISCOVERIES
     EDUCATING THEATRE-GOERS
     THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE
     POETS AS POLICEMEN
     PUDD'NHEAD WILSON DRAMATIZED
     DALY THEATRE
     THE DRESS OF CIVILIZED WOMAN
     DRESS REFORM AND COPYRIGHT
     COLLEGE GIRLS
     GIRLS
     THE LADIES
     WOMAN'S PRESS CLUB
     VOTES FOR WOMEN
     WOMAN-AN OPINION
     ADVICE TO GIRLS
     TAXES AND MORALS
     TAMMANY AND CROKER
     MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION
     MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT
     CHINA AND THE PHILIPPINES
     THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL MORALS
     LAYMAN'S SERMON
     UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT SOCIETY
     PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
     EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP
     COURAGE
     THE DINNER TO MR. CHOATE
     ON STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE
     HENRY M. STANLEY
     DINNER TO MR. JEROME
     HENRY IRVING
     DINNER TO HAMILTON W. MABIE
     INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY
     DINNER TO WHITELAW REID
     ROGERS AND RAILROADS
     THE OLD-FASHIONED PRINTER
     SOCIETY OF AMERICAN AUTHORS
     READING-ROOM OPENING
     LITERATURE
     DISAPPEARANCE OF LITERATURE
     THE NEW YORK PRESS CLUB DINNER
     THE ALPHABET AND SIMPLIFIED SPELLING
     SPELLING AND PICTURES
     BOOKS AND BURGLARS
     AUTHORS' CLUB
     BOOKSELLERS
     "MARK TWAIN's FIRST APPEARANCE"
     MORALS AND MEMORY
     QUEEN VICTORIA
     JOAN OF ARC
     ACCIDENT INSURANCE--ETC.
     OSTEOPATHY
     WATER-SUPPLY
     MISTAKEN IDENTITY
     CATS AND CANDY
     OBITUARY POETRY
     CIGARS AND TOBACCO
     BILLIARDS
     THE UNION RIGHT OR WRONG?
     AN IDEAL FRENCH ADDRESS
     STATISTICS
     GALVESTON ORPHAN BAZAAR
     SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE
     CHARITY AND ACTORS
     RUSSIAN REPUBLIC
     RUSSIAN SUFFERERS
     WATTERSON AND TWAIN AS REBELS
     ROBERT FULTON FUND
     FULTON DAY, JAMESTOWN
     LOTOS CLUB DINNER IN HONOR OF MARK TWAIN
     COPYRIGHT
     IN AID OF THE BLIND
     DR. MARK TWAIN, FARMEOPATH
     MISSOURI UNIVERSITY SPEECH
     BUSINESS
     CARNEGIE THE BENEFACTOR
     ON POETRY, VERACITY, AND SUICIDE
     WELCOME HOME
     AN UNDELIVERED SPEECH
     SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY
     TO THE WHITEFRIARS
     THE ASCOT GOLD CUP
     THE SAVAGE CLUB DINNER
     GENERAL MILES AND THE DOG
     WHEN IN DOUBT, TELL THE TRUTH
     THE DAY WE CELEBRATE
     INDEPENDENCE DAY
     AMERICANS AND THE ENGLISH
     ABOUT LONDON
     PRINCETON
     THE ST. LOUIS HARBOR-BOAT "MARK TWAIN"
     SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1853-1910
     ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE



               THE COMPLETE PROJECT GUTENBERG MARK TWAIN



INNOCENTS ABROAD

by Mark Twain


[From an 1869--1st Edition]



                                CONTENTS


                                CHAPTER I.
Popular Talk of the Excursion--Programme of the Trip--Duly Ticketed for
the Excursion--Defection of the Celebrities

                               CHAPTER II.
Grand Preparations--An Imposing Dignitary--The European Exodus
--Mr. Blucher's Opinion--Stateroom No. 10--The Assembling of the Clans
--At Sea at Last

                               CHAPTER III.
"Averaging" the Passengers--Far, far at Sea.--Tribulation among the
Patriarchs--Seeking Amusement under Difficulties--Five Captains in the
Ship

                               CHAPTER IV.
The Pilgrims Becoming Domesticated--Pilgrim Life at Sea
--"Horse-Billiards"--The "Synagogue"--The Writing School--Jack's "Journal"
--The "Q. C. Club"--The Magic Lantern--State Ball on Deck--Mock Trials
--Charades--Pilgrim Solemnity--Slow Music--The Executive Officer Delivers
an Opinion

                                CHAPTER V.
Summer in Mid-Atlantic--An Eccentric Moon--Mr. Blucher Loses Confidence
--The Mystery of "Ship Time"--The Denizens of the Deep--"Land Hoh"
--The First Landing on a Foreign Shore--Sensation among the Natives
--Something about the Azores Islands--Blucher's Disastrous Dinner
--The Happy Result

                               CHAPTER VI.
Solid Information--A Fossil Community--Curious Ways and Customs
--JesuitHumbuggery--Fantastic Pilgrimizing--Origin of the Russ Pavement
--Squaring Accounts with the Fossils--At Sea Again

                               CHAPTER VII.
A Tempest at Night--Spain and Africa on Exhibition--Greeting a Majestic
Stranger--The Pillars of Hercules--The Rock of Gibraltar--Tiresome
Repetition--"The Queen's Chair"--Serenity Conquered--Curiosities of
the Secret Caverns--Personnel of Gibraltar--Some Odd Characters
--A Private Frolic in Africa--Bearding a Moorish Garrison (without loss
of life)--Vanity Rebuked--Disembarking in the Empire of Morocco

                              CHAPTER VIII.
The Ancient City of Tangier, Morocco--Strange Sights--A Cradle of
Antiquity--We become Wealthy--How they Rob the Mail in Africa--The Danger
of being Opulent in Morocco

                               CHAPTER IX.
A Pilgrim--in Deadly Peril--How they Mended the Clock--Moorish
Punishments for Crime--Marriage Customs--Looking Several ways for Sunday
--Shrewd, Practice of Mohammedan Pilgrims--Reverence for Cats--Bliss of
being a Consul-General

                                CHAPTER X.
Fourth of July at Sea--Mediterranean Sunset--The "Oracle" is Delivered
of an Opinion--Celebration Ceremonies--The Captain's Speech--France in
Sight--The Ignorant Native--In Marseilles--Another Blunder--Lost in
the Great City--Found Again--A Frenchy Scene

                               CHAPTER XI.
Getting used to it--No Soap--Bill of Fare, Table d'hote--"An American
Sir"--A Curious Discovery--The "Pilgrim" Bird--Strange Companionship
--A Grave of the Living--A Long Captivity--Some of Dumas' Heroes--Dungeon
of the Famous "Iron Mask."

                               CHAPTXR XII.
A Holiday Flight through France--Summer Garb of the Landscape--Abroad
on the Great Plains--Peculiarities of French Cars--French Politeness
American Railway Officials--"Twenty Mnutes to Dinner!"--Why there
are no Accidents--The "Old Travellers"--Still on the Wing--Paris at
Last----French Order and Quiet--Place of the Bastile--Seeing the Sights
--A Barbarous Atrocity--Absurd Billiards

                              CHAPTER XIII.
More Trouble--Monsieur Billfinger--Re-Christening the Frenchman--In the
Clutches of a Paris Guide--The International Exposition--Fine Military
Review--Glimpse of the Emperor Napoleon and the Sultan of Turkey

                               CHAPTER XIV.
The Venerable Cathedral of Notre-Dame--Jean Sanspeur's Addition
--Treasures and Sacred Relics--The Legend of the Cross--The Morgue--The
Outrageious 'Can-Can'--Blondin Aflame--The Louvre Palace--The Great Park
--Showy Pageantry--Preservation of Noted Things

                               CHAPTER XV.
French National Burying--Ground--Among the Great Dead--The Shrine of
Disappointed Love--The Story of Abelard and Heloise--"English Spoken
Here"--"American Drinks Compounded Here"--Imperial Honors to an
American--The Over-estimated Grisette--Departure from Paris--A Deliberate
Opinion Concerning the Comeliness of American Women

                               CHAPTER XVI.
Versailles--Paradise Regained--A Wonderful Park--Paradise Lost
--Napoleonic Strategy

                              CHAPTER XVII.
War--The American Forces Victorious--" Home Again"--Italy in Sight
The "City of Palaces"--Beauty of the Genoese Women--The "Stub-Hunters"
--Among the Palaces--Gifted Guide--Church Magnificence--"Women not
Admitted"--How the Genoese Live--Massive Architecture--A Scrap of Ancient
History--Graves for 60,000

                              CHAPTER XVIII.
Flying Through Italy--Marengo--First Glimpse of the Famous Cathedral
--Description of some of its Wonders--A Horror Carved in Stone----An
Unpleasant Adventure--A Good Man--A Sermon from the Tomb--Tons of Gold
and Silver--Some More Holy Relics--Solomon's Temple

                               CHAPTER XIX
"Do You Wiz zo Haut can be?"--La Scala--Petrarch and Laura--Lucrezia
Borgia--Ingenious Frescoes--Ancient Roman Amphitheatre--A Clever
Delusion--Distressing Billiards--The Chief Charm of European Life--An
Italian Bath--Wanted: Soap--Crippled French--Mutilated English--The Most
Celebrated Painting in the World--Amateur Raptures--Uninspired Critics
--Anecdote--A Wonderful Echo--A Kiss for a Franc

                                CHAPTER XX
Rural Italy by Rail--Fumigated, According to Law--The Sorrowing
Englishman--Night by the Lake of Como--The Famous Lake--Its Scenery
--Como compared with Tahoe--Meeting a Shipmate

                               CHAPTER XXI.
The Pretty Lago di Lecco--A Carriage Drive in the Country--Astonishing
Sociability in a Coachman--Sleepy Land--Bloody Shrines--The Heart and
Home of Priestcraft--A Thrilling Mediaeval Romance--The Birthplace of
Harlequin--Approaching Venice

                              CHAPTER XXII.
Night in Venice--The "Gay Gondolier"--The Grand Fete by Moonlight
--The Notable Sights of Venice--The Mother of the Republics Desolate

                              CHANTER XXIII.
The Famous Gondola--The Gondola in an Unromantic Aspect--The Great Square
of St. Mark and the Winged Lion--Snobs, at Home and Abroad--Sepulchres of
the Great Dead--A Tilt at the "Old Masters"--A Contraband Guide
--The Conspiracy--Moving Again

                              CHAPTER XXIV.
Down Through Italy by Rail--Idling in Florence--Dante and Galileo--An
Ungrateful City--Dazzling Generosity--Wonderful Mosaics--The Historical
Arno--Lost Again--Found Again, but no Fatted Calf Ready--The Leaning
Tower of Pisa--The Ancient Duomo--The Old Original First Pendulum that
Ever Swung--An Enchanting Echo--A New Holy Sepulchre--A Relic of
Antiquity--A Fallen Republic--At Leghorn--At Home Again, and Satisfied,
on Board the Ship--Our Vessel an Object of Grave Suspicion--Garibaldi
Visited--Threats of Quarantine

                               CHAPTER XXV.
The Works of Bankruptcy--Railway Grandeur--How to Fill an Empty
Treasury--The Sumptuousness of Mother Church--Ecclesiastical Splendor
--Magnificence and Misery--General Execration--More Magnificence
A Good Word for the Priests--Civita Vecchia the Dismal--Off for Rome

                              CHAPTER XXVI.
The Modern Roman on His Travels--The Grandeur of St. Peter's--Holy Relics
--Grand View from the Dome--The Holy Inquisition--Interesting Old Monkish
Frauds--The Ruined Coliseum--The Coliseum in the Days of its Prime
--Ancient Playbill of a Coliseum Performance--A Roman Newspaper Criticism
1700 Years Old

                              CHAPTER XXVII.
"Butchered to Make a Roman Holiday"--The Man who Never Complained
--An Exasperating Subject--Asinine Guides--The Roman Catacombs
The Saint Whose Fervor Burst his Ribs--The Miracle of the Bleeding Heart
--The Legend of Ara Coeli

                             CHAPTER XXVIII.
Picturesque Horrors--The Legend of Brother Thomas--Sorrow Scientifically
Analyzed--A Festive Company of the Dead--The Great Vatican Museum
Artist Sins of Omission--The Rape of the Sabines--Papal Protection of
Art--High Price of "Old Masters"--Improved Scripture--Scale of Rank
of the Holy Personages in Rome--Scale of Honors Accorded Them
--Fossilizing--Away for Naples

                              CHAPTER XXIX.
Naples--In Quarantine at Last--Annunciation--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius--A
Two Cent Community--The Black Side of Neapolitan Character--Monkish
Miracles--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued--The Stranger and the
Hackman--Night View of Naples from the Mountain-side---Ascent of Mount
Vesuvius Continued

                               CHAPTER XXX.
Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued--Beautiful View at Dawn--Less
Beautiful in the Back Streets--Ascent of Vesuvius Continued--Dwellings a
Hundred Feet High--A Motley Procession--Bill of Fare for a Peddler's
Breakfast--Princely Salaries--Ascent of Vesuvius Continued--An Average of
Prices--The wonderful "Blue Grotto"--Visit to Celebrated Localities in
the Bay of Naples--The Poisoned "Grotto of the Dog"--A Petrified Sea of
Lava--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued--The Summit Reached--Description
of the Crater--Descent of Vesuvius

                              CHAPTER XXXI.
The Buried City of Pompeii--How Dwellings Appear that have been
Unoccupied for Eighteen hundred years--The Judgment Seat--Desolation--The
Footprints of the Departed--"No Women Admitted"--Theatres, Bakeshops,
Schools--Skeletons preserved by the Ashes and Cinders--The Brave Martyr
to Duty--Rip Van Winkle--The Perishable Nature of Fame

                              CHAPTER XXXII.
At Sea Once More--The Pilgrims all Well--Superb Stromboli--Sicily by
Moonlight--Scylla and Charybdis--The "Oracle" at Fault--Skirting the
Isles of Greece Ancient Athens--Blockaded by Quarantine and Refused
Permission to Enter--Running the Blockade--A Bloodless Midnight
Adventure--Turning Robbers from Necessity--Attempt to Carry the Acropolis
by Storm--We Fail--Among the Glories of the Past--A World of Ruined
Sculpture--A Fairy Vision--Famous Localities--Retreating in Good Order
--Captured by the Guards--Travelling in Military State--Safe on Board
Again

                             CHAPTER XXXIII.
Modern Greece--Fallen Greatness--Sailing Through the Archipelago and the
Dardanelles--Footprints of History--The First Shoddy Contractor of whom
History gives any Account--Anchored Before Constantinople--Fantastic
Fashions--The Ingenious Goose-Rancher--Marvelous Cripples--The Great
Mosque--The Thousand and One Columns--The Grand Bazaar of Stamboul

                              CHAPTER XXXIV.
Scarcity of Morals and Whiskey--Slave-Girl Market Report--Commercial
Morality at a Discount--The Slandered Dogs of Constantinople
--Questionable Delights of Newspaperdom in Turkey--Ingenious Italian
Journalism--No More Turkish Lunches Desired--The Turkish Bath Fraud
--The Narghileh Fraud--Jackplaned by a Native--The Turkish Coffee Fraud

                              CHAPTER XXXV.
Sailing Through the Bosporus and the Black Sea--"Far-Away Moses"
--Melancholy Sebastopol--Hospitably Received in Russia--Pleasant English
People--Desperate Fighting--Relic Hunting--How Travellers Form "Cabinets"

                              CHAPTER XXXVI.
Nine Thousand Miles East--Imitation American Town in Russia--Gratitude
that Came Too Late--To Visit the Autocrat of All the Russias

                             CHAPTER XXXVII.
Summer Home of Royalty--Practising for the Dread Ordeal--Committee on
Imperial Address--Reception by the Emperor and Family--Dresses of the
Imperial Party--Concentrated Power--Counting the Spoons--At the Grand
Duke's--A Charming Villa--A Knightly Figure--The Grand Duchess--A Grand
Ducal Breakfast--Baker's Boy, the Famine-Breeder--Theatrical Monarchs a
Fraud--Saved as by Fire--The Governor--General's Visit to the Ship
--Official "Style"--Aristocratic Visitors--"Munchausenizing" with Them
--Closing Ceremonies

                             CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Return to Constantinople--We Sail for Asia--The Sailors Burlesque the
Imperial Visitors--Ancient Smyrna--The "Oriental Splendor" Fraud
--The "Biblical Crown of Life"--Pilgrim Prophecy-Savans--Sociable
Armenian Girls--A Sweet Reminiscence--"The Camels are Coming, Ha-ha!"

                              CHAPTER XXXIX.
Smyrna's Lions--The Martyr Polycarp--The "Seven Churches"--Remains of the
Six Smyrnas--Mysterious Oyster Mine Oysters--Seeking Scenery--A Millerite
Tradition--A Railroad Out of its Sphere

                               CHAPTER XL.
Journeying Toward Ancient Ephesus--Ancient Ayassalook--The Villanous
Donkey--A Fantastic Procession--Bygone Magnificence--Fragments of
History--The Legend of the Seven Sleepers

                               CHAPTER XLI.
Vandalism Prohibited--Angry Pilgrims--Approaching Holy Land!--The "Shrill
Note of Preparation"--Distress About Dragomans and Transportation
--The "Long Route" Adopted--In Syria--Something about Beirout--A Choice
Specimen of a Greek "Ferguson"--Outfits--Hideous Horseflesh--Pilgrim
"Style"--What of Aladdin's Lamp?

                              CHAPTER XLII.
"Jacksonville," in the Mountains of Lebanon--Breakfasting above a Grand
Panorama--The Vanished City--The Peculiar Steed, "Jericho"--The Pilgrims
Progress--Bible Scenes--Mount Hermon, Joshua's Battle Fields, etc.
--The Tomb of Noah--A Most Unfortunate People

                              CHAPTER XLIII.
Patriarchal Customs--Magnificent Baalbec--Description of the Ruins
--Scribbling Smiths and Joneses--Pilgrim Fidelity to the Letter of the Law
--The Revered Fountain of Baalam's Ass

                              CHAPTER XLIV.
Extracts from Note-Book--Mahomet's Paradise and the Bible's--Beautiful
Damascus the Oldest City on Earth--Oriental Scenes within the Curious Old
City--Damascus Street Car--The Story of St. Paul--The "Street called
Straight"--Mahomet's Tomb and St. George's--The Christian Massacre
--Mohammedan Dread of Pollution--The House of Naaman
--The Horrors of Leprosy

                               CHAPTER XLV.
The Cholera by way of Variety--Hot--Another Outlandish Procession--Pen
and-Ink Photograph of "Jonesborough," Syria--Tomb of Nimrod, the Mighty
Hunter--The Stateliest Ruin of All--Stepping over the Borders of
Holy-Land--Bathing in the Sources of Jordan--More "Specimen" Hunting
--Ruins of Cesarea--Philippi--"On This Rock Will I Build my Church"--The
People the Disciples Knew--The Noble Steed "Baalbec"--Sentimental Horse
Idolatry of the Arabs

                              CHAPTER XLVI.
Dan--Bashan--Genessaret--A Notable Panorama--Smallness of Palestine
--Scraps of History--Character of the Country--Bedouin Shepherds--Glimpses
of the Hoary Past--Mr. Grimes's Bedouins--A Battle--Ground of Joshua
--That Soldier's Manner of Fighting--Barak's Battle--The Necessity of
Unlearning Some Things--Desolation

                              CHAPTER XLVII.
"Jack's Adventure"--Joseph's Pit--The Story of Joseph--Joseph's
Magnanimity and Esau's--The Sacred Lake of Genessaret--Enthusiasm of the
Pilgrims--Why We did not Sail on Galilee--About Capernaum--Concerning the
Saviour's Brothers and Sisters--Journeying toward Magdela

                             CHAPTER XLVIII.
Curious Specimens of Art and Architecture--Public Reception of the
Pilgrims--Mary Magdalen's House--Tiberias and its Queer Inhabitants
--The Sacred Sea of Galilee--Galilee by Night

                              CHAPTER XLIX.
The Ancient Baths--Ye Apparition--A Distinguished Panorama--The Last
Battle of the Crusades--The Story of the Lord of Kerak--Mount Tabor
--What one Sees from its Top--Memory of a Wonderful Garden--The House of
Deborah the Prophetess

                                CHAPTER L.
Toward Nazareth--Bitten By a Camel--Grotto of the Annunciation, Nazareth
--Noted Grottoes in General--Joseph's Workshop--A Sacred Bowlder
--The Fountain of the Virgin--Questionable Female Beauty
--Literary Curiosities

                               CHAPTER LI.
Boyhood of the Saviour--Unseemly Antics of Sober Pilgrims--Home of the
Witch of Endor--Nain--Profanation--A Popular Oriental Picture--Biblical
Metaphors Becoming steadily More Intelligible--The Shuuem Miracle
--The "Free Son of The Desert"--Ancient Jezrael--Jehu's Achievements
--Samaria and its Famous Siege

                               CHAPTER LII
Curious Remnant of the Past--Shechem--The Oldest "First Family" on Earth
--The Oldest Manuscript Extant--The Genuine Tomb of Joseph--Jacob's Well
--Shiloh--Camping with the Arabs--Jacob's Ladder--More Desolation
--Ramah, Beroth, the Tomb of Samuel, The Fountain of Beira--Impatience
--Approaching Jerusalem--The Holy City in Sight--Noting Its Prominent
Features--Domiciled Within the Sacred Walls

                              CHAPTER LIII.
"The Joy of the Whole Earth"--Description of Jerusalem--Church of the
Holy Sepulchre--The Stone of Unction--The Grave of Jesus--Graves of
Nicodemus and Joseph of Armattea--Places of the Apparition--The Finding
of the There Crosses----The Legend--Monkish Impostures--The Pillar of
Flagellation--The Place of a Relic--Godfrey's Sword--"The Bonds of
Christ"--"The Center of the Earth"--Place whence the Dust was taken of
which Adam was Made--Grave of Adam--The Martyred Soldier--The Copper
Plate that was on the Cross--The Good St. Helena--Place of the Division
of the Garments--St. Dimas, the Penitent Thief--The Late Emperor
Maximilian's Contribution--Grotto wherein the Crosses were Found, and the
Nails, and the Crown of Thorns--Chapel of the Mocking--Tomb of
Melchizedek--Graves of Two Renowned Crusaders--The Place of the
Crucifixion

                               CHAPTER LIV.
The "Sorrowful Way"--The Legend of St. Veronica's Handkerchief
--An Illustrious Stone--House of the Wandering Jew--The Tradition of the
Wanderer--Solomon's Temple--Mosque of Omar--Moslem Traditions--"Women not
Admitted"--The Fate of a Gossip--Turkish Sacred Relics--Judgment Seat of
David and Saul--Genuine Precious Remains of Solomon's Temple--Surfeited
with Sights--The Pool of Siloam--The Garden of Gethsemane and Other
Sacred Localities

                               CHAPTER LV.
Rebellion in the Camp--Charms of Nomadic Life--Dismal Rumors--En Route
for Jericho and The Dead Sea--Pilgrim Strategy--Bethany and the Dwelling
of Lazarus--"Bedouins!"--Ancient Jericho--Misery--The Night March
--The Dead Sea--An Idea of What a "Wilderness" in Palestine is--The Holy
hermits of Mars Saba--Good St. Saba--Women not Admitted--Buried from the
World for all Time--Unselfish Catholic Benevolence--Gazelles--The Plain
of the Shepherds--Birthplace of the Saviour, Bethlehem--Church of the
Nativity--Its Hundred Holy Places--The Famous "Milk" Grotto--Tradition
--Return to Jerusalem--Exhausted

                               CHAPTER LVI.
Departure from Jerusalem--Samson--The Plain of Sharon--Arrival at Joppa
--Horse of Simon the Tanner--The Long Pilgrimage Ended--Character of
Palestine Scenery--The Curse

                              CHAPTER LVII.
The Happiness of being at Sea once more--"Home" as it is in a Pleasure
Ship--"Shaking Hands" with the Vessel--Jack in Costume--His Father's
Parting Advice--Approaching Egypt--Ashore in Alexandria--A Deserved
Compliment for the Donkeys--Invasion of the Lost Tribes of America--End
of the Celebrated "Jaffa Colony"--Scenes in Grand Cairo--Shepheard's
Hotel Contrasted with a Certain American Hotel--Preparing for the
Pyramids

                              CHAPTER LVIII.
"Recherche" Donkeys--A Wild Ride--Specimens of Egyptian Modesty--Moses in
the Bulrushes--Place where the Holy Family Sojourned--Distant view of the
Pyramids--A Nearer View--The Ascent--Superb View from the top of the
Pyramid--"Backsheesh! Backsheesh!"--An Arab Exploit--In the Bowels of the
Pyramid--Strategy--Reminiscence of "Holiday's Hill"--Boyish Exploit--The
Majestic Sphynx--Things the Author will not Tell--Grand Old Egypt

                               CHAPTER LIX.
Going Home--A Demoralized Note-Book--A Boy's Diary--Mere Mention of Old
Spain--Departure from Cadiz--A Deserved Rebuke--The Beautiful Madeiras
--Tabooed--In the Delightful Bermudas--An English Welcome--Good-by to
"Our Friends the Bermudians"--Packing Trunks for Home--Our First
Accident--The Long Cruise Drawing to a Close--At Home--Amen

                               CHAPTER LX.
Thankless Devotion--A Newspaper Valedictory--Conclusion



                                 PREFACE

This book is a record of a pleasure trip.  If it were a record of a
solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that
profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper
to works of that kind, and withal so attractive.  Yet notwithstanding it
is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to
the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked
at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in
those countries before him.  I make small pretense of showing anyone how
he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea--other books do
that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.

I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of
travel-writing that may be charged against me--for I think I have seen with
impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether
wisely or not.

In this volume I have used portions of letters which I wrote for the
Daily Alta California, of San Francisco, the proprietors of that journal
having waived their rights and given me the necessary permission.  I have
also inserted portions of several letters written for the New York
Tribune and the New York Herald.

THE AUTHOR.
SAN FRANCISCO.



CHAPTER I.

For months the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was
chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at
countless firesides.  It was a novelty in the way of excursions--its like
had not been thought of before, and it compelled that interest which
attractive novelties always command.  It was to be a picnic on a gigantic
scale.  The participants in it, instead of freighting an ungainly steam
ferry--boat with youth and beauty and pies and doughnuts, and paddling up
some obscure creek to disembark upon a grassy lawn and wear themselves
out with a long summer day's laborious frolicking under the impression
that it was fun, were to sail away in a great steamship with flags flying
and cannon pealing, and take a royal holiday beyond the broad ocean in
many a strange clime and in many a land renowned in history! They were to
sail for months over the breezy Atlantic and the sunny Mediterranean;
they were to scamper about the decks by day, filling the ship with shouts
and laughter--or read novels and poetry in the shade of the smokestacks,
or watch for the jelly-fish and the nautilus over the side, and the
shark, the whale, and other strange monsters of the deep; and at night
they were to dance in the open air, on the upper deck, in the midst of a
ballroom that stretched from horizon to horizon, and was domed by the
bending heavens and lighted by no meaner lamps than the stars and the
magnificent moon--dance, and promenade, and smoke, and sing, and make
love, and search the skies for constellations that never associate with
the "Big Dipper" they were so tired of; and they were to see the ships of
twenty navies--the customs and costumes of twenty curious peoples--the
great cities of half a world--they were to hob-nob with nobility and hold
friendly converse with kings and princes, grand moguls, and the anointed
lords of mighty empires! It was a brave conception; it was the offspring
of a most ingenious brain.  It was well advertised, but it hardly needed
it: the bold originality, the extraordinary character, the seductive
nature, and the vastness of the enterprise provoked comment everywhere
and advertised it in every household in the land.  Who could read the
program of the excursion without longing to make one of the party?  I will
insert it here.  It is almost as good as a map.  As a text for this book,
nothing could be better:

                   EXCURSION TO THE HOLY LAND, EGYPT,
      THE CRIMEA, GREECE, AND INTERMEDIATE POINTS OF INTEREST.
                     BROOKLYN, February 1st, 1867

       The undersigned will make an excursion as above during the coming
     season, and begs to submit to you the following programme:

       A first-class steamer, to be under his own command, and capable of
     accommodating at least one hundred and fifty cabin passengers, will
     be selected, in which will be taken a select company, numbering not
     more than   three-fourths of the ship's capacity.  There is good
     reason to believe that this company can be easily made up in this
     immediate vicinity, of mutual friends and acquaintances.

       The steamer will be provided with every necessary comfort,
     including library and musical instruments.

       An experienced physician will be on board.

       Leaving New York about June 1st, a middle and pleasant route will
     be taken across the Atlantic, and passing through the group of
     Azores, St. Michael will be reached in about ten days.  A day or two
     will be spent here, enjoying the fruit and wild scenery of these
     islands, and the voyage continued, and Gibraltar reached in three or
     four days.

       A day or two will be spent here in looking over the wonderful
     subterraneous fortifications, permission to visit these galleries
     being readily obtained.

       From Gibraltar, running along the coasts of Spain and France,
     Marseilles will be reached in three days.  Here ample time will be
     given not only to look over the city, which was founded six hundred
     years before the Christian era, and its artificial port, the finest
     of the kind in the Mediterranean, but to visit Paris during the
     Great Exhibition; and the beautiful city of Lyons, lying
     intermediate, from the heights of which, on a clear day, Mont Blanc
     and the Alps can be distinctly seen.  Passengers who may wish to
     extend the time at Paris can do so, and, passing down through
     Switzerland, rejoin the steamer at Genoa.

       From Marseilles to Genoa is a run of one night.  The excursionists
     will have an opportunity to look over this, the "magnificent city of
     palaces," and visit the birthplace of Columbus, twelve miles off,
     over a beautiful road built by Napoleon I.  From this point,
     excursions may be made to Milan, Lakes Como and Maggiore, or to
     Milan, Verona (famous for its extraordinary fortifications), Padua,
     and Venice.  Or, if passengers desire to visit Parma (famous for
     Correggio's frescoes) and Bologna, they can by rail go on to
     Florence, and rejoin the steamer at Leghorn, thus spending about
     three weeks amid the cities most famous for art in Italy.

       From Genoa the run to Leghorn will be made along the coast in one
     night, and time appropriated to this point in which to visit
     Florence, its palaces and galleries; Pisa, its cathedral and
     "Leaning Tower," and Lucca and its baths, and Roman amphitheater;
     Florence, the most remote, being distant by rail about sixty miles.

       From Leghorn to Naples (calling at Civita Vecchia to land any who
     may prefer to go to Rome from that point), the distance will be made
     in about thirty-six hours; the route will lay along the coast of
     Italy, close by Caprera, Elba, and Corsica.  Arrangements have been
     made to take on board at Leghorn a pilot for Caprera, and, if
     practicable, a call will be made there to visit the home of
     Garibaldi.

       Rome [by rail], Herculaneum, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Vergil's tomb, and
     possibly the ruins of Paestum can be visited, as well as the
     beautiful surroundings of Naples and its charming bay.

       The next point of interest will be Palermo, the most beautiful
     city of Sicily, which will be reached in one night from Naples.  A
     day will be spent here, and leaving in the evening, the course will
     be taken towards Athens.

       Skirting along the north coast of Sicily, passing through the
     group of Aeolian Isles, in sight of Stromboli and Vulcania, both
     active volcanoes, through the Straits of Messina, with "Scylla" on
     the one hand and "Charybdis" on the other, along the east coast of
     Sicily, and in sight of Mount Etna, along the south coast of Italy,
     the west and south coast of Greece, in sight of ancient Crete, up
     Athens Gulf, and into the Piraeus, Athens will be reached in two and
     a half or three days.  After tarrying here awhile, the Bay of
     Salamis will be crossed, and a day given to Corinth, whence the
     voyage will be continued to Constantinople, passing on the way
     through the Grecian Archipelago, the Dardanelles, the Sea of
     Marmora, and the mouth of the Golden Horn, and arriving in about
     forty-eight hours from Athens.

       After leaving Constantinople, the way will be taken out through
     the beautiful Bosphorus, across the Black Sea to Sebastopol and
     Balaklava, a run of about twenty-four hours.  Here it is proposed to
     remain two days, visiting the harbors, fortifications, and
     battlefields of the Crimea; thence back through the Bosphorus,
     touching at Constantinople to take in any who may have preferred to
     remain there; down through the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles,
     along the coasts of ancient Troy and Lydia in Asia, to Smyrna, which
     will be reached in two or two and a half days from Constantinople.
     A sufficient stay will be made here to give opportunity of visiting
     Ephesus, fifty miles distant by rail.

       From Smyrna towards the Holy Land the course will lay through the
     Grecian  Archipelago, close by the Isle of Patmos, along the coast
     of Asia, ancient Pamphylia, and the Isle of Cyprus.  Beirut will be
     reached in three days.  At Beirut time will be given to visit
     Damascus; after which the steamer will proceed to Joppa.

       From Joppa, Jerusalem, the River Jordan, the Sea of Tiberias,
     Nazareth, Bethany, Bethlehem, and other points of interest in the
     Holy Land can be visited, and here those who may have preferred to
     make the journey from Beirut through the country, passing through
     Damascus, Galilee, Capernaum, Samaria, and by the River Jordan and
     Sea of Tiberias, can rejoin the steamer.

       Leaving Joppa, the next point of interest to visit will be
     Alexandria, which will be reached in twenty-four hours.  The ruins
     of Caesar's Palace, Pompey's Pillar, Cleopatra's Needle, the
     Catacombs, and ruins of ancient Alexandria will be found worth the
     visit.  The journey to Cairo, one hundred and thirty miles by rail,
     can be made in a few hours, and from which can be visited the site
     of ancient Memphis, Joseph's Granaries, and the Pyramids.

       From Alexandria the route will be taken homeward, calling at
     Malta, Cagliari (in Sardinia), and Palma (in Majorca), all
     magnificent harbors, with charming scenery, and abounding in fruits.

       A day or two will be spent at each place, and leaving Parma in the
     evening, Valencia in Spain will be reached the next morning.  A few
     days will be spent in this, the finest city of Spain.

       From Valencia, the homeward course will be continued, skirting
     along the coast of Spain.  Alicant, Carthagena, Palos, and Malaga
     will be passed but a mile or two distant, and Gibraltar reached in
     about twenty-four hours.

       A stay of one day will be made here, and the voyage continued to
     Madeira, which will be reached in about three days.  Captain
     Marryatt writes: "I do not know a spot on the globe which so much
     astonishes and delights upon first arrival as Madeira." A stay of
     one or two days will be made here, which, if time permits, may be
     extended, and passing on through the islands, and probably in sight
     of the Peak of Teneriffe, a southern track will be taken, and the
     Atlantic crossed within the latitudes of the northeast trade winds,
     where mild and pleasant weather, and a smooth sea, can always be
     expected.

       A call will be made at Bermuda, which lies directly in this route
     homeward, and will be reached in about ten days from Madeira, and
     after spending a short time with our friends the Bermudians, the
     final departure will be made for home, which will be reached in
     about three days.

       Already, applications have been received from parties in Europe
     wishing to join the Excursion there.

       The ship will at all times be a home, where the excursionists, if
     sick, will be surrounded by kind friends, and have all possible
     comfort and sympathy.

       Should contagious sickness exist in any of the ports named in the
     program, such ports will be passed, and others of interest
     substituted.

       The price of passage is fixed at $1,250, currency, for each adult
     passenger.  Choice of rooms and of seats at the tables apportioned
     in the order in which passages are engaged; and no passage
     considered engaged until ten percent of the passage money is
     deposited with the treasurer.

       Passengers can remain on board of the steamer, at all ports, if
     they desire, without additional expense, and all boating at the
     expense of the ship.

       All passages must be paid for when taken, in order that the most
     perfect arrangements be made for starting at the appointed time.

       Applications for passage must be approved by the committee before
     tickets are issued, and can be made to the undersigned.

       Articles of interest or curiosity, procured by the passengers
     during the voyage, may be brought home in the steamer free of
     charge.

       Five dollars per day, in gold, it is believed, will be a fair
     calculation to make for all traveling expenses onshore and at the
     various points where passengers may wish to leave the steamer for
     days at a time.

       The trip can be extended, and the route changed, by unanimous vote
     of the passengers.

      CHAS.  C.  DUNCAN,  117 WALL STREET, NEW YORK  R.  R.  G******,
     Treasurer

      Committee on Applications  J.  T.  H*****, ESQ.  R.  R.  G*****,
     ESQ.  C.  C.  Duncan

      Committee on Selecting Steamer  CAPT.  W.  W.  S* * * *, Surveyor
     for Board of Underwriters

       C.  W.  C******, Consulting Engineer for U.S.  and Canada  J.  T.
     H*****, Esq. C.  C.  DUNCAN

       P.S.--The very beautiful and substantial side-wheel steamship
     "Quaker City" has been chartered for the occasion, and will leave
     New York June 8th.  Letters have been issued by the government
     commending the party to courtesies abroad.

What was there lacking about that program to make it perfectly
irresistible?  Nothing that any finite mind could discover.  Paris,
England, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy--Garibaldi! The Grecian
Archipelago! Vesuvius! Constantinople! Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and
"our friends the Bermudians"! People in Europe desiring to join the
excursion--contagious sickness to be avoided--boating at the expense of
the ship--physician on board--the circuit of the globe to be made if the
passengers unanimously desired it--the company to be rigidly selected by
a pitiless "Committee on Applications"--the vessel to be as rigidly
selected by as pitiless a "Committee on Selecting Steamer." Human nature
could not withstand these bewildering temptations.  I hurried to the
treasurer's office and deposited my ten percent.  I rejoiced to know that
a few vacant staterooms were still left.  I did avoid a critical personal
examination into my character by that bowelless committee, but I referred
to all the people of high standing I could think of in the community who
would be least likely to know anything about me.

Shortly a supplementary program was issued which set forth that the
Plymouth Collection of Hymns would be used on board the ship.  I then
paid the balance of my passage money.

I was provided with a receipt and duly and officially accepted as an
excursionist.  There was happiness in that but it was tame compared to
the novelty of being "select."

This supplementary program also instructed the excursionists to provide
themselves with light musical instruments for amusement in the ship, with
saddles for Syrian travel, green spectacles and umbrellas, veils for
Egypt, and substantial clothing to use in rough pilgrimizing in the Holy
Land.  Furthermore, it was suggested that although the ship's library
would afford a fair amount of reading matter, it would still be well if
each passenger would provide himself with a few guidebooks, a Bible, and
some standard works of travel.  A list was appended, which consisted
chiefly of books relating to the Holy Land, since the Holy Land was part
of the excursion and seemed to be its main feature.

Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was to have accompanied the expedition, but
urgent duties obliged him to give up the idea.  There were other
passengers who could have been spared better and would have been spared
more willingly.  Lieutenant General Sherman was to have been of the party
also, but the Indian war compelled his presence on the plains.  A popular
actress had entered her name on the ship's books, but something
interfered and she couldn't go.  The "Drummer Boy of the Potomac"
deserted, and lo, we had never a celebrity left!

However, we were to have a "battery of guns" from the Navy Department (as
per advertisement) to be used in answering royal salutes; and the
document furnished by the Secretary of the Navy, which was to make
"General Sherman and party" welcome guests in the courts and camps of the
old world, was still left to us, though both document and battery, I
think, were shorn of somewhat of their original august proportions.
However, had not we the seductive program still, with its Paris, its
Constantinople, Smyrna, Jerusalem, Jericho, and "our friends the
Bermudians?" What did we care?



CHAPTER II.

Occasionally, during the following month, I dropped in at 117 Wall Street
to inquire how the repairing and refurnishing of the vessel was coming
on, how additions to the passenger list were averaging, how many people
the committee were decreeing not "select" every day and banishing in
sorrow and tribulation.  I was glad to know that we were to have a little
printing press on board and issue a daily newspaper of our own.  I was
glad to learn that our piano, our parlor organ, and our melodeon were to
be the best instruments of the kind that could be had in the market.  I
was proud to observe that among our excursionists were three ministers of
the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several military
and naval chieftains with sounding titles, an ample crop of "Professors"
of various kinds, and a gentleman who had "COMMISSIONER OF THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA TO EUROPE, ASIA, AND AFRICA" thundering after his name
in one awful blast!  I had carefully prepared myself to take rather a
back seat in that ship because of the uncommonly select material that
would alone be permitted to pass through the camel's eye of that
committee on credentials; I had schooled myself to expect an imposing
array of military and naval heroes and to have to set that back seat
still further back in consequence of it maybe; but I state frankly that I
was all unprepared for this crusher.

I fell under that titular avalanche a torn and blighted thing.  I said
that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I supposed he must
--but that to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary
to send a dignitary of that tonnage across the ocean, it would be in
better taste, and safer, to take him apart and cart him over in sections
in several ships.

Ah, if I had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that
his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of
seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs
for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed old fossil the Smithsonian
Institute, I would have felt so much relieved.

During that memorable month I basked in the happiness of being for once
in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement.  Everybody
was going to Europe--I, too, was going to Europe.  Everybody was going to
the famous Paris Exposition--I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition.
The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of
the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week in the aggregate.
If I met a dozen individuals during that month who were not going to
Europe shortly, I have no distinct remembrance of it now.  I walked about
the city a good deal with a young Mr.  Blucher, who was booked for the
excursion.  He was confiding, good-natured, unsophisticated,
companionable; but he was not a man to set the river on fire.  He had the
most extraordinary notions about this European exodus and came at last to
consider the whole nation as packing up for emigration to France.  We
stepped into a store on Broadway one day, where he bought a handkerchief,
and when the man could not make change, Mr. B. said:

"Never mind, I'll hand it to you in Paris."

"But I am not going to Paris."

"How is--what did I understand you to say?"

"I said I am not going to Paris."

"Not going to Paris!  Not g---- well, then, where in the nation are you
going to?"

"Nowhere at all."

"Not anywhere whatsoever?--not any place on earth but this?"

"Not any place at all but just this--stay here all summer."

My comrade took his purchase and walked out of the store without a word
--walked out with an injured look upon his countenance.  Up the street
apiece he broke silence and said impressively: "It was a lie--that is my
opinion of it!"

In the fullness of time the ship was ready to receive her passengers.
I was introduced to the young gentleman who was to be my roommate, and
found him to be intelligent, cheerful of spirit, unselfish, full of
generous impulses, patient, considerate, and wonderfully good-natured.
Not any passenger that sailed in the Quaker City will withhold his
endorsement of what I have just said.  We selected a stateroom forward of
the wheel, on the starboard side, "below decks."  It had two berths in
it, a dismal dead-light, a sink with a washbowl in it, and a long,
sumptuously cushioned locker, which was to do service as a
sofa--partly--and partly as a hiding place for our things.  Notwithstanding all this
furniture, there was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat
in, at least with entire security to the cat.  However, the room was
large, for a ship's stateroom, and was in every way satisfactory.

The vessel was appointed to sail on a certain Saturday early in June.

A little after noon on that distinguished Saturday I reached the ship and
went on board.  All was bustle and confusion.  [I have seen that remark
before somewhere.]  The pier was crowded with carriages and men;
passengers were arriving and hurrying on board; the vessel's decks were
encumbered with trunks and valises; groups of excursionists, arrayed in
unattractive traveling costumes, were moping about in a drizzling rain
and looking as droopy and woebegone as so many molting chickens.  The
gallant flag was up, but it was under the spell, too, and hung limp and
disheartened by the mast.  Altogether, it was the bluest, bluest
spectacle!  It was a pleasure excursion--there was no gainsaying that,
because the program said so--it was so nominated in the bond--but it
surely hadn't the general aspect of one.

Finally, above the banging, and rumbling, and shouting, and hissing of
steam rang the order to "cast off!"--a sudden rush to the gangways--a
scampering ashore of visitors-a revolution of the wheels, and we were
off--the pic-nic was begun!  Two very mild cheers went up from the
dripping crowd on the pier; we answered them gently from the slippery
decks; the flag made an effort to wave, and failed; the "battery of guns"
spake not--the ammunition was out.

We steamed down to the foot of the harbor and came to anchor.  It was
still raining.  And not only raining, but storming.  "Outside" we could
see, ourselves, that there was a tremendous sea on.  We must lie still,
in the calm harbor, till the storm should abate.  Our passengers hailed
from fifteen states; only a few of them had ever been to sea before;
manifestly it would not do to pit them against a full-blown tempest until
they had got their sea-legs on.  Toward evening the two steam tugs that
had accompanied us with a rollicking champagne-party of young New Yorkers
on board who wished to bid farewell to one of our number in due and
ancient form departed, and we were alone on the deep.  On deep five
fathoms, and anchored fast to the bottom.  And out in the solemn rain, at
that.  This was pleasuring with a vengeance.

It was an appropriate relief when the gong sounded for prayer meeting.
The first Saturday night of any other pleasure excursion might have been
devoted to whist and dancing; but I submit it to the unprejudiced mind if
it would have been in good taste for us to engage in such frivolities,
considering what we had gone through and the frame of mind we were in.
We would have shone at a wake, but not at anything more festive.

However, there is always a cheering influence about the sea; and in my
berth that night, rocked by the measured swell of the waves and lulled by
the murmur of the distant surf, I soon passed tranquilly out of all
consciousness of the dreary experiences of the day and damaging
premonitions of the future.



CHAPTER III.

All day Sunday at anchor.  The storm had gone down a great deal, but the
sea had not.  It was still piling its frothy hills high in air "outside,"
as we could plainly see with the glasses.  We could not properly begin a
pleasure excursion on Sunday; we could not offer untried stomachs to so
pitiless a sea as that.  We must lie still till Monday.  And we did.  But
we had repetitions of church and prayer-meetings; and so, of course, we
were just as eligibly situated as we could have been any where.

I was up early that Sabbath morning and was early to breakfast.  I felt a
perfectly natural desire to have a good, long, unprejudiced look at the
passengers at a time when they should be free from self-consciousness
--which is at breakfast, when such a moment occurs in the lives of human
beings at all.

I was greatly surprised to see so many elderly people--I might almost
say, so many venerable people.  A glance at the long lines of heads was
apt to make one think it was all gray.  But it was not.  There was a
tolerably fair sprinkling of young folks, and another fair sprinkling of
gentlemen and ladies who were non-committal as to age, being neither
actually old or absolutely young.

The next morning we weighed anchor and went to sea.  It was a great
happiness to get away after this dragging, dispiriting delay.  I thought
there never was such gladness in the air before, such brightness in the
sun, such beauty in the sea.  I was satisfied with the picnic then and
with all its belongings.  All my malicious instincts were dead within me;
and as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of charity rose up in
their place that was as boundless, for the time being, as the broad ocean
that was heaving its billows about us.  I wished to express my feelings
--I wished to lift up my voice and sing; but I did not know anything to
sing, and so I was obliged to give up the idea.  It was no loss to the
ship, though, perhaps.

It was breezy and pleasant, but the sea was still very rough.  One could
not promenade without risking his neck; at one moment the bowsprit was
taking a deadly aim at the sun in midheaven, and at the next it was
trying to harpoon a shark in the bottom of the ocean.  What a weird
sensation it is to feel the stern of a ship sinking swiftly from under you
and see the bow climbing high away among the clouds!  One's safest course
that day was to clasp a railing and hang on; walking was too precarious a
pastime.

By some happy fortune I was not seasick.--That was a thing to be proud
of.  I had not always escaped before.  If there is one thing in the world
that will make a man peculiarly and insufferably self-conceited, it is to
have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his
comrades are seasick.  Soon a venerable fossil, shawled to the chin and
bandaged like a mummy, appeared at the door of the after deck-house, and
the next lurch of the ship shot him into my arms.  I said:

"Good-morning, Sir.  It is a fine day."

He put his hand on his stomach and said, "Oh, my!" and then staggered
away and fell over the coop of a skylight.

Presently another old gentleman was projected from the same door with
great violence.  I said:

"Calm yourself, Sir--There is no hurry.  It is a fine day, Sir."

He, also, put his hand on his stomach and said "Oh, my!" and reeled away.

In a little while another veteran was discharged abruptly from the same
door, clawing at the air for a saving support.  I said:

"Good morning, Sir.  It is a fine day for pleasuring.  You were about to
say--"

"Oh, my!"

I thought so.  I anticipated him, anyhow.  I stayed there and was
bombarded with old gentlemen for an hour, perhaps; and all I got out of
any of them was "Oh, my!"

I went away then in a thoughtful mood.  I said, this is a good pleasure
excursion.  I like it.  The passengers are not garrulous, but still they
are sociable.  I like those old people, but somehow they all seem to have
the "Oh, my" rather bad.

I knew what was the matter with them.  They were seasick.  And I was glad
of it.  We all like to see people seasick when we are not, ourselves.
Playing whist by the cabin lamps when it is storming outside is pleasant;
walking the quarterdeck in the moonlight is pleasant; smoking in the
breezy foretop is pleasant when one is not afraid to go up there; but
these are all feeble and commonplace compared with the joy of seeing
people suffering the miseries of seasickness.

I picked up a good deal of information during the afternoon.  At one time
I was climbing up the quarterdeck when the vessel's stem was in the sky;
I was smoking a cigar and feeling passably comfortable.  Somebody
ejaculated:

"Come, now, that won't answer.  Read the sign up there--NO SMOKING ABAFT
THE WHEEL!"

It was Captain Duncan, chief of the expedition.  I went forward, of
course.  I saw a long spyglass lying on a desk in one of the upper-deck
state-rooms back of the pilot-house and reached after it--there was a
ship in the distance.

"Ah, ah--hands off!  Come out of that!"

I came out of that.  I said to a deck-sweep--but in a low voice:

"Who is that overgrown pirate with the whiskers and the discordant
voice?"

"It's Captain Bursley--executive officer--sailing master."

I loitered about awhile, and then, for want of something better to do,
fell to carving a railing with my knife.  Somebody said, in an
insinuating, admonitory voice:

"Now, say--my friend--don't you know any better than to be whittling the
ship all to pieces that way?  You ought to know better than that."

I went back and found the deck sweep.

"Who is that smooth-faced, animated outrage yonder in the fine clothes?"

"That's Captain L****, the owner of the ship--he's one of the main
bosses."

In the course of time I brought up on the starboard side of the
pilot-house and found a sextant lying on a bench.  Now, I said, they
"take the sun" through this thing; I should think I might see that vessel
through it.  I had hardly got it to my eye when someone touched me on the
shoulder and said deprecatingly:

"I'll have to get you to give that to me, Sir.  If there's anything you'd
like to know about taking the sun, I'd as soon tell you as not--but I
don't like to trust anybody with that instrument.  If you want any
figuring done--Aye, aye, sir!"

He was gone to answer a call from the other side.  I sought the
deck-sweep.

"Who is that spider-legged gorilla yonder with the sanctimonious
countenance?"

"It's Captain Jones, sir--the chief mate."

"Well.  This goes clear away ahead of anything I ever heard of before.
Do you--now I ask you as a man and a brother--do you think I could
venture to throw a rock here in any given direction without hitting a
captain of this ship?"

"Well, sir, I don't know--I think likely you'd fetch the captain of the
watch may be, because he's a-standing right yonder in the way."

I went below--meditating and a little downhearted.  I thought, if five
cooks can spoil a broth, what may not five captains do with a pleasure
excursion.



CHAPTER IV.

We plowed along bravely for a week or more, and without any conflict of
jurisdiction among the captains worth mentioning.  The passengers soon
learned to accommodate themselves to their new circumstances, and life in
the ship became nearly as systematically monotonous as the routine of a
barrack.  I do not mean that it was dull, for it was not entirely so by
any means--but there was a good deal of sameness about it.  As is always
the fashion at sea, the passengers shortly began to pick up sailor terms
--a sign that they were beginning to feel at home.  Half-past six was no
longer half-past six to these pilgrims from New England, the South, and
the Mississippi Valley, it was "seven bells"; eight, twelve, and four
o'clock were "eight bells"; the captain did not take the longitude at
nine o'clock, but at "two bells."  They spoke glibly of the "after
cabin," the "for'rard cabin," "port and starboard" and the "fo'castle."

At seven bells the first gong rang; at eight there was breakfast, for
such as were not too seasick to eat it.  After that all the well people
walked arm-in-arm up and down the long promenade deck, enjoying the fine
summer mornings, and the seasick ones crawled out and propped themselves
up in the lee of the paddle-boxes and ate their dismal tea and toast, and
looked wretched.  From eleven o'clock until luncheon, and from luncheon
until dinner at six in the evening, the employments and amusements were
various.  Some reading was done, and much smoking and sewing, though not
by the same parties; there were the monsters of the deep to be looked
after and wondered at; strange ships had to be scrutinized through
opera-glasses, and sage decisions arrived at concerning them; and more
than that, everybody took a personal interest in seeing that the flag was
run up and politely dipped three times in response to the salutes of
those strangers; in the smoking room there were always parties of
gentlemen playing euchre, draughts and dominoes, especially dominoes,
that delightfully harmless game; and down on the main deck, "for'rard"
--for'rard of the chicken-coops and the cattle--we had what was called
"horse billiards."  Horse billiards is a fine game.  It affords good,
active exercise, hilarity, and consuming excitement.  It is a mixture of
"hop-scotch" and shuffleboard played with a crutch.  A large hop-scotch
diagram is marked out on the deck with chalk, and each compartment
numbered.  You stand off three or four steps, with some broad wooden
disks before you on the deck, and these you send forward with a vigorous
thrust of a long crutch.  If a disk stops on a chalk line, it does not
count anything.  If it stops in division No. 7, it counts 7; in 5, it
counts 5, and so on.  The game is 100, and four can play at a time.  That
game would be very simple played on a stationary floor, but with us, to
play it well required science.  We had to allow for the reeling of the
ship to the right or the left.  Very often one made calculations for a
heel to the right and the ship did not go that way.  The consequence was
that that disk missed the whole hopscotch plan a yard or two, and then
there was humiliation on one side and laughter on the other.

When it rained the passengers had to stay in the house, of course--or at
least the cabins--and amuse themselves with games, reading, looking out
of the windows at the very familiar billows, and talking gossip.

By 7 o'clock in the evening, dinner was about over; an hour's promenade
on the upper deck followed; then the gong sounded and a large majority of
the party repaired to the after cabin (upper), a handsome saloon fifty or
sixty feet long, for prayers.  The unregenerated called this saloon the
"Synagogue."  The devotions consisted only of two hymns from the Plymouth
Collection and a short prayer, and seldom occupied more than fifteen
minutes.  The hymns were accompanied by parlor-organ music when the sea
was smooth enough to allow a performer to sit at the instrument without
being lashed to his chair.

After prayers the Synagogue shortly took the semblance of a writing
school.  The like of that picture was never seen in a ship before.
Behind the long dining tables on either side of the saloon, and scattered
from one end to the other of the latter, some twenty or thirty gentlemen
and ladies sat them down under the swaying lamps and for two or three
hours wrote diligently in their journals.  Alas! that journals so
voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as
most of them did!  I doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host
but can show a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the first twenty
days' voyaging in the Quaker City, and I am morally certain that not ten
of the party can show twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty
thousand miles of voyaging!  At certain periods it becomes the dearest
ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a
book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him
the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world,
and the pleasantest.  But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find
out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance,
devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination may hope
to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal
and not sustain a shameful defeat.

One of our favorite youths, Jack, a splendid young fellow with a head
full of good sense, and a pair of legs that were a wonder to look upon in
the way of length and straightness and slimness, used to report progress
every morning in the most glowing and spirited way, and say:

"Oh, I'm coming along bully!" (he was a little given to slang in his
happier moods.)  "I wrote ten pages in my journal last night--and you
know I wrote nine the night before and twelve the night before that.
Why, it's only fun!"

"What do you find to put in it, Jack?"

"Oh, everything.  Latitude and longitude, noon every day; and how many
miles we made last twenty-four hours; and all the domino games I beat and
horse billiards; and whales and sharks and porpoises; and the text of the
sermon Sundays (because that'll tell at home, you know); and the ships we
saluted and what nation they were; and which way the wind was, and
whether there was a heavy sea, and what sail we carried, though we don't
ever carry any, principally, going against a head wind always--wonder
what is the reason of that?--and how many lies Moult has told--Oh, every
thing!  I've got everything down.  My father told me to keep that
journal.  Father wouldn't take a thousand dollars for it when I get it
done."

"No, Jack; it will be worth more than a thousand dollars--when you get it
done."

"Do you?--no, but do you think it will, though?

"Yes, it will be worth at least as much as a thousand dollars--when you
get it done.  May be more."

"Well, I about half think so, myself.  It ain't no slouch of a journal."

But it shortly became a most lamentable "slouch of a journal."  One night
in Paris, after a hard day's toil in sightseeing, I said:

"Now I'll go and stroll around the cafes awhile, Jack, and give you a
chance to write up your journal, old fellow."

His countenance lost its fire.  He said:

"Well, no, you needn't mind.  I think I won't run that journal anymore.
It is awful tedious.  Do you know--I reckon I'm as much as four thousand
pages behind hand.  I haven't got any France in it at all.  First I
thought I'd leave France out and start fresh.  But that wouldn't do,
would it?  The governor would say, 'Hello, here--didn't see anything in
France?'  That cat wouldn't fight, you know.  First I thought I'd copy
France out of the guide-book, like old Badger in the for'rard cabin,
who's writing a book, but there's more than three hundred pages of it.
Oh, I don't think a journal's any use--do you?  They're only a bother,
ain't they?"

"Yes, a journal that is incomplete isn't of much use, but a journal
properly kept is worth a thousand dollars--when you've got it done."

"A thousand!--well, I should think so.  I wouldn't finish it for a
million."

His experience was only the experience of the majority of that
industrious night school in the cabin.  If you wish to inflict a
heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to
keep a journal a year.

A good many expedients were resorted to to keep the excursionists amused
and satisfied.  A club was formed, of all the passengers, which met in
the writing school after prayers and read aloud about the countries we
were approaching and discussed the information so obtained.

Several times the photographer of the expedition brought out his
transparent pictures and gave us a handsome magic-lantern exhibition.
His views were nearly all of foreign scenes, but there were one or two
home pictures among them.  He advertised that he would "open his
performance in the after cabin at 'two bells' (nine P.M.) and show the
passengers where they shall eventually arrive"--which was all very well,
but by a funny accident the first picture that flamed out upon the canvas
was a view of Greenwood Cemetery!

On several starlight nights we danced on the upper deck, under the
awnings, and made something of a ball-room display of brilliancy by
hanging a number of ship's lanterns to the stanchions.  Our music
consisted of the well-mixed strains of a melodeon which was a little
asthmatic and apt to catch its breath where it ought to come out strong,
a clarinet which was a little unreliable on the high keys and rather
melancholy on the low ones, and a disreputable accordion that had a leak
somewhere and breathed louder than it squawked--a more elegant term does
not occur to me just now.  However, the dancing was infinitely worse than
the music.  When the ship rolled to starboard the whole platoon of
dancers came charging down to starboard with it, and brought up in mass
at the rail; and when it rolled to port they went floundering down to
port with the same unanimity of sentiment.  Waltzers spun around
precariously for a matter of fifteen seconds and then went scurrying down
to the rail as if they meant to go overboard.  The Virginia reel, as
performed on board the Quaker City, had more genuine reel about it than
any reel I ever saw before, and was as full of interest to the spectator
as it was full of desperate chances and hairbreadth escapes to the
participant.  We gave up dancing, finally.

We celebrated a lady's birthday anniversary with toasts, speeches, a
poem, and so forth.  We also had a mock trial.  No ship ever went to sea
that hadn't a mock trial on board.  The purser was accused of stealing an
overcoat from stateroom No. 10.  A judge was appointed; also clerks, a
crier of the court, constables, sheriffs; counsel for the State and for
the defendant; witnesses were subpoenaed, and a jury empaneled after much
challenging.  The witnesses were stupid and unreliable and contradictory,
as witnesses always are.  The counsel were eloquent, argumentative, and
vindictively abusive of each other, as was characteristic and proper.
The case was at last submitted and duly finished by the judge with an
absurd decision and a ridiculous sentence.

The acting of charades was tried on several evenings by the young
gentlemen and ladies, in the cabins, and proved the most distinguished
success of all the amusement experiments.

An attempt was made to organize a debating club, but it was a failure.
There was no oratorical talent in the ship.

We all enjoyed ourselves--I think I can safely say that, but it was in a
rather quiet way.  We very, very seldom played the piano; we played the
flute and the clarinet together, and made good music, too, what there was
of it, but we always played the same old tune; it was a very pretty tune
--how well I remember it--I wonder when I shall ever get rid of it.  We
never played either the melodeon or the organ except at devotions--but I
am too fast: young Albert did know part of a tune something about
"O Something-Or-Other How Sweet It Is to Know That He's His
What's-his-Name" (I do not remember the exact title of it, but it was
very plaintive and full of sentiment); Albert played that pretty much
all the time until we contracted with him to restrain himself.  But
nobody ever sang by moonlight on the upper deck, and the congregational
singing at church and prayers was not of a superior order of
architecture.  I put up with it as long as I could and then joined in
and tried to improve it, but this encouraged young George to join in
too, and that made a failure of it; because George's voice was just
"turning," and when he was singing a dismal sort of bass it was apt to
fly off the handle and startle everybody with a most discordant cackle
on the upper notes.  George didn't know the tunes, either, which was
also a drawback to his performances.  I said:

"Come, now, George, don't improvise.  It looks too egotistical.  It will
provoke remark.  Just stick to 'Coronation,' like the others.  It is a
good tune--you can't improve it any, just off-hand, in this way."

"Why, I'm not trying to improve it--and I am singing like the others
--just as it is in the notes."

And he honestly thought he was, too; and so he had no one to blame but
himself when his voice caught on the center occasionally and gave him the
lockjaw.

There were those among the unregenerated who attributed the unceasing
head-winds to our distressing choir-music.  There were those who said
openly that it was taking chances enough to have such ghastly music going
on, even when it was at its best; and that to exaggerate the crime by
letting George help was simply flying in the face of Providence.  These
said that the choir would keep up their lacerating attempts at melody
until they would bring down a storm some day that would sink the ship.

There were even grumblers at the prayers.  The executive officer said the
pilgrims had no charity:

"There they are, down there every night at eight bells, praying for fair
winds--when they know as well as I do that this is the only ship going
east this time of the year, but there's a thousand coming west--what's a
fair wind for us is a head wind to them--the Almighty's blowing a fair
wind for a thousand vessels, and this tribe wants him to turn it clear
around so as to accommodate one--and she a steamship at that!  It ain't
good sense, it ain't good reason, it ain't good Christianity, it ain't
common human charity.  Avast with such nonsense!"



CHAPTER V.

Taking it "by and large," as the sailors say, we had a pleasant ten days'
run from New York to the Azores islands--not a fast run, for the distance
is only twenty-four hundred miles, but a right pleasant one in the main.
True, we had head winds all the time, and several stormy experiences
which sent fifty percent of the passengers to bed sick and made the ship
look dismal and deserted--stormy experiences that all will remember who
weathered them on the tumbling deck and caught the vast sheets of spray
that every now and then sprang high in air from the weather bow and swept
the ship like a thunder-shower; but for the most part we had balmy summer
weather and nights that were even finer than the days.  We had the
phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at
the same hour every night.  The reason of this singular conduct on the
part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when
we reflected that we were gaining about twenty minutes every day because
we were going east so fast--we gained just about enough every day to keep
along with the moon.  It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had
left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in the same place and
remained always the same.

Young Mr. Blucher, who is from the Far West and is on his first voyage,
was a good deal worried by the constantly changing "ship time."  He was
proud of his new watch at first and used to drag it out promptly when
eight bells struck at noon, but he came to look after a while as if he
were losing confidence in it.  Seven days out from New York he came on
deck and said with great decision:

"This thing's a swindle!"

"What's a swindle?"

"Why, this watch.  I bought her out in Illinois--gave $150 for her--and I
thought she was good.  And, by George, she is good onshore, but somehow
she don't keep up her lick here on the water--gets seasick may be.  She
skips; she runs along regular enough till half-past eleven, and then, all
of a sudden, she lets down.  I've set that old regulator up faster and
faster, till I've shoved it clear around, but it don't do any good; she
just distances every watch in the ship, and clatters along in a way
that's astonishing till it is noon, but them eight bells always gets in
about ten minutes ahead of her anyway.  I don't know what to do with her
now.  She's doing all she can--she's going her best gait, but it won't
save her.  Now, don't you know, there ain't a watch in the ship that's
making better time than she is, but what does it signify?  When you hear
them eight bells you'll find her just about ten minutes short of her
score sure."

The ship was gaining a full hour every three days, and this fellow was
trying to make his watch go fast enough to keep up to her.  But, as he
had said, he had pushed the regulator up as far as it would go, and the
watch was "on its best gait," and so nothing was left him but to fold his
hands and see the ship beat the race.  We sent him to the captain, and he
explained to him the mystery of "ship time" and set his troubled mind at
rest.  This young man asked a great many questions about seasickness
before we left, and wanted to know what its characteristics were and how
he was to tell when he had it.  He found out.

We saw the usual sharks, blackfish, porpoises, etc., of course, and by and
by large schools of Portuguese men-of-war were added to the regular list
of sea wonders.  Some of them were white and some of a brilliant carmine
color.  The nautilus is nothing but a transparent web of jelly that
spreads itself to catch the wind, and has fleshy-looking strings a foot
or two long dangling from it to keep it steady in the water.  It is an
accomplished sailor and has good sailor judgment.  It reefs its sail when
a storm threatens or the wind blows pretty hard, and furls it entirely
and goes down when a gale blows.  Ordinarily it keeps its sail wet and in
good sailing order by turning over and dipping it in the water for a
moment.  Seamen say the nautilus is only found in these waters between
the 35th and 45th parallels of latitude.

At three o'clock on the morning of the twenty-first of June, we were
awakened and notified that the Azores islands were in sight.  I said I
did not take any interest in islands at three o'clock in the morning.
But another persecutor came, and then another and another, and finally
believing that the general enthusiasm would permit no one to slumber in
peace, I got up and went sleepily on deck.  It was five and a half
o'clock now, and a raw, blustering morning.  The passengers were huddled
about the smoke-stacks and fortified behind ventilators, and all were
wrapped in wintry costumes and looking sleepy and unhappy in the pitiless
gale and the drenching spray.

The island in sight was Flores.  It seemed only a mountain of mud
standing up out of the dull mists of the sea.  But as we bore down upon
it the sun came out and made it a beautiful picture--a mass of green
farms and meadows that swelled up to a height of fifteen hundred feet and
mingled its upper outlines with the clouds.  It was ribbed with sharp,
steep ridges and cloven with narrow canyons, and here and there on the
heights, rocky upheavals shaped themselves into mimic battlements and
castles; and out of rifted clouds came broad shafts of sunlight, that
painted summit, and slope and glen, with bands of fire, and left belts of
somber shade between.  It was the aurora borealis of the frozen pole
exiled to a summer land!

We skirted around two-thirds of the island, four miles from shore, and
all the opera glasses in the ship were called into requisition to settle
disputes as to whether mossy spots on the uplands were groves of trees or
groves of weeds, or whether the white villages down by the sea were
really villages or only the clustering tombstones of cemeteries.  Finally
we stood to sea and bore away for San Miguel, and Flores shortly became a
dome of mud again and sank down among the mists, and disappeared.  But to
many a seasick passenger it was good to see the green hills again, and
all were more cheerful after this episode than anybody could have
expected them to be, considering how sinfully early they had gotten up.

But we had to change our purpose about San Miguel, for a storm came up
about noon that so tossed and pitched the vessel that common sense
dictated a run for shelter.  Therefore we steered for the nearest island
of the group--Fayal (the people there pronounce it Fy-all, and put the
accent on the first syllable).  We anchored in the open roadstead of
Horta, half a mile from the shore.  The town has eight thousand to ten
thousand inhabitants.  Its snow-white houses nestle cosily in a sea of
fresh green vegetation, and no village could look prettier or more
attractive.  It sits in the lap of an amphitheater of hills which are
three hundred to seven hundred feet high, and carefully cultivated clear
to their summits--not a foot of soil left idle.  Every farm and every
acre is cut up into little square inclosures by stone walls, whose duty
it is to protect the growing products from the destructive gales that
blow there.  These hundreds of green squares, marked by their black lava
walls, make the hills look like vast checkerboards.

The islands belong to Portugal, and everything in Fayal has Portuguese
characteristics about it.  But more of that anon.  A swarm of swarthy,
noisy, lying, shoulder-shrugging, gesticulating Portuguese boatmen, with
brass rings in their ears and fraud in their hearts, climbed the ship's
sides, and various parties of us contracted with them to take us ashore
at so much a head, silver coin of any country.  We landed under the walls
of a little fort, armed with batteries of twelve-and-thirty-two-pounders,
which Horta considered a most formidable institution, but if we were ever
to get after it with one of our turreted monitors, they would have to
move it out in the country if they wanted it where they could go and find
it again when they needed it.  The group on the pier was a rusty one--men
and women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, uncombed and
unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession beggars.  They
trooped after us, and never more while we tarried in Fayal did we get rid
of them.  We walked up the middle of the principal street, and these
vermin surrounded us on all sides and glared upon us; and every moment
excited couples shot ahead of the procession to get a good look back,
just as village boys do when they accompany the elephant on his
advertising trip from street to street.  It was very flattering to me to
be part of the material for such a sensation.  Here and there in the
doorways we saw women with fashionable Portuguese hoods on.  This hood is
of thick blue cloth, attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a
marvel of ugliness.  It stands up high and spreads far abroad, and is
unfathomably deep.  It fits like a circus tent, and a woman's head is
hidden away in it like the man's who prompts the singers from his tin
shed in the stage of an opera.  There is no particle of trimming about
this monstrous capote, as they call it--it is just a plain, ugly
dead-blue mass of sail, and a woman can't go within eight points of the
wind with one of them on; she has to go before the wind or not at all.
The general style of the capote is the same in all the islands, and will
remain so for the next ten thousand years, but each island shapes its
capotes just enough differently from the others to enable an observer to
tell at a glance what particular island a lady hails from.

The Portuguese pennies, or reis (pronounced rays), are prodigious.  It
takes one thousand reis to make a dollar, and all financial estimates are
made in reis.  We did not know this until after we had found it out
through Blucher.  Blucher said he was so happy and so grateful to be on
solid land once more that he wanted to give a feast--said he had heard it
was a cheap land, and he was bound to have a grand banquet.  He invited
nine of us, and we ate an excellent dinner at the principal hotel.  In
the midst of the jollity produced by good cigars, good wine, and passable
anecdotes, the landlord presented his bill.  Blucher glanced at it and
his countenance fell.  He took another look to assure himself that his
senses had not deceived him and then read the items aloud, in a faltering
voice, while the roses in his cheeks turned to ashes:

"'Ten dinners, at 600 reis, 6,000 reis!'  Ruin and desolation!

"'Twenty-five cigars, at 100 reis, 2,500 reis!'  Oh, my sainted mother!

"'Eleven bottles of wine, at 1,200 reis, 13,200 reis!'  Be with us all!

"'TOTAL, TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED REIS!'  The suffering Moses!
There ain't money enough in the ship to pay that bill!  Go--leave me to
my misery, boys, I am a ruined community."

I think it was the blankest-looking party I ever saw.  Nobody could say a
word.  It was as if every soul had been stricken dumb.  Wine glasses
descended slowly to the table, their contents untasted.  Cigars dropped
unnoticed from nerveless fingers.  Each man sought his neighbor's eye,
but found in it no ray of hope, no encouragement.  At last the fearful
silence was broken.  The shadow of a desperate resolve settled upon
Blucher's countenance like a cloud, and he rose up and said:

"Landlord, this is a low, mean swindle, and I'll never, never stand it.
Here's a hundred and fifty dollars, Sir, and it's all you'll get--I'll
swim in blood before I'll pay a cent more."

Our spirits rose and the landlord's fell--at least we thought so; he was
confused, at any rate, notwithstanding he had not understood a word that
had been said.  He glanced from the little pile of gold pieces to Blucher
several times and then went out.  He must have visited an American, for
when he returned, he brought back his bill translated into a language
that a Christian could understand--thus:

10 dinners, 6,000 reis, or .  .  .$6.00

25 cigars, 2,500 reis, or .  .  .  2.50

11 bottles wine, 13,200 reis, or  13.20

Total 21,700 reis, or .  .  .  . $21.70

Happiness reigned once more in Blucher's dinner party.  More refreshments
were ordered.



CHAPTER VI.

I think the Azores must be very little known in America.  Out of our
whole ship's company there was not a solitary individual who knew
anything whatever about them.  Some of the party, well read concerning
most other lands, had no other information about the Azores than that
they were a group of nine or ten small islands far out in the Atlantic,
something more than halfway between New York and Gibraltar.  That was
all.  These considerations move me to put in a paragraph of dry facts
just here.

The community is eminently Portuguese--that is to say, it is slow, poor,
shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.  There is a civil governor, appointed by the
King of Portugal, and also a military governor, who can assume supreme
control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure.  The islands
contain a population of about 200,000, almost entirely Portuguese.
Everything is staid and settled, for the country was one hundred years
old when Columbus discovered America.  The principal crop is corn, and
they raise it and grind it just as their great-great-great-grandfathers
did.  They plow with a board slightly shod with iron; their trifling
little harrows are drawn by men and women; small windmills grind the
corn, ten bushels a day, and there is one assistant superintendent to
feed the mill and a general superintendent to stand by and keep him from
going to sleep.  When the wind changes they hitch on some donkeys and
actually turn the whole upper half of the mill around until the sails are
in proper position, instead of fixing the concern so that the sails could
be moved instead of the mill.  Oxen tread the wheat from the ear, after
the fashion prevalent in the time of Methuselah.  There is not a
wheelbarrow in the land--they carry everything on their heads, or on
donkeys, or in a wicker-bodied cart, whose wheels are solid blocks of
wood and whose axles turn with the wheel.  There is not a modern plow in
the islands or a threshing machine.  All attempts to introduce them have
failed.  The good Catholic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to
shield him from all blasphemous desire to know more than his father did
before him.  The climate is mild; they never have snow or ice, and I saw
no chimneys in the town.  The donkeys and the men, women, and children of
a family all eat and sleep in the same room, and are unclean, are ravaged
by vermin, and are truly happy.  The people lie, and cheat the stranger,
and are desperately ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for their
dead.  The latter trait shows how little better they are than the donkeys
they eat and sleep with.  The only well-dressed Portuguese in the camp
are the half a dozen well-to-do families, the Jesuit priests, and the
soldiers of the little garrison.  The wages of a laborer are twenty to
twenty-four cents a day, and those of a good mechanic about twice as
much.  They count it in reis at a thousand to the dollar, and this makes
them rich and contented.  Fine grapes used to grow in the islands, and an
excellent wine was made and exported.  But a disease killed all the vines
fifteen years ago, and since that time no wine has been made.  The
islands being wholly of volcanic origin, the soil is necessarily very
rich.  Nearly every foot of ground is under cultivation, and two or three
crops a year of each article are produced, but nothing is exported save a
few oranges--chiefly to England.  Nobody comes here, and nobody goes
away.  News is a thing unknown in Fayal.  A thirst for it is a passion
equally unknown.  A Portuguese of average intelligence inquired if our
civil war was over.  Because, he said, somebody had told him it was--or
at least it ran in his mind that somebody had told him something like
that!  And when a passenger gave an officer of the garrison copies of the
Tribune, the Herald, and Times, he was surprised to find later news in
them from Lisbon than he had just received by the little monthly steamer.
He was told that it came by cable.  He said he knew they had tried to lay
a cable ten years ago, but it had been in his mind somehow that they
hadn't succeeded!

It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flourishes.  We
visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred years old and found in it a
piece of the veritable cross upon which our Saviour was crucified.  It
was polished and hard, and in as excellent a state of preservation as if
the dread tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen
centuries ago.  But these confiding people believe in that piece of wood
unhesitatingly.

In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid silver--at
least they call it so, and I think myself it would go a couple of hundred
to the ton (to speak after the fashion of the silver miners)--and before
it is kept forever burning a small lamp.  A devout lady who died, left
money and contracted for unlimited masses for the repose of her soul, and
also stipulated that this lamp should be kept lighted always, day and
night.  She did all this before she died, you understand.  It is a very
small lamp and a very dim one, and it could not work her much damage, I
think, if it went out altogether.

The great altar of the cathedral and also three or four minor ones are a
perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and gingerbread.  And they have a swarm of
rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some
on one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and
some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left
to blow--all of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for
the hospital than the cathedral.

The walls of the chancel are of porcelain, all pictured over with figures
of almost life size, very elegantly wrought and dressed in the fanciful
costumes of two centuries ago.  The design was a history of something or
somebody, but none of us were learned enough to read the story.  The old
father, reposing under a stone close by, dated 1686, might have told us
if he could have risen.  But he didn't.

As we came down through the town we encountered a squad of little donkeys
ready saddled for use.  The saddles were peculiar, to say the least.
They consisted of a sort of saw-buck with a small mattress on it, and
this furniture covered about half the donkey.  There were no stirrups,
but really such supports were not needed--to use such a saddle was the
next thing to riding a dinner table--there was ample support clear out to
one's knee joints.  A pack of ragged Portuguese muleteers crowded around
us, offering their beasts at half a dollar an hour--more rascality to the
stranger, for the market price is sixteen cents.  Half a dozen of us
mounted the ungainly affairs and submitted to the indignity of making a
ridiculous spectacle of ourselves through the principal streets of a town
of 10,000 inhabitants.

We started.  It was not a trot, a gallop, or a canter, but a stampede,
and made up of all possible or conceivable gaits.  No spurs were
necessary.  There was a muleteer to every donkey and a dozen volunteers
beside, and they banged the donkeys with their goad sticks, and pricked
them with their spikes, and shouted something that sounded like
"Sekki-yah!" and kept up a din and a racket that was worse than Bedlam
itself. These rascals were all on foot, but no matter, they were always
up to time--they can outrun and outlast a donkey.  Altogether, ours was
a lively and a picturesque procession, and drew crowded audiences to the
balconies wherever we went.

Blucher could do nothing at all with his donkey.  The beast scampered
zigzag across the road and the others ran into him; he scraped Blucher
against carts and the corners of houses; the road was fenced in with high
stone walls, and the donkey gave him a polishing first on one side and
then on the other, but never once took the middle; he finally came to the
house he was born in and darted into the parlor, scraping Blucher off at
the doorway.  After remounting, Blucher said to the muleteer, "Now,
that's enough, you know; you go slow hereafter."

But the fellow knew no English and did not understand, so he simply said,
"Sekki-yah!" and the donkey was off again like a shot.  He turned a comer
suddenly, and Blucher went over his head.  And, to speak truly, every
mule stumbled over the two, and the whole cavalcade was piled up in a
heap.  No harm done.  A fall from one of those donkeys is of little more
consequence than rolling off a sofa.  The donkeys all stood still after
the catastrophe and waited for their dismembered saddles to be patched up
and put on by the noisy muleteers.  Blucher was pretty angry and wanted
to swear, but every time he opened his mouth his animal did so also and
let off a series of brays that drowned all other sounds.

It was fun, scurrying around the breezy hills and through the beautiful
canyons.  There was that rare thing, novelty, about it; it was a fresh,
new, exhilarating sensation, this donkey riding, and worth a hundred worn
and threadbare home pleasures.

The roads were a wonder, and well they might be.  Here was an island with
only a handful of people in it--25,000--and yet such fine roads do not
exist in the United States outside of Central Park.  Everywhere you go,
in any direction, you find either a hard, smooth, level thoroughfare,
just sprinkled with black lava sand, and bordered with little gutters
neatly paved with small smooth pebbles, or compactly paved ones like
Broadway.  They talk much of the Russ pavement in New York, and call it a
new invention--yet here they have been using it in this remote little
isle of the sea for two hundred years!  Every street in Horta is
handsomely paved with the heavy Russ blocks, and the surface is neat and
true as a floor--not marred by holes like Broadway.  And every road is
fenced in by tall, solid lava walls, which will last a thousand years in
this land where frost is unknown.  They are very thick, and are often
plastered and whitewashed and capped with projecting slabs of cut stone.
Trees from gardens above hang their swaying tendrils down, and contrast
their bright green with the whitewash or the black lava of the walls and
make them beautiful.  The trees and vines stretch across these narrow
roadways sometimes and so shut out the sun that you seem to be riding
through a tunnel.  The pavements, the roads, and the bridges are all
government work.

The bridges are of a single span--a single arch--of cut stone, without a
support, and paved on top with flags of lava and ornamental pebblework.
Everywhere are walls, walls, walls, and all of them tasteful and
handsome--and eternally substantial; and everywhere are those marvelous
pavements, so neat, so smooth, and so indestructible.  And if ever roads
and streets and the outsides of houses were perfectly free from any sign
or semblance of dirt, or dust, or mud, or uncleanliness of any kind, it
is Horta, it is Fayal.  The lower classes of the people, in their persons
and their domiciles, are not clean--but there it stops--the town and the
island are miracles of cleanliness.

We arrived home again finally, after a ten-mile excursion, and the
irrepressible muleteers scampered at our heels through the main street,
goading the donkeys, shouting the everlasting "Sekki-yah," and singing
"John Brown's Body" in ruinous English.

When we were dismounted and it came to settling, the shouting and jawing
and swearing and quarreling among the muleteers and with us was nearly
deafening.  One fellow would demand a dollar an hour for the use of his
donkey; another claimed half a dollar for pricking him up, another a
quarter for helping in that service, and about fourteen guides presented
bills for showing us the way through the town and its environs; and every
vagrant of them was more vociferous, and more vehement and more frantic
in gesture than his neighbor.  We paid one guide and paid for one
muleteer to each donkey.

The mountains on some of the islands are very high.  We sailed along the
shore of the island of Pico, under a stately green pyramid that rose up
with one unbroken sweep from our very feet to an altitude of 7,613 feet,
and thrust its summit above the white clouds like an island adrift in a
fog!

We got plenty of fresh oranges, lemons, figs, apricots, etc., in these
Azores, of course.  But I will desist.  I am not here to write Patent
Office reports.

We are on our way to Gibraltar, and shall reach there five or six days
out from the Azores.



CHAPTER VII.

A week of buffeting a tempestuous and relentless sea; a week of
seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely quarterdecks drenched with
spray--spray so ambitious that it even coated the smokestacks thick with
a white crust of salt to their very tops; a week of shivering in the
shelter of the lifeboats and deckhouses by day and blowing suffocating
"clouds" and boisterously performing at dominoes in the smoking room at
night.

And the last night of the seven was the stormiest of all.  There was no
thunder, no noise but the pounding bows of the ship, the keen whistling
of the gale through the cordage, and the rush of the seething waters.
But the vessel climbed aloft as if she would climb to heaven--then paused
an instant that seemed a century and plunged headlong down again, as from
a precipice.  The sheeted sprays drenched the decks like rain.  The
blackness of darkness was everywhere.  At long intervals a flash of
lightning clove it with a quivering line of fire that revealed a heaving
world of water where was nothing before, kindled the dusky cordage to
glittering silver, and lit up the faces of the men with a ghastly luster!

Fear drove many on deck that were used to avoiding the night winds and
the spray.  Some thought the vessel could not live through the night, and
it seemed less dreadful to stand out in the midst of the wild tempest and
see the peril that threatened than to be shut up in the sepulchral
cabins, under the dim lamps, and imagine the horrors that were abroad on
the ocean.  And once out--once where they could see the ship struggling
in the strong grasp of the storm--once where they could hear the shriek
of the winds and face the driving spray and look out upon the majestic
picture the lightnings disclosed, they were prisoners to a fierce
fascination they could not resist, and so remained.  It was a wild night
--and a very, very long one.

Everybody was sent scampering to the deck at seven o'clock this lovely
morning of the thirtieth of June with the glad news that land was in
sight!  It was a rare thing and a joyful, to see all the ship's family
abroad once more, albeit the happiness that sat upon every countenance
could only partly conceal the ravages which that long siege of storms had
wrought there.  But dull eyes soon sparkled with pleasure, pallid cheeks
flushed again, and frames weakened by sickness gathered new life from the
quickening influences of the bright, fresh morning.  Yea, and from a
still more potent influence: the worn castaways were to see the blessed
land again!--and to see it was to bring back that motherland that was in
all their thoughts.

Within the hour we were fairly within the Straits of Gibraltar, the tall
yellow-splotched hills of Africa on our right, with their bases veiled in
a blue haze and their summits swathed in clouds--the same being according
to Scripture, which says that "clouds and darkness are over the land."
The words were spoken of this particular portion of Africa, I believe.
On our left were the granite-ribbed domes of old Spain.  The strait is
only thirteen miles wide in its narrowest part.

At short intervals along the Spanish shore were quaint-looking old stone
towers--Moorish, we thought--but learned better afterwards.  In former
times the Morocco rascals used to coast along the Spanish Main in their
boats till a safe opportunity seemed to present itself, and then dart in
and capture a Spanish village and carry off all the pretty women they
could find.  It was a pleasant business, and was very popular.  The
Spaniards built these watchtowers on the hills to enable them to keep a
sharper lookout on the Moroccan speculators.

The picture on the other hand was very beautiful to eyes weary of the
changeless sea, and by and by the ship's company grew wonderfully
cheerful.  But while we stood admiring the cloud-capped peaks and the
lowlands robed in misty gloom a finer picture burst upon us and chained
every eye like a magnet--a stately ship, with canvas piled on canvas till
she was one towering mass of bellying sail!  She came speeding over the
sea like a great bird.  Africa and Spain were forgotten.  All homage was
for the beautiful stranger.  While everybody gazed she swept superbly by
and flung the Stars and Stripes to the breeze!  Quicker than thought,
hats and handkerchiefs flashed in the air, and a cheer went up!  She was
beautiful before--she was radiant now.  Many a one on our decks knew then
for the first time how tame a sight his country's flag is at home
compared to what it is in a foreign land.  To see it is to see a vision
of home itself and all its idols, and feel a thrill that would stir a
very river of sluggish blood!

We were approaching the famed Pillars of Hercules, and already the
African one, "Ape's Hill," a grand old mountain with summit streaked with
granite ledges, was in sight.  The other, the great Rock of Gibraltar,
was yet to come.  The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the
head of navigation and the end of the world.  The information the
ancients didn't have was very voluminous.  Even the prophets wrote book
after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the
existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must
have known it was there, I should think.

In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly
in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by
the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled
parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar.  There could not be two rocks like
that in one kingdom.

The Rock of Gibraltar is about a mile and a half long, I should say, by
1,400 to 1,500 feet high, and a quarter of a mile wide at its base.  One
side and one end of it come about as straight up out of the sea as the
side of a house, the other end is irregular and the other side is a steep
slant which an army would find very difficult to climb.  At the foot of
this slant is the walled town of Gibraltar--or rather the town occupies
part of the slant.  Everywhere--on hillside, in the precipice, by the
sea, on the heights--everywhere you choose to look, Gibraltar is clad
with masonry and bristling with guns.  It makes a striking and lively
picture from whatsoever point you contemplate it.  It is pushed out into
the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive of
a "gob" of mud on the end of a shingle.  A few hundred yards of this flat
ground at its base belongs to the English, and then, extending across the
strip from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, a distance of a quarter of
a mile, comes the "Neutral Ground," a space two or three hundred yards
wide, which is free to both parties.

"Are you going through Spain to Paris?"  That question was bandied about
the ship day and night from Fayal to Gibraltar, and I thought I never
could get so tired of hearing any one combination of words again or more
tired of answering, "I don't know."  At the last moment six or seven had
sufficient decision of character to make up their minds to go, and did
go, and I felt a sense of relief at once--it was forever too late now and
I could make up my mind at my leisure not to go.  I must have a
prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to
make it up.

But behold how annoyances repeat themselves.  We had no sooner gotten rid
of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar guides started another--a
tiresome repetition of a legend that had nothing very astonishing about
it, even in the first place: "That high hill yonder is called the Queen's
Chair; it is because one of the queens of Spain placed her chair there
when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she
would never move from the spot till the English flag was lowered from the
fortresses.  If the English hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag
for a few hours one day, she'd have had to break her oath or die up
there."

We rode on asses and mules up the steep, narrow streets and entered the
subterranean galleries the English have blasted out in the rock.  These
galleries are like spacious railway tunnels, and at short intervals in
them great guns frown out upon sea and town through portholes five or six
hundred feet above the ocean.  There is a mile or so of this subterranean
work, and it must have cost a vast deal of money and labor.  The gallery
guns command the peninsula and the harbors of both oceans, but they might
as well not be there, I should think, for an army could hardly climb the
perpendicular wall of the rock anyhow.  Those lofty portholes afford
superb views of the sea, though.  At one place, where a jutting crag was
hollowed out into a great chamber whose furniture was huge cannon and
whose windows were portholes, a glimpse was caught of a hill not far
away, and a soldier said:

"That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because a queen
of Spain placed her chair there once when the French and Spanish troops
were besieging Gibraltar, and said she would never move from the spot
till the English flag was lowered from the fortresses.  If the English
hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day,
she'd have had to break her oath or die up there."

On the topmost pinnacle of Gibraltar we halted a good while, and no doubt
the mules were tired.  They had a right to be.  The military road was
good, but rather steep, and there was a good deal of it.  The view from
the narrow ledge was magnificent; from it vessels seeming like the
tiniest little toy boats were turned into noble ships by the telescopes,
and other vessels that were fifty miles away and even sixty, they said,
and invisible to the naked eye, could be clearly distinguished through
those same telescopes.  Below, on one side, we looked down upon an
endless mass of batteries and on the other straight down to the sea.

While I was resting ever so comfortably on a rampart, and cooling my
baking head in the delicious breeze, an officious guide belonging to
another party came up and said:

"Senor, that high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair--"

"Sir, I am a helpless orphan in a foreign land.  Have pity on me.  Don't
--now don't inflict that most in-FERNAL old legend on me anymore today!"

There--I had used strong language after promising I would never do so
again; but the provocation was more than human nature could bear.  If you
had been bored so, when you had the noble panorama of Spain and Africa
and the blue Mediterranean spread abroad at your feet, and wanted to gaze
and enjoy and surfeit yourself in its beauty in silence, you might have
even burst into stronger language than I did.

Gibraltar has stood several protracted sieges, one of them of nearly four
years' duration (it failed), and the English only captured it by
stratagem.  The wonder is that anybody should ever dream of trying so
impossible a project as the taking it by assault--and yet it has been
tried more than once.

The Moors held the place twelve hundred years ago, and a staunch old
castle of theirs of that date still frowns from the middle of the town,
with moss-grown battlements and sides well scarred by shots fired in
battles and sieges that are forgotten now.  A secret chamber in the rock
behind it was discovered some time ago, which contained a sword of
exquisite workmanship, and some quaint old armor of a fashion that
antiquaries are not acquainted with, though it is supposed to be Roman.
Roman armor and Roman relics of various kinds have been found in a cave
in the sea extremity of Gibraltar; history says Rome held this part of
the country about the Christian era, and these things seem to confirm the
statement.

In that cave also are found human bones, crusted with a very thick, stony
coating, and wise men have ventured to say that those men not only lived
before the flood, but as much as ten thousand years before it.  It may be
true--it looks reasonable enough--but as long as those parties can't vote
anymore, the matter can be of no great public interest.  In this cave
likewise are found skeletons and fossils of animals that exist in every
part of Africa, yet within memory and tradition have never existed in any
portion of Spain save this lone peak of Gibraltar!  So the theory is that
the channel between Gibraltar and Africa was once dry land, and that the
low, neutral neck between Gibraltar and the Spanish hills behind it was
once ocean, and of course that these African animals, being over at
Gibraltar (after rock, perhaps--there is plenty there), got closed out
when the great change occurred.  The hills in Africa, across the channel,
are full of apes, and there are now and always have been apes on the rock
of Gibraltar--but not elsewhere in Spain!  The subject is an interesting
one.

There is an English garrison at Gibraltar of 6,000 or 7,000 men, and so
uniforms of flaming red are plenty; and red and blue, and undress
costumes of snowy white, and also the queer uniform of the bare-kneed
Highlander; and one sees soft-eyed Spanish girls from San Roque, and
veiled Moorish beauties (I suppose they are beauties) from Tarifa, and
turbaned, sashed, and trousered Moorish merchants from Fez, and
long-robed, bare-legged, ragged Muhammadan vagabonds from Tetuan and
Tangier, some brown, some yellow and some as black as virgin ink--and
Jews from all around, in gabardine, skullcap, and slippers, just as they
are in pictures and theaters, and just as they were three thousand years
ago, no doubt.  You can easily understand that a tribe (somehow our
pilgrims suggest that expression, because they march in a straggling
procession through these foreign places with such an Indian-like air of
complacency and independence about them) like ours, made up from fifteen
or sixteen states of the Union, found enough to stare at in this
shifting panorama of fashion today.

Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among
us who are sometimes an annoyance.  However, I do not count the Oracle in
that list.  I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who
eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have
any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think
of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of
any long word he uses or ever gets it in the right place; yet he will
serenely venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up
complacently with quotations from authors who never existed, and finally
when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has
been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken
arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and play them in your
very teeth as original with himself.  He reads a chapter in the
guidebooks, mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes
off to inflict the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which has been
festering in his brain for years and which he gathered in college from
erudite authors who are dead now and out of print.  This morning at
breakfast he pointed out of the window and said:

"Do you see that there hill out there on that African coast?  It's one of
them Pillows of Herkewls, I should say--and there's the ultimate one
alongside of it."

"The ultimate one--that is a good word--but the pillars are not both on
the same side of the strait."  (I saw he had been deceived by a
carelessly written sentence in the guidebook.)

"Well, it ain't for you to say, nor for me.  Some authors states it that
way, and some states it different.  Old Gibbons don't say nothing about
it--just shirks it complete--Gibbons always done that when he got stuck
--but there is Rolampton, what does he say?  Why, he says that they was
both on the same side, and Trinculian, and Sobaster, and Syraccus, and
Langomarganbl----"

"Oh, that will do--that's enough.  If you have got your hand in for
inventing authors and testimony, I have nothing more to say--let them be
on the same side."

We don't mind the Oracle.  We rather like him.  We can tolerate the
Oracle very easily, but we have a poet and a good-natured enterprising
idiot on board, and they do distress the company.  The one gives copies
of his verses to consuls, commanders, hotel keepers, Arabs, Dutch--to
anybody, in fact, who will submit to a grievous infliction most kindly
meant.  His poetry is all very well on shipboard, notwithstanding when he
wrote an "Ode to the Ocean in a Storm" in one half hour, and an
"Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship" in the next, the
transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an
invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander
in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the
Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with the passengers.

The other personage I have mentioned is young and green, and not bright,
not learned, and not wise.  He will be, though, someday if he recollects
the answers to all his questions.  He is known about the ship as the
"Interrogation Point," and this by constant use has become shortened to
"Interrogation."  He has distinguished himself twice already.  In Fayal
they pointed out a hill and told him it was 800 feet high and 1,100 feet
long.  And they told him there was a tunnel 2,000 feet long and 1,000
feet high running through the hill, from end to end.  He believed it.  He
repeated it to everybody, discussed it, and read it from his notes.
Finally, he took a useful hint from this remark, which a thoughtful old
pilgrim made:

"Well, yes, it is a little remarkable--singular tunnel altogether--stands
up out of the top of the hill about two hundred feet, and one end of it
sticks out of the hill about nine hundred!"

Here in Gibraltar he corners these educated British officers and badgers
them with braggadocio about America and the wonders she can perform!  He
told one of them a couple of our gunboats could come here and knock
Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea!

At this present moment half a dozen of us are taking a private pleasure
excursion of our own devising.  We form rather more than half the list of
white passengers on board a small steamer bound for the venerable Moorish
town of Tangier, Africa.  Nothing could be more absolutely certain than
that we are enjoying ourselves.  One can not do otherwise who speeds over
these sparkling waters and breathes the soft atmosphere of this sunny
land.  Care cannot assail us here.  We are out of its jurisdiction.

We even steamed recklessly by the frowning fortress of Malabat
(a stronghold of the Emperor of Morocco) without a twinge of fear.
The whole garrison turned out under arms and assumed a threatening
attitude--yet still we did not fear.  The entire garrison marched and
counter-marched within the rampart, in full view--yet notwithstanding
even this, we never flinched.

I suppose we really do not know what fear is.  I inquired the name of the
garrison of the fortress of Malabat, and they said it was Mehemet Ali Ben
Sancom.  I said it would be a good idea to get some more garrisons to
help him; but they said no, he had nothing to do but hold the place, and
he was competent to do that, had done it two years already.  That was
evidence which one could not well refute.  There is nothing like
reputation.

Every now and then my glove purchase in Gibraltar last night intrudes
itself upon me.  Dan and the ship's surgeon and I had been up to the
great square, listening to the music of the fine military bands and
contemplating English and Spanish female loveliness and fashion, and at
nine o'clock were on our way to the theater, when we met the General, the
Judge, the Commodore, the Colonel, and the Commissioner of the United
States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa, who had been to the Club
House to register their several titles and impoverish the bill of fare;
and they told us to go over to the little variety store near the Hall of
Justice and buy some kid gloves.  They said they were elegant and very
moderate in price.  It seemed a stylish thing to go to the theater in kid
gloves, and we acted upon the hint.  A very handsome young lady in the
store offered me a pair of blue gloves.  I did not want blue, but she
said they would look very pretty on a hand like mine.  The remark touched
me tenderly.  I glanced furtively at my hand, and somehow it did seem
rather a comely member.  I tried a glove on my left and blushed a little.
Manifestly the size was too small for me.  But I felt gratified when she
said:

"Oh, it is just right!"  Yet I knew it was no such thing.

I tugged at it diligently, but it was discouraging work.  She said:

"Ah!  I see you are accustomed to wearing kid gloves--but some gentlemen
are so awkward about putting them on."

It was the last compliment I had expected.  I only understand putting on
the buckskin article perfectly.  I made another effort and tore the glove
from the base of the thumb into the palm of the hand--and tried to hide
the rent.  She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to
deserve them or die:

"Ah, you have had experience!  [A rip down the back of the hand.] They
are just right for you--your hand is very small--if they tear you need
not pay for them.  [A rent across the middle.]  I can always tell when a
gentleman understands putting on kid gloves.  There is a grace about it
that only comes with long practice."  The whole after-guard of the glove
"fetched away," as the sailors say, the fabric parted across the
knuckles, and nothing was left but a melancholy ruin.

I was too much flattered to make an exposure and throw the merchandise on
the angel's hands.  I was hot, vexed, confused, but still happy; but I
hated the other boys for taking such an absorbing interest in the
proceedings.  I wished they were in Jericho.  I felt exquisitely mean
when I said cheerfully:

"This one does very well; it fits elegantly.  I like a glove that fits.
No, never mind, ma'am, never mind; I'll put the other on in the street.
It is warm here."

It was warm.  It was the warmest place I ever was in.  I paid the bill,
and as I passed out with a fascinating bow I thought I detected a light
in the woman's eye that was gently ironical; and when I looked back from
the street, and she was laughing all to herself about something or other,
I said to myself with withering sarcasm, "Oh, certainly; you know how to
put on kid gloves, don't you?  A self-complacent ass, ready to be
flattered out of your senses by every petticoat that chooses to take the
trouble to do it!"

The silence of the boys annoyed me.  Finally Dan said musingly:

"Some gentlemen don't know how to put on kid gloves at all, but some do."

And the doctor said (to the moon, I thought):

"But it is always easy to tell when a gentleman is used to putting on kid
gloves."

Dan soliloquized after a pause:

"Ah, yes; there is a grace about it that only comes with long, very long
practice."

"Yes, indeed, I've noticed that when a man hauls on a kid glove like he
was dragging a cat out of an ash hole by the tail, he understands putting
on kid gloves; he's had ex--"

"Boys, enough of a thing's enough!  You think you are very smart, I
suppose, but I don't.  And if you go and tell any of those old gossips in
the ship about this thing, I'll never forgive you for it; that's all."

They let me alone then for the time being.  We always let each other
alone in time to prevent ill feeling from spoiling a joke.  But they had
bought gloves, too, as I did.  We threw all the purchases away together
this morning.  They were coarse, unsubstantial, freckled all over with
broad yellow splotches, and could neither stand wear nor public
exhibition.  We had entertained an angel unawares, but we did not take
her in.  She did that for us.

Tangier!  A tribe of stalwart Moors are wading into the sea to carry us
ashore on their backs from the small boats.



CHAPTER VIII.

This is royal!  Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it
--these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well
enough.  We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present.
Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time.  Elsewhere we
have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always
with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and
so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force.  We wanted
something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign--foreign from top to
bottom--foreign from center to circumference--foreign inside and outside
and all around--nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness
--nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun.
And lo!  In Tangier we have found it.  Here is not the slightest thing
that ever we have seen save in pictures--and we always mistrusted the
pictures before.  We cannot anymore.  The pictures used to seem
exaggerations--they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality.  But
behold, they were not wild enough--they were not fanciful enough--they
have not told half the story.  Tangier is a foreign land if ever there
was one, and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save
The Arabian Nights.  Here are no white men visible, yet swarms of
humanity are all about us.  Here is a packed and jammed city enclosed in
a massive stone wall which is more than a thousand years old.  All the
houses nearly are one-and two-story, made of thick walls of stone,
plastered outside, square as a dry-goods box, flat as a floor on top, no
cornices, whitewashed all over--a crowded city of snowy tombs!  And the
doors are arched with the peculiar arch we see in Moorish pictures; the
floors are laid in varicolored diamond flags; in tesselated, many-colored
porcelain squares wrought in the furnaces of Fez; in red tiles and broad
bricks that time cannot wear; there is no furniture in the rooms (of
Jewish dwellings) save divans--what there is in Moorish ones no man may
know; within their sacred walls no Christian dog can enter.  And the
streets are oriental--some of them three feet wide, some six, but only
two that are over a dozen; a man can blockade the most of them by
extending his body across them.  Isn't it an oriental picture?

There are stalwart Bedouins of the desert here, and stately Moors proud
of a history that goes back to the night of time; and Jews whose fathers
fled hither centuries upon centuries ago; and swarthy Riffians from the
mountains--born cut-throats--and original, genuine Negroes as black as
Moses; and howling dervishes and a hundred breeds of Arabs--all sorts and
descriptions of people that are foreign and curious to look upon.

And their dresses are strange beyond all description.  Here is a bronzed
Moor in a prodigious white turban, curiously embroidered jacket, gold and
crimson sash, of many folds, wrapped round and round his waist, trousers
that only come a little below his knee and yet have twenty yards of stuff
in them, ornamented scimitar, bare shins, stockingless feet, yellow
slippers, and gun of preposterous length--a mere soldier!--I thought he
was the Emperor at least.  And here are aged Moors with flowing white
beards and long white robes with vast cowls; and Bedouins with long,
cowled, striped cloaks; and Negroes and Riffians with heads clean-shaven
except a kinky scalp lock back of the ear or, rather, upon the after
corner of the skull; and all sorts of barbarians in all sorts of weird
costumes, and all more or less ragged.  And here are Moorish women who
are enveloped from head to foot in coarse white robes, and whose sex can
only be determined by the fact that they only leave one eye visible and
never look at men of their own race, or are looked at by them in public.
Here are five thousand Jews in blue gabardines, sashes about their
waists, slippers upon their feet, little skullcaps upon the backs of
their heads, hair combed down on the forehead, and cut straight across
the middle of it from side to side--the selfsame fashion their Tangier
ancestors have worn for I don't know how many bewildering centuries.
Their feet and ankles are bare.  Their noses are all hooked, and hooked
alike.  They all resemble each other so much that one could almost
believe they were of one family.  Their women are plump and pretty, and
do smile upon a Christian in a way which is in the last degree
comforting.

What a funny old town it is!  It seems like profanation to laugh and jest
and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid its hoary relics.  Only the
stately phraseology and the measured speech of the sons of the Prophet
are suited to a venerable antiquity like this.  Here is a crumbling wall
that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the
Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first
Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted
castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden
time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where
it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and
sold in the streets of ancient Thebes!

The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, Romans, all have
battled for Tangier--all have won it and lost it.  Here is a ragged,
oriental-looking Negro from some desert place in interior Africa, filling
his goatskin with water from a stained and battered fountain built by the
Romans twelve hundred years ago.  Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge
built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago.  Men who had seen the
infant Saviour in the Virgin's arms have stood upon it, maybe.

Near it are the ruins of a dockyard where Caesar repaired his ships and
loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, fifty years before the
Christian era.

Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the
phantoms of forgotten ages.  My eyes are resting upon a spot where stood
a monument which was seen and described by Roman historians less than two
thousand years ago, whereon was inscribed:

               "WE ARE THE CANAANITES.  WE ARE THEY THAT
               HAVE BEEN DRIVEN OUT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN
               BY THE JEWISH ROBBER, JOSHUA."

Joshua drove them out, and they came here.  Not many leagues from here is
a tribe of Jews whose ancestors fled thither after an unsuccessful revolt
against King David, and these their descendants are still under a ban and
keep to themselves.

Tangier has been mentioned in history for three thousand years.  And it
was a town, though a queer one, when Hercules, clad in his lion skin,
landed here, four thousand years ago.  In these streets he met Anitus,
the king of the country, and brained him with his club, which was the
fashion among gentlemen in those days.  The people of Tangier (called
Tingis then) lived in the rudest possible huts and dressed in skins and
carried clubs, and were as savage as the wild beasts they were constantly
obliged to war with.  But they were a gentlemanly race and did no work.
They lived on the natural products of the land.  Their king's country
residence was at the famous Garden of Hesperides, seventy miles down the
coast from here.  The garden, with its golden apples (oranges), is gone
now--no vestige of it remains.  Antiquarians concede that such a
personage as Hercules did exist in ancient times and agree that he was an
enterprising and energetic man, but decline to believe him a good,
bona-fide god, because that would be unconstitutional.

Down here at Cape Spartel is the celebrated cave of Hercules, where that
hero took refuge when he was vanquished and driven out of the Tangier
country.  It is full of inscriptions in the dead languages, which fact
makes me think Hercules could not have traveled much, else he would not
have kept a journal.

Five days' journey from here--say two hundred miles--are the ruins of an
ancient city, of whose history there is neither record nor tradition.
And yet its arches, its columns, and its statues proclaim it to have been
built by an enlightened race.

The general size of a store in Tangier is about that of an ordinary
shower bath in a civilized land.  The Muhammadan merchant, tinman,
shoemaker, or vendor of trifles sits cross-legged on the floor and
reaches after any article you may want to buy.  You can rent a whole
block of these pigeonholes for fifty dollars a month.  The market people
crowd the marketplace with their baskets of figs, dates, melons,
apricots, etc., and among them file trains of laden asses, not much
larger, if any, than a Newfoundland dog.  The scene is lively, is
picturesque, and smells like a police court.  The Jewish money-changers
have their dens close at hand, and all day long are counting bronze coins
and transferring them from one bushel basket to another.  They don't coin
much money nowadays, I think.  I saw none but what was dated four or five
hundred years back, and was badly worn and battered.  These coins are not
very valuable.  Jack went out to get a napoleon changed, so as to have
money suited to the general cheapness of things, and came back and said
he had "swamped the bank, had bought eleven quarts of coin, and the head
of the firm had gone on the street to negotiate for the balance of the
change."  I bought nearly half a pint of their money for a shilling
myself.  I am not proud on account of having so much money, though.  I
care nothing for wealth.

The Moors have some small silver coins and also some silver slugs worth a
dollar each.  The latter are exceedingly scarce--so much so that when
poor ragged Arabs see one they beg to be allowed to kiss it.

They have also a small gold coin worth two dollars.  And that reminds me
of something.  When Morocco is in a state of war, Arab couriers carry
letters through the country and charge a liberal postage.  Every now and
then they fall into the hands of marauding bands and get robbed.
Therefore, warned by experience, as soon as they have collected two
dollars' worth of money they exchange it for one of those little gold
pieces, and when robbers come upon them, swallow it.  The stratagem was
good while it was unsuspected, but after that the marauders simply gave
the sagacious United States mail an emetic and sat down to wait.

The Emperor of Morocco is a soulless despot, and the great officers under
him are despots on a smaller scale.  There is no regular system of
taxation, but when the Emperor or the Bashaw want money, they levy on
some rich man, and he has to furnish the cash or go to prison.
Therefore, few men in Morocco dare to be rich.  It is too dangerous a
luxury.  Vanity occasionally leads a man to display wealth, but sooner or
later the Emperor trumps up a charge against him--any sort of one will
do--and confiscates his property.  Of course, there are many rich men in
the empire, but their money is buried, and they dress in rags and
counterfeit poverty.  Every now and then the Emperor imprisons a man who
is suspected of the crime of being rich, and makes things so
uncomfortable for him that he is forced to discover where he has hidden
his money.

Moors and Jews sometimes place themselves under the protection of the
foreign consuls, and then they can flout their riches in the Emperor's
face with impunity.



CHAPTER IX.

About the first adventure we had yesterday afternoon, after landing here,
came near finishing that heedless Blucher.  We had just mounted some
mules and asses and started out under the guardianship of the stately,
the princely, the magnificent Hadji Muhammad Lamarty (may his tribe
increase!) when we came upon a fine Moorish mosque, with tall tower, rich
with checker-work of many-colored porcelain, and every part and portion
of the edifice adorned with the quaint architecture of the Alhambra, and
Blucher started to ride into the open doorway.  A startling "Hi-hi!" from
our camp followers and a loud "Halt!" from an English gentleman in the
party checked the adventurer, and then we were informed that so dire a
profanation is it for a Christian dog to set foot upon the sacred
threshold of a Moorish mosque that no amount of purification can ever
make it fit for the faithful to pray in again.  Had Blucher succeeded in
entering the place, he would no doubt have been chased through the town
and stoned; and the time has been, and not many years ago, either, when a
Christian would have been most ruthlessly slaughtered if captured in a
mosque.  We caught a glimpse of the handsome tessellated pavements within
and of the devotees performing their ablutions at the fountains, but even
that we took that glimpse was a thing not relished by the Moorish
bystanders.

Some years ago the clock in the tower of the mosque got out of order.
The Moors of Tangier have so degenerated that it has been long since
there was an artificer among them capable of curing so delicate a patient
as a debilitated clock.  The great men of the city met in solemn conclave
to consider how the difficulty was to be met.  They discussed the matter
thoroughly but arrived at no solution.  Finally, a patriarch arose and
said:

"Oh, children of the Prophet, it is known unto you that a Portuguee dog
of a Christian clock mender pollutes the city of Tangier with his
presence.  Ye know, also, that when mosques are builded, asses bear the
stones and the cement, and cross the sacred threshold.  Now, therefore,
send the Christian dog on all fours, and barefoot, into the holy place to
mend the clock, and let him go as an ass!"

And in that way it was done.  Therefore, if Blucher ever sees the inside
of a mosque, he will have to cast aside his humanity and go in his
natural character.  We visited the jail and found Moorish prisoners
making mats and baskets.  (This thing of utilizing crime savors of
civilization.)  Murder is punished with death.  A short time ago three
murderers were taken beyond the city walls and shot.  Moorish guns are
not good, and neither are Moorish marksmen.  In this instance they set up
the poor criminals at long range, like so many targets, and practiced on
them--kept them hopping about and dodging bullets for half an hour before
they managed to drive the center.

When a man steals cattle, they cut off his right hand and left leg and
nail them up in the marketplace as a warning to everybody.  Their surgery
is not artistic.  They slice around the bone a little, then break off the
limb.  Sometimes the patient gets well; but, as a general thing, he
don't.  However, the Moorish heart is stout.  The Moors were always
brave.  These criminals undergo the fearful operation without a wince,
without a tremor of any kind, without a groan!  No amount of suffering
can bring down the pride of a Moor or make him shame his dignity with a
cry.

Here, marriage is contracted by the parents of the parties to it.  There
are no valentines, no stolen interviews, no riding out, no courting in
dim parlors, no lovers' quarrels and reconciliations--no nothing that is
proper to approaching matrimony.  The young man takes the girl his father
selects for him, marries her, and after that she is unveiled, and he sees
her for the first time.  If after due acquaintance she suits him, he
retains her; but if he suspects her purity, he bundles her back to her
father; if he finds her diseased, the same; or if, after just and
reasonable time is allowed her, she neglects to bear children, back she
goes to the home of her childhood.

Muhammadans here who can afford it keep a good many wives on hand.  They
are called wives, though I believe the Koran only allows four genuine
wives--the rest are concubines.  The Emperor of Morocco don't know how
many wives he has, but thinks he has five hundred.  However, that is near
enough--a dozen or so, one way or the other, don't matter.

Even the Jews in the interior have a plurality of wives.

I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish women (for they
are only human, and will expose their faces for the admiration of a
Christian dog when no male Moor is by), and I am full of veneration for
the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness.

They carry their children at their backs, in a sack, like other savages
the world over.

Many of the Negroes are held in slavery by the Moors.  But the moment a
female slave becomes her master's concubine her bonds are broken, and as
soon as a male slave can read the first chapter of the Koran (which
contains the creed) he can no longer be held in bondage.

They have three Sundays a week in Tangier.  The Muhammadans' comes on
Friday, the Jews' on Saturday, and that of the Christian Consuls on
Sunday.  The Jews are the most radical.  The Moor goes to his mosque
about noon on his Sabbath, as on any other day, removes his shoes at the
door, performs his ablutions, makes his salaams, pressing his forehead to
the pavement time and again, says his prayers, and goes back to his work.

But the Jew shuts up shop; will not touch copper or bronze money at all;
soils his fingers with nothing meaner than silver and gold; attends the
synagogue devoutly; will not cook or have anything to do with fire; and
religiously refrains from embarking in any enterprise.

The Moor who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca is entitled to high
distinction.  Men call him Hadji, and he is thenceforward a great
personage.  Hundreds of Moors come to Tangier every year and embark for
Mecca.  They go part of the way in English steamers, and the ten or
twelve dollars they pay for passage is about all the trip costs.  They
take with them a quantity of food, and when the commissary department
fails they "skirmish," as Jack terms it in his sinful, slangy way.  From
the time they leave till they get home again, they never wash, either on
land or sea.  They are usually gone from five to seven months, and as
they do not change their clothes during all that time, they are totally
unfit for the drawing room when they get back.

Many of them have to rake and scrape a long time to gather together the
ten dollars their steamer passage costs, and when one of them gets back
he is a bankrupt forever after.  Few Moors can ever build up their
fortunes again in one short lifetime after so reckless an outlay.  In
order to confine the dignity of Hadji to gentlemen of patrician blood and
possessions, the Emperor decreed that no man should make the pilgrimage
save bloated aristocrats who were worth a hundred dollars in specie.  But
behold how iniquity can circumvent the law!  For a consideration, the
Jewish money-changer lends the pilgrim one hundred dollars long enough
for him to swear himself through, and then receives it back before the
ship sails out of the harbor!

Spain is the only nation the Moors fear.  The reason is that Spain sends
her heaviest ships of war and her loudest guns to astonish these Muslims,
while America and other nations send only a little contemptible tub of a
gunboat occasionally.  The Moors, like other savages, learn by what they
see, not what they hear or read.  We have great fleets in the
Mediterranean, but they seldom touch at African ports.  The Moors have a
small opinion of England, France, and America, and put their
representatives to a deal of red-tape circumlocution before they grant
them their common rights, let alone a favor.  But the moment the Spanish
minister makes a demand, it is acceded to at once, whether it be just or
not.

Spain chastised the Moors five or six years ago, about a disputed piece
of property opposite Gibraltar, and captured the city of Tetouan.  She
compromised on an augmentation of her territory, twenty million dollars'
indemnity in money, and peace.  And then she gave up the city.  But she
never gave it up until the Spanish soldiers had eaten up all the cats.
They would not compromise as long as the cats held out.  Spaniards are
very fond of cats.  On the contrary, the Moors reverence cats as
something sacred.  So the Spaniards touched them on a tender point that
time.  Their unfeline conduct in eating up all the Tetouan cats aroused a
hatred toward them in the breasts of the Moors, to which even the driving
them out of Spain was tame and passionless.  Moors and Spaniards are foes
forever now.  France had a minister here once who embittered the nation
against him in the most innocent way.  He killed a couple of battalions
of cats (Tangier is full of them) and made a parlor carpet out of their
hides.  He made his carpet in circles--first a circle of old gray
tomcats, with their tails all pointing toward the center; then a circle
of yellow cats; next a circle of black cats and a circle of white ones;
then a circle of all sorts of cats; and, finally, a centerpiece of
assorted kittens.  It was very beautiful, but the Moors curse his memory
to this day.

When we went to call on our American Consul General today I noticed that
all possible games for parlor amusement seemed to be represented on his
center tables.  I thought that hinted at lonesomeness.  The idea was
correct.  His is the only American family in Tangier.  There are many
foreign consuls in this place, but much visiting is not indulged in.
Tangier is clear out of the world, and what is the use of visiting when
people have nothing on earth to talk about?  There is none.  So each
consul's family stays at home chiefly and amuses itself as best it can.
Tangier is full of interest for one day, but after that it is a weary
prison.  The Consul General has been here five years, and has got enough
of it to do him for a century, and is going home shortly.  His family
seize upon their letters and papers when the mail arrives, read them over
and over again for two days or three, talk them over and over again for
two or three more till they wear them out, and after that for days
together they eat and drink and sleep, and ride out over the same old
road, and see the same old tiresome things that even decades of centuries
have scarcely changed, and say never a single word!  They have literally
nothing whatever to talk about.  The arrival of an American man-of-war is
a godsend to them.  "O Solitude, where are the charms which sages have
seen in thy face?"  It is the completest exile that I can conceive of.
I would seriously recommend to the government of the United States that
when a man commits a crime so heinous that the law provides no adequate
punishment for it, they make him Consul General to Tangier.

I am glad to have seen Tangier--the second-oldest town in the world.  But
I am ready to bid it good-bye, I believe.

We shall go hence to Gibraltar this evening or in the morning, and
doubtless the Quaker City will sail from that port within the next
forty-eight hours.



CHAPTER X.

We passed the Fourth of July on board the Quaker City, in mid-ocean.  It
was in all respects a characteristic Mediterranean day--faultlessly
beautiful.  A cloudless sky; a refreshing summer wind; a radiant sunshine
that glinted cheerily from dancing wavelets instead of crested mountains
of water; a sea beneath us that was so wonderfully blue, so richly,
brilliantly blue, that it overcame the dullest sensibilities with the
spell of its fascination.

They even have fine sunsets on the Mediterranean--a thing that is
certainly rare in most quarters of the globe.  The evening we sailed away
from Gibraltar, that hard-featured rock was swimming in a creamy mist so
rich, so soft, so enchantingly vague and dreamy, that even the Oracle,
that serene, that inspired, that overpowering humbug, scorned the dinner
gong and tarried to worship!

He said: "Well, that's gorgis, ain't it!  They don't have none of them
things in our parts, do they?  I consider that them effects is on account
of the superior refragability, as you may say, of the sun's diramic
combination with the lymphatic forces of the perihelion of Jubiter.  What
should you think?"

"Oh, go to bed!" Dan said that, and went away.

"Oh, yes, it's all very well to say go to bed when a man makes an
argument which another man can't answer.  Dan don't never stand any
chance in an argument with me.  And he knows it, too.  What should you
say, Jack?"

"Now, Doctor, don't you come bothering around me with that dictionary
bosh.  I don't do you any harm, do I?  Then you let me alone."

"He's gone, too.  Well, them fellows have all tackled the old Oracle, as
they say, but the old man's most too many for 'em.  Maybe the Poet Lariat
ain't satisfied with them deductions?"

The poet replied with a barbarous rhyme and went below.

"'Pears that he can't qualify, neither.  Well, I didn't expect nothing
out of him.  I never see one of them poets yet that knowed anything.
He'll go down now and grind out about four reams of the awfullest slush
about that old rock and give it to a consul, or a pilot, or a nigger, or
anybody he comes across first which he can impose on.  Pity but
somebody'd take that poor old lunatic and dig all that poetry rubbage out
of him.  Why can't a man put his intellect onto things that's some value?
Gibbons, and Hippocratus, and Sarcophagus, and all them old ancient
philosophers was down on poets--"

"Doctor," I said, "you are going to invent authorities now and I'll leave
you, too.  I always enjoy your conversation, notwithstanding the
luxuriance of your syllables, when the philosophy you offer rests on your
own responsibility; but when you begin to soar--when you begin to support
it with the evidence of authorities who are the creations of your own
fancy--I lose confidence."

That was the way to flatter the doctor.  He considered it a sort of
acknowledgment on my part of a fear to argue with him.  He was always
persecuting the passengers with abstruse propositions framed in language
that no man could understand, and they endured the exquisite torture a
minute or two and then abandoned the field.  A triumph like this, over
half a dozen antagonists was sufficient for one day; from that time
forward he would patrol the decks beaming blandly upon all comers, and so
tranquilly, blissfully happy!

But I digress.  The thunder of our two brave cannon announced the Fourth
of July, at daylight, to all who were awake.  But many of us got our
information at a later hour, from the almanac.  All the flags were sent
aloft except half a dozen that were needed to decorate portions of the
ship below, and in a short time the vessel assumed a holiday appearance.
During the morning, meetings were held and all manner of committees set
to work on the celebration ceremonies.  In the afternoon the ship's
company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the
asthmatic melodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled "The
Star-Spangled Banner," the choir chased it to cover, and George came in
with a peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered
it. Nobody mourned.

We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional
and I do not endorse it), and then the President, throned behind a cable
locker with a national flag spread over it, announced the "Reader," who
rose up and read that same old Declaration of Independence which we have
all listened to so often without paying any attention to what it said;
and after that the President piped the Orator of the Day to quarters and
he made that same old speech about our national greatness which we so
religiously believe and so fervently applaud.  Now came the choir into
court again, with the complaining instruments, and assaulted "Hail
Columbia"; and when victory hung wavering in the scale, George returned
with his dreadful wild-goose stop turned on and the choir won, of course.
A minister pronounced the benediction, and the patriotic little gathering
disbanded.  The Fourth of July was safe, as far as the Mediterranean was
concerned.

At dinner in the evening, a well-written original poem was recited with
spirit by one of the ship's captains, and thirteen regular toasts were
washed down with several baskets of champagne.  The speeches were bad
--execrable almost without exception.  In fact, without any exception but
one.  Captain Duncan made a good speech; he made the only good speech of
the evening.  He said:

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--May we all live to a green old age and be
prosperous and happy.  Steward, bring up another basket of champagne."

It was regarded as a very able effort.

The festivities, so to speak, closed with another of those miraculous
balls on the promenade deck.  We were not used to dancing on an even
keel, though, and it was only a questionable success.  But take it all
together, it was a bright, cheerful, pleasant Fourth.

Toward nightfall the next evening, we steamed into the great artificial
harbor of this noble city of Marseilles, and saw the dying sunlight gild
its clustering spires and ramparts, and flood its leagues of environing
verdure with a mellow radiance that touched with an added charm the white
villas that flecked the landscape far and near.  [Copyright secured
according to law.]

There were no stages out, and we could not get on the pier from the ship.
It was annoying.  We were full of enthusiasm--we wanted to see France!
Just at nightfall our party of three contracted with a waterman for the
privilege of using his boat as a bridge--its stern was at our companion
ladder and its bow touched the pier.  We got in and the fellow backed out
into the harbor.  I told him in French that all we wanted was to walk
over his thwarts and step ashore, and asked him what he went away out
there for.  He said he could not understand me.  I repeated.  Still he
could not understand.  He appeared to be very ignorant of French.  The
doctor tried him, but he could not understand the doctor.  I asked this
boatman to explain his conduct, which he did; and then I couldn't
understand him.  Dan said:

"Oh, go to the pier, you old fool--that's where we want to go!"

We reasoned calmly with Dan that it was useless to speak to this
foreigner in English--that he had better let us conduct this business in
the French language and not let the stranger see how uncultivated he was.

"Well, go on, go on," he said, "don't mind me.  I don't wish to
interfere.  Only, if you go on telling him in your kind of French, he
never will find out where we want to go to.  That is what I think about
it."

We rebuked him severely for this remark and said we never knew an
ignorant person yet but was prejudiced.  The Frenchman spoke again, and
the doctor said:

"There now, Dan, he says he is going to allez to the douain.  Means he is
going to the hotel.  Oh, certainly--we don't know the French language."

This was a crusher, as Jack would say.  It silenced further criticism
from the disaffected member.  We coasted past the sharp bows of a navy of
great steamships and stopped at last at a government building on a stone
pier.  It was easy to remember then that the douain was the customhouse
and not the hotel.  We did not mention it, however.  With winning French
politeness the officers merely opened and closed our satchels, declined
to examine our passports, and sent us on our way.  We stopped at the
first cafe we came to and entered.  An old woman seated us at a table and
waited for orders.  The doctor said:

"Avez-vous du vin?"

The dame looked perplexed.  The doctor said again, with elaborate
distinctness of articulation:

"Avez-vous du--vin!"

The dame looked more perplexed than before.  I said:

"Doctor, there is a flaw in your pronunciation somewhere.  Let me try
her.  Madame, avez-vous du vin?--It isn't any use, Doctor--take the
witness."

"Madame, avez-vous du vin--du fromage--pain--pickled pigs' feet--beurre
--des oeufs--du boeuf--horseradish, sauerkraut, hog and hominy--anything,
anything in the world that can stay a Christian stomach!"

She said:

"Bless you, why didn't you speak English before?  I don't know anything
about your plagued French!"

The humiliating taunts of the disaffected member spoiled the supper, and
we dispatched it in angry silence and got away as soon as we could.  Here
we were in beautiful France--in a vast stone house of quaint
architecture--surrounded by all manner of curiously worded French signs
--stared at by strangely habited, bearded French people--everything
gradually and surely forcing upon us the coveted consciousness that at
last, and beyond all question, we were in beautiful France and absorbing
its nature to the forgetfulness of everything else, and coming to feel
the happy romance of the thing in all its enchanting delightfulness--and
to think of this skinny veteran intruding with her vile English, at such
a moment, to blow the fair vision to the winds!  It was exasperating.

We set out to find the centre of the city, inquiring the direction every
now and then.  We never did succeed in making anybody understand just
exactly what we wanted, and neither did we ever succeed in comprehending
just exactly what they said in reply, but then they always pointed--they
always did that--and we bowed politely and said, "Merci, monsieur," and
so it was a blighting triumph over the disaffected member anyway.  He was
restive under these victories and often asked:

"What did that pirate say?"

"Why, he told us which way to go to find the Grand Casino."

"Yes, but what did he say?"

"Oh, it don't matter what he said--we understood him.  These are educated
people--not like that absurd boatman."

"Well, I wish they were educated enough to tell a man a direction that
goes some where--for we've been going around in a circle for an hour.
I've passed this same old drugstore seven times."

We said it was a low, disreputable falsehood (but we knew it was not).
It was plain that it would not do to pass that drugstore again, though
--we might go on asking directions, but we must cease from following
finger-pointings if we hoped to check the suspicions of the disaffected
member.

A long walk through smooth, asphaltum-paved streets bordered by blocks of
vast new mercantile houses of cream-colored stone every house and every
block precisely like all the other houses and all the other blocks for a
mile, and all brilliantly lighted--brought us at last to the principal
thoroughfare.  On every hand were bright colors, flashing constellations
of gas burners, gaily dressed men and women thronging the sidewalks
--hurry, life, activity, cheerfulness, conversation, and laughter
everywhere!  We found the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix, and wrote
down who we were, where we were born, what our occupations were, the
place we came from last, whether we were married or single, how we liked
it, how old we were, where we were bound for and when we expected to get
there, and a great deal of information of similar importance--all for the
benefit of the landlord and the secret police.  We hired a guide and
began the business of sightseeing immediately.  That first night on
French soil was a stirring one.  I cannot think of half the places we
went to or what we particularly saw; we had no disposition to examine
carefully into anything at all--we only wanted to glance and go--to move,
keep moving!  The spirit of the country was upon us.  We sat down,
finally, at a late hour, in the great Casino, and called for unstinted
champagne.  It is so easy to be bloated aristocrats where it costs
nothing of consequence!  There were about five hundred people in that
dazzling place, I suppose, though the walls being papered entirely with
mirrors, so to speak, one could not really tell but that there were a
hundred thousand.  Young, daintily dressed exquisites and young,
stylishly dressed women, and also old gentlemen and old ladies, sat in
couples and groups about innumerable marble-topped tables and ate fancy
suppers, drank wine, and kept up a chattering din of conversation that
was dazing to the senses.  There was a stage at the far end and a large
orchestra; and every now and then actors and actresses in preposterous
comic dresses came out and sang the most extravagantly funny songs, to
judge by their absurd actions; but that audience merely suspended its
chatter, stared cynically, and never once smiled, never once applauded!
I had always thought that Frenchmen were ready to laugh at any thing.



CHAPTER XI.

We are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility.  We are getting
reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no
carpets--floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness
that is death to sentimental musing.  We are getting used to tidy,
noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your
back and your elbows like butterflies, quick to comprehend orders, quick
to fill them; thankful for a gratuity without regard to the amount; and
always polite--never otherwise than polite.  That is the strangest
curiosity yet--a really polite hotel waiter who isn't an idiot.  We are
getting used to driving right into the central court of the hotel, in the
midst of a fragrant circle of vines and flowers, and in the midst also of
parties of gentlemen sitting quietly reading the paper and smoking.  We
are getting used to ice frozen by artificial process in ordinary bottles
--the only kind of ice they have here.  We are getting used to all these
things, but we are not getting used to carrying our own soap.  We are
sufficiently civilized to carry our own combs and toothbrushes, but this
thing of having to ring for soap every time we wash is new to us and not
pleasant at all.  We think of it just after we get our heads and faces
thoroughly wet or just when we think we have been in the bathtub long
enough, and then, of course, an annoying delay follows.  These
Marseillaises make Marseillaise hymns and Marseilles vests and Marseilles
soap for all the world, but they never sing their hymns or wear their
vests or wash with their soap themselves.

We have learned to go through the lingering routine of the table d'hote
with patience, with serenity, with satisfaction.  We take soup, then wait
a few minutes for the fish; a few minutes more and the plates are
changed, and the roast beef comes; another change and we take peas;
change again and take lentils; change and take snail patties (I prefer
grasshoppers); change and take roast chicken and salad; then strawberry
pie and ice cream; then green figs, pears, oranges, green almonds, etc.;
finally coffee.  Wine with every course, of course, being in France.
With such a cargo on board, digestion is a slow process, and we must sit
long in the cool chambers and smoke--and read French newspapers, which
have a strange fashion of telling a perfectly straight story till you get
to the "nub" of it, and then a word drops in that no man can translate,
and that story is ruined.  An embankment fell on some Frenchmen
yesterday, and the papers are full of it today--but whether those
sufferers were killed, or crippled, or bruised, or only scared is more
than I can possibly make out, and yet I would just give anything to know.

We were troubled a little at dinner today by the conduct of an American,
who talked very loudly and coarsely and laughed boisterously where all
others were so quiet and well behaved.  He ordered wine with a royal
flourish and said:

"I never dine without wine, sir" (which was a pitiful falsehood), and
looked around upon the company to bask in the admiration he expected to
find in their faces.  All these airs in a land where they would as soon
expect to leave the soup out of the bill of fare as the wine!--in a land
where wine is nearly as common among all ranks as water!  This fellow
said: "I am a free-born sovereign, sir, an American, sir, and I want
everybody to know it!"  He did not mention that he was a lineal
descendant of Balaam's ass, but everybody knew that without his telling
it.

We have driven in the Prado--that superb avenue bordered with patrician
mansions and noble shade trees--and have visited the chateau Boarely and
its curious museum.  They showed us a miniature cemetery there--a copy of
the first graveyard that was ever in Marseilles, no doubt.  The delicate
little skeletons were lying in broken vaults and had their household gods
and kitchen utensils with them.  The original of this cemetery was dug up
in the principal street of the city a few years ago.  It had remained
there, only twelve feet underground, for a matter of twenty-five hundred
years or thereabouts.  Romulus was here before he built Rome, and thought
something of founding a city on this spot, but gave up the idea.  He may
have been personally acquainted with some of these Phoenicians whose
skeletons we have been examining.

In the great Zoological Gardens we found specimens of all the animals the
world produces, I think, including a dromedary, a monkey ornamented with
tufts of brilliant blue and carmine hair--a very gorgeous monkey he was
--a hippopotamus from the Nile, and a sort of tall, long-legged bird with a
beak like a powder horn and close-fitting wings like the tails of a dress
coat.  This fellow stood up with his eyes shut and his shoulders stooped
forward a little, and looked as if he had his hands under his coat
tails. Such tranquil stupidity, such supernatural gravity, such
self-righteousness, and such ineffable self-complacency as were in the
countenance and attitude of that gray-bodied, dark-winged, bald-headed,
and preposterously uncomely bird!  He was so ungainly, so pimply about
the head, so scaly about the legs, yet so serene, so unspeakably
satisfied!  He was the most comical-looking creature that can be
imagined.  It was good to hear Dan and the doctor laugh--such natural and
such enjoyable laughter had not been heard among our excursionists since
our ship sailed away from America.  This bird was a godsend to us, and I
should be an ingrate if I forgot to make honorable mention of him in
these pages.  Ours was a pleasure excursion; therefore we stayed with
that bird an hour and made the most of him.  We stirred him up
occasionally, but he only unclosed an eye and slowly closed it again,
abating no jot of his stately piety of demeanor or his tremendous
seriousness.  He only seemed to say, "Defile not Heaven's anointed with
unsanctified hands."  We did not know his name, and so we called him "The
Pilgrim."  Dan said:

"All he wants now is a Plymouth Collection."

The boon companion of the colossal elephant was a common cat!  This cat
had a fashion of climbing up the elephant's hind legs and roosting on his
back.  She would sit up there, with her paws curved under her breast, and
sleep in the sun half the afternoon.  It used to annoy the elephant at
first, and he would reach up and take her down, but she would go aft and
climb up again.  She persisted until she finally conquered the elephant's
prejudices, and now they are inseparable friends.  The cat plays about
her comrade's forefeet or his trunk often, until dogs approach, and then
she goes aloft out of danger.  The elephant has annihilated several dogs
lately that pressed his companion too closely.

We hired a sailboat and a guide and made an excursion to one of the small
islands in the harbor to visit the Castle d'If.  This ancient fortress
has a melancholy history.  It has been used as a prison for political
offenders for two or three hundred years, and its dungeon walls are
scarred with the rudely carved names of many and many a captive who
fretted his life away here and left no record of himself but these sad
epitaphs wrought with his own hands.  How thick the names were!  And
their long-departed owners seemed to throng the gloomy cells and
corridors with their phantom shapes.  We loitered through dungeon after
dungeon, away down into the living rock below the level of the sea, it
seemed.  Names everywhere!--some plebeian, some noble, some even
princely.  Plebeian, prince, and noble had one solicitude in common--they
would not be forgotten!  They could suffer solitude, inactivity, and the
horrors of a silence that no sound ever disturbed, but they could not
bear the thought of being utterly forgotten by the world.  Hence the
carved names.  In one cell, where a little light penetrated, a man had
lived twenty-seven years without seeing the face of a human being--lived
in filth and wretchedness, with no companionship but his own thoughts,
and they were sorrowful enough and hopeless enough, no doubt.  Whatever
his jailers considered that he needed was conveyed to his cell by night
through a wicket.

This man carved the walls of his prison house from floor to roof with all
manner of figures of men and animals grouped in intricate designs.  He
had toiled there year after year, at his self-appointed task, while
infants grew to boyhood--to vigorous youth--idled through school and
college--acquired a profession--claimed man's mature estate--married and
looked back to infancy as to a thing of some vague, ancient time, almost.
But who shall tell how many ages it seemed to this prisoner?  With the
one, time flew sometimes; with the other, never--it crawled always.  To
the one, nights spent in dancing had seemed made of minutes instead of
hours; to the other, those selfsame nights had been like all other nights
of dungeon life and seemed made of slow, dragging weeks instead of hours
and minutes.

One prisoner of fifteen years had scratched verses upon his walls, and
brief prose sentences--brief, but full of pathos.  These spoke not of
himself and his hard estate, but only of the shrine where his spirit fled
the prison to worship--of home and the idols that were templed there.
He never lived to see them.

The walls of these dungeons are as thick as some bed-chambers at home are
wide--fifteen feet.  We saw the damp, dismal cells in which two of Dumas'
heroes passed their confinement--heroes of "Monte Cristo."  It was here
that the brave Abbe wrote a book with his own blood, with a pen made of a
piece of iron hoop, and by the light of a lamp made out of shreds of
cloth soaked in grease obtained from his food; and then dug through the
thick wall with some trifling instrument which he wrought himself out of
a stray piece of iron or table cutlery and freed Dantes from his chains.
It was a pity that so many weeks of dreary labor should have come to
naught at last.

They showed us the noisome cell where the celebrated "Iron Mask"--that
ill-starred brother of a hardhearted king of France--was confined for a
season before he was sent to hide the strange mystery of his life from
the curious in the dungeons of Ste. Marguerite.  The place had a far
greater interest for us than it could have had if we had known beyond all
question who the Iron Mask was, and what his history had been, and why
this most unusual punishment had been meted out to him.  Mystery!  That
was the charm.  That speechless tongue, those prisoned features, that
heart so freighted with unspoken troubles, and that breast so oppressed
with its piteous secret had been here.  These dank walls had known the
man whose dolorous story is a sealed book forever!  There was fascination
in the spot.



CHAPTER XII.

We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France.
What a bewitching land it is!  What a garden!  Surely the leagues of
bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their
grasses trimmed by the barber.  Surely the hedges are shaped and measured
and their symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners.
Surely the long straight rows of stately poplars that divide the
beautiful landscape like the squares of a checker-board are set with line
and plummet, and their uniform height determined with a spirit level.
Surely the straight, smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-planed and
sandpapered every day.  How else are these marvels of symmetry,
cleanliness, and order attained?  It is wonderful.  There are no
unsightly stone walls and never a fence of any kind.  There is no dirt,
no decay, no rubbish anywhere--nothing that even hints at untidiness
--nothing that ever suggests neglect.  All is orderly and beautiful--every
thing is charming to the eye.

We had such glimpses of the Rhone gliding along between its grassy banks;
of cosy cottages buried in flowers and shrubbery; of quaint old red-tiled
villages with mossy medieval cathedrals looming out of their midst; of
wooded hills with ivy-grown towers and turrets of feudal castles
projecting above the foliage; such glimpses of Paradise, it seemed to us,
such visions of fabled fairyland!

We knew then what the poet meant when he sang of:  "--thy cornfields
green, and sunny vines,  O pleasant land of France!"

And it is a pleasant land.  No word describes it so felicitously as that
one.  They say there is no word for "home" in the French language.  Well,
considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive
aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word.  Let us not
waste too much pity on "homeless" France.  I have observed that Frenchmen
abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time
or other.  I am not surprised at it now.

We are not infatuated with these French railway cars, though.  We took
first-class passage, not because we wished to attract attention by doing
a thing which is uncommon in Europe but because we could make our journey
quicker by so doing.  It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any
country.  It is too tedious.  Stagecoaching is infinitely more
delightful.  Once I crossed the plains and deserts and mountains of the
West in a stagecoach, from the Missouri line to California, and since
then all my pleasure trips must be measured to that rare holiday frolic.
Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and clatter, by night and
by day, and never a weary moment, never a lapse of interest!  The first
seven hundred miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and
softer and smoother than any sea and figured with designs fitted to its
magnitude--the shadows of the clouds.  Here were no scenes but summer
scenes, and no disposition inspired by them but to lie at full length on
the mail sacks in the grateful breeze and dreamily smoke the pipe of
peace--what other, where all was repose and contentment?  In cool
mornings, before the sun was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city
toiling and moiling to perch in the foretop with the driver and see the
six mustangs scamper under the sharp snapping of the whip that never
touched them; to scan the blue distances of a world that knew no lords
but us; to cleave the wind with uncovered head and feel the sluggish
pulses rousing to the spirit of a speed that pretended to the resistless
rush of a typhoon!  Then thirteen hundred miles of desert solitudes; of
limitless panoramas of bewildering perspective; of mimic cities, of
pinnacled cathedrals, of massive fortresses, counterfeited in the eternal
rocks and splendid with the crimson and gold of the setting sun; of dizzy
altitudes among fog-wreathed peaks and never-melting snows, where
thunders and lightnings and tempests warred magnificently at our feet and
the storm clouds above swung their shredded banners in our very faces!
But I forgot.  I am in elegant France now, and not scurrying through the
great South Pass and the Wind River Mountains, among antelopes and
buffaloes and painted Indians on the warpath.  It is not meet that I
should make too disparaging comparisons between humdrum travel on a
railway and that royal summer flight across a continent in a stagecoach.
I meant in the beginning to say that railway journeying is tedious and
tiresome, and so it is--though at the time I was thinking particularly of
a dismal fifty-hour pilgrimage between New York and St. Louis.  Of course
our trip through France was not really tedious because all its scenes and
experiences were new and strange; but as Dan says, it had its
"discrepancies."

The cars are built in compartments that hold eight persons each.  Each
compartment is partially subdivided, and so there are two tolerably
distinct parties of four in it.  Four face the other four.  The seats and
backs are thickly padded and cushioned and are very comfortable; you can
smoke if you wish; there are no bothersome peddlers; you are saved the
infliction of a multitude of disagreeable fellow passengers.  So far, so
well.  But then the conductor locks you in when the train starts; there
is no water to drink in the car; there is no heating apparatus for night
travel; if a drunken rowdy should get in, you could not remove a matter
of twenty seats from him or enter another car; but above all, if you are
worn out and must sleep, you must sit up and do it in naps, with cramped
legs and in a torturing misery that leaves you withered and lifeless the
next day--for behold they have not that culmination of all charity and
human kindness, a sleeping car, in all France.  I prefer the American
system.  It has not so many grievous "discrepancies."

In France, all is clockwork, all is order.  They make no mistakes.  Every
third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a
brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions
with tireless politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and
ready to go and put you into it to make sure that you shall not go
astray.  You cannot pass into the waiting room of the depot till you have
secured your ticket, and you cannot pass from its only exit till the
train is at its threshold to receive you.  Once on board, the train will
not start till your ticket has been examined--till every passenger's
ticket has been inspected.  This is chiefly for your own good.  If by any
possibility you have managed to take the wrong train, you will be handed
over to a polite official who will take you whither you belong and bestow
you with many an affable bow.  Your ticket will be inspected every now
and then along the route, and when it is time to change cars you will
know it.  You are in the hands of officials who zealously study your
welfare and your interest, instead of turning their talents to the
invention of new methods of discommoding and snubbing you, as is very
often the main employment of that exceedingly self-satisfied monarch, the
railroad conductor of America.

But the happiest regulation in French railway government is--thirty
minutes to dinner!  No five-minute boltings of flabby rolls, muddy
coffee, questionable eggs, gutta-percha beef, and pies whose conception
and execution are a dark and bloody mystery to all save the cook that
created them!  No, we sat calmly down--it was in old Dijon, which is so
easy to spell and so impossible to pronounce except when you civilize it
and call it Demijohn--and poured out rich Burgundian wines and munched
calmly through a long table d'hote bill of fare, snail patties, delicious
fruits and all, then paid the trifle it cost and stepped happily aboard
the train again, without once cursing the railroad company.  A rare
experience and one to be treasured forever.

They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, and I think it
must be true.  If I remember rightly, we passed high above wagon roads or
through tunnels under them, but never crossed them on their own level.
About every quarter of a mile, it seemed to me, a man came out and held
up a club till the train went by, to signify that everything was safe
ahead.  Switches were changed a mile in advance by pulling a wire rope
that passed along the ground by the rail, from station to station.
Signals for the day and signals for the night gave constant and timely
notice of the position of switches.

No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of in France.  But why?
Because when one occurs, somebody has to hang for it!  Not hang, maybe,
but be punished at least with such vigor of emphasis as to make
negligence a thing to be shuddered at by railroad officials for many a
day thereafter.  "No blame attached to the officers"--that lying and
disaster-breeding verdict so common to our softhearted juries is seldom
rendered in France.  If the trouble occurred in the conductor's
department, that officer must suffer if his subordinate cannot be proven
guilty; if in the engineer's department and the case be similar, the
engineer must answer.

The Old Travelers--those delightful parrots who have "been here before"
and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever
will know--tell us these things, and we believe them because they are
pleasant things to believe and because they are plausible and savor of
the rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us
everywhere.

But we love the Old Travelers.  We love to hear them prate and drivel and
lie.  We can tell them the moment we see them.  They always throw out a
few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded
every individual and know that he has not traveled.  Then they open their
throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar,
and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth!  Their central idea, their grand
aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and
humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory!  They will not let you
know anything.  They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they
laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand
the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest
absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair
images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless
ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast!  But still I love the Old Travelers.
I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability
to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant
fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their
overwhelming mendacity!

By Lyons and the Saone (where we saw the lady of Lyons and thought little
of her comeliness), by Villa Franca, Tonnere, venerable Sens, Melun,
Fontainebleau, and scores of other beautiful cities, we swept, always
noting the absence of hog-wallows, broken fences, cow lots, unpainted
houses, and mud, and always noting, as well, the presence of cleanliness,
grace, taste in adorning and beautifying, even to the disposition of a
tree or the turning of a hedge, the marvel of roads in perfect repair,
void of ruts and guiltless of even an inequality of surface--we bowled
along, hour after hour, that brilliant summer day, and as nightfall
approached we entered a wilderness of odorous flowers and shrubbery, sped
through it, and then, excited, delighted, and half persuaded that we were
only the sport of a beautiful dream, lo, we stood in magnificent Paris!

What excellent order they kept about that vast depot!  There was no
frantic crowding and jostling, no shouting and swearing, and no
swaggering intrusion of services by rowdy hackmen.  These latter gentry
stood outside--stood quietly by their long line of vehicles and said
never a word.  A kind of hackman general seemed to have the whole matter
of transportation in his hands.  He politely received the passengers and
ushered them to the kind of conveyance they wanted, and told the driver
where to deliver them.  There was no "talking back," no dissatisfaction
about overcharging, no grumbling about anything.  In a little while we
were speeding through the streets of Paris and delightfully recognizing
certain names and places with which books had long ago made us familiar.
It was like meeting an old friend when we read Rue de Rivoli on the
street corner; we knew the genuine vast palace of the Louvre as well as
we knew its picture; when we passed by the Column of July we needed no
one to tell us what it was or to remind us that on its site once stood
the grim Bastille, that grave of human hopes and happiness, that dismal
prison house within whose dungeons so many young faces put on the
wrinkles of age, so many proud spirits grew humble, so many brave hearts
broke.

We secured rooms at the hotel, or rather, we had three beds put into one
room, so that we might be together, and then we went out to a restaurant,
just after lamplighting, and ate a comfortable, satisfactory, lingering
dinner.  It was a pleasure to eat where everything was so tidy, the food
so well cooked, the waiters so polite, and the coming and departing
company so moustached, so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and
wonderfully Frenchy!  All the surroundings were gay and enlivening.  Two
hundred people sat at little tables on the sidewalk, sipping wine and
coffee; the streets were thronged with light vehicles and with joyous
pleasure-seekers; there was music in the air, life and action all about
us, and a conflagration of gaslight everywhere!

After dinner we felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as we might
see without distressing exertion, and so we sauntered through the
brilliant streets and looked at the dainty trifles in variety stores and
jewelry shops.  Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we
put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the
incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed
we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile
verbs and participles.

We noticed that in the jewelry stores they had some of the articles
marked "gold" and some labeled "imitation."  We wondered at this
extravagance of honesty and inquired into the matter.  We were informed
that inasmuch as most people are not able to tell false gold from the
genuine article, the government compels jewelers to have their gold work
assayed and stamped officially according to its fineness and their
imitation work duly labeled with the sign of its falsity.  They told us
the jewelers would not dare to violate this law, and that whatever a
stranger bought in one of their stores might be depended upon as being
strictly what it was represented to be.  Verily, a wonderful land is
France!

Then we hunted for a barber-shop.  From earliest infancy it had been
a cherished ambition of mine to be shaved some day in a palatial
barber-shop in Paris.  I wished to recline at full length in a cushioned
invalid chair, with pictures about me and sumptuous furniture; with
frescoed walls and gilded arches above me and vistas of Corinthian
columns stretching far before me; with perfumes of Araby to intoxicate
my senses and the slumbrous drone of distant noises to soothe me to
sleep.  At the end of an hour I would wake up regretfully and find my
face as smooth and as soft as an infant's.  Departing, I would lift my
hands above that barber's head and say, "Heaven bless you, my son!"

So we searched high and low, for a matter of two hours, but never a
barber-shop could we see.  We saw only wig-making establishments, with
shocks of dead and repulsive hair bound upon the heads of painted waxen
brigands who stared out from glass boxes upon the passer-by with their
stony eyes and scared him with the ghostly white of their countenances.
We shunned these signs for a time, but finally we concluded that the
wig-makers must of necessity be the barbers as well, since we could find
no single legitimate representative of the fraternity.  We entered and
asked, and found that it was even so.

I said I wanted to be shaved.  The barber inquired where my room was.  I
said never mind where my room was, I wanted to be shaved--there, on the
spot.  The doctor said he would be shaved also.  Then there was an
excitement among those two barbers!  There was a wild consultation, and
afterwards a hurrying to and fro and a feverish gathering up of razors
from obscure places and a ransacking for soap.  Next they took us into a
little mean, shabby back room; they got two ordinary sitting-room chairs
and placed us in them with our coats on.  My old, old dream of bliss
vanished into thin air!

I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn.  One of the wig-making
villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by
plastering a mass of suds into my mouth.  I expelled the nasty stuff with
a strong English expletive and said, "Foreigner, beware!"  Then this
outlaw strapped his razor on his boot, hovered over me ominously for six
fearful seconds, and then swooped down upon me like the genius of
destruction.  The first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my
face and lifted me out of the chair.  I stormed and raved, and the other
boys enjoyed it.  Their beards are not strong and thick.  Let us draw the
curtain over this harrowing scene.

Suffice it that I submitted and went through with the cruel infliction of
a shave by a French barber; tears of exquisite agony coursed down my
cheeks now and then, but I survived.  Then the incipient assassin held a
basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents over my face, and
into my bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean pretense of
washing away the soap and blood.  He dried my features with a towel and
was going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused.  I said, with
withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned--I declined to be
scalped.

I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never,
never, never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barber-shops anymore.
The truth is, as I believe I have since found out, that they have no
barber shops worthy of the name in Paris--and no barbers, either, for
that matter.  The impostor who does duty as a barber brings his pans and
napkins and implements of torture to your residence and deliberately
skins you in your private apartments.  Ah, I have suffered, suffered,
suffered, here in Paris, but never mind--the time is coming when I shall
have a dark and bloody revenge.  Someday a Parisian barber will come to
my room to skin me, and from that day forth that barber will never be
heard of more.

At eleven o'clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly referred to
billiards.  Joy!  We had played billiards in the Azores with balls that
were not round and on an ancient table that was very little smoother than
a brick pavement--one of those wretched old things with dead cushions,
and with patches in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made
the balls describe the most astonishing and unsuspected angles and
perform feats in the way of unlooked-for and almost impossible
"scratches" that were perfectly bewildering.  We had played at Gibraltar
with balls the size of a walnut, on a table like a public square--and in
both instances we achieved far more aggravation than amusement.  We
expected to fare better here, but we were mistaken.  The cushions were a
good deal higher than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion of always
stopping under the cushions, we accomplished very little in the way of
caroms.  The cushions were hard and unelastic, and the cues were so
crooked that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would
infallibly put the "English" on the wrong side of the hall.  Dan was to
mark while the doctor and I played.  At the end of an hour neither of us
had made a count, and so Dan was tired of keeping tally with nothing to
tally, and we were heated and angry and disgusted.  We paid the heavy
bill--about six cents--and said we would call around sometime when we had
a week to spend, and finish the game.

We adjourned to one of those pretty cafes and took supper and tested the
wines of the country, as we had been instructed to do, and found them
harmless and unexciting.  They might have been exciting, however, if we
had chosen to drink a sufficiency of them.

To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we now sought
our grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre and climbed into our
sumptuous bed to read and smoke--but alas!

          It was pitiful,
          In a whole city-full,
          Gas we had none.

No gas to read by--nothing but dismal candles.  It was a shame.  We tried
to map out excursions for the morrow; we puzzled over French "guides to
Paris"; we talked disjointedly in a vain endeavor to make head or tail of
the wild chaos of the day's sights and experiences; we subsided to
indolent smoking; we gaped and yawned and stretched--then feebly wondered
if we were really and truly in renowned Paris, and drifted drowsily away
into that vast mysterious void which men call sleep.



CHAPTER XIII.

The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o'clock.  We went to the
'commissionaire' of the hotel--I don't know what a 'commissionaire' is,
but that is the man we went to--and told him we wanted a guide.  He said
the national Exposition had drawn such multitudes of Englishmen and
Americans to Paris that it would be next to impossible to find a good
guide unemployed.  He said he usually kept a dozen or two on hand, but he
only had three now.  He called them.  One looked so like a very pirate
that we let him go at once.  The next one spoke with a simpering
precision of pronunciation that was irritating and said:

"If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in
hees serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat is magnifique to look
upon in ze beautiful Parree.  I speaky ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw."

He would have done well to have stopped there, because he had that much
by heart and said it right off without making a mistake.  But his
self-complacency seduced him into attempting a flight into regions of
unexplored English, and the reckless experiment was his ruin.  Within ten
seconds he was so tangled up in a maze of mutilated verbs and torn and
bleeding forms of speech that no human ingenuity could ever have gotten
him out of it with credit.  It was plain enough that he could not
"speaky" the English quite as "pairfaitemaw" as he had pretended he
could.

The third man captured us.  He was plainly dressed, but he had a
noticeable air of neatness about him.  He wore a high silk hat which was
a little old, but had been carefully brushed.  He wore second-hand kid
gloves, in good repair, and carried a small rattan cane with a curved
handle--a female leg--of ivory.  He stepped as gently and as daintily as
a cat crossing a muddy street; and oh, he was urbanity; he was quiet,
unobtrusive self-possession; he was deference itself!  He spoke softly
and guardedly; and when he was about to make a statement on his sole
responsibility or offer a suggestion, he weighed it by drachms and
scruples first, with the crook of his little stick placed meditatively to
his teeth.  His opening speech was perfect.  It was perfect in
construction, in phraseology, in grammar, in emphasis, in pronunciation
--everything.  He spoke little and guardedly after that.  We were charmed.
We were more than charmed--we were overjoyed.  We hired him at once.  We
never even asked him his price.  This man--our lackey, our servant, our
unquestioning slave though he was--was still a gentleman--we could see
that--while of the other two one was coarse and awkward and the other was
a born pirate.  We asked our man Friday's name.  He drew from his
pocketbook a snowy little card and passed it to us with a profound bow:

                             A. BILLFINGER,
                    Guide to Paris, France, Germany,
                            Spain, &c., &c.
                       Grande Hotel du Louvre.

"Billfinger!  Oh, carry me home to die!"

That was an "aside" from Dan.  The atrocious name grated harshly on my
ear, too.  The most of us can learn to forgive, and even to like, a
countenance that strikes us unpleasantly at first, but few of us, I
fancy, become reconciled to a jarring name so easily.  I was almost sorry
we had hired this man, his name was so unbearable.  However, no matter.
We were impatient to start.  Billfinger stepped to the door to call a
carriage, and then the doctor said:

"Well, the guide goes with the barbershop, with the billiard-table, with
the gasless room, and may be with many another pretty romance of Paris.
I expected to have a guide named Henri de Montmorency, or Armand de la
Chartreuse, or something that would sound grand in letters to the
villagers at home, but to think of a Frenchman by the name of Billfinger!
Oh!  This is absurd, you know.  This will never do.  We can't say
Billfinger; it is nauseating.  Name him over again; what had we better
call him?  Alexis du Caulaincourt?"

"Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville," I suggested.

"Call him Ferguson," said Dan.

That was practical, unromantic good sense.  Without debate, we expunged
Billfinger as Billfinger, and called him Ferguson.

The carriage--an open barouche--was ready.  Ferguson mounted beside the
driver, and we whirled away to breakfast.  As was proper, Mr. Ferguson
stood by to transmit our orders and answer questions.  By and by, he
mentioned casually--the artful adventurer--that he would go and get his
breakfast as soon as we had finished ours.  He knew we could not get
along without him and that we would not want to loiter about and wait for
him.  We asked him to sit down and eat with us.  He begged, with many a
bow, to be excused.  It was not proper, he said; he would sit at another
table.  We ordered him peremptorily to sit down with us.

Here endeth the first lesson.  It was a mistake.

As long as we had that fellow after that, he was always hungry; he was
always thirsty.  He came early; he stayed late; he could not pass a
restaurant; he looked with a lecherous eye upon every wine shop.
Suggestions to stop, excuses to eat and to drink, were forever on his
lips.  We tried all we could to fill him so full that he would have no
room to spare for a fortnight, but it was a failure.  He did not hold
enough to smother the cravings of his superhuman appetite.

He had another "discrepancy" about him.  He was always wanting us to buy
things.  On the shallowest pretenses he would inveigle us into shirt
stores, boot stores, tailor shops, glove shops--anywhere under the broad
sweep of the heavens that there seemed a chance of our buying anything.
Anyone could have guessed that the shopkeepers paid him a percentage on
the sales, but in our blessed innocence we didn't until this feature of
his conduct grew unbearably prominent.  One day Dan happened to mention
that he thought of buying three or four silk dress patterns for presents.
Ferguson's hungry eye was upon him in an instant.  In the course of
twenty minutes the carriage stopped.

"What's this?"

"Zis is ze finest silk magazin in Paris--ze most celebrate."

"What did you come here for?  We told you to take us to the palace of the
Louvre."

"I suppose ze gentleman say he wish to buy some silk."

"You are not required to 'suppose' things for the party, Ferguson.  We do
not wish to tax your energies too much.  We will bear some of the burden
and heat of the day ourselves.  We will endeavor to do such 'supposing'
as is really necessary to be done.  Drive on."  So spake the doctor.

Within fifteen minutes the carriage halted again, and before another silk
store.  The doctor said:

"Ah, the palace of the Louvre--beautiful, beautiful edifice!  Does the
Emperor Napoleon live here now, Ferguson?"

"Ah, Doctor!  You do jest; zis is not ze palace; we come there directly.
But since we pass right by zis store, where is such beautiful silk--"

"Ah!  I see, I see.  I meant to have told you that we did not wish to
purchase any silks to-day, but in my absent-mindedness I forgot it.  I
also meant to tell you we wished to go directly to the Louvre, but I
forgot that also.  However, we will go there now.  Pardon my seeming
carelessness, Ferguson.  Drive on."

Within the half hour we stopped again--in front of another silk store.
We were angry; but the doctor was always serene, always smooth-voiced.
He said:

"At last!  How imposing the Louvre is, and yet how small!  How
exquisitely fashioned!  How charmingly situated!--Venerable, venerable
pile--"

"Pairdon, Doctor, zis is not ze Louvre--it is--"

"What is it?"

"I have ze idea--it come to me in a moment--zat ze silk in zis magazin--"

"Ferguson, how heedless I am.  I fully intended to tell you that we did
not wish to buy any silks to-day, and I also intended to tell you that we
yearned to go immediately to the palace of the Louvre, but enjoying the
happiness of seeing you devour four breakfasts this morning has so filled
me with pleasurable emotions that I neglect the commonest interests of
the time.  However, we will proceed now to the Louvre, Ferguson."

"But, doctor," (excitedly,) "it will take not a minute--not but one small
minute!  Ze gentleman need not to buy if he not wish to--but only look at
ze silk--look at ze beautiful fabric.  [Then pleadingly.] Sair--just only
one leetle moment!"

Dan said, "Confound the idiot!  I don't want to see any silks today, and
I won't look at them.  Drive on."

And the doctor: "We need no silks now, Ferguson.  Our hearts yearn for
the Louvre.  Let us journey on--let us journey on."

"But doctor!  It is only one moment--one leetle moment.  And ze time will
be save--entirely save!  Because zere is nothing to see now--it is too
late.  It want ten minute to four and ze Louvre close at four--only one
leetle moment, Doctor!"

The treacherous miscreant!  After four breakfasts and a gallon of
champagne, to serve us such a scurvy trick.  We got no sight of the
countless treasures of art in the Louvre galleries that day, and our only
poor little satisfaction was in the reflection that Ferguson sold not a
solitary silk dress pattern.

I am writing this chapter partly for the satisfaction of abusing that
accomplished knave Billfinger, and partly to show whosoever shall read
this how Americans fare at the hands of the Paris guides and what sort of
people Paris guides are.  It need not be supposed that we were a stupider
or an easier prey than our countrymen generally are, for we were not.
The guides deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the
first time and sees its sights alone or in company with others as little
experienced as himself.  I shall visit Paris again someday, and then let
the guides beware!  I shall go in my war paint--I shall carry my tomahawk
along.

I think we have lost but little time in Paris.  We have gone to bed every
night tired out.  Of course we visited the renowned International
Exposition.  All the world did that.  We went there on our third day in
Paris--and we stayed there nearly two hours.  That was our first and last
visit.  To tell the truth, we saw at a glance that one would have to
spend weeks--yea, even months--in that monstrous establishment to get an
intelligible idea of it.  It was a wonderful show, but the moving masses
of people of all nations we saw there were a still more wonderful show.
I discovered that if I were to stay there a month, I should still find
myself looking at the people instead of the inanimate objects on
exhibition.  I got a little interested in some curious old tapestries of
the thirteenth century, but a party of Arabs came by, and their dusky
faces and quaint costumes called my attention away at once.  I watched a
silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements and a living
intelligence in his eyes--watched him swimming about as comfortably and
as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a
jeweler's shop--watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and
hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate motions
of swallowing it--but the moment it disappeared down his throat some
tattooed South Sea Islanders approached and I yielded to their
attractions.

Presently I found a revolving pistol several hundred years old which
looked strangely like a modern Colt, but just then I heard that the
Empress of the French was in another part of the building, and hastened
away to see what she might look like.  We heard martial music--we saw an
unusual number of soldiers walking hurriedly about--there was a general
movement among the people.  We inquired what it was all about and learned
that the Emperor of the French and the Sultan of Turkey were about to
review twenty-five thousand troops at the Arc de l'Etoile.  We
immediately departed.  I had a greater anxiety to see these men than I
could have had to see twenty expositions.

We drove away and took up a position in an open space opposite the
American minister's house.  A speculator bridged a couple of barrels with
a board and we hired standing places on it.  Presently there was a sound
of distant music; in another minute a pillar of dust came moving slowly
toward us; a moment more and then, with colors flying and a grand crash
of military music, a gallant array of cavalrymen emerged from the dust
and came down the street on a gentle trot.  After them came a long line
of artillery; then more cavalry, in splendid uniforms; and then their
imperial majesties Napoleon III and Abdul Aziz.  The vast concourse of
people swung their hats and shouted--the windows and housetops in the
wide vicinity burst into a snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs, and the
wavers of the same mingled their cheers with those of the masses below.
It was a stirring spectacle.

But the two central figures claimed all my attention.  Was ever such a
contrast set up before a multitude till then?  Napoleon in military
uniform--a long-bodied, short-legged man, fiercely moustached, old,
wrinkled, with eyes half closed, and such a deep, crafty, scheming
expression about them!--Napoleon, bowing ever so gently to the loud
plaudits, and watching everything and everybody with his cat eyes from
under his depressed hat brim, as if to discover any sign that those
cheers were not heartfelt and cordial.

Abdul Aziz, absolute lord of the Ottoman empire--clad in dark green
European clothes, almost without ornament or insignia of rank; a red
Turkish fez on his head; a short, stout, dark man, black-bearded,
black-eyed, stupid, unprepossessing--a man whose whole appearance
somehow suggested that if he only had a cleaver in his hand and a white
apron on, one would not be at all surprised to hear him say: "A mutton
roast today, or will you have a nice porterhouse steak?"

Napoleon III, the representative of the highest modern civilization,
progress, and refinement; Abdul-Aziz, the representative of a people by
nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive,
superstitious--and a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity,
Blood.  Here in brilliant Paris, under this majestic Arch of Triumph, the
First Century greets the Nineteenth!

NAPOLEON III., Emperor of France!  Surrounded by shouting thousands, by
military pomp, by the splendors of his capital city, and companioned by
kings and princes--this is the man who was sneered at and reviled and
called Bastard--yet who was dreaming of a crown and an empire all the
while; who was driven into exile--but carried his dreams with him; who
associated with the common herd in America and ran foot races for a
wager--but still sat upon a throne in fancy; who braved every danger to
go to his dying mother--and grieved that she could not be spared to see
him cast aside his plebeian vestments for the purple of royalty; who kept
his faithful watch and walked his weary beat a common policeman of
London--but dreamed the while of a coming night when he should tread the
long-drawn corridors of the Tuileries; who made the miserable fiasco of
Strasbourg; saw his poor, shabby eagle, forgetful of its lesson, refuse
to perch upon his shoulder; delivered his carefully prepared, sententious
burst of eloquence upon unsympathetic ears; found himself a prisoner, the
butt of small wits, a mark for the pitiless ridicule of all the world
--yet went on dreaming of coronations and splendid pageants as before; who
lay a forgotten captive in the dungeons of Ham--and still schemed and
planned and pondered over future glory and future power; President of
France at last! a coup d'etat, and surrounded by applauding armies,
welcomed by the thunders of cannon, he mounts a throne and waves before
an astounded world the sceptre of a mighty empire!  Who talks of the
marvels of fiction?  Who speaks of the wonders of romance?  Who prates of
the tame achievements of Aladdin and the Magii of Arabia?

ABDUL-AZIZ, Sultan of Turkey, Lord of the Ottoman Empire!  Born to a
throne; weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as his meanest slave; chief of a
vast royalty, yet the puppet of his Premier and the obedient child of a
tyrannical mother; a man who sits upon a throne--the beck of whose finger
moves navies and armies--who holds in his hands the power of life and
death over millions--yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, idles with his
eight hundred concubines, and when he is surfeited with eating and
sleeping and idling, and would rouse up and take the reins of government
and threaten to be a sultan, is charmed from his purpose by wary Fuad
Pacha with a pretty plan for a new palace or a new ship--charmed away
with a new toy, like any other restless child; a man who sees his people
robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but speaks no word to
save them; who believes in gnomes and genii and the wild fables of The
Arabian Nights, but has small regard for the mighty magicians of to-day,
and is nervous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and
steamboats and telegraphs; who would see undone in Egypt all that great
Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him;
a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth--a degraded,
poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime,
and brutality--and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life
and then pass to the dust and the worms and leave it so!

Napoleon has augmented the commercial prosperity of France in ten years
to such a degree that figures can hardly compute it.  He has rebuilt
Paris and has partly rebuilt every city in the state.  He condemns a
whole street at a time, assesses the damages, pays them, and rebuilds
superbly.  Then speculators buy up the ground and sell, but the original
owner is given the first choice by the government at a stated price
before the speculator is permitted to purchase.  But above all things, he
has taken the sole control of the empire of France into his hands and
made it a tolerably free land--for people who will not attempt to go too
far in meddling with government affairs.  No country offers greater
security to life and property than France, and one has all the freedom he
wants, but no license--no license to interfere with anybody or make
anyone uncomfortable.

As for the Sultan, one could set a trap any where and catch a dozen abler
men in a night.

The bands struck up, and the brilliant adventurer, Napoleon III., the
genius of Energy, Persistence, Enterprise; and the feeble Abdul-Aziz, the
genius of Ignorance, Bigotry, and Indolence, prepared for the Forward
--March!

We saw the splendid review, we saw the white-moustached old Crimean
soldier, Canrobert, Marshal of France, we saw--well, we saw every thing,
and then we went home satisfied.



CHAPTER XIV.

We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame.  We had heard of it before.
It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how
intelligent we are.  We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment;
it was like the pictures.  We stood at a little distance and changed from
one point of observation to another and gazed long at its lofty square
towers and its rich front, clustered thick with stony, mutilated saints
who had been looking calmly down from their perches for ages.  The
Patriarch of Jerusalem stood under them in the old days of chivalry and
romance, and preached the third Crusade, more than six hundred years ago;
and since that day they have stood there and looked quietly down upon the
most thrilling scenes, the grandest pageants, the most extraordinary
spectacles that have grieved or delighted Paris.  These battered and
broken-nosed old fellows saw many and many a cavalcade of mail-clad
knights come marching home from Holy Land; they heard the bells above
them toll the signal for the St. Bartholomew's Massacre, and they saw the
slaughter that followed; later they saw the Reign of Terror, the carnage
of the Revolution, the overthrow of a king, the coronation of two
Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a
regiment of servants in the Tuileries to-day--and they may possibly
continue to stand there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away
and the banners of a great republic floating above its ruins.  I wish
these old parties could speak.  They could tell a tale worth the
listening to.

They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now stands, in the
old Roman days, eighteen or twenty centuries ago--remains of it are still
preserved in Paris; and that a Christian church took its place about A.D.
300; another took the place of that in A.D. 500; and that the foundations
of the present cathedral were laid about A.D. 1100.  The ground ought to
be measurably sacred by this time, one would think.  One portion of this
noble old edifice is suggestive of the quaint fashions of ancient times.
It was built by Jean Sans-Peur, Duke of Burgundy, to set his conscience
at rest--he had assassinated the Duke of Orleans.  Alas!  Those good old
times are gone when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and
soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks and mortar
and building an addition to a church.

The portals of the great western front are bisected by square pillars.
They took the central one away in 1852, on the occasion of thanksgivings
for the reinstitution of the presidential power--but precious soon they
had occasion to reconsider that motion and put it back again!  And they
did.

We loitered through the grand aisles for an hour or two, staring up at
the rich stained-glass windows embellished with blue and yellow and
crimson saints and martyrs, and trying to admire the numberless great
pictures in the chapels, and then we were admitted to the sacristy and
shown the magnificent robes which the Pope wore when he crowned Napoleon
I; a wagon-load of solid gold and silver utensils used in the great
public processions and ceremonies of the church; some nails of the true
cross, a fragment of the cross itself, a part of the crown of thorns.
We had already seen a large piece of the true cross in a church in the
Azores, but no nails.  They showed us likewise the bloody robe which that
archbishop of Paris wore who exposed his sacred person and braved the
wrath of the insurgents of 1848, to mount the barricades and hold aloft
the olive branch of peace in the hope of stopping the slaughter.  His
noble effort cost him his life.  He was shot dead.  They showed us a cast
of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed him, and the two
vertebrae in which it lodged.  These people have a somewhat singular
taste in the matter of relics.  Ferguson told us that the silver cross
which the good archbishop wore at his girdle was seized and thrown into
the Seine, where it lay embedded in the mud for fifteen years, and then
an angel appeared to a priest and told him where to dive for it; he did
dive for it and got it, and now it is there on exhibition at Notre Dame,
to be inspected by anybody who feels an interest in inanimate objects of
miraculous intervention.

Next we went to visit the Morgue, that horrible receptacle for the dead
who die mysteriously and leave the manner of their taking off a dismal
secret.  We stood before a grating and looked through into a room which
was hung all about with the clothing of dead men; coarse blouses,
water-soaked; the delicate garments of women and children; patrician
vestments, hacked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was
crushed and bloody.  On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked,
swollen, purple; clasping the fragment of a broken bush with a grip
which death had so petrified that human strength could not unloose it
--mute witness of the last despairing effort to save the life that was
doomed beyond all help. A stream of water trickled ceaselessly over the
hideous face.  We knew that the body and the clothing were there for
identification by friends, but still we wondered if anybody could love
that repulsive object or grieve for its loss.  We grew meditative and
wondered if, some forty years ago, when the mother of that ghastly thing
was dandling it upon her knee, and kissing it and petting it and
displaying it with satisfied pride to the passers-by, a prophetic vision
of this dread ending ever flitted through her brain.  I half feared that
the mother, or the wife or a brother of the dead man might come while we
stood there, but nothing of the kind occurred.  Men and women came, and
some looked eagerly in and pressed their faces against the bars; others
glanced carelessly at the body and turned away with a disappointed look
--people, I thought, who live upon strong excitements and who attend the
exhibitions of the Morgue regularly, just as other people go to see
theatrical spectacles every night.  When one of these looked in and
passed on, I could not help thinking--

"Now this don't afford you any satisfaction--a party with his head shot
off is what you need."

One night we went to the celebrated Jardin Mabille, but only staid a
little while.  We wanted to see some of this kind of Paris life, however,
and therefore the next night we went to a similar place of entertainment
in a great garden in the suburb of Asnieres.  We went to the railroad
depot, toward evening, and Ferguson got tickets for a second-class
carriage.  Such a perfect jam of people I have not often seen--but there
was no noise, no disorder, no rowdyism.  Some of the women and young
girls that entered the train we knew to be of the demi-monde, but others
we were not at all sure about.

The girls and women in our carriage behaved themselves modestly and
becomingly all the way out, except that they smoked.  When we arrived at
the garden in Asnieres, we paid a franc or two admission and entered a
place which had flower beds in it, and grass plots, and long, curving
rows of ornamental shrubbery, with here and there a secluded bower
convenient for eating ice cream in.  We moved along the sinuous gravel
walks, with the great concourse of girls and young men, and suddenly a
domed and filigreed white temple, starred over and over and over again
with brilliant gas jets, burst upon us like a fallen sun.  Nearby was a
large, handsome house with its ample front illuminated in the same way,
and above its roof floated the Star-Spangled Banner of America.

"Well!" I said.  "How is this?"  It nearly took my breath away.

Ferguson said an American--a New Yorker--kept the place, and was carrying
on quite a stirring opposition to the Jardin Mabille.

Crowds composed of both sexes and nearly all ages were frisking about the
garden or sitting in the open air in front of the flagstaff and the
temple, drinking wine and coffee or smoking.  The dancing had not begun
yet.  Ferguson said there was to be an exhibition.  The famous Blondin
was going to perform on a tightrope in another part of the garden.  We
went thither.  Here the light was dim, and the masses of people were
pretty closely packed together.  And now I made a mistake which any
donkey might make, but a sensible man never.  I committed an error which
I find myself repeating every day of my life.  Standing right before a
young lady, I said:

"Dan, just look at this girl, how beautiful she is!"

"I thank you more for the evident sincerity of the compliment, sir, than
for the extraordinary publicity you have given to it!"  This in good,
pure English.

We took a walk, but my spirits were very, very sadly dampened.  I did not
feel right comfortable for some time afterward.  Why will people be so
stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten
thousand persons?

But Blondin came out shortly.  He appeared on a stretched cable, far away
above the sea of tossing hats and handkerchiefs, and in the glare of the
hundreds of rockets that whizzed heavenward by him he looked like a wee
insect.  He balanced his pole and walked the length of his rope--two or
three hundred feet; he came back and got a man and carried him across; he
returned to the center and danced a jig; next he performed some gymnastic
and balancing feats too perilous to afford a pleasant spectacle; and he
finished by fastening to his person a thousand Roman candles, Catherine
wheels, serpents and rockets of all manner of brilliant colors, setting
them on fire all at once and walking and waltzing across his rope again
in a blinding blaze of glory that lit up the garden and the people's
faces like a great conflagration at midnight.

The dance had begun, and we adjourned to the temple.  Within it was a
drinking saloon, and all around it was a broad circular platform for the
dancers.  I backed up against the wall of the temple, and waited.  Twenty
sets formed, the music struck up, and then--I placed my hands before my
face for very shame.  But I looked through my fingers.  They were dancing
the renowned "Can-can."  A handsome girl in the set before me tripped
forward lightly to meet the opposite gentleman, tripped back again,
grasped her dresses vigorously on both sides with her hands, raised them
pretty high, danced an extraordinary jig that had more activity and
exposure about it than any jig I ever saw before, and then, drawing her
clothes still higher, she advanced gaily to the center and launched a
vicious kick full at her vis-a-vis that must infallibly have removed his
nose if he had been seven feet high.  It was a mercy he was only six.

That is the can-can.  The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily,
as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a
woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to.
There is no word of exaggeration in this.  Any of the staid, respectable,
aged people who were there that night can testify to the truth of that
statement.  There were a good many such people present.  I suppose French
morality is not of that straight-laced description which is shocked at
trifles.

I moved aside and took a general view of the can-can.  Shouts, laughter,
furious music, a bewildering chaos of darting and intermingling forms,
stormy jerking and snatching of gay dresses, bobbing beads, flying arms,
lightning flashes of white-stockinged calves and dainty slippers in the
air, and then a grand final rush, riot, a terrific hubbub, and a wild
stampede!  Heavens!  Nothing like it has been seen on earth since
trembling Tam O'Shanter saw the devil and the witches at their orgies
that stormy night in "Alloway's auld haunted kirk."

We visited the Louvre, at a time when we had no silk purchases in view,
and looked at its miles of paintings by the old masters.  Some of them
were beautiful, but at the same time they carried such evidences about
them of the cringing spirit of those great men that we found small
pleasure in examining them.  Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons
was more prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than the
charms of color and expression which are claimed to be in the pictures.
Gratitude for kindnesses is well, but it seems to me that some of those
artists carried it so far that it ceased to be gratitude and became
worship.  If there is a plausible excuse for the worship of men, then by
all means let us forgive Rubens and his brethren.

But I will drop the subject, lest I say something about the old masters
that might as well be left unsaid.

Of course we drove in the Bois de Boulogne, that limitless park, with its
forests, its lakes, its cascades, and its broad avenues.  There were
thousands upon thousands of vehicles abroad, and the scene was full of
life and gaiety.  There were very common hacks, with father and mother
and all the children in them; conspicuous little open carriages with
celebrated ladies of questionable reputation in them; there were Dukes
and Duchesses abroad, with gorgeous footmen perched behind, and equally
gorgeous outriders perched on each of the six horses; there were blue and
silver, and green and gold, and pink and black, and all sorts and
descriptions of stunning and startling liveries out, and I almost yearned
to be a flunkey myself, for the sake of the fine clothes.

But presently the Emperor came along and he outshone them all.  He was
preceded by a bodyguard of gentlemen on horseback in showy uniforms, his
carriage-horses (there appeared to be somewhere in the remote
neighborhood of a thousand of them,) were bestridden by gallant-looking
fellows, also in stylish uniforms, and after the carriage followed
another detachment of bodyguards.  Everybody got out of the way;
everybody bowed to the Emperor and his friend the Sultan; and they went
by on a swinging trot and disappeared.

I will not describe the Bois de Boulogne.  I can not do it.  It is simply
a beautiful, cultivated, endless, wonderful wilderness.  It is an
enchanting place.  It is in Paris now, one may say, but a crumbling old
cross in one portion of it reminds one that it was not always so.  The
cross marks the spot where a celebrated troubadour was waylaid and
murdered in the fourteenth century.  It was in this park that that fellow
with an unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian Czar's
life last spring with a pistol.  The bullet struck a tree.  Ferguson
showed us the place.  Now in America that interesting tree would be
chopped down or forgotten within the next five years, but it will be
treasured here.  The guides will point it out to visitors for the next
eight hundred years, and when it decays and falls down they will put up
another there and go on with the same old story just the same.



CHAPTER XV.

One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the national
burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her
greatest and best children, the last home of scores of illustrious men
and women who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their own
energy and their own genius.  It is a solemn city of winding streets and
of miniature marble temples and mansions of the dead gleaming white from
out a wilderness of foliage and fresh flowers.  Not every city is so well
peopled as this, or has so ample an area within its walls.  Few palaces
exist in any city that are so exquisite in design, so rich in art, so
costly in material, so graceful, so beautiful.

We had stood in the ancient church of St. Denis, where the marble
effigies of thirty generations of kings and queens lay stretched at
length upon the tombs, and the sensations invoked were startling and
novel; the curious armor, the obsolete costumes, the placid faces, the
hands placed palm to palm in eloquent supplication--it was a vision of
gray antiquity.  It seemed curious enough to be standing face to face, as
it were, with old Dagobert I., and Clovis and Charlemagne, those vague,
colossal heroes, those shadows, those myths of a thousand years ago!  I
touched their dust-covered faces with my finger, but Dagobert was deader
than the sixteen centuries that have passed over him, Clovis slept well
after his labor for Christ, and old Charlemagne went on dreaming of his
paladins, of bloody Roncesvalles, and gave no heed to me.

The great names of Pere la Chaise impress one, too, but differently.
There the suggestion brought constantly to his mind is, that this place
is sacred to a nobler royalty--the royalty of heart and brain.  Every
faculty of mind, every noble trait of human nature, every high occupation
which men engage in, seems represented by a famous name.  The effect is a
curious medley.  Davoust and Massena, who wrought in many a battle
tragedy, are here, and so also is Rachel, of equal renown in mimic
tragedy on the stage.  The Abbe Sicard sleeps here--the first great
teacher of the deaf and dumb--a man whose heart went out to every
unfortunate, and whose life was given to kindly offices in their service;
and not far off, in repose and peace at last, lies Marshal Ney, whose
stormy spirit knew no music like the bugle call to arms.  The man who
originated public gas-lighting, and that other benefactor who introduced
the cultivation of the potato and thus blessed millions of his starving
countrymen, lie with the Prince of Masserano, and with exiled queens and
princes of Further India.  Gay-Lussac the chemist, Laplace the
astronomer, Larrey the surgeon, de Suze the advocate, are here, and with
them are Talma, Bellini, Rubini; de Balzac, Beaumarchais, Beranger;
Moliere and Lafontaine, and scores of other men whose names and whose
worthy labors are as familiar in the remote by-places of civilization as
are the historic deeds of the kings and princes that sleep in the marble
vaults of St. Denis.

But among the thousands and thousands of tombs in Pere la Chaise, there
is one that no man, no woman, no youth of either sex, ever passes by
without stopping to examine.  Every visitor has a sort of indistinct idea
of the history of its dead and comprehends that homage is due there, but
not one in twenty thousand clearly remembers the story of that tomb and
its romantic occupants.  This is the grave of Abelard and Heloise--a
grave which has been more revered, more widely known, more written and
sung about and wept over, for seven hundred years, than any other in
Christendom save only that of the Saviour.  All visitors linger pensively
about it; all young people capture and carry away keepsakes and mementoes
of it; all Parisian youths and maidens who are disappointed in love come
there to bail out when they are full of tears; yea, many stricken lovers
make pilgrimages to this shrine from distant provinces to weep and wail
and "grit" their teeth over their heavy sorrows, and to purchase the
sympathies of the chastened spirits of that tomb with offerings of
immortelles and budding flowers.

Go when you will, you find somebody snuffling over that tomb.  Go when
you will, you find it furnished with those bouquets and immortelles.  Go
when you will, you find a gravel-train from Marseilles arriving to supply
the deficiencies caused by memento-cabbaging vandals whose affections
have miscarried.

Yet who really knows the story of Abelard and Heloise?  Precious few
people.  The names are perfectly familiar to every body, and that is
about all.  With infinite pains I have acquired a knowledge of that
history, and I propose to narrate it here, partly for the honest
information of the public and partly to show that public that they have
been wasting a good deal of marketable sentiment very unnecessarily.


                       STORY OF ABELARD AND HELOISE

Heloise was born seven hundred and sixty-six years ago.  She may have had
parents.  There is no telling.  She lived with her uncle Fulbert, a canon
of the cathedral of Paris.  I do not know what a canon of a cathedral is,
but that is what he was.  He was nothing more than a sort of a mountain
howitzer, likely, because they had no heavy artillery in those days.
Suffice it, then, that Heloise lived with her uncle the howitzer and was
happy.  She spent the most of her childhood in the convent of Argenteuil
--never heard of Argenteuil before, but suppose there was really such a
place.  She then returned to her uncle, the old gun, or son of a gun, as
the case may be, and he taught her to write and speak Latin, which was
the language of literature and polite society at that period.

Just at this time, Pierre Abelard, who had already made himself widely
famous as a rhetorician, came to found a school of rhetoric in Paris.
The originality of his principles, his eloquence, and his great physical
strength and beauty created a profound sensation.  He saw Heloise, and
was captivated by her blooming youth, her beauty, and her charming
disposition.  He wrote to her; she answered.  He wrote again; she
answered again.  He was now in love.  He longed to know her--to speak to
her face to face.

His school was near Fulbert's house.  He asked Fulbert to allow him to
call.  The good old swivel saw here a rare opportunity: his niece, whom
he so much loved, would absorb knowledge from this man, and it would not
cost him a cent.  Such was Fulbert--penurious.

Fulbert's first name is not mentioned by any author, which is
unfortunate.  However, George W. Fulbert will answer for him as well as
any other.  We will let him go at that.  He asked Abelard to teach her.

Abelard was glad enough of the opportunity.  He came often and staid
long.  A letter of his shows in its very first sentence that he came
under that friendly roof like a cold-hearted villain as he was, with the
deliberate intention of debauching a confiding, innocent girl.  This is
the letter:

          "I cannot cease to be astonished at the simplicity of Fulbert;
          I was as much surprised as if he had placed a lamb in the power
          of a hungry wolf.  Heloise and I, under pretext of study, gave
          ourselves up wholly to love, and the solitude that love seeks
          our studies procured for us.  Books were open before us, but we
          spoke oftener of love than philosophy, and kisses came more
          readily from our lips than words."

And so, exulting over an honorable confidence which to his degraded
instinct was a ludicrous "simplicity," this unmanly Abelard seduced the
niece of the man whose guest he was.  Paris found it out.  Fulbert was
told of it--told often--but refused to believe it.  He could not
comprehend how a man could be so depraved as to use the sacred protection
and security of hospitality as a means for the commission of such a crime
as that.  But when he heard the rowdies in the streets singing the
love-songs of Abelard to Heloise, the case was too plain--love-songs come
not properly within the teachings of rhetoric and philosophy.

He drove Abelard from his house.  Abelard returned secretly and carried
Heloise away to Palais, in Brittany, his native country.  Here, shortly
afterward, she bore a son, who, from his rare beauty, was surnamed
Astrolabe--William G.  The girl's flight enraged Fulbert, and he longed
for vengeance, but feared to strike lest retaliation visit Heloise--for
he still loved her tenderly.  At length Abelard offered to marry Heloise
--but on a shameful condition: that the marriage should be kept secret
from the world, to the end that (while her good name remained a wreck, as
before,) his priestly reputation might be kept untarnished.  It was like
that miscreant.  Fulbert saw his opportunity and consented.  He would see
the parties married, and then violate the confidence of the man who had
taught him that trick; he would divulge the secret and so remove somewhat
of the obloquy that attached to his niece's fame.  But the niece
suspected his scheme.  She refused the marriage at first; she said
Fulbert would betray the secret to save her, and besides, she did not
wish to drag down a lover who was so gifted, so honored by the world,
and who had such a splendid career before him.  It was noble,
self-sacrificing love, and characteristic of the pure-souled Heloise,
but it was not good sense.

But she was overruled, and the private marriage took place.  Now for
Fulbert!  The heart so wounded should be healed at last; the proud spirit
so tortured should find rest again; the humbled head should be lifted up
once more.  He proclaimed the marriage in the high places of the city and
rejoiced that dishonor had departed from his house.  But lo!  Abelard
denied the marriage!  Heloise denied it!  The people, knowing the former
circumstances, might have believed Fulbert had only Abelard denied it,
but when the person chiefly interested--the girl herself--denied it, they
laughed, despairing Fulbert to scorn.

The poor canon of the cathedral of Paris was spiked again.  The last hope
of repairing the wrong that had been done his house was gone.  What next?
Human nature suggested revenge.  He compassed it.  The historian says:

          "Ruffians, hired by Fulbert, fell upon Abelard by night, and
          inflicted upon him a terrible and nameless mutilation."

I am seeking the last resting place of those "ruffians."  When I find it
I shall shed some tears on it, and stack up some bouquets and
immortelles, and cart away from it some gravel whereby to remember that
howsoever blotted by crime their lives may have been, these ruffians did
one just deed, at any rate, albeit it was not warranted by the strict
letter of the law.

Heloise entered a convent and gave good-bye to the world and its
pleasures for all time.  For twelve years she never heard of Abelard
--never even heard his name mentioned.  She had become prioress of
Argenteuil and led a life of complete seclusion.  She happened one day to
see a letter written by him, in which he narrated his own history.  She
cried over it and wrote him.  He answered, addressing her as his "sister
in Christ."  They continued to correspond, she in the unweighed language
of unwavering affection, he in the chilly phraseology of the polished
rhetorician.  She poured out her heart in passionate, disjointed
sentences; he replied with finished essays, divided deliberately into
heads and sub-heads, premises and argument.  She showered upon him the
tenderest epithets that love could devise, he addressed her from the
North Pole of his frozen heart as the "Spouse of Christ!"  The abandoned
villain!

On account of her too easy government of her nuns, some disreputable
irregularities were discovered among them, and the Abbot of St. Denis
broke up her establishment.  Abelard was the official head of the
monastery of St. Gildas de Ruys, at that time, and when he heard of her
homeless condition a sentiment of pity was aroused in his breast (it is a
wonder the unfamiliar emotion did not blow his head off,) and he placed
her and her troop in the little oratory of the Paraclete, a religious
establishment which he had founded.  She had many privations and
sufferings to undergo at first, but her worth and her gentle disposition
won influential friends for her, and she built up a wealthy and
flourishing nunnery.  She became a great favorite with the heads of the
church, and also the people, though she seldom appeared in public.  She
rapidly advanced in esteem, in good report, and in usefulness, and
Abelard as rapidly lost ground.  The Pope so honored her that he made her
the head of her order.  Abelard, a man of splendid talents, and ranking
as the first debater of his time, became timid, irresolute, and
distrustful of his powers.  He only needed a great misfortune to topple
him from the high position he held in the world of intellectual
excellence, and it came.  Urged by kings and princes to meet the subtle
St. Bernard in debate and crush him, he stood up in the presence of a
royal and illustrious assemblage, and when his antagonist had finished he
looked about him and stammered a commencement; but his courage failed
him, the cunning of his tongue was gone: with his speech unspoken, he
trembled and sat down, a disgraced and vanquished champion.

He died a nobody, and was buried at Cluny, A.D., 1144.  They removed his
body to the Paraclete afterward, and when Heloise died, twenty years
later, they buried her with him, in accordance with her last wish.  He
died at the ripe age of 64, and she at 63.  After the bodies had remained
entombed three hundred years, they were removed once more.  They were
removed again in 1800, and finally, seventeen years afterward, they were
taken up and transferred to Pere la Chaise, where they will remain in
peace and quiet until it comes time for them to get up and move again.

History is silent concerning the last acts of the mountain howitzer.  Let
the world say what it will about him, I, at least, shall always respect
the memory and sorrow for the abused trust and the broken heart and the
troubled spirit of the old smooth-bore.  Rest and repose be his!

Such is the story of Abelard and Heloise.  Such is the history that
Lamartine has shed such cataracts of tears over.  But that man never
could come within the influence of a subject in the least pathetic
without overflowing his banks.  He ought to be dammed--or leveed, I
should more properly say.  Such is the history--not as it is usually
told, but as it is when stripped of the nauseous sentimentality that
would enshrine for our loving worship a dastardly seducer like Pierre
Abelard.  I have not a word to say against the misused, faithful girl,
and would not withhold from her grave a single one of those simple
tributes which blighted youths and maidens offer to her memory, but I am
sorry enough that I have not time and opportunity to write four or five
volumes of my opinion of her friend the founder of the Parachute, or the
Paraclete, or whatever it was.

The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my
ignorance!  I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort
of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled
to any tearful attentions or not.  I wish I had my immortelles back, now,
and that bunch of radishes.

In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign "English Spoken Here,"
just as one sees in the windows at home the sign "Ici on parle
francaise."  We always invaded these places at once--and invariably
received the information, framed in faultless French, that the clerk who
did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would
be back in an hour--would Monsieur buy something?  We wondered why those
parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary
hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be
in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand.  The truth was, it
was a base fraud--a snare to trap the unwary--chaff to catch fledglings
with.  They had no English-murdering clerk.  They trusted to the sign to
inveigle foreigners into their lairs, and trusted to their own
blandishments to keep them there till they bought something.

We ferreted out another French imposition--a frequent sign to this
effect: "ALL MANNER OF AMERICAN DRINKS ARTISTICALLY PREPARED HERE."  We
procured the services of a gentleman experienced in the nomenclature of
the American bar, and moved upon the works of one of these impostors.  A
bowing, aproned Frenchman skipped forward and said:

"Que voulez les messieurs?"  I do not know what "Que voulez les
messieurs?"  means, but such was his remark.

Our general said, "We will take a whiskey straight."

[A stare from the Frenchman.]

"Well, if you don't know what that is, give us a champagne cock-tail."

[A stare and a shrug.]

"Well, then, give us a sherry cobbler."

The Frenchman was checkmated.  This was all Greek to him.

"Give us a brandy smash!"

The Frenchman began to back away, suspicious of the ominous vigor of the
last order--began to back away, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his
hands apologetically.

The General followed him up and gained a complete victory.  The
uneducated foreigner could not even furnish a Santa Cruz Punch, an
Eye-Opener, a Stone-Fence, or an Earthquake.  It was plain that he was a
wicked impostor.

An acquaintance of mine said the other day that he was doubtless the only
American visitor to the Exposition who had had the high honor of being
escorted by the Emperor's bodyguard.  I said with unobtrusive frankness
that I was astonished that such a long-legged, lantern-jawed,
unprepossessing-looking specter as he should be singled out for a
distinction like that, and asked how it came about.  He said he had
attended a great military review in the Champ de Mars some time ago, and
while the multitude about him was growing thicker and thicker every
moment he observed an open space inside the railing.  He left his
carriage and went into it.  He was the only person there, and so he had
plenty of room, and the situation being central, he could see all the
preparations going on about the field.  By and by there was a sound of
music, and soon the Emperor of the French and the Emperor of Austria,
escorted by the famous Cent Gardes, entered the enclosure.  They seemed
not to observe him, but directly, in response to a sign from the
commander of the guard, a young lieutenant came toward him with a file of
his men following, halted, raised his hand, and gave the military salute,
and then said in a low voice that he was sorry to have to disturb a
stranger and a gentleman, but the place was sacred to royalty.  Then this
New Jersey phantom rose up and bowed and begged pardon, then with the
officer beside him, the file of men marching behind him, and with every
mark of respect, he was escorted to his carriage by the imperial Cent
Gardes!  The officer saluted again and fell back, the New Jersey sprite
bowed in return and had presence of mind enough to pretend that he had
simply called on a matter of private business with those emperors, and so
waved them an adieu and drove from the field!

Imagine a poor Frenchman ignorantly intruding upon a public rostrum
sacred to some six-penny dignitary in America.  The police would scare
him to death first with a storm of their elegant blasphemy, and then pull
him to pieces getting him away from there.  We are measurably superior to
the French in some things, but they are immeasurably our betters in
others.

Enough of Paris for the present.  We have done our whole duty by it.  We
have seen the Tuileries, the Napoleon Column, the Madeleine, that wonder
of wonders the tomb of Napoleon, all the great churches and museums,
libraries, imperial palaces, and sculpture and picture galleries, the
Pantheon, Jardin des Plantes, the opera, the circus, the legislative
body, the billiard rooms, the barbers, the grisettes--

Ah, the grisettes!  I had almost forgotten.  They are another romantic
fraud.  They were (if you let the books of travel tell it) always so
beautiful--so neat and trim, so graceful--so naive and trusting--so
gentle, so winning--so faithful to their shop duties, so irresistible
to buyers in their prattling importunity--so devoted to their
poverty-stricken students of the Latin Quarter--so lighthearted and
happy on their Sunday picnics in the suburbs--and oh, so charmingly,
so delightfully immoral!

Stuff!  For three or four days I was constantly saying:

"Quick, Ferguson!  Is that a grisette?"

And he always said, "No."

He comprehended at last that I wanted to see a grisette.  Then he showed
me dozens of them.  They were like nearly all the Frenchwomen I ever saw
--homely.  They had large hands, large feet, large mouths; they had pug
noses as a general thing, and moustaches that not even good breeding
could overlook; they combed their hair straight back without parting;
they were ill-shaped, they were not winning, they were not graceful; I
knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and
finally, to my thinking it would be base flattery to call them immoral.

Aroint thee, wench!  I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin
Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him.  Thus topples to earth
another idol of my infancy.

We have seen every thing, and tomorrow we go to Versailles.  We shall see
Paris only for a little while as we come back to take up our line of
march for the ship, and so I may as well bid the beautiful city a
regretful farewell.  We shall travel many thousands of miles after we
leave here and visit many great cities, but we shall find none so
enchanting as this.

Some of our party have gone to England, intending to take a roundabout
course and rejoin the vessel at Leghorn or Naples several weeks hence.
We came near going to Geneva, but have concluded to return to Marseilles
and go up through Italy from Genoa.

I will conclude this chapter with a remark that I am sincerely proud to
be able to make--and glad, as well, that my comrades cordially endorse
it, to wit: by far the handsomest women we have seen in France were born
and reared in America.

I feel now like a man who has redeemed a failing reputation and shed
luster upon a dimmed escutcheon, by a single just deed done at the
eleventh hour.

Let the curtain fall, to slow music.



CHAPTER XVI.

VERSAILLES!  It is wonderfully beautiful!  You gaze and stare and try to
understand that it is real, that it is on the earth, that it is not the
Garden of Eden--but your brain grows giddy, stupefied by the world of
beauty around you, and you half believe you are the dupe of an exquisite
dream.  The scene thrills one like military music!  A noble palace,
stretching its ornamented front, block upon block away, till it seemed
that it would never end; a grand promenade before it, whereon the armies
of an empire might parade; all about it rainbows of flowers, and colossal
statues that were almost numberless and yet seemed only scattered over
the ample space; broad flights of stone steps leading down from the
promenade to lower grounds of the park--stairways that whole regiments
might stand to arms upon and have room to spare; vast fountains whose
great bronze effigies discharged rivers of sparkling water into the air
and mingled a hundred curving jets together in forms of matchless beauty;
wide grass-carpeted avenues that branched hither and thither in every
direction and wandered to seemingly interminable distances, walled all
the way on either side with compact ranks of leafy trees whose branches
met above and formed arches as faultless and as symmetrical as ever were
carved in stone; and here and there were glimpses of sylvan lakes with
miniature ships glassed in their surfaces.  And every where--on the
palace steps, and the great promenade, around the fountains, among the
trees, and far under the arches of the endless avenues--hundreds and
hundreds of people in gay costumes walked or ran or danced, and gave to
the fairy picture the life and animation which was all of perfection it
could have lacked.

It was worth a pilgrimage to see.  Everything is on so gigantic a scale.
Nothing is small--nothing is cheap.  The statues are all large; the
palace is grand; the park covers a fair-sized county; the avenues are
interminable.  All the distances and all the dimensions about Versailles
are vast.  I used to think the pictures exaggerated these distances and
these dimensions beyond all reason, and that they made Versailles more
beautiful than it was possible for any place in the world to be.  I know
now that the pictures never came up to the subject in any respect, and
that no painter could represent Versailles on canvas as beautiful as it
is in reality.  I used to abuse Louis XIV for spending two hundred
millions of dollars in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so
scarce with some of his subjects; but I have forgiven him now.  He took a
tract of land sixty miles in circumference and set to work to make this
park and build this palace and a road to it from Paris.  He kept 36,000
men employed daily on it, and the labor was so unhealthy that they used
to die and be hauled off by cartloads every night.  The wife of a
nobleman of the time speaks of this as an "inconvenience," but naively
remarks that "it does not seem worthy of attention in the happy state of
tranquillity we now enjoy."

I always thought ill of people at home who trimmed their shrubbery into
pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and
when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to
feel dissatisfied.  But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom
of it.  They seek the general effect.  We distort a dozen sickly trees
into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room,
and then surely they look absurd enough.  But here they take two hundred
thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of
leaf or branch to grow on the trunk lower down than six feet above the
ground; from that point the boughs begin to project, and very gradually
they extend outward further and further till they meet overhead, and a
faultless tunnel of foliage is formed.  The arch is mathematically
precise.  The effect is then very fine.  They make trees take fifty
different shapes, and so these quaint effects are infinitely varied and
picturesque.  The trees in no two avenues are shaped alike, and
consequently the eye is not fatigued with anything in the nature of
monotonous uniformity.  I will drop this subject now, leaving it to
others to determine how these people manage to make endless ranks of
lofty forest trees grow to just a certain thickness of trunk (say a foot
and two-thirds); how they make them spring to precisely the same height
for miles; how they make them grow so close together; how they compel one
huge limb to spring from the same identical spot on each tree and form
the main sweep of the arch; and how all these things are kept exactly in
the same condition and in the same exquisite shapeliness and symmetry
month after month and year after year--for I have tried to reason out the
problem and have failed.

We walked through the great hall of sculpture and the one hundred and
fifty galleries of paintings in the palace of Versailles, and felt that
to be in such a place was useless unless one had a whole year at his
disposal.  These pictures are all battle scenes, and only one solitary
little canvas among them all treats of anything but great French
victories.  We wandered, also, through the Grand Trianon and the Petit
Trianon, those monuments of royal prodigality, and with histories so
mournful--filled, as it is, with souvenirs of Napoleon the First, and
three dead kings and as many queens.  In one sumptuous bed they had all
slept in succession, but no one occupies it now.  In a large dining room
stood the table at which Louis XIV and his mistress Madame Maintenon, and
after them Louis XV, and Pompadour, had sat at their meals naked and
unattended--for the table stood upon a trapdoor, which descended with it
to regions below when it was necessary to replenish its dishes.  In a
room of the Petit Trianon stood the furniture, just as poor Marie
Antoinette left it when the mob came and dragged her and the King to
Paris, never to return.  Near at hand, in the stables, were prodigious
carriages that showed no color but gold--carriages used by former kings
of France on state occasions, and never used now save when a kingly head
is to be crowned or an imperial infant christened.  And with them were
some curious sleighs, whose bodies were shaped like lions, swans, tigers,
etc.--vehicles that had once been handsome with pictured designs and
fine workmanship, but were dusty and decaying now.  They had their
history.  When Louis XIV had finished the Grand Trianon, he told
Maintenon he had created a Paradise for her, and asked if she could think
of anything now to wish for.  He said he wished the Trianon to be
perfection--nothing less.  She said she could think of but one thing--it
was summer, and it was balmy France--yet she would like well to sleigh
ride in the leafy avenues of Versailles!  The next morning found miles
and miles of grassy avenues spread thick with snowy salt and sugar, and a
procession of those quaint sleighs waiting to receive the chief concubine
of the gaiest and most unprincipled court that France has ever seen!

From sumptuous Versailles, with its palaces, its statues, its gardens,
and its fountains, we journeyed back to Paris and sought its antipodes
--the Faubourg St. Antoine.  Little, narrow streets; dirty children
blockading them; greasy, slovenly women capturing and spanking them;
filthy dens on first floors, with rag stores in them (the heaviest
business in the Faubourg is the chiffonier's); other filthy dens where
whole suits of second and third-hand clothing are sold at prices that
would ruin any proprietor who did not steal his stock; still other filthy
dens where they sold groceries--sold them by the half-pennyworth--five
dollars would buy the man out, goodwill and all.  Up these little crooked
streets they will murder a man for seven dollars and dump the body in the
Seine.  And up some other of these streets--most of them, I should say
--live lorettes.

All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, vice, and crime
go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every
side.  Here the people live who begin the revolutions.  Whenever there is
anything of that kind to be done, they are always ready.  They take as
much genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting a
throat or shoving a friend into the Seine.  It is these savage-looking
ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries occasionally, and
swarm into Versailles when a king is to be called to account.

But they will build no more barricades, they will break no more soldiers'
heads with paving-stones.  Louis Napoleon has taken care of all that.  He
is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble
boulevards as straight as an arrow--avenues which a cannon ball could
traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible
than the flesh and bones of men--boulevards whose stately edifices will
never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented
revolution breeders.  Five of these great thoroughfares radiate from one
ample centre--a centre which is exceedingly well adapted to the
accommodation of heavy artillery.  The mobs used to riot there, but they
must seek another rallying-place in future.  And this ingenious Napoleon
paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition
of asphaltum and sand.  No more barricades of flagstones--no more
assaulting his Majesty's troops with cobbles.  I cannot feel friendly
toward my quondam fellow-American, Napoleon III., especially at this
time,--[July, 1867.]--when in fancy I see his credulous victim,
Maximilian, lying stark and stiff in Mexico, and his maniac widow
watching eagerly from her French asylum for the form that will never
come--but I do admire his nerve, his calm self-reliance, his shrewd good
sense.



CHAPTER XVII.

We had a pleasant journey of it seaward again.  We found that for the
three past nights our ship had been in a state of war.  The first night
the sailors of a British ship, being happy with grog, came down on the
pier and challenged our sailors to a free fight.  They accepted with
alacrity, repaired to the pier, and gained--their share of a drawn
battle.  Several bruised and bloody members of both parties were carried
off by the police and imprisoned until the following morning.  The next
night the British boys came again to renew the fight, but our men had had
strict orders to remain on board and out of sight.  They did so, and the
besieging party grew noisy and more and more abusive as the fact became
apparent (to them) that our men were afraid to come out.  They went away
finally with a closing burst of ridicule and offensive epithets.  The
third night they came again and were more obstreperous than ever.  They
swaggered up and down the almost deserted pier, and hurled curses,
obscenity, and stinging sarcasms at our crew.  It was more than human
nature could bear.  The executive officer ordered our men ashore--with
instructions not to fight.  They charged the British and gained a
brilliant victory.  I probably would not have mentioned this war had it
ended differently.  But I travel to learn, and I still remember that they
picture no French defeats in the battle-galleries of Versailles.

It was like home to us to step on board the comfortable ship again and
smoke and lounge about her breezy decks.  And yet it was not altogether
like home, either, because so many members of the family were away.  We
missed some pleasant faces which we would rather have found at dinner,
and at night there were gaps in the euchre-parties which could not be
satisfactorily filled.  "Moult"  was in England, Jack in Switzerland,
Charley in Spain.  Blucher was gone, none could tell where.  But we were
at sea again, and we had the stars and the ocean to look at, and plenty
of room to meditate in.

In due time the shores of Italy were sighted, and as we stood gazing from
the decks, early in the bright summer morning, the stately city of Genoa
rose up out of the sea and flung back the sunlight from her hundred
palaces.

Here we rest for the present--or rather, here we have been trying to
rest, for some little time, but we run about too much to accomplish a
great deal in that line.

I would like to remain here.  I had rather not go any further.  There may
be prettier women in Europe, but I doubt it.  The population of Genoa is
120,000; two-thirds of these are women, I think, and at least two-thirds
of the women are beautiful.  They are as dressy and as tasteful and as
graceful as they could possibly be without being angels.  However, angels
are not very dressy, I believe.  At least the angels in pictures are not
--they wear nothing but wings.  But these Genoese women do look so
charming.  Most of the young demoiselles are robed in a cloud of white
from head to foot, though many trick themselves out more elaborately.
Nine-tenths of them wear nothing on their heads but a filmy sort of veil,
which falls down their backs like a white mist.  They are very fair, and
many of them have blue eyes, but black and dreamy dark brown ones are met
with oftenest.

The ladies and gentlemen of Genoa have a pleasant fashion of promenading
in a large park on the top of a hill in the center of the city, from six
till nine in the evening, and then eating ices in a neighboring garden an
hour or two longer.  We went to the park on Sunday evening.  Two thousand
persons were present, chiefly young ladies and gentlemen.  The gentlemen
were dressed in the very latest Paris fashions, and the robes of the
ladies glinted among the trees like so many snowflakes.  The multitude
moved round and round the park in a great procession.  The bands played,
and so did the fountains; the moon and the gas lamps lit up the scene,
and altogether it was a brilliant and an animated picture.  I scanned
every female face that passed, and it seemed to me that all were
handsome.  I never saw such a freshet of loveliness before.  I did not
see how a man of only ordinary decision of character could marry here,
because before he could get his mind made up he would fall in love with
somebody else.

Never smoke any Italian tobacco.  Never do it on any account.  It makes
me shudder to think what it must be made of.  You cannot throw an old
cigar "stub" down anywhere, but some vagabond will pounce upon it on the
instant.  I like to smoke a good deal, but it wounds my sensibilities to
see one of these stub-hunters watching me out of the corners of his
hungry eyes and calculating how long my cigar will be likely to last.
It reminded me too painfully of that San Francisco undertaker who used to
go to sick-beds with his watch in his hand and time the corpse.  One of
these stub-hunters followed us all over the park last night, and we never
had a smoke that was worth anything.  We were always moved to appease him
with the stub before the cigar was half gone, because he looked so
viciously anxious.  He regarded us as his own legitimate prey, by right
of discovery, I think, because he drove off several other professionals
who wanted to take stock in us.

Now, they surely must chew up those old stubs, and dry and sell them for
smoking-tobacco.  Therefore, give your custom to other than Italian
brands of the article.

"The Superb" and the "City of Palaces" are names which Genoa has held for
centuries.  She is full of palaces, certainly, and the palaces are
sumptuous inside, but they are very rusty without and make no pretensions
to architectural magnificence.  "Genoa the Superb" would be a felicitous
title if it referred to the women.

We have visited several of the palaces--immense thick-walled piles, with
great stone staircases, tesselated marble pavements on the floors,
(sometimes they make a mosaic work, of intricate designs, wrought in
pebbles or little fragments of marble laid in cement,) and grand salons
hung with pictures by Rubens, Guido, Titian, Paul Veronese, and so on,
and portraits of heads of the family, in plumed helmets and gallant coats
of mail, and patrician ladies in stunning costumes of centuries ago.
But, of course, the folks were all out in the country for the summer, and
might not have known enough to ask us to dinner if they had been at home,
and so all the grand empty salons, with their resounding pavements, their
grim pictures of dead ancestors, and tattered banners with the dust of
bygone centuries upon them, seemed to brood solemnly of death and the
grave, and our spirits ebbed away, and our cheerfulness passed from us.
We never went up to the eleventh story.  We always began to suspect
ghosts.  There was always an undertaker-looking servant along, too, who
handed us a program, pointed to the picture that began the list of the
salon he was in, and then stood stiff and stark and unsmiling in his
petrified livery till we were ready to move on to the next chamber,
whereupon he marched sadly ahead and took up another malignantly
respectful position as before.  I wasted so much time praying that the
roof would fall in on these dispiriting flunkies that I had but little
left to bestow upon palace and pictures.

And besides, as in Paris, we had a guide.  Perdition catch all the
guides.  This one said he was the most gifted linguist in Genoa, as far
as English was concerned, and that only two persons in the city beside
himself could talk the language at all.  He showed us the birthplace of
Christopher Columbus, and after we had reflected in silent awe before it
for fifteen minutes, he said it was not the birthplace of Columbus, but
of Columbus' grandmother!  When we demanded an explanation of his conduct
he only shrugged his shoulders and answered in barbarous Italian.  I
shall speak further of this guide in a future chapter.  All the
information we got out of him we shall be able to carry along with us, I
think.

I have not been to church so often in a long time as I have in the last
few weeks.  The people in these old lands seem to make churches their
specialty.  Especially does this seem to be the case with the citizens of
Genoa.  I think there is a church every three or four hundred yards all
over town.  The streets are sprinkled from end to end with shovel-hatted,
long-robed, well-fed priests, and the church bells by dozens are pealing
all the day long, nearly.  Every now and then one comes across a friar of
orders gray, with shaven head, long, coarse robe, rope girdle and beads,
and with feet cased in sandals or entirely bare.  These worthies suffer
in the flesh and do penance all their lives, I suppose, but they look
like consummate famine-breeders.  They are all fat and serene.

The old Cathedral of San Lorenzo is about as notable a building as we
have found in Genoa.  It is vast, and has colonnades of noble pillars,
and a great organ, and the customary pomp of gilded moldings, pictures,
frescoed ceilings, and so forth.  I cannot describe it, of course--it
would require a good many pages to do that.  But it is a curious place.
They said that half of it--from the front door halfway down to the altar
--was a Jewish synagogue before the Saviour was born, and that no
alteration had been made in it since that time.  We doubted the
statement, but did it reluctantly.  We would much rather have believed
it.  The place looked in too perfect repair to be so ancient.

The main point of interest about the cathedral is the little Chapel of
St. John the Baptist.  They only allow women to enter it on one day in
the year, on account of the animosity they still cherish against the sex
because of the murder of the Saint to gratify a caprice of Herodias.  In
this Chapel is a marble chest, in which, they told us, were the ashes of
St. John; and around it was wound a chain, which, they said, had confined
him when he was in prison.  We did not desire to disbelieve these
statements, and yet we could not feel certain that they were correct
--partly because we could have broken that chain, and so could St. John,
and partly because we had seen St. John's ashes before, in another
church.  We could not bring ourselves to think St. John had two sets of
ashes.

They also showed us a portrait of the Madonna which was painted by St.
Luke, and it did not look half as old and smoky as some of the pictures
by Rubens.  We could not help admiring the Apostle's modesty in never
once mentioning in his writings that he could paint.

But isn't this relic matter a little overdone?  We find a piece of the
true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that
held it together.  I would not like to be positive, but I think we have
seen as much as a keg of these nails.  Then there is the crown of thorns;
they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also
in Notre Dame.  And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have
seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.

I only meant to write about the churches, but I keep wandering from the
subject.  I could say that the Church of the Annunciation is a wilderness
of beautiful columns, of statues, gilded moldings, and pictures almost
countless, but that would give no one an entirely perfect idea of the
thing, and so where is the use?  One family built the whole edifice, and
have got money left.  There is where the mystery lies.  We had an idea at
first that only a mint could have survived the expense.

These people here live in the heaviest, highest, broadest, darkest,
solidest houses one can imagine.  Each one might "laugh a siege to
scorn."  A hundred feet front and a hundred high is about the style, and
you go up three flights of stairs before you begin to come upon signs of
occupancy.  Everything is stone, and stone of the heaviest--floors,
stairways, mantels, benches--everything.  The walls are four to five feet
thick.  The streets generally are four or five to eight feet wide and as
crooked as a corkscrew.  You go along one of these gloomy cracks, and
look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your
head, where the tops of the tall houses on either side of the street bend
almost together.  You feel as if you were at the bottom of some
tremendous abyss, with all the world far above you.  You wind in and out
and here and there, in the most mysterious way, and have no more idea of
the points of the compass than if you were a blind man.  You can never
persuade yourself that these are actually streets, and the frowning,
dingy, monstrous houses dwellings, till you see one of these beautiful,
prettily dressed women emerge from them--see her emerge from a dark,
dreary-looking den that looks dungeon all over, from the ground away
halfway up to heaven.  And then you wonder that such a charming moth
could come from such a forbidding shell as that.  The streets are wisely
made narrow and the houses heavy and thick and stony, in order that the
people may be cool in this roasting climate.  And they are cool, and stay
so.  And while I think of it--the men wear hats and have very dark
complexions, but the women wear no headgear but a flimsy veil like a
gossamer's web, and yet are exceedingly fair as a general thing.
Singular, isn't it?

The huge palaces of Genoa are each supposed to be occupied by one family,
but they could accommodate a hundred, I should think.  They are relics of
the grandeur of Genoa's palmy days--the days when she was a great
commercial and maritime power several centuries ago.  These houses, solid
marble palaces though they be, are in many cases of a dull pinkish color,
outside, and from pavement to eaves are pictured with Genoese battle
scenes, with monstrous Jupiters and Cupids, and with familiar
illustrations from Grecian mythology.  Where the paint has yielded to age
and exposure and is peeling off in flakes and patches, the effect is not
happy.  A noseless Cupid or a Jupiter with an eye out or a Venus with a
fly-blister on her breast, are not attractive features in a picture.
Some of these painted walls reminded me somewhat of the tall van,
plastered with fanciful bills and posters, that follows the bandwagon of
a circus about a country village.  I have not read or heard that the
outsides of the houses of any other European city are frescoed in this
way.

I can not conceive of such a thing as Genoa in ruins.  Such massive
arches, such ponderous substructions as support these towering
broad-winged edifices, we have seldom seen before; and surely the great
blocks of stone of which these edifices are built can never decay; walls
that are as thick as an ordinary American doorway is high cannot
crumble.

The republics of Genoa and Pisa were very powerful in the Middle Ages.
Their ships filled the Mediterranean, and they carried on an extensive
commerce with Constantinople and Syria.  Their warehouses were the great
distributing depots from whence the costly merchandise of the East was
sent abroad over Europe.  They were warlike little nations and defied, in
those days, governments that overshadow them now as mountains overshadow
molehills.  The Saracens captured and pillaged Genoa nine hundred years
ago, but during the following century Genoa and Pisa entered into an
offensive and defensive alliance and besieged the Saracen colonies in
Sardinia and the Balearic Isles with an obstinacy that maintained its
pristine vigor and held to its purpose for forty long years.  They were
victorious at last and divided their conquests equably among their great
patrician families.  Descendants of some of those proud families still
inhabit the palaces of Genoa, and trace in their own features a
resemblance to the grim knights whose portraits hang in their stately
halls, and to pictured beauties with pouting lips and merry eyes whose
originals have been dust and ashes for many a dead and forgotten century.

The hotel we live in belonged to one of those great orders of knights of
the Cross in the times of the Crusades, and its mailed sentinels once
kept watch and ward in its massive turrets and woke the echoes of these
halls and corridors with their iron heels.

But Genoa's greatness has degenerated into an unostentatious commerce in
velvets and silver filagree-work.  They say that each European town has
its specialty.  These filagree things are Genoa's specialty.  Her smiths
take silver ingots and work them up into all manner of graceful and
beautiful forms.  They make bunches of flowers, from flakes and wires of
silver, that counterfeit the delicate creations the frost weaves upon a
windowpane; and we were shown a miniature silver temple whose fluted
columns, whose Corinthian capitals and rich entablatures, whose spire,
statues, bells, and ornate lavishness of sculpture were wrought in
polished silver, and with such matchless art that every detail was a
fascinating study and the finished edifice a wonder of beauty.

We are ready to move again, though we are not really tired yet of the
narrow passages of this old marble cave.  Cave is a good word--when
speaking of Genoa under the stars.  When we have been prowling at
midnight through the gloomy crevices they call streets, where no
footfalls but ours were echoing, where only ourselves were abroad, and
lights appeared only at long intervals and at a distance, and
mysteriously disappeared again, and the houses at our elbows seemed to
stretch upward farther than ever toward the heavens, the memory of a cave
I used to know at home was always in my mind, with its lofty passages,
its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its
flitting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations of branching
crevices and corridors where we least expected them.

We are not tired of the endless processions of cheerful, chattering
gossipers that throng these courts and streets all day long, either; nor
of the coarse-robed monks; nor of the "Asti" wines, which that old doctor
(whom we call the Oracle,) with customary felicity in the matter of
getting everything wrong, misterms "nasty."  But we must go,
nevertheless.

Our last sight was the cemetery (a burial place intended to accommodate
60,000 bodies,) and we shall continue to remember it after we shall have
forgotten the palaces.  It is a vast marble collonaded corridor extending
around a great unoccupied square of ground; its broad floor is marble,
and on every slab is an inscription--for every slab covers a corpse.  On
either side, as one walks down the middle of the passage, are monuments,
tombs, and sculptured figures that are exquisitely wrought and are full
of grace and beauty.  They are new and snowy; every outline is perfect,
every feature guiltless of mutilation, flaw, or blemish; and therefore,
to us these far-reaching ranks of bewitching forms are a hundred fold
more lovely than the damaged and dingy statuary they have saved from the
wreck of ancient art and set up in the galleries of Paris for the worship
of the world.

Well provided with cigars and other necessaries of life, we are now ready
to take the cars for Milan.



CHAPTER XVIII.

All day long we sped through a mountainous country whose peaks were
bright with sunshine, whose hillsides were dotted with pretty villas
sitting in the midst of gardens and shrubbery, and whose deep ravines
were cool and shady and looked ever so inviting from where we and the
birds were winging our flight through the sultry upper air.

We had plenty of chilly tunnels wherein to check our perspiration,
though.  We timed one of them.  We were twenty minutes passing through
it, going at the rate of thirty to thirty-five miles an hour.

Beyond Alessandria we passed the battle-field of Marengo.

Toward dusk we drew near Milan and caught glimpses of the city and the
blue mountain peaks beyond.  But we were not caring for these things
--they did not interest us in the least.  We were in a fever of impatience;
we were dying to see the renowned cathedral!  We watched--in this
direction and that--all around--everywhere.  We needed no one to point it
out--we did not wish any one to point it out--we would recognize it even
in the desert of the great Sahara.

At last, a forest of graceful needles, shimmering in the amber sunlight,
rose slowly above the pygmy housetops, as one sometimes sees, in the far
horizon, a gilded and pinnacled mass of cloud lift itself above the waste
of waves, at sea,--the Cathedral!  We knew it in a moment.

Half of that night, and all of the next day, this architectural autocrat
was our sole object of interest.

What a wonder it is!  So grand, so solemn, so vast!  And yet so delicate,
so airy, so graceful!  A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in
the soft moonlight only a fairy delusion of frost-work that might vanish
with a breath!  How sharply its pinnacled angles and its wilderness of
spires were cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon
its snowy roof!  It was a vision!--a miracle!--an anthem sung in stone, a
poem wrought in marble!

Howsoever you look at the great cathedral, it is noble, it is beautiful!
Wherever you stand in Milan or within seven miles of Milan, it is visible
and when it is visible, no other object can chain your whole attention.
Leave your eyes unfettered by your will but a single instant and they
will surely turn to seek it.  It is the first thing you look for when you
rise in the morning, and the last your lingering gaze rests upon at
night.  Surely it must be the princeliest creation that ever brain of man
conceived.

At nine o'clock in the morning we went and stood before this marble
colossus.  The central one of its five great doors is bordered with a
bas-relief of birds and fruits and beasts and insects, which have been so
ingeniously carved out of the marble that they seem like living
creatures--and the figures are so numerous and the design so complex that
one might study it a week without exhausting its interest.  On the great
steeple--surmounting the myriad of spires--inside of the spires--over the
doors, the windows--in nooks and corners--every where that a niche or a
perch can be found about the enormous building, from summit to base,
there is a marble statue, and every statue is a study in itself!
Raphael, Angelo, Canova--giants like these gave birth to the designs, and
their own pupils carved them.  Every face is eloquent with expression,
and every attitude is full of grace.  Away above, on the lofty roof, rank
on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through
their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond.  In their midst the central
steeple towers proudly up like the mainmast of some great Indiaman among
a fleet of coasters.

We wished to go aloft.  The sacristan showed us a marble stairway (of
course it was marble, and of the purest and whitest--there is no other
stone, no brick, no wood, among its building materials) and told us to go
up one hundred and eighty-two steps and stop till he came.  It was not
necessary to say stop--we should have done that any how.  We were tired
by the time we got there.  This was the roof.  Here, springing from its
broad marble flagstones, were the long files of spires, looking very tall
close at hand, but diminishing in the distance like the pipes of an
organ.  We could see now that the statue on the top of each was the size
of a large man, though they all looked like dolls from the street.  We
could see, also, that from the inside of each and every one of these
hollow spires, from sixteen to thirty-one beautiful marble statues looked
out upon the world below.

From the eaves to the comb of the roof stretched in endless succession
great curved marble beams, like the fore-and-aft braces of a steamboat,
and along each beam from end to end stood up a row of richly carved
flowers and fruits--each separate and distinct in kind, and over 15,000
species represented.  At a little distance these rows seem to close
together like the ties of a railroad track, and then the mingling
together of the buds and blossoms of this marble garden forms a picture
that is very charming to the eye.

We descended and entered.  Within the church, long rows of fluted
columns, like huge monuments, divided the building into broad aisles, and
on the figured pavement fell many a soft blush from the painted windows
above.  I knew the church was very large, but I could not fully
appreciate its great size until I noticed that the men standing far down
by the altar looked like boys, and seemed to glide, rather than walk.  We
loitered about gazing aloft at the monster windows all aglow with
brilliantly colored scenes in the lives of the Saviour and his followers.
Some of these pictures are mosaics, and so artistically are their
thousand particles of tinted glass or stone put together that the work
has all the smoothness and finish of a painting.  We counted sixty panes
of glass in one window, and each pane was adorned with one of these
master achievements of genius and patience.

The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture which he said was
considered to have come from the hand of Phidias, since it was not
possible that any other artist, of any epoch, could have copied nature
with such faultless accuracy.  The figure was that of a man without a
skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fiber and tendon and tissue
of the human frame represented in minute detail.  It looked natural,
because somehow it looked as if it were in pain.  A skinned man would be
likely to look that way unless his attention were occupied with some
other matter.  It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination
about it some where.  I am very sorry I saw it, because I shall always
see it now.  I shall dream of it sometimes.  I shall dream that it is
resting its corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with its
dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me
and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs.

It is hard to forget repulsive things.  I remember yet how I ran off from
school once, when I was a boy, and then, pretty late at night, concluded
to climb into the window of my father's office and sleep on a lounge,
because I had a delicacy about going home and getting thrashed.  As I lay
on the lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I fancied I
could see a long, dusky, shapeless thing stretched upon the floor.  A
cold shiver went through me.  I turned my face to the wall.  That did not
answer.  I was afraid that that thing would creep over and seize me in
the dark.  I turned back and stared at it for minutes and minutes--they
seemed hours.  It appeared to me that the lagging moonlight never, never
would get to it.  I turned to the wall and counted twenty, to pass the
feverish time away.  I looked--the pale square was nearer.  I turned
again and counted fifty--it was almost touching it.  With desperate will
I turned again and counted one hundred, and faced about, all in a
tremble.  A white human hand lay in the moonlight!  Such an awful sinking
at the heart--such a sudden gasp for breath!  I felt--I cannot tell what
I felt.  When I recovered strength enough, I faced the wall again.  But
no boy could have remained so with that mysterious hand behind him.  I
counted again and looked--the most of a naked arm was exposed.  I put my
hands over my eyes and counted till I could stand it no longer, and then
--the pallid face of a man was there, with the corners of the mouth drawn
down, and the eyes fixed and glassy in death!  I raised to a sitting
posture and glowered on that corpse till the light crept down the bare
breastline by line--inch by inch--past the nipple--and then it disclosed
a ghastly stab!

I went away from there.  I do not say that I went away in any sort of a
hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient.  I went out at the window,
and I carried the sash along with me.  I did not need the sash, but it
was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.--I was
not scared, but I was considerably agitated.

When I reached home, they whipped me, but I enjoyed it.  It seemed
perfectly delightful.  That man had been stabbed near the office that
afternoon, and they carried him in there to doctor him, but he only lived
an hour.  I have slept in the same room with him often since then--in my
dreams.

Now we will descend into the crypt, under the grand altar of Milan
Cathedral, and receive an impressive sermon from lips that have been
silent and hands that have been gestureless for three hundred years.

The priest stopped in a small dungeon and held up his candle.  This was
the last resting-place of a good man, a warm-hearted, unselfish man; a
man whose whole life was given to succoring the poor, encouraging the
faint-hearted, visiting the sick; in relieving distress, whenever and
wherever he found it.  His heart, his hand, and his purse were always
open.  With his story in one's mind he can almost see his benignant
countenance moving calmly among the haggard faces of Milan in the days
when the plague swept the city, brave where all others were cowards, full
of compassion where pity had been crushed out of all other breasts by the
instinct of self-preservation gone mad with terror, cheering all, praying
with all, helping all, with hand and brain and purse, at a time when
parents forsook their children, the friend deserted the friend, and the
brother turned away from the sister while her pleadings were still
wailing in his ears.

This was good St. Charles Borromeo, Bishop of Milan.  The people idolized
him; princes lavished uncounted treasures upon him.  We stood in his
tomb.  Near by was the sarcophagus, lighted by the dripping candles.  The
walls were faced with bas-reliefs representing scenes in his life done in
massive silver.  The priest put on a short white lace garment over his
black robe, crossed himself, bowed reverently, and began to turn a
windlass slowly.  The sarcophagus separated in two parts, lengthwise, and
the lower part sank down and disclosed a coffin of rock crystal as clear
as the atmosphere.  Within lay the body, robed in costly habiliments
covered with gold embroidery and starred with scintillating gems.  The
decaying head was black with age, the dry skin was drawn tight to the
bones, the eyes were gone, there was a hole in the temple and another in
the cheek, and the skinny lips were parted as in a ghastly smile!  Over
this dreadful face, its dust and decay and its mocking grin, hung a crown
sown thick with flashing brilliants; and upon the breast lay crosses and
croziers of solid gold that were splendid with emeralds and diamonds.

How poor, and cheap, and trivial these gew-gaws seemed in presence of the
solemnity, the grandeur, the awful majesty of Death!  Think of Milton,
Shakespeare, Washington, standing before a reverent world tricked out in
the glass beads, the brass ear-rings and tin trumpery of the savages of
the plains!

Dead Bartolomeo preached his pregnant sermon, and its burden was: You
that worship the vanities of earth--you that long for worldly honor,
worldly wealth, worldly fame--behold their worth!

To us it seemed that so good a man, so kind a heart, so simple a nature,
deserved rest and peace in a grave sacred from the intrusion of prying
eyes, and believed that he himself would have preferred to have it so,
but peradventure our wisdom was at fault in this regard.

As we came out upon the floor of the church again, another priest
volunteered to show us the treasures of the church.

What, more?  The furniture of the narrow chamber of death we had just
visited weighed six millions of francs in ounces and carats alone,
without a penny thrown into the account for the costly workmanship
bestowed upon them!  But we followed into a large room filled with tall
wooden presses like wardrobes.  He threw them open, and behold, the
cargoes of "crude bullion" of the assay offices of Nevada faded out of my
memory.  There were Virgins and bishops there, above their natural size,
made of solid silver, each worth, by weight, from eight hundred thousand
to two millions of francs, and bearing gemmed books in their hands worth
eighty thousand; there were bas-reliefs that weighed six hundred pounds,
carved in solid silver; croziers and crosses, and candlesticks six and
eight feet high, all of virgin gold, and brilliant with precious stones;
and beside these were all manner of cups and vases, and such things, rich
in proportion.  It was an Aladdin's palace.  The treasures here, by
simple weight, without counting workmanship, were valued at fifty
millions of francs!  If I could get the custody of them for a while, I
fear me the market price of silver bishops would advance shortly, on
account of their exceeding scarcity in the Cathedral of Milan.

The priests showed us two of St. Paul's fingers, and one of St. Peter's;
a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black,) and also bones of all the other
disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of
his face.  Among the most precious of the relics were a stone from the
Holy Sepulchre, part of the crown of thorns, (they have a whole one at
Notre Dame,) a fragment of the purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail
from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by the
veritable hand of St. Luke.  This is the second of St. Luke's Virgins we
have seen.  Once a year all these holy relics are carried in procession
through the streets of Milan.

I like to revel in the dryest details of the great cathedral.  The
building is five hundred feet long by one hundred and eighty wide, and
the principal steeple is in the neighborhood of four hundred feet high.
It has 7,148 marble statues, and will have upwards of three thousand more
when it is finished.  In addition it has one thousand five hundred
bas-reliefs.  It has one hundred and thirty-six spires--twenty-one more
are to be added.  Each spire is surmounted by a statue six and a half
feet high.  Every thing about the church is marble, and all from the
same quarry; it was bequeathed to the Archbishopric for this purpose
centuries ago.  So nothing but the mere workmanship costs; still that is
expensive --the bill foots up six hundred and eighty-four millions of
francs thus far (considerably over a hundred millions of dollars,) and
it is estimated that it will take a hundred and twenty years yet to
finish the cathedral.  It looks complete, but is far from being so.  We
saw a new statue put in its niche yesterday, alongside of one which had
been standing these four hundred years, they said.  There are four
staircases leading up to the main steeple, each of which cost a hundred
thousand dollars, with the four hundred and eight statues which adorn
them.  Marco Compioni was the architect who designed the wonderful
structure more than five hundred years ago, and it took him forty-six
years to work out the plan and get it ready to hand over to the
builders.  He is dead now.  The building was begun a little less than
five hundred years ago, and the third generation hence will not see it
completed.

The building looks best by moonlight, because the older portions of it,
being stained with age, contrast unpleasantly with the newer and whiter
portions.  It seems somewhat too broad for its height, but may be
familiarity with it might dissipate this impression.

They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter's at
Rome.  I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human
hands.

We bid it good-bye, now--possibly for all time.  How surely, in some
future day, when the memory of it shall have lost its vividness, shall we
half believe we have seen it in a wonderful dream, but never with waking
eyes!



CHAPTER XIX.

"Do you wis zo haut can be?"

That was what the guide asked when we were looking up at the bronze
horses on the Arch of Peace.  It meant, do you wish to go up there?
I give it as a specimen of guide-English.  These are the people that make
life a burthen to the tourist.  Their tongues are never still.  They talk
forever and forever, and that is the kind of billingsgate they use.
Inspiration itself could hardly comprehend them.  If they would only show
you a masterpiece of art, or a venerable tomb, or a prison-house, or a
battle-field, hallowed by touching memories or historical reminiscences,
or grand traditions, and then step aside and hold still for ten minutes
and let you think, it would not be so bad.  But they interrupt every
dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling.
Sometimes when I have been standing before some cherished old idol of
mine that I remembered years and years ago in pictures in the geography
at school, I have thought I would give a whole world if the human parrot
at my side would suddenly perish where he stood and leave me to gaze, and
ponder, and worship.

No, we did not "wis zo haut can be."  We wished to go to La Scala, the
largest theater in the world, I think they call it.  We did so.  It was a
large place.  Seven separate and distinct masses of humanity--six great
circles and a monster parquette.

We wished to go to the Ambrosian Library, and we did that also.  We saw a
manuscript of Virgil, with annotations in the handwriting of Petrarch,
the gentleman who loved another man's Laura, and lavished upon her all
through life a love which was a clear waste of the raw material.  It was
sound sentiment, but bad judgment.  It brought both parties fame, and
created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that
is running yet.  But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura?  (I do
not know his other name.)  Who glorifies him?  Who bedews him with tears?
Who writes poetry about him?  Nobody.  How do you suppose he liked the
state of things that has given the world so much pleasure?  How did he
enjoy having another man following his wife every where and making her
name a familiar word in every garlic-exterminating mouth in Italy with
his sonnets to her pre-empted eyebrows?  They got fame and sympathy--he
got neither.  This is a peculiarly felicitous instance of what is called
poetical justice.  It is all very fine; but it does not chime with my
notions of right.  It is too one-sided--too ungenerous.

Let the world go on fretting about Laura and Petrarch if it will; but as
for me, my tears and my lamentations shall be lavished upon the unsung
defendant.

We saw also an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia, a lady for whom I
have always entertained the highest respect, on account of her rare
histrionic capabilities, her opulence in solid gold goblets made of
gilded wood, her high distinction as an operatic screamer, and the
facility with which she could order a sextuple funeral and get the
corpses ready for it.  We saw one single coarse yellow hair from
Lucrezia's head, likewise.  It awoke emotions, but we still live.  In
this same library we saw some drawings by Michael Angelo (these Italians
call him Mickel Angelo,) and Leonardo da Vinci.  (They spell it Vinci and
pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.)
We reserve our opinion of these sketches.

In another building they showed us a fresco representing some lions and
other beasts drawing chariots; and they seemed to project so far from the
wall that we took them to be sculptures.  The artist had shrewdly
heightened the delusion by painting dust on the creatures' backs, as if
it had fallen there naturally and properly.  Smart fellow--if it be smart
to deceive strangers.

Elsewhere we saw a huge Roman amphitheatre, with its stone seats still in
good preservation.  Modernized, it is now the scene of more peaceful
recreations than the exhibition of a party of wild beasts with Christians
for dinner.  Part of the time, the Milanese use it for a race track, and
at other seasons they flood it with water and have spirited yachting
regattas there.  The guide told us these things, and he would hardly try
so hazardous an experiment as the telling of a falsehood, when it is all
he can do to speak the truth in English without getting the lock-jaw.

In another place we were shown a sort of summer arbor, with a fence
before it.  We said that was nothing.  We looked again, and saw, through
the arbor, an endless stretch of garden, and shrubbery, and grassy lawn.
We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be
done.  It was only another delusion--a painting by some ingenious artist
with little charity in his heart for tired folk.  The deception was
perfect.  No one could have imagined the park was not real.  We even
thought we smelled the flowers at first.

We got a carriage at twilight and drove in the shaded avenues with the
other nobility, and after dinner we took wine and ices in a fine garden
with the great public.  The music was excellent, the flowers and
shrubbery were pleasant to the eye, the scene was vivacious, everybody
was genteel and well-behaved, and the ladies were slightly moustached,
and handsomely dressed, but very homely.

We adjourned to a cafe and played billiards an hour, and I made six or
seven points by the doctor pocketing his ball, and he made as many by my
pocketing my ball.  We came near making a carom sometimes, but not the
one we were trying to make.  The table was of the usual European style
--cushions dead and twice as high as the balls; the cues in bad repair.
The natives play only a sort of pool on them.  We have never seen any
body playing the French three-ball game yet, and I doubt if there is any
such game known in France, or that there lives any man mad enough to try
to play it on one of these European tables.  We had to stop playing
finally because Dan got to sleeping fifteen minutes between the counts
and paying no attention to his marking.

Afterward we walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some
time, enjoying other people's comfort and wishing we could export some of
it to our restless, driving, vitality-consuming marts at home.  Just in
this one matter lies the main charm of life in Europe--comfort.  In
America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go
on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry
our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we
ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep.  We burn
up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into
a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime
in Europe.  When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it
lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the
continent in the same coach he started in--the coach is stabled somewhere
on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days;
when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the
barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own
accord.  We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon
ourselves.  What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be,
if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our
edges!

I do envy these Europeans the comfort they take.  When the work of the
day is done, they forget it.  Some of them go, with wife and children, to
a beer hall and sit quietly and genteelly drinking a mug or two of ale
and listening to music; others walk the streets, others drive in the
avenues; others assemble in the great ornamental squares in the early
evening to enjoy the sight and the fragrance of flowers and to hear the
military bands play--no European city being without its fine military
music at eventide; and yet others of the populace sit in the open air in
front of the refreshment houses and eat ices and drink mild beverages
that could not harm a child.  They go to bed moderately early, and sleep
well.  They are always quiet, always orderly, always cheerful,
comfortable, and appreciative of life and its manifold blessings.  One
never sees a drunken man among them.  The change that has come over our
little party is surprising.  Day by day we lose some of our restlessness
and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease that is in the
tranquil atmosphere about us and in the demeanor of the people.  We grow
wise apace.  We begin to comprehend what life is for.

We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bath-house.  They were going to
put all three of us in one bath-tub, but we objected.  Each of us had an
Italian farm on his back.  We could have felt affluent if we had been
officially surveyed and fenced in.  We chose to have three bathtubs, and
large ones--tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real
estate, and brought it with them.  After we were stripped and had taken
the first chilly dash, we discovered that haunting atrocity that has
embittered our lives in so many cities and villages of Italy and France
--there was no soap.  I called.  A woman answered, and I barely had time to
throw myself against the door--she would have been in, in another second.
I said:

"Beware, woman!  Go away from here--go away, now, or it will be the worse
for you.  I am an unprotected male, but I will preserve my honor at the
peril of my life!"

These words must have frightened her, for she skurried away very fast.

Dan's voice rose on the air:

"Oh, bring some soap, why don't you!"

The reply was Italian.  Dan resumed:

"Soap, you know--soap.  That is what I want--soap.  S-o-a-p, soap;
s-o-p-e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap.  Hurry up!  I don't know how you Irish spell
it, but I want it.  Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it.  I'm freezing."

I heard the doctor say impressively:

"Dan, how often have we told you that these foreigners cannot understand
English?  Why will you not depend upon us?  Why will you not tell us what
you want, and let us ask for it in the language of the country?  It would
save us a great deal of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance
causes us.  I will address this person in his mother tongue: 'Here,
cospetto! corpo di Bacco!  Sacramento!  Solferino!--Soap, you son of a
gun!'  Dan, if you would let us talk for you, you would never expose your
ignorant vulgarity."

Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at once, but
there was a good reason for it.  There was not such an article about the
establishment.  It is my belief that there never had been.  They had to
send far up town, and to several different places before they finally got
it, so they said.  We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes.  The same
thing had occurred the evening before, at the hotel.  I think I have
divined the reason for this state of things at last.  The English know
how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other
foreigners do not use the article.

At every hotel we stop at we always have to send out for soap, at the
last moment, when we are grooming ourselves for dinner, and they put it
in the bill along with the candles and other nonsense.  In Marseilles
they make half the fancy toilet soap we consume in America, but the
Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they
have obtained from books of travel, just as they have acquired an
uncertain notion of clean shirts, and the peculiarities of the gorilla,
and other curious matters.  This reminds me of poor Blucher's note to the
landlord in Paris:

     PARIS, le 7 Juillet.  Monsieur le Landlord--Sir: Pourquoi don't you
     mettez some savon in your bed-chambers?  Est-ce que vous pensez I
     will steal it?  La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles
     when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had
     none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other
     on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice.
     Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je
     l'aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble.  You hear me.  Allons.
     BLUCHER.

I remonstrated against the sending of this note, because it was so mixed
up that the landlord would never be able to make head or tail of it; but
Blucher said he guessed the old man could read the French of it and
average the rest.

Blucher's French is bad enough, but it is not much worse than the English
one finds in advertisements all over Italy every day.  For instance,
observe the printed card of the hotel we shall probably stop at on the
shores of Lake Como:

     "NOTISH."

     "This hotel which the best it is in Italy and most superb, is
     handsome locate on the best situation of the lake, with the most
     splendid view near the Villas Melzy, to the King of Belgian, and
     Serbelloni.  This hotel have recently enlarge, do offer all
     commodities on moderate price, at the strangers gentlemen who whish
     spend the seasons on the Lake Come."

How is that, for a specimen?  In the hotel is a handsome little chapel
where an English clergyman is employed to preach to such of the guests of
the house as hail from England and America, and this fact is also set
forth in barbarous English in the same advertisement.  Wouldn't you have
supposed that the adventurous linguist who framed the card would have
known enough to submit it to that clergyman before he sent it to the
printer?

Here in Milan, in an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church, is the
mournful wreck of the most celebrated painting in the world--"The Last
Supper," by Leonardo da Vinci.  We are not infallible judges of pictures,
but of course we went there to see this wonderful painting, once so
beautiful, always so worshipped by masters in art, and forever to be
famous in song and story.  And the first thing that occurred was the
infliction on us of a placard fairly reeking with wretched English.  Take
a morsel of it: "Bartholomew (that is the first figure on the left hand
side at the spectator,) uncertain and doubtful about what he thinks to
have heard, and upon which he wants to be assured by himself at Christ
and by no others."

Good, isn't it?  And then Peter is described as "argumenting in a
threatening and angrily condition at Judas Iscariot."

This paragraph recalls the picture.  "The Last Supper" is painted on the
dilapidated wall of what was a little chapel attached to the main church
in ancient times, I suppose.  It is battered and scarred in every
direction, and stained and discolored by time, and Napoleon's horses
kicked the legs off most the disciples when they (the horses, not the
disciples,) were stabled there more than half a century ago.

I recognized the old picture in a moment--the Saviour with bowed head
seated at the centre of a long, rough table with scattering fruits and
dishes upon it, and six disciples on either side in their long robes,
talking to each other--the picture from which all engravings and all
copies have been made for three centuries.  Perhaps no living man has
ever known an attempt to paint the Lord's Supper differently.  The world
seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not
possible for human genius to outdo this creation of da Vinci's.  I
suppose painters will go on copying it as long as any of the original is
left visible to the eye.  There were a dozen easels in the room, and as
many artists transferring the great picture to their canvases.  Fifty
proofs of steel engravings and lithographs were scattered around, too.
And as usual, I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to
the original, that is, to my inexperienced eye.  Wherever you find a
Raphael, a Rubens, a Michelangelo, a Carracci, or a da Vinci (and we see
them every day,) you find artists copying them, and the copies are always
the handsomest.  Maybe the originals were handsome when they were new,
but they are not now.

This picture is about thirty feet long, and ten or twelve high, I should
think, and the figures are at least life size.  It is one of the largest
paintings in Europe.

The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred,
and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon
the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.  Only the attitudes are
certain.

People come here from all parts of the world, and glorify this
masterpiece.  They stand entranced before it with bated breath and parted
lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of
rapture:

"Oh, wonderful!"

"Such expression!"

"Such grace of attitude!"

"Such dignity!"

"Such faultless drawing!"

"Such matchless coloring!"

"Such feeling!"

"What delicacy of touch!"

"What sublimity of conception!"

"A vision!  A vision!"

I only envy these people; I envy them their honest admiration, if it be
honest--their delight, if they feel delight.  I harbor no animosity
toward any of them.  But at the same time the thought will intrude itself
upon me, How can they see what is not visible?  What would you think of a
man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra,
and said: "What matchless beauty!  What soul!  What expression!"  What
would you think of a man who gazed upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said:
"What sublimity!  What feeling!  What richness of coloring!"  What would
you think of a man who stared in ecstasy upon a desert of stumps and
said: "Oh, my soul, my beating heart, what a noble forest is here!"

You would think that those men had an astonishing talent for seeing
things that had already passed away.  It was what I thought when I stood
before "The Last Supper" and heard men apostrophizing wonders, and
beauties and perfections which had faded out of the picture and gone, a
hundred years before they were born.  We can imagine the beauty that was
once in an aged face; we can imagine the forest if we see the stumps; but
we can not absolutely see these things when they are not there.  I am
willing to believe that the eye of the practiced artist can rest upon the
Last Supper and renew a lustre where only a hint of it is left, supply a
tint that has faded away, restore an expression that is gone; patch, and
color, and add, to the dull canvas until at last its figures shall stand
before him aglow with the life, the feeling, the freshness, yea, with all
the noble beauty that was theirs when first they came from the hand of
the master.  But I can not work this miracle.  Can those other uninspired
visitors do it, or do they only happily imagine they do?

After reading so much about it, I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a
very miracle of art once.  But it was three hundred years ago.

It vexes me to hear people talk so glibly of "feeling," "expression,"
"tone," and those other easily acquired and inexpensive technicalities of
art that make such a fine show in conversations concerning pictures.
There is not one man in seventy-five hundred that can tell what a
pictured face is intended to express.  There is not one man in five
hundred that can go into a court-room and be sure that he will not
mistake some harmless innocent of a juryman for the black-hearted
assassin on trial.  Yet such people talk of "character" and presume to
interpret "expression" in pictures.  There is an old story that Matthews,
the actor, was once lauding the ability of the human face to express the
passions and emotions hidden in the breast.  He said the countenance
could disclose what was passing in the heart plainer than the tongue
could.

"Now," he said, "observe my face--what does it express?"

"Despair!"

"Bah, it expresses peaceful resignation!  What does this express?"

"Rage!"

"Stuff!  It means terror!  This!"

"Imbecility!"

"Fool!  It is smothered ferocity!  Now this!"

"Joy!"

"Oh, perdition!  Any ass can see it means insanity!"

Expression!  People coolly pretend to read it who would think themselves
presumptuous if they pretended to interpret the hieroglyphics on the
obelisks of Luxor--yet they are fully as competent to do the one thing as
the other.  I have heard two very intelligent critics speak of Murillo's
Immaculate Conception (now in the museum at Seville,) within the past few
days.  One said:

"Oh, the Virgin's face is full of the ecstasy of a joy that is complete
--that leaves nothing more to be desired on earth!"

The other said:

"Ah, that wonderful face is so humble, so pleading--it says as plainly as
words could say it: 'I fear; I tremble; I am unworthy.  But Thy will be
done; sustain Thou Thy servant!'"

The reader can see the picture in any drawing-room; it can be easily
recognized: the Virgin (the only young and really beautiful Virgin that
was ever painted by one of the old masters, some of us think,) stands in
the crescent of the new moon, with a multitude of cherubs hovering about
her, and more coming; her hands are crossed upon her breast, and upon her
uplifted countenance falls a glory out of the heavens.  The reader may
amuse himself, if he chooses, in trying to determine which of these
gentlemen read the Virgin's "expression" aright, or if either of them did
it.

Any one who is acquainted with the old masters will comprehend how much
"The Last Supper" is damaged when I say that the spectator can not really
tell, now, whether the disciples are Hebrews or Italians.  These ancient
painters never succeeded in denationalizing themselves.  The Italian
artists painted Italian Virgins, the Dutch painted Dutch Virgins, the
Virgins of the French painters were Frenchwomen--none of them ever put
into the face of the Madonna that indescribable something which proclaims
the Jewess, whether you find her in New York, in Constantinople, in
Paris, Jerusalem, or in the empire of Morocco.  I saw in the Sandwich
Islands, once, a picture copied by a talented German artist from an
engraving in one of the American illustrated papers.  It was an allegory,
representing Mr. Davis in the act of signing a secession act or some such
document.  Over him hovered the ghost of Washington in warning attitude,
and in the background a troop of shadowy soldiers in Continental uniform
were limping with shoeless, bandaged feet through a driving snow-storm.
Valley Forge was suggested, of course.  The copy seemed accurate, and yet
there was a discrepancy somewhere.  After a long examination I discovered
what it was--the shadowy soldiers were all Germans!  Jeff Davis was a
German! even the hovering ghost was a German ghost!  The artist had
unconsciously worked his nationality into the picture.  To tell the
truth, I am getting a little perplexed about John the Baptist and his
portraits.  In France I finally grew reconciled to him as a Frenchman;
here he is unquestionably an Italian.  What next?  Can it be possible
that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an
Irishman in Dublin?

We took an open barouche and drove two miles out of Milan to "see ze
echo," as the guide expressed it.  The road was smooth, it was bordered
by trees, fields, and grassy meadows, and the soft air was filled with
the odor of flowers.  Troops of picturesque peasant girls, coming from
work, hooted at us, shouted at us, made all manner of game of us, and
entirely delighted me.  My long-cherished judgment was confirmed.  I
always did think those frowsy, romantic, unwashed peasant girls I had
read so much about in poetry were a glaring fraud.

We enjoyed our jaunt.  It was an exhilarating relief from tiresome
sight-seeing.

We distressed ourselves very little about the astonishing echo the guide
talked so much about.  We were growing accustomed to encomiums on wonders
that too often proved no wonders at all.  And so we were most happily
disappointed to find in the sequel that the guide had even failed to rise
to the magnitude of his subject.

We arrived at a tumble-down old rookery called the Palazzo Simonetti--a
massive hewn-stone affair occupied by a family of ragged Italians.
A good-looking young girl conducted us to a window on the second floor
which looked out on a court walled on three sides by tall buildings.  She
put her head out at the window and shouted.  The echo answered more times
than we could count.  She took a speaking trumpet and through it she
shouted, sharp and quick, a single "Ha!"  The echo answered:

"Ha!--ha!----ha!--ha!--ha!-ha! ha! h-a-a-a-a-a!" and finally went off
into a rollicking convulsion of the jolliest laughter that could be
imagined.  It was so joyful--so long continued--so perfectly cordial and
hearty, that every body was forced to join in.  There was no resisting
it.

Then the girl took a gun and fired it.  We stood ready to count the
astonishing clatter of reverberations.  We could not say one, two, three,
fast enough, but we could dot our notebooks with our pencil points almost
rapidly enough to take down a sort of short-hand report of the result.
My page revealed the following account.  I could not keep up, but I did
as well as I could.

I set down fifty-two distinct repetitions, and then the echo got the
advantage of me.  The doctor set down sixty-four, and thenceforth the
echo moved too fast for him, also.  After the separate concussions could
no longer be noted, the reverberations dwindled to a wild, long-sustained
clatter of sounds such as a watchman's rattle produces.  It is likely
that this is the most remarkable echo in the world.

The doctor, in jest, offered to kiss the young girl, and was taken a
little aback when she said he might for a franc!  The commonest gallantry
compelled him to stand by his offer, and so he paid the franc and took
the kiss.  She was a philosopher.  She said a franc was a good thing to
have, and she did not care any thing for one paltry kiss, because she had
a million left.  Then our comrade, always a shrewd businessman, offered
to take the whole cargo at thirty days, but that little financial scheme
was a failure.



CHAPTER XX.

We left Milan by rail.  The Cathedral six or seven miles behind us; vast,
dreamy, bluish, snow-clad mountains twenty miles in front of us,--these
were the accented points in the scenery.  The more immediate scenery
consisted of fields and farm-houses outside the car and a monster-headed
dwarf and a moustached woman inside it.  These latter were not
show-people.  Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in Italy
to attract attention.

We passed through a range of wild, picturesque hills, steep, wooded,
cone-shaped, with rugged crags projecting here and there, and with
dwellings and ruinous castles perched away up toward the drifting clouds.
We lunched at the curious old town of Como, at the foot of the lake, and
then took the small steamer and had an afternoon's pleasure excursion to
this place,--Bellaggio.

When we walked ashore, a party of policemen (people whose cocked hats and
showy uniforms would shame the finest uniform in the military service of
the United States,) put us into a little stone cell and locked us in.  We
had the whole passenger list for company, but their room would have been
preferable, for there was no light, there were no windows, no
ventilation.  It was close and hot.  We were much crowded.  It was the
Black Hole of Calcutta on a small scale.  Presently a smoke rose about
our feet--a smoke that smelled of all the dead things of earth, of all
the putrefaction and corruption imaginable.

We were there five minutes, and when we got out it was hard to tell which
of us carried the vilest fragrance.

These miserable outcasts called that "fumigating" us, and the term was a
tame one indeed.  They fumigated us to guard themselves against the
cholera, though we hailed from no infected port.  We had left the cholera
far behind us all the time.  However, they must keep epidemics away
somehow or other, and fumigation is cheaper than soap.  They must either
wash themselves or fumigate other people.  Some of the lower classes had
rather die than wash, but the fumigation of strangers causes them no
pangs.  They need no fumigation themselves.  Their habits make it
unnecessary.  They carry their preventive with them; they sweat and
fumigate all the day long.  I trust I am a humble and a consistent
Christian.  I try to do what is right.  I know it is my duty to "pray for
them that despitefully use me;" and therefore, hard as it is, I shall
still try to pray for these fumigating, maccaroni-stuffing
organ-grinders.

Our hotel sits at the water's edge--at least its front garden does--and
we walk among the shrubbery and smoke at twilight; we look afar off at
Switzerland and the Alps, and feel an indolent willingness to look no
closer; we go down the steps and swim in the lake; we take a shapely
little boat and sail abroad among the reflections of the stars; lie on
the thwarts and listen to the distant laughter, the singing, the soft
melody of flutes and guitars that comes floating across the water from
pleasuring gondolas; we close the evening with exasperating billiards on
one of those same old execrable tables.  A midnight luncheon in our ample
bed-chamber; a final smoke in its contracted veranda facing the water,
the gardens, and the mountains; a summing up of the day's events.  Then
to bed, with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes up
pictures of France, of Italy, of the ship, of the ocean, of home, in
grotesque and bewildering disorder.  Then a melting away of familiar
faces, of cities, and of tossing waves, into a great calm of
forgetfulness and peace.

After which, the nightmare.

Breakfast in the morning, and then the lake.

I did not like it yesterday.  I thought Lake Tahoe was much finer.
I have to confess now, however, that my judgment erred somewhat, though
not extravagantly.  I always had an idea that Como was a vast basin of
water, like Tahoe, shut in by great mountains.  Well, the border of huge
mountains is here, but the lake itself is not a basin.  It is as crooked
as any brook, and only from one-quarter to two-thirds as wide as the
Mississippi.  There is not a yard of low ground on either side of it
--nothing but endless chains of mountains that spring abruptly from the
water's edge and tower to altitudes varying from a thousand to two
thousand feet.  Their craggy sides are clothed with vegetation, and white
specks of houses peep out from the luxuriant foliage everywhere; they are
even perched upon jutting and picturesque pinnacles a thousand feet above
your head.

Again, for miles along the shores, handsome country seats, surrounded by
gardens and groves, sit fairly in the water, sometimes in nooks carved by
Nature out of the vine-hung precipices, and with no ingress or egress
save by boats.  Some have great broad stone staircases leading down to
the water, with heavy stone balustrades ornamented with statuary and
fancifully adorned with creeping vines and bright-colored flowers--for
all the world like a drop curtain in a theatre, and lacking nothing but
long-waisted, high-heeled women and plumed gallants in silken tights
coming down to go serenading in the splendid gondola in waiting.

A great feature of Como's attractiveness is the multitude of pretty
houses and gardens that cluster upon its shores and on its mountain
sides.  They look so snug and so homelike, and at eventide when every
thing seems to slumber, and the music of the vesper bells comes stealing
over the water, one almost believes that nowhere else than on the lake of
Como can there be found such a paradise of tranquil repose.

From my window here in Bellaggio, I have a view of the other side of the
lake now, which is as beautiful as a picture.  A scarred and wrinkled
precipice rises to a height of eighteen hundred feet; on a tiny bench
half way up its vast wall, sits a little snowflake of a church, no bigger
than a martin-box, apparently; skirting the base of the cliff are a
hundred orange groves and gardens, flecked with glimpses of the white
dwellings that are buried in them; in front, three or four gondolas lie
idle upon the water--and in the burnished mirror of the lake, mountain,
chapel, houses, groves and boats are counterfeited so brightly and so
clearly that one scarce knows where the reality leaves off and the
reflection begins!

The surroundings of this picture are fine.  A mile away, a grove-plumed
promontory juts far into the lake and glasses its palace in the blue
depths; in midstream a boat is cutting the shining surface and leaving a
long track behind, like a ray of light; the mountains beyond are veiled
in a dreamy purple haze; far in the opposite direction a tumbled mass of
domes and verdant slopes and valleys bars the lake, and here indeed does
distance lend enchantment to the view--for on this broad canvas, sun and
clouds and the richest of atmospheres have blended a thousand tints
together, and over its surface the filmy lights and shadows drift, hour
after hour, and glorify it with a beauty that seems reflected out of
Heaven itself.  Beyond all question, this is the most voluptuous scene we
have yet looked upon.

Last night the scenery was striking and picturesque.  On the other side
crags and trees and snowy houses were reflected in the lake with a
wonderful distinctness, and streams of light from many a distant window
shot far abroad over the still waters.  On this side, near at hand, great
mansions, white with moonlight, glared out from the midst of masses of
foliage that lay black and shapeless in the shadows that fell from the
cliff above--and down in the margin of the lake every feature of the
weird vision was faithfully repeated.

Today we have idled through a wonder of a garden attached to a ducal
estate--but enough of description is enough, I judge.

I suspect that this was the same place the gardener's son deceived the
Lady of Lyons with, but I do not know.  You may have heard of the passage
somewhere:

          "A deep vale,
          Shut out by Alpine hills from the rude world,
          Near a clear lake margined by fruits of gold
          And whispering myrtles:
          Glassing softest skies, cloudless,
          Save with rare and roseate shadows;
          A palace, lifting to eternal heaven its marbled walls,
          From out a glossy bower of coolest foliage musical with birds."

That is all very well, except the "clear" part of the lake.  It certainly
is clearer than a great many lakes, but how dull its waters are compared
with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe!  I speak of the north
shore of Tahoe, where one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a
hundred and eighty feet.  I have tried to get this statement off at par
here, but with no success; so I have been obliged to negotiate it at
fifty percent discount.  At this rate I find some takers; perhaps the
reader will receive it on the same terms--ninety feet instead of one
hundred and eighty.  But let it be remembered that those are forced
terms--Sheriff's sale prices.  As far as I am privately concerned, I
abate not a jot of the original assertion that in those strangely
magnifying waters one may count the scales on a trout (a trout of the
large kind,) at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet--may see every
pebble on the bottom--might even count a paper of dray-pins.  People talk
of the transparent waters of the Mexican Bay of Acapulco, but in my own
experience I know they cannot compare with those I am speaking of.  I
have fished for trout, in Tahoe, and at a measured depth of eighty-four
feet I have seen them put their noses to the bait and I could see their
gills open and shut.  I could hardly have seen the trout themselves at
that distance in the open air.

As I go back in spirit and recall that noble sea, reposing among the
snow-peaks six thousand feet above the ocean, the conviction comes strong
upon me again that Como would only seem a bedizened little courtier in
that august presence.

Sorrow and misfortune overtake the legislature that still from year to
year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen!  Tahoe!  It suggests
no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity.  Tahoe for a sea
in the clouds: a sea that has character and asserts it in solemn calms at
times, at times in savage storms; a sea whose royal seclusion is guarded
by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand
feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose
belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!

Tahoe means grasshoppers.  It means grasshopper soup.  It is Indian, and
suggestive of Indians.  They say it is Pi-ute--possibly it is Digger.
I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers--those degraded savages who
roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones
with tar, and "gaum" it thick all over their heads and foreheads and
ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning.  These
are the gentry that named the Lake.

People say that Tahoe means "Silver Lake"--"Limpid Water"--"Falling
Leaf."  Bosh.  It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger
tribe,--and of the Pi-utes as well.  It isn't worth while, in these
practical times, for people to talk about Indian poetry--there never was
any in them--except in the Fenimore Cooper Indians.  But they are an
extinct tribe that never existed.  I know the Noble Red Man.  I have
camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them, taken part
in the chase with them--for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle; I
have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast.  I would
gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.

But I am growing unreliable.  I will return to my comparison of the
lakes.  Como is a little deeper than Tahoe, if people here tell the
truth.  They say it is eighteen hundred feet deep at this point, but it
does not look a dead enough blue for that.  Tahoe is one thousand five
hundred and twenty-five feet deep in the centre, by the state geologist's
measurement.  They say the great peak opposite this town is five thousand
feet high: but I feel sure that three thousand feet of that statement is
a good honest lie.  The lake is a mile wide, here, and maintains about
that width from this point to its northern extremity--which is distant
sixteen miles: from here to its southern extremity--say fifteen miles--it
is not over half a mile wide in any place, I should think.  Its snow-clad
mountains one hears so much about are only seen occasionally, and then in
the distance, the Alps.  Tahoe is from ten to eighteen miles wide, and
its mountains shut it in like a wall.  Their summits are never free from
snow the year round.  One thing about it is very strange: it never has
even a skim of ice upon its surface, although lakes in the same range of
mountains, lying in a lower and warmer temperature, freeze over in
winter.

It is cheerful to meet a shipmate in these out-of-the-way places and
compare notes with him.  We have found one of ours here--an old soldier
of the war, who is seeking bloodless adventures and rest from his
campaigns in these sunny lands.--[Colonel J.  HERON FOSTER, editor of a
Pittsburgh journal, and a most estimable gentleman.  As these sheets are
being prepared for the press I am pained to learn of his decease shortly
after his return home--M.T.]



CHAPTER XXI.

We voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through wild mountain
scenery, and by hamlets and villas, and disembarked at the town of Lecco.
They said it was two hours, by carriage to the ancient city of Bergamo,
and that we would arrive there in good season for the railway train.  We
got an open barouche and a wild, boisterous driver, and set out.  It was
delightful.  We had a fast team and a perfectly smooth road.  There were
towering cliffs on our left, and the pretty Lago di Lecco on our right,
and every now and then it rained on us.  Just before starting, the driver
picked up, in the street, a stump of a cigar an inch long, and put it in
his mouth.  When he had carried it thus about an hour, I thought it would
be only Christian charity to give him a light.  I handed him my cigar,
which I had just lit, and he put it in his mouth and returned his stump
to his pocket!  I never saw a more sociable man.  At least I never saw a
man who was more sociable on a short acquaintance.

We saw interior Italy, now.  The houses were of solid stone, and not
often in good repair.  The peasants and their children were idle, as a
general thing, and the donkeys and chickens made themselves at home in
drawing-room and bed-chamber and were not molested.  The drivers of each
and every one of the slow-moving market-carts we met were stretched in
the sun upon their merchandise, sound a sleep.  Every three or four
hundred yards, it seemed to me, we came upon the shrine of some saint or
other--a rude picture of him built into a huge cross or a stone pillar by
the road-side.--Some of the pictures of the Saviour were curiosities in
their way.  They represented him stretched upon the cross, his
countenance distorted with agony.  From the wounds of the crown of
thorns; from the pierced side; from the mutilated hands and feet; from
the scourged body--from every hand-breadth of his person streams of blood
were flowing!  Such a gory, ghastly spectacle would frighten the children
out of their senses, I should think.  There were some unique auxiliaries
to the painting which added to its spirited effect.  These were genuine
wooden and iron implements, and were prominently disposed round about the
figure: a bundle of nails; the hammer to drive them; the sponge; the reed
that supported it; the cup of vinegar; the ladder for the ascent of the
cross; the spear that pierced the Saviour's side.  The crown of thorns
was made of real thorns, and was nailed to the sacred head.  In some
Italian church-paintings, even by the old masters, the Saviour and the
Virgin wear silver or gilded crowns that are fastened to the pictured
head with nails.  The effect is as grotesque as it is incongruous.

Here and there, on the fronts of roadside inns, we found huge, coarse
frescoes of suffering martyrs like those in the shrines.  It could not
have diminished their sufferings any to be so uncouthly represented.
We were in the heart and home of priest craft--of a happy, cheerful,
contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and
everlasting unaspiring worthlessness.  And we said fervently: it suits
these people precisely; let them enjoy it, along with the other animals,
and Heaven forbid that they be molested.  We feel no malice toward these
fumigators.

We passed through the strangest, funniest, undreampt-of old towns, wedded
to the customs and steeped in the dreams of the elder ages, and perfectly
unaware that the world turns round!  And perfectly indifferent, too, as
to whether it turns around or stands still.  They have nothing to do but
eat and sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a
friend to stand by and keep them awake.  They are not paid for thinking
--they are not paid to fret about the world's concerns.  They were not
respectable people--they were not worthy people--they were not learned
and wise and brilliant people--but in their breasts, all their stupid
lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding!  How can men,
calling themselves men, consent to be so degraded and happy.

We whisked by many a gray old medieval castle, clad thick with ivy that
swung its green banners down from towers and turrets where once some old
Crusader's flag had floated.  The driver pointed to one of these ancient
fortresses, and said, (I translate):

"Do you see that great iron hook that projects from the wall just under
the highest window in the ruined tower?"

We said we could not see it at such a distance, but had no doubt it was
there.

"Well," he said; "there is a legend connected with that iron hook.
Nearly seven hundred years ago, that castle was the property of the noble
Count Luigi Gennaro Guido Alphonso di Genova----"

"What was his other name?"  said Dan.

"He had no other name.  The name I have spoken was all the name he had.
He was the son of----"

"Poor but honest parents--that is all right--never mind the particulars
--go on with the legend."

                               THE LEGEND.

Well, then, all the world, at that time, was in a wild excitement about
the Holy Sepulchre.  All the great feudal lords in Europe were pledging
their lands and pawning their plate to fit out men-at-arms so that they
might join the grand armies of Christendom and win renown in the Holy
Wars.  The Count Luigi raised money, like the rest, and one mild
September morning, armed with battle-ax, portcullis and thundering
culverin, he rode through the greaves and bucklers of his donjon-keep
with as gallant a troop of Christian bandits as ever stepped in Italy.
He had his sword, Excalibur, with him.  His beautiful countess and her
young daughter waved him a tearful adieu from the battering-rams and
buttresses of the fortress, and he galloped away with a happy heart.

He made a raid on a neighboring baron and completed his outfit with the
booty secured.  He then razed the castle to the ground, massacred the
family and moved on.  They were hardy fellows in the grand old days of
chivalry.  Alas!  Those days will never come again.

Count Luigi grew high in fame in Holy Land.  He plunged into the carnage
of a hundred battles, but his good Excalibur always brought him out
alive, albeit often sorely wounded.  His face became browned by exposure
to the Syrian sun in long marches; he suffered hunger and thirst; he
pined in prisons, he languished in loathsome plague-hospitals.  And many
and many a time he thought of his loved ones at home, and wondered if all
was well with them.  But his heart said, Peace, is not thy brother
watching over thy household?

                              * * * * * * *

Forty-two years waxed and waned; the good fight was won; Godfrey reigned
in Jerusalem--the Christian hosts reared the banner of the cross above
the Holy Sepulchre!

Twilight was approaching.  Fifty harlequins, in flowing robes, approached
this castle wearily, for they were on foot, and the dust upon their
garments betokened that they had traveled far.  They overtook a peasant,
and asked him if it were likely they could get food and a hospitable bed
there, for love of Christian charity, and if perchance, a moral parlor
entertainment might meet with generous countenance--"for," said they,
"this exhibition hath no feature that could offend the most fastidious
taste."

"Marry," quoth the peasant, "an' it please your worships, ye had better
journey many a good rood hence with your juggling circus than trust your
bones in yonder castle."

"How now, sirrah!"  exclaimed the chief monk, "explain thy ribald speech,
or by'r Lady it shall go hard with thee."

"Peace, good mountebank, I did but utter the truth that was in my heart.
San Paolo be my witness that did ye but find the stout Count Leonardo in
his cups, sheer from the castle's topmost battlements would he hurl ye
all!  Alack-a-day, the good Lord Luigi reigns not here in these sad
times."

"The good Lord Luigi?"

"Aye, none other, please your worship.  In his day, the poor rejoiced in
plenty and the rich he did oppress; taxes were not known, the fathers of
the church waxed fat upon his bounty; travelers went and came, with none
to interfere; and whosoever would, might tarry in his halls in cordial
welcome, and eat his bread and drink his wine, withal.  But woe is me!
some two and forty years agone the good count rode hence to fight for
Holy Cross, and many a year hath flown since word or token have we had of
him.  Men say his bones lie bleaching in the fields of Palestine."

"And now?"

"Now!  God 'a mercy, the cruel Leonardo lords it in the castle.  He
wrings taxes from the poor; he robs all travelers that journey by his
gates; he spends his days in feuds and murders, and his nights in revel
and debauch; he roasts the fathers of the church upon his kitchen spits,
and enjoyeth the same, calling it pastime.  These thirty years Luigi's
countess hath not been seen by any [he] in all this land, and many
whisper that she pines in the dungeons of the castle for that she will
not wed with Leonardo, saying her dear lord still liveth and that she
will die ere she prove false to him.  They whisper likewise that her
daughter is a prisoner as well.  Nay, good jugglers, seek ye refreshment
other wheres.  'Twere better that ye perished in a Christian way than
that ye plunged from off yon dizzy tower.  Give ye good-day."

"God keep ye, gentle knave--farewell."

But heedless of the peasant's warning, the players moved straightway
toward the castle.

Word was brought to Count Leonardo that a company of mountebanks besought
his hospitality.

"'Tis well.  Dispose of them in the customary manner.  Yet stay!  I have
need of them.  Let them come hither.  Later, cast them from the
battlements--or--how many priests have ye on hand?"

"The day's results are meagre, good my lord.  An abbot and a dozen
beggarly friars is all we have."

"Hell and furies!  Is the estate going to seed?  Send hither the
mountebanks.  Afterward, broil them with the priests."

The robed and close-cowled harlequins entered.  The grim Leonardo sate in
state at the head of his council board.  Ranged up and down the hall on
either hand stood near a hundred men-at-arms.

"Ha, villains!"  quoth the count, "What can ye do to earn the hospitality
ye crave."

"Dread lord and mighty, crowded audiences have greeted our humble efforts
with rapturous applause.  Among our body count we the versatile and
talented Ugolino; the justly celebrated Rodolpho; the gifted and
accomplished Roderigo; the management have spared neither pains nor
expense--"

"S'death!  What can ye do?  Curb thy prating tongue."

"Good my lord, in acrobatic feats, in practice with the dumb-bells, in
balancing and ground and lofty tumbling are we versed--and sith your
highness asketh me, I venture here to publish that in the truly marvelous
and entertaining Zampillaerostation--"

"Gag him! throttle him!  Body of Bacchus! am I a dog that I am to be
assailed with polysyllabled blasphemy like to this?  But hold!  Lucretia,
Isabel, stand forth!  Sirrah, behold this dame, this weeping wench.  The
first I marry, within the hour; the other shall dry her tears or feed the
vultures.  Thou and thy vagabonds shall crown the wedding with thy
merry-makings.  Fetch hither the priest!"

The dame sprang toward the chief player.

"O, save me!"  she cried; "save me from a fate far worse than death!
Behold these sad eyes, these sunken cheeks, this withered frame!  See
thou the wreck this fiend hath made, and let thy heart be moved with
pity!  Look upon this damosel; note her wasted form, her halting step,
her bloomless cheeks where youth should blush and happiness exult in
smiles!  Hear us and have compassion.  This monster was my husband's
brother.  He who should have been our shield against all harm, hath kept
us shut within the noisome caverns of his donjon-keep for lo these thirty
years.  And for what crime?  None other than that I would not belie my
troth, root out my strong love for him who marches with the legions of
the cross in Holy Land, (for O, he is not dead!) and wed with him!  Save
us, O, save thy persecuted suppliants!"

She flung herself at his feet and clasped his knees.

"Ha!-ha!-ha!"  shouted the brutal Leonardo.  "Priest, to thy work!"  and
he dragged the weeping dame from her refuge.  "Say, once for all, will
you be mine?--for by my halidome, that breath that uttereth thy refusal
shall be thy last on earth!"

"NE-VER?"

"Then die!" and the sword leaped from its scabbard.

Quicker than thought, quicker than the lightning's flash, fifty monkish
habits disappeared, and fifty knights in splendid armor stood revealed!
fifty falchions gleamed in air above the men-at-arms, and brighter,
fiercer than them all, flamed Excalibur aloft, and cleaving downward
struck the brutal Leonardo's weapon from his grasp!

"A Luigi to the rescue!  Whoop!"

"A Leonardo! 'tare an ouns!'"

"Oh, God, Oh, God, my husband!"

"Oh, God, Oh, God, my wife!"

"My father!"

"My precious!"  [Tableau.]
===
Count Luigi bound his usurping brother hand and foot.  The practiced
knights from Palestine made holyday sport of carving the awkward
men-at-arms into chops and steaks.  The victory was complete.  Happiness
reigned.  The knights all married the daughter.  Joy! wassail! finis!

"But what did they do with the wicked brother?"

"Oh nothing--only hanged him on that iron hook I was speaking of.  By the
chin."

"As how?"

"Passed it up through his gills into his mouth."

"Leave him there?"

"Couple of years."

"Ah--is--is he dead?"

"Six hundred and fifty years ago, or such a matter."

"Splendid legend--splendid lie--drive on."

We reached the quaint old fortified city of Bergamo, the renowned in
history, some three-quarters of an hour before the train was ready to
start.  The place has thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and is
remarkable for being the birthplace of harlequin.  When we discovered
that, that legend of our driver took to itself a new interest in our
eyes.

Rested and refreshed, we took the rail happy and contented.  I shall not
tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi; its stately castle that
holds in its stony bosom the secrets of an age so remote that even
tradition goeth not back to it; the imposing mountain scenery that
ennobles the landscape thereabouts; nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty
Verona; nor of their Montagues and Capulets, their famous balconies and
tombs of Juliet and Romeo et al., but hurry straight to the ancient city
of the sea, the widowed bride of the Adriatic.  It was a long, long ride.
But toward evening, as we sat silent and hardly conscious of where we
were--subdued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a
conversational storm--some one shouted--
"VENICE!"

And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, lay a great
city, with its towers and domes and steeples drowsing in a golden mist of
sunset.



CHAPTER XXII.

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for
nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's
applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held
dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest
oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every
clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay.  Six
hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the
great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous
trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world.  To-day her
piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are
vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories.  Her glory is
departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about
her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten
of the world.  She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a
hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her
puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,
--a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for
school-girls and children.

The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for
flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists.  It seems a sort of
sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us
softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and
her desolation from our view.  One ought, indeed, to turn away from her
rags, her poverty and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was
when she sunk the fleets of Charlemagne; when she humbled Frederick
Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of
Constantinople.

We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a hearse belonging
to the Grand Hotel d'Europe.  At any rate, it was more like a hearse than
any thing else, though to speak by the card, it was a gondola.  And this
was the storied gondola of Venice!--the fairy boat in which the princely
cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit
canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician
beauties, while the gay gondolier in silken doublet touched his guitar
and sang as only gondoliers can sing!  This the famed gondola and this
the gorgeous gondolier!--the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable
hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy,
barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which
should have been sacred from public scrutiny.  Presently, as he turned a
corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of
towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to
the traditions of his race.  I stood it a little while.  Then I said:

"Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a
stranger, but I am not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such
caterwauling as that.  If that goes on, one of us has got to take water.
It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice have been blighted
forever as to the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier; this
system of destruction shall go no farther; I will accept the hearse,
under protest, and you may fly your flag of truce in peace, but here I
register a dark and bloody oath that you shan't sing.  Another yelp, and
overboard you go."

I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed
forever.  But I was too hasty.  In a few minutes we swept gracefully out
into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry
and romance stood revealed.  Right from the water's edge rose long lines
of stately palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and
thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys;
ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves.
There was life and motion everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a
hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was suggestive of secret
enterprises of bravoes and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and half
in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed to
have an expression about them of having an eye out for just such
enterprises as these at that same moment.  Music came floating over the
waters--Venice was complete.

It was a beautiful picture--very soft and dreamy and beautiful.  But what
was this Venice to compare with the Venice of midnight?  Nothing.  There
was a fete--a grand fete in honor of some saint who had been instrumental
in checking the cholera three hundred years ago, and all Venice was
abroad on the water.  It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not
know how soon they might need the saint's services again, now that the
cholera was spreading every where.  So in one vast space--say a third of
a mile wide and two miles long--were collected two thousand gondolas, and
every one of them had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored
lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants.  Just as
far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together
--like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms
were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling
together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy
evolutions.  Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a
rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the
boats around it.  Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and
pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the
faces of the young and the sweet-scented and lovely below, was a picture;
and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless,
so many-colored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture
likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful.  Many and many a party
of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely
decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed,
white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables
tricked out as if for a bridal supper.  They had brought along the
costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken
curtains from the same places, I suppose.  And they had also brought
pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian
paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded
around to stare and listen.

There was music every where--choruses, string bands, brass bands, flutes,
every thing.  I was so surrounded, walled in, with music, magnificence
and loveliness, that I became inspired with the spirit of the scene, and
sang one tune myself.  However, when I observed that the other gondolas
had sailed away, and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard, I
stopped.

The fete was magnificent.  They kept it up the whole night long, and I
never enjoyed myself better than I did while it lasted.

What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is!  Narrow streets,
vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries,
and all partly submerged; no dry land visible any where, and no sidewalks
worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the
restaurant, you must call a gondola.  It must be a paradise for cripples,
for verily a man has no use for legs here.

For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Arkansas town,
because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the
houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming
in and out of the alleys and by-ways, that I could not get rid of the
impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet,
and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water
mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.

In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the
charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered
sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once
more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago.  It is easy,
then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and
fair ladies--with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon
the rich argosies of Venetian commerce--with Othellos and Desdemonas,
with Iagos and Roderigos--with noble fleets and victorious legions
returning from the wars.  In the treacherous sunlight we see Venice
decayed, forlorn, poverty-stricken, and commerceless--forgotten and
utterly insignificant.  But in the moonlight, her fourteen centuries of
greatness fling their glories about her, and once more is she the
princeliest among the nations of the earth.

          "There is a glorious city in the sea;
          The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,
          Ebbing and flowing; and the salt-sea weed
          Clings to the marble of her palaces.
          No track of men, no footsteps to and fro,
          Lead to her gates!  The path lies o'er the sea,
          Invisible: and from the land we went,
          As to a floating city--steering in,
          And gliding up her streets, as in a dream,
          So smoothly, silently--by many a dome,
          Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,
          The statues ranged along an azure sky;
          By many a pile, in more than Eastern pride,
          Of old the residence of merchant kings;
          The fronts of some, tho' time had shatter'd them,
          Still glowing with the richest hues of art,
          As tho' the wealth within them had run o'er."

What would one naturally wish to see first in Venice?  The Bridge of
Sighs, of course--and next the Church and the Great Square of St. Mark,
the Bronze Horses, and the famous Lion of St. Mark.

We intended to go to the Bridge of Sighs, but happened into the Ducal
Palace first--a building which necessarily figures largely in Venetian
poetry and tradition.  In the Senate Chamber of the ancient Republic we
wearied our eyes with staring at acres of historical paintings by
Tintoretto and Paul Veronese, but nothing struck us forcibly except the
one thing that strikes all strangers forcibly--a black square in the
midst of a gallery of portraits.  In one long row, around the great hall,
were painted the portraits of the Doges of Venice (venerable fellows,
with flowing white beards, for of the three hundred Senators eligible to
the office, the oldest was usually chosen Doge,) and each had its
complimentary inscription attached--till you came to the place that
should have had Marino Faliero's picture in it, and that was blank and
black--blank, except that it bore a terse inscription, saying that the
conspirator had died for his crime.  It seemed cruel to keep that
pitiless inscription still staring from the walls after the unhappy
wretch had been in his grave five hundred years.

At the head of the Giant's Staircase, where Marino Faliero was beheaded,
and where the Doges were crowned in ancient times, two small slits in the
stone wall were pointed out--two harmless, insignificant orifices that
would never attract a stranger's attention--yet these were the terrible
Lions' Mouths!  The heads were gone (knocked off by the French during
their occupation of Venice,) but these were the throats, down which went
the anonymous accusation, thrust in secretly at dead of night by an
enemy, that doomed many an innocent man to walk the Bridge of Sighs and
descend into the dungeon which none entered and hoped to see the sun
again.  This was in the old days when the Patricians alone governed
Venice--the common herd had no vote and no voice.  There were one
thousand five hundred Patricians; from these, three hundred Senators were
chosen; from the Senators a Doge and a Council of Ten were selected, and
by secret ballot the Ten chose from their own number a Council of Three.
All these were Government spies, then, and every spy was under
surveillance himself--men spoke in whispers in Venice, and no man trusted
his neighbor--not always his own brother.  No man knew who the Council of
Three were--not even the Senate, not even the Doge; the members of that
dread tribunal met at night in a chamber to themselves, masked, and robed
from head to foot in scarlet cloaks, and did not even know each other,
unless by voice.  It was their duty to judge heinous political crimes,
and from their sentence there was no appeal.  A nod to the executioner
was sufficient.  The doomed man was marched down a hall and out at a
door-way into the covered Bridge of Sighs, through it and into the
dungeon and unto his death.  At no time in his transit was he visible to
any save his conductor.  If a man had an enemy in those old days, the
cleverest thing he could do was to slip a note for the Council of Three
into the Lion's mouth, saying "This man is plotting against the
Government."  If the awful Three found no proof, ten to one they would
drown him anyhow, because he was a deep rascal, since his plots were
unsolvable.  Masked judges and masked executioners, with unlimited power,
and no appeal from their judgements, in that hard, cruel age, were not
likely to be lenient with men they suspected yet could not convict.

We walked through the hall of the Council of Ten, and presently entered
the infernal den of the Council of Three.

The table around which they had sat was there still, and likewise the
stations where the masked inquisitors and executioners formerly stood,
frozen, upright and silent, till they received a bloody order, and then,
without a word, moved off like the inexorable machines they were, to
carry it out.  The frescoes on the walls were startlingly suited to the
place.  In all the other saloons, the halls, the great state chambers of
the palace, the walls and ceilings were bright with gilding, rich with
elaborate carving, and resplendent with gallant pictures of Venetian
victories in war, and Venetian display in foreign courts, and hallowed
with portraits of the Virgin, the Saviour of men, and the holy saints
that preached the Gospel of Peace upon earth--but here, in dismal
contrast, were none but pictures of death and dreadful suffering!--not a
living figure but was writhing in torture, not a dead one but was smeared
with blood, gashed with wounds, and distorted with the agonies that had
taken away its life!

From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step--one might almost jump
across the narrow canal that intervenes.  The ponderous stone Bridge of
Sighs crosses it at the second story--a bridge that is a covered tunnel
--you can not be seen when you walk in it.  It is partitioned lengthwise,
and through one compartment walked such as bore light sentences in
ancient times, and through the other marched sadly the wretches whom the
Three had doomed to lingering misery and utter oblivion in the dungeons,
or to sudden and mysterious death.  Down below the level of the water, by
the light of smoking torches, we were shown the damp, thick-walled cells
where many a proud patrician's life was eaten away by the long-drawn
miseries of solitary imprisonment--without light, air, books; naked,
unshaven, uncombed, covered with vermin; his useless tongue forgetting
its office, with none to speak to; the days and nights of his life no
longer marked, but merged into one eternal eventless night; far away from
all cheerful sounds, buried in the silence of a tomb; forgotten by his
helpless friends, and his fate a dark mystery to them forever; losing his
own memory at last, and knowing no more who he was or how he came there;
devouring the loaf of bread and drinking the water that were thrust into
the cell by unseen hands, and troubling his worn spirit no more with
hopes and fears and doubts and longings to be free; ceasing to scratch
vain prayers and complainings on walls where none, not even himself,
could see them, and resigning himself to hopeless apathy, driveling
childishness, lunacy!  Many and many a sorrowful story like this these
stony walls could tell if they could but speak.

In a little narrow corridor, near by, they showed us where many a
prisoner, after lying in the dungeons until he was forgotten by all save
his persecutors, was brought by masked executioners and garroted, or
sewed up in a sack, passed through a little window to a boat, at dead of
night, and taken to some remote spot and drowned.

They used to show to visitors the implements of torture wherewith the
Three were wont to worm secrets out of the accused--villainous machines
for crushing thumbs; the stocks where a prisoner sat immovable while
water fell drop by drop upon his head till the torture was more than
humanity could bear; and a devilish contrivance of steel, which inclosed
a prisoner's head like a shell, and crushed it slowly by means of a
screw.  It bore the stains of blood that had trickled through its joints
long ago, and on one side it had a projection whereon the torturer rested
his elbow comfortably and bent down his ear to catch the moanings of the
sufferer perishing within.

Of course we went to see the venerable relic of the ancient glory of
Venice, with its pavements worn and broken by the passing feet of a
thousand years of plebeians and patricians--The Cathedral of St. Mark.
It is built entirely of precious marbles, brought from the Orient
--nothing in its composition is domestic.  Its hoary traditions make it an
object of absorbing interest to even the most careless stranger, and thus
far it had interest for me; but no further.  I could not go into
ecstasies over its coarse mosaics, its unlovely Byzantine architecture,
or its five hundred curious interior columns from as many distant
quarries.  Every thing was worn out--every block of stone was smooth and
almost shapeless with the polishing hands and shoulders of loungers who
devoutly idled here in by-gone centuries and have died and gone to the
dev--no, simply died, I mean.

Under the altar repose the ashes of St. Mark--and Matthew, Luke and John,
too, for all I know.  Venice reveres those relics above all things
earthly.  For fourteen hundred years St. Mark has been her patron saint.
Every thing about the city seems to be named after him or so named as to
refer to him in some way--so named, or some purchase rigged in some way
to scrape a sort of hurrahing acquaintance with him.  That seems to be
the idea.  To be on good terms with St. Mark, seems to be the very summit
of Venetian ambition.  They say St. Mark had a tame lion, and used to
travel with him--and every where that St. Mark went, the lion was sure to
go.  It was his protector, his friend, his librarian.  And so the Winged
Lion of St. Mark, with the open Bible under his paw, is a favorite emblem
in the grand old city.  It casts its shadow from the most ancient pillar
in Venice, in the Grand Square of St. Mark, upon the throngs of free
citizens below, and has so done for many a long century.  The winged lion
is found every where--and doubtless here, where the winged lion is, no
harm can come.

St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt.  He was martyred, I think.
However, that has nothing to do with my legend.  About the founding of
the city of Venice--say four hundred and fifty years after Christ--(for
Venice is much younger than any other Italian city,) a priest dreamed
that an angel told him that until the remains of St. Mark were brought to
Venice, the city could never rise to high distinction among the nations;
that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and a magnificent
church built over it; and that if ever the Venetians allowed the Saint to
be removed from his new resting-place, in that day Venice would perish
from off the face of the earth.  The priest proclaimed his dream, and
forthwith Venice set about procuring the corpse of St. Mark.  One
expedition after another tried and failed, but the project was never
abandoned during four hundred years.  At last it was secured by
stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something.  The commander of a
Venetian expedition disguised himself, stole the bones, separated them,
and packed them in vessels filled with lard.  The religion of Mahomet
causes its devotees to abhor anything that is in the nature of pork, and
so when the Christian was stopped by the officers at the gates of the
city, they only glanced once into his precious baskets, then turned up
their noses at the unholy lard, and let him go.  The bones were buried in
the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had been waiting long years to
receive them, and thus the safety and the greatness of Venice were
secured.  And to this day there be those in Venice who believe that if
those holy ashes were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a
dream, and its foundations be buried forever in the unremembering sea.



CHAPTER XXIII.

The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as
a serpent.  It is twenty or thirty feet long, and is narrow and deep,
like a canoe; its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from the water like
the horns of a crescent with the abruptness of the curve slightly
modified.

The bow is ornamented with a steel comb with a battle-ax attachment which
threatens to cut passing boats in two occasionally, but never does.  The
gondola is painted black because in the zenith of Venetian magnificence
the gondolas became too gorgeous altogether, and the Senate decreed that
all such display must cease, and a solemn, unembellished black be
substituted.  If the truth were known, it would doubtless appear that
rich plebeians grew too prominent in their affectation of patrician show
on the Grand Canal, and required a wholesome snubbing.  Reverence for the
hallowed Past and its traditions keeps the dismal fashion in force now
that the compulsion exists no longer.  So let it remain.  It is the color
of mourning.  Venice mourns.  The stern of the boat is decked over and
the gondolier stands there.  He uses a single oar--a long blade, of
course, for he stands nearly erect.  A wooden peg, a foot and a half
high, with two slight crooks or curves in one side of it and one in the
other, projects above the starboard gunwale.  Against that peg the
gondolier takes a purchase with his oar, changing it at intervals to the
other side of the peg or dropping it into another of the crooks, as the
steering of the craft may demand--and how in the world he can back and
fill, shoot straight ahead, or flirt suddenly around a corner, and make
the oar stay in those insignificant notches, is a problem to me and a
never diminishing matter of interest.  I am afraid I study the
gondolier's marvelous skill more than I do the sculptured palaces we
glide among.  He cuts a corner so closely, now and then, or misses
another gondola by such an imperceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself
"scrooching," as the children say, just as one does when a buggy wheel
grazes his elbow.  But he makes all his calculations with the nicest
precision, and goes darting in and out among a Broadway confusion of busy
craft with the easy confidence of the educated hackman.  He never makes a
mistake.

Sometimes we go flying down the great canals at such a gait that we can
get only the merest glimpses into front doors, and again, in obscure
alleys in the suburbs, we put on a solemnity suited to the silence, the
mildew, the stagnant waters, the clinging weeds, the deserted houses and
the general lifelessness of the place, and move to the spirit of grave
meditation.

The gondolier is a picturesque rascal for all he wears no satin harness,
no plumed bonnet, no silken tights.  His attitude is stately; he is lithe
and supple; all his movements are full of grace.  When his long canoe,
and his fine figure, towering from its high perch on the stern, are cut
against the evening sky, they make a picture that is very novel and
striking to a foreign eye.

We sit in the cushioned carriage-body of a cabin, with the curtains
drawn, and smoke, or read, or look out upon the passing boats, the
houses, the bridges, the people, and enjoy ourselves much more than we
could in a buggy jolting over our cobble-stone pavements at home.  This
is the gentlest, pleasantest locomotion we have ever known.

But it seems queer--ever so queer--to see a boat doing duty as a private
carriage.  We see business men come to the front door, step into a
gondola, instead of a street car, and go off down town to the
counting-room.

We see visiting young ladies stand on the stoop, and laugh, and kiss
good-bye, and flirt their fans and say "Come soon--now do--you've been
just as mean as ever you can be--mother's dying to see you--and we've
moved into the new house, O such a love of a place!--so convenient to the
post office and the church, and the Young Men's Christian Association;
and we do have such fishing, and such carrying on, and such
swimming-matches in the back yard--Oh, you must come--no distance at all,
and if you go down through by St. Mark's and the Bridge of Sighs, and cut
through the alley and come up by the church of Santa Maria dei Frari, and
into the Grand Canal, there isn't a bit of current--now do come, Sally
Maria--by-bye!" and then the little humbug trips down the steps, jumps
into the gondola, says, under her breath, "Disagreeable old thing, I hope
she won't!" goes skimming away, round the corner; and the other girl
slams the street door and says, "Well, that infliction's over, any way,
--but I suppose I've got to go and see her--tiresome stuck-up thing!"
Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world.  We see the
diffident young man, mild of moustache, affluent of hair, indigent of
brain, elegant of costume, drive up to her father's mansion, tell his
hackman to bail out and wait, start fearfully up the steps and meet "the
old gentleman" right on the threshold!--hear him ask what street the new
British Bank is in--as if that were what he came for--and then bounce
into his boat and skurry away with his coward heart in his boots!--see
him come sneaking around the corner again, directly, with a crack of the
curtain open toward the old gentleman's disappearing gondola, and out
scampers his Susan with a flock of little Italian endearments fluttering
from her lips, and goes to drive with him in the watery avenues down
toward the Rialto.

We see the ladies go out shopping, in the most natural way, and flit from
street to street and from store to store, just in the good old fashion,
except that they leave the gondola, instead of a private carriage,
waiting at the curbstone a couple of hours for them,--waiting while they
make the nice young clerks pull down tons and tons of silks and velvets
and moire antiques and those things; and then they buy a paper of pins
and go paddling away to confer the rest of their disastrous patronage on
some other firm.  And they always have their purchases sent home just in
the good old way.  Human nature is very much the same all over the world;
and it is so like my dear native home to see a Venetian lady go into a
store and buy ten cents' worth of blue ribbon and have it sent home in a
scow.  Ah, it is these little touches of nature that move one to tears in
these far-off foreign lands.

We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their nurses, for an
airing.  We see staid families, with prayer-book and beads, enter the
gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and float away to church.  And at
midnight we see the theatre break up and discharge its swarm of hilarious
youth and beauty; we hear the cries of the hackman-gondoliers, and behold
the struggling crowd jump aboard, and the black multitude of boats go
skimming down the moonlit avenues; we see them separate here and there,
and disappear up divergent streets; we hear the faint sounds of laughter
and of shouted farewells floating up out of the distance; and then, the
strange pageant being gone, we have lonely stretches of glittering water
--of stately buildings--of blotting shadows--of weird stone faces
creeping into the moonlight--of deserted bridges--of motionless boats at
anchor.  And over all broods that mysterious stillness, that stealthy
quiet, that befits so well this old dreaming Venice.

We have been pretty much every where in our gondola.  We have bought
beads and photographs in the stores, and wax matches in the Great Square
of St. Mark.  The last remark suggests a digression.  Every body goes to
this vast square in the evening.  The military bands play in the centre
of it and countless couples of ladies and gentlemen promenade up and down
on either side, and platoons of them are constantly drifting away toward
the old Cathedral, and by the venerable column with the Winged Lion of
St. Mark on its top, and out to where the boats lie moored; and other
platoons are as constantly arriving from the gondolas and joining the
great throng.  Between the promenaders and the side-walks are seated
hundreds and hundreds of people at small tables, smoking and taking
granita, (a first cousin to ice-cream;) on the side-walks are more
employing themselves in the same way.  The shops in the first floor of
the tall rows of buildings that wall in three sides of the square are
brilliantly lighted, the air is filled with music and merry voices, and
altogether the scene is as bright and spirited and full of cheerfulness
as any man could desire.  We enjoy it thoroughly.  Very many of the young
women are exceedingly pretty and dress with rare good taste.  We are
gradually and laboriously learning the ill-manners of staring them
unflinchingly in the face--not because such conduct is agreeable to us,
but because it is the custom of the country and they say the girls like
it.  We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the
different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when
we get home.  We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with
our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.  All our
passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in
view which I have mentioned.  The gentle reader will never, never know
what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.  I speak now,
of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad,
and therefore is not already a consummate ass.  If the case be otherwise,
I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and
call him brother.  I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own
heart when I shall have finished my travels.

On this subject let me remark that there are Americans abroad in Italy
who have actually forgotten their mother tongue in three months--forgot
it in France.  They can not even write their address in English in a
hotel register.  I append these evidences, which I copied verbatim from
the register of a hotel in a certain Italian city:

     "John P. Whitcomb, Etats Unis.  "Wm. L. Ainsworth, travailleur (he
     meant traveler, I suppose,) Etats Unis.  "George P. Morton et fils,
     d'Amerique.  "Lloyd B.  Williams, et trois amis, ville de Boston,
     Amerique.  "J. Ellsworth Baker, tout de suite de France, place de
     naissance Amerique, destination la Grand Bretagne."

I love this sort of people.  A lady passenger of ours tells of a
fellow-citizen of hers who spent eight weeks in Paris and then returned
home and addressed his dearest old bosom friend Herbert as Mr.
"Er-bare!"  He apologized, though, and said, "'Pon my soul it is
aggravating, but I cahn't help it--I have got so used to speaking
nothing but French, my dear Erbare--damme there it goes again!--got so
used to French pronunciation that I cahn't get rid of it--it is
positively annoying, I assure you."  This entertaining idiot, whose name
was Gordon, allowed himself to be hailed three times in the street
before he paid any attention, and then begged a thousand pardons and
said he had grown so accustomed to hearing himself addressed as "M'sieu
Gor-r-dong," with a roll to the r, that he had forgotten the legitimate
sound of his name! He wore a rose in his button-hole; he gave the French
salutation--two flips of the hand in front of the face; he called Paris
Pairree in ordinary English conversation; he carried envelopes bearing
foreign postmarks protruding from his breast-pocket; he cultivated a
moustache and imperial, and did what else he could to suggest to the
beholder his pet fancy that he resembled Louis Napoleon--and in a spirit
of thankfulness which is entirely unaccountable, considering the slim
foundation there was for it, he praised his Maker that he was as he was,
and went on enjoying his little life just the same as if he really had
been deliberately designed and erected by the great Architect of the
Universe.

Think of our Whitcombs, and our Ainsworths and our Williamses writing
themselves down in dilapidated French in foreign hotel registers!  We
laugh at Englishmen, when we are at home, for sticking so sturdily to
their national ways and customs, but we look back upon it from abroad
very forgivingly.  It is not pleasant to see an American thrusting his
nationality forward obtrusively in a foreign land, but Oh, it is pitiable
to see him making of himself a thing that is neither male nor female,
neither fish, flesh, nor fowl--a poor, miserable, hermaphrodite
Frenchman!

Among a long list of churches, art galleries, and such things, visited by
us in Venice, I shall mention only one--the church of Santa Maria dei
Frari.  It is about five hundred years old, I believe, and stands on
twelve hundred thousand piles.  In it lie the body of Canova and the
heart of Titian, under magnificent monuments.  Titian died at the age of
almost one hundred years.  A plague which swept away fifty thousand lives
was raging at the time, and there is notable evidence of the reverence in
which the great painter was held, in the fact that to him alone the state
permitted a public funeral in all that season of terror and death.

In this church, also, is a monument to the doge Foscari, whose name a
once resident of Venice, Lord Byron, has made permanently famous.

The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity
in the way of mortuary adornment.  It is eighty feet high and is fronted
like some fantastic pagan temple.  Against it stand four colossal
Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments.  The black
legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of
shiny black marble, shows.  The artist was as ingenious as his funeral
designs were absurd.  There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and
two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus.  On high, amid all this
grotesqueness, sits the departed doge.

In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the state
archives of Venice.  We did not see them, but they are said to number
millions of documents.  "They are the records of centuries of the most
watchful, observant and suspicious government that ever existed--in which
every thing was written down and nothing spoken out."  They fill nearly
three hundred rooms.  Among them are manuscripts from the archives of
nearly two thousand families, monasteries and convents.  The secret
history of Venice for a thousand years is here--its plots, its hidden
trials, its assassinations, its commissions of hireling spies and masked
bravoes--food, ready to hand, for a world of dark and mysterious
romances.

Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice.  We have seen, in these old
churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate sepulchre ornamentation
such as we never dreampt of before.  We have stood in the dim religious
light of these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty
monuments and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed
drifting back, back, back, into the solemn past, and looking upon the
scenes and mingling with the peoples of a remote antiquity.  We have been
in a half-waking sort of dream all the time.  I do not know how else to
describe the feeling.  A part of our being has remained still in the
nineteenth century, while another part of it has seemed in some
unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.

We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with looking at
them and refuse to find interest in them any longer.  And what wonder,
when there are twelve hundred pictures by Palma the Younger in Venice and
fifteen hundred by Tintoretto?  And behold there are Titians and the
works of other artists in proportion.  We have seen Titian's celebrated
Cain and Abel, his David and Goliah, his Abraham's Sacrifice.  We have
seen Tintoretto's monster picture, which is seventy-four feet long and I
do not know how many feet high, and thought it a very commodious picture.
We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate
the world.  I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no
opportunity in America to acquire a critical judgment in art, and since I
could not hope to become educated in it in Europe in a few short weeks, I
may therefore as well acknowledge with such apologies as may be due, that
to me it seemed that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them
all.  They all have a marked family resemblance to each other, they dress
alike, in coarse monkish robes and sandals, they are all bald headed,
they all stand in about the same attitude, and without exception they are
gazing heavenward with countenances which the Ainsworths, the Mortons and
the Williamses, et fils, inform me are full of "expression."  To me there
is nothing tangible about these imaginary portraits, nothing that I can
grasp and take a living interest in.  If great Titian had only been
gifted with prophecy, and had skipped a martyr, and gone over to England
and painted a portrait of Shakspeare, even as a youth, which we could all
have confidence in now, the world down to the latest generations would
have forgiven him the lost martyr in the rescued seer.  I think posterity
could have spared one more martyr for the sake of a great historical
picture of Titian's time and painted by his brush--such as Columbus
returning in chains from the discovery of a world, for instance.  The old
masters did paint some Venetian historical pictures, and these we did not
tire of looking at, notwithstanding representations of the formal
introduction of defunct doges to the Virgin Mary in regions beyond the
clouds clashed rather harshly with the proprieties, it seemed to us.

But humble as we are, and unpretending, in the matter of art, our
researches among the painted monks and martyrs have not been wholly in
vain.  We have striven hard to learn.  We have had some success.  We have
mastered some things, possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the
learned, but to us they give pleasure, and we take as much pride in our
little acquirements as do others who have learned far more, and we love
to display them full as well.  When we see a monk going about with a lion
and looking tranquilly up to heaven, we know that that is St. Mark.  When
we see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven,
trying to think of a word, we know that that is St. Matthew.  When we see
a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human
skull beside him, and without other baggage, we know that that is St.
Jerome.  Because we know that he always went flying light in the matter
of baggage.  When we see a party looking tranquilly up to heaven,
unconscious that his body is shot through and through with arrows, we
know that that is St. Sebastian.  When we see other monks looking
tranquilly up to heaven, but having no trade-mark, we always ask who
those parties are.  We do this because we humbly wish to learn.  We have
seen thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, and twenty-two thousand St. Marks,
and sixteen thousand St. Matthews, and sixty thousand St. Sebastians, and
four millions of assorted monks, undesignated, and we feel encouraged to
believe that when we have seen some more of these various pictures, and
had a larger experience, we shall begin to take an absorbing interest in
them like our cultivated countrymen from Amerique.

Now it does give me real pain to speak in this almost unappreciative way
of the old masters and their martyrs, because good friends of mine in the
ship--friends who do thoroughly and conscientiously appreciate them and
are in every way competent to discriminate between good pictures and
inferior ones--have urged me for my own sake not to make public the fact
that I lack this appreciation and this critical discrimination myself.  I
believe that what I have written and may still write about pictures will
give them pain, and I am honestly sorry for it.  I even promised that I
would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast.  But alas!  I never
could keep a promise.  I do not blame myself for this weakness, because
the fault must lie in my physical organization.  It is likely that such a
very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to
make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was
crowded out.  But I grieve not.  I like no half-way things.  I had rather
have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary
capacity.  I certainly meant to keep that promise, but I find I can not
do it.  It is impossible to travel through Italy without speaking of
pictures, and can I see them through others' eyes?

If I did not so delight in the grand pictures that are spread before me
every day of my life by that monarch of all the old masters, Nature, I
should come to believe, sometimes, that I had in me no appreciation of
the beautiful, whatsoever.

It seems to me that whenever I glory to think that for once I have
discovered an ancient painting that is beautiful and worthy of all
praise, the pleasure it gives me is an infallible proof that it is not a
beautiful picture and not in any wise worthy of commendation.  This very
thing has occurred more times than I can mention, in Venice.  In every
single instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm with the
remark:

"It is nothing--it is of the Renaissance."

I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, and so always I
had to simply say,

"Ah! so it is--I had not observed it before."

I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, the offspring
of a South Carolina slave.  But it occurred too often for even my
self-complacency, did that exasperating "It is nothing--it is of the
Renaissance."  I said at last:

"Who is this Renaissance?  Where did he come from?  Who gave him
permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?"

We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a
term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of
art.  The guide said that after Titian's time and the time of the other
great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it
partially rose again--an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these
shabby pictures were the work of their hands.  Then I said, in my heat,
that I "wished to goodness high art had declined five hundred years
sooner."  The Renaissance pictures suit me very well, though sooth to say
its school were too much given to painting real men and did not indulge
enough in martyrs.

The guide I have spoken of is the only one we have had yet who knew any
thing.  He was born in South Carolina, of slave parents.  They came to
Venice while he was an infant.  He has grown up here.  He is well
educated.  He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and
French, with perfect facility; is a worshipper of art and thoroughly
conversant with it; knows the history of Venice by heart and never tires
of talking of her illustrious career.  He dresses better than any of us,
I think, and is daintily polite.  Negroes are deemed as good as white
people, in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his
native land.  His judgment is correct.

I have had another shave.  I was writing in our front room this afternoon
and trying hard to keep my attention on my work and refrain from looking
out upon the canal.  I was resisting the soft influences of the climate
as well as I could, and endeavoring to overcome the desire to be indolent
and happy.  The boys sent for a barber.  They asked me if I would be
shaved.  I reminded them of my tortures in Genoa, Milan, Como; of my
declaration that I would suffer no more on Italian soil.  I said "Not any
for me, if you please."

I wrote on.  The barber began on the doctor.  I heard him say:

"Dan, this is the easiest shave I have had since we left the ship."

He said again, presently:

"Why Dan, a man could go to sleep with this man shaving him."

Dan took the chair.  Then he said:

"Why this is Titian.  This is one of the old masters."

I wrote on.  Directly Dan said:

"Doctor, it is perfect luxury.  The ship's barber isn't any thing to
him."

My rough beard wee distressing me beyond measure.  The barber was rolling
up his apparatus.  The temptation was too strong.  I said:

"Hold on, please.  Shave me also."

I sat down in the chair and closed my eyes.  The barber soaped my face,
and then took his razor and gave me a rake that well nigh threw me into
convulsions.  I jumped out of the chair: Dan and the doctor were both
wiping blood off their faces and laughing.

I said it was a mean, disgraceful fraud.

They said that the misery of this shave had gone so far beyond any thing
they had ever experienced before, that they could not bear the idea of
losing such a chance of hearing a cordial opinion from me on the subject.

It was shameful.  But there was no help for it.  The skinning was begun
and had to be finished.  The tears flowed with every rake, and so did the
fervent execrations.  The barber grew confused, and brought blood every
time.  I think the boys enjoyed it better than any thing they have seen
or heard since they left home.

We have seen the Campanile, and Byron's house and Balbi's the geographer,
and the palaces of all the ancient dukes and doges of Venice, and we have
seen their effeminate descendants airing their nobility in fashionable
French attire in the Grand Square of St. Mark, and eating ices and
drinking cheap wines, instead of wearing gallant coats of mail and
destroying fleets and armies as their great ancestors did in the days of
Venetian glory.  We have seen no bravoes with poisoned stilettos, no
masks, no wild carnival; but we have seen the ancient pride of Venice,
the grim Bronze Horses that figure in a thousand legends.  Venice may
well cherish them, for they are the only horses she ever had.  It is said
there are hundreds of people in this curious city who never have seen a
living horse in their lives.  It is entirely true, no doubt.

And so, having satisfied ourselves, we depart to-morrow, and leave the
venerable Queen of the Republics to summon her vanished ships, and
marshal her shadowy armies, and know again in dreams the pride of her old
renown.



CHAPTER XXIV.

Some of the Quaker City's passengers had arrived in Venice from
Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were
expected every day.  We heard of no casualties among them, and no
sickness.

We were a little fatigued with sight seeing, and so we rattled through a
good deal of country by rail without caring to stop.  I took few notes.
I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book, except that we
arrived there in good season, but saw none of the sausages for which the
place is so justly celebrated.

Pistoia awoke but a passing interest.

Florence pleased us for a while.  I think we appreciated the great figure
of David in the grand square, and the sculptured group they call the Rape
of the Sabines.  We wandered through the endless collections of paintings
and statues of the Pitti and Ufizzi galleries, of course.  I make that
statement in self-defense; there let it stop.  I could not rest under the
imputation that I visited Florence and did not traverse its weary miles
of picture galleries.  We tried indolently to recollect something about
the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other historical cut-throats whose
quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine
history, but the subject was not attractive.  We had been robbed of all
the fine mountain scenery on our little journey by a system of
railroading that had three miles of tunnel to a hundred yards of
daylight, and we were not inclined to be sociable with Florence.  We had
seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed
the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because
his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a
damning heresy by the church; and we know that long after the world had
accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great
men, they had still let him rot there.  That we had lived to see his dust
in honored sepulture in the church of Santa Croce we owed to a society of
literati, and not to Florence or her rulers.  We saw Dante's tomb in that
church, also, but we were glad to know that his body was not in it; that
the ungrateful city that had exiled him and persecuted him would give
much to have it there, but need not hope to ever secure that high honor
to herself.  Medicis are good enough for Florence.  Let her plant Medicis
and build grand monuments over them to testify how gratefully she was
wont to lick the hand that scourged her.

Magnanimous Florence!  Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in
mosaic.  Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world.  Florence
loves to have that said.  Florence is proud of it.  Florence would foster
this specialty of hers.  She is grateful to the artists that bring to her
this high credit and fill her coffers with foreign money, and so she
encourages them with pensions.  With pensions!  Think of the lavishness
of it.  She knows that people who piece together the beautiful trifles
die early, because the labor is so confining, and so exhausting to hand
and brain, and so she has decreed that all these people who reach the age
of sixty shall have a pension after that!  I have not heard that any of
them have called for their dividends yet.  One man did fight along till
he was sixty, and started after his pension, but it appeared that there
had been a mistake of a year in his family record, and so he gave it up
and died.

These artists will take particles of stone or glass no larger than a
mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve button or a shirt stud,
so smoothly and with such nice adjustment of the delicate shades of color
the pieces bear, as to form a pigmy rose with stem, thorn, leaves, petals
complete, and all as softly and as truthfully tinted as though Nature had
builded it herself.  They will counterfeit a fly, or a high-toned bug, or
the ruined Coliseum, within the cramped circle of a breastpin, and do it
so deftly and so neatly that any man might think a master painted it.

I saw a little table in the great mosaic school in Florence--a little
trifle of a centre table--whose top was made of some sort of precious
polished stone, and in the stone was inlaid the figure of a flute, with
bell-mouth and a mazy complication of keys.  No painting in the world
could have been softer or richer; no shading out of one tint into another
could have been more perfect; no work of art of any kind could have been
more faultless than this flute, and yet to count the multitude of little
fragments of stone of which they swore it was formed would bankrupt any
man's arithmetic!  I do not think one could have seen where two particles
joined each other with eyes of ordinary shrewdness.  Certainly we could
detect no such blemish.  This table-top cost the labor of one man for ten
long years, so they said, and it was for sale for thirty-five thousand
dollars.

We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, in Florence, to
weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo, Raphael and Machiavelli,
(I suppose they are buried there, but it may be that they reside
elsewhere and rent their tombs to other parties--such being the fashion
in Italy,) and between times we used to go and stand on the bridges and
admire the Arno.  It is popular to admire the Arno.  It is a great
historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating
around.  It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water
into it.  They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a
river, do these dark and bloody Florentines.  They even help out the
delusion by building bridges over it.  I do not see why they are too good
to wade.

How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices
sometimes!  I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence
and find it all beautiful, all attractive.  But I do not care to think of
it now, at all, nor of its roomy shops filled to the ceiling with snowy
marble and alabaster copies of all the celebrated sculptures in Europe
--copies so enchanting to the eye that I wonder how they can really be
shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are the portraits of.  I
got lost in Florence at nine o'clock, one night, and staid lost in that
labyrinth of narrow streets and long rows of vast buildings that look all
alike, until toward three o'clock in the morning.  It was a pleasant
night and at first there were a good many people abroad, and there were
cheerful lights about.  Later, I grew accustomed to prowling about
mysterious drifts and tunnels and astonishing and interesting myself with
coming around corners expecting to find the hotel staring me in the face,
and not finding it doing any thing of the kind.  Later still, I felt
tired.  I soon felt remarkably tired.  But there was no one abroad, now
--not even a policeman.  I walked till I was out of all patience, and very
hot and thirsty.  At last, somewhere after one o'clock, I came
unexpectedly to one of the city gates.  I knew then that I was very far
from the hotel.  The soldiers thought I wanted to leave the city, and
they sprang up and barred the way with their muskets.  I said:

"Hotel d'Europe!"

It was all the Italian I knew, and I was not certain whether that was
Italian or French.  The soldiers looked stupidly at each other and at me,
and shook their heads and took me into custody.  I said I wanted to go
home.  They did not understand me.  They took me into the guard-house and
searched me, but they found no sedition on me.  They found a small piece
of soap (we carry soap with us, now,) and I made them a present of it,
seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity.  I continued to say Hotel
d'Europe, and they continued to shake their heads, until at last a young
soldier nodding in the corner roused up and said something.  He said he
knew where the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent
him away with me.  We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, it
appeared to me, and then he got lost.  He turned this way and that, and
finally gave it up and signified that he was going to spend the remainder
of the morning trying to find the city gate again.  At that moment it
struck me that there was something familiar about the house over the way.
It was the hotel!

It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a soldier there
that knew even as much as he did; for they say that the policy of the
government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly
and from country to city, so that they can not become acquainted with the
people and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspiracies
with friends.  My experiences of Florence were chiefly unpleasant.  I
will change the subject.

At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure the world has
any knowledge of--the Leaning Tower.  As every one knows, it is in the
neighborhood of one hundred and eighty feet high--and I beg to observe
that one hundred and eighty feet reach to about the hight of four
ordinary three-story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a
very considerable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspire to,
even when it stands upright--yet this one leans more than thirteen feet
out of the perpendicular.  It is seven hundred years old, but neither
history or tradition say whether it was built as it is, purposely, or
whether one of its sides has settled.  There is no record that it ever
stood straight up.  It is built of marble.  It is an airy and a beautiful
structure, and each of its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns,
some of marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that were
handsome when they were new.  It is a bell tower, and in its top hangs a
chime of ancient bells.  The winding staircase within is dark, but one
always knows which side of the tower he is on because of his naturally
gravitating from one side to the other of the staircase with the rise or
dip of the tower.  Some of the stone steps are foot-worn only on one end;
others only on the other end; others only in the middle.  To look down
into the tower from the top is like looking down into a tilted well.  A
rope that hangs from the centre of the top touches the wall before it
reaches the bottom.  Standing on the summit, one does not feel altogether
comfortable when he looks down from the high side; but to crawl on your
breast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch your neck out
far enough to see the base of the tower, makes your flesh creep, and
convinces you for a single moment in spite of all your philosophy, that
the building is falling.  You handle yourself very carefully, all the
time, under the silly impression that if it is not falling, your trifling
weight will start it unless you are particular not to "bear down" on it.

The Duomo, close at hand, is one of the finest cathedrals in Europe.  It
is eight hundred years old.  Its grandeur has outlived the high
commercial prosperity and the political importance that made it a
necessity, or rather a possibility.  Surrounded by poverty, decay and
ruin, it conveys to us a more tangible impression of the former greatness
of Pisa than books could give us.

The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning Tower, is a
stately rotunda, of huge dimensions, and was a costly structure.  In it
hangs the lamp whose measured swing suggested to Galileo the pendulum.
It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of
science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it
has.  Pondering, in its suggestive presence, I seemed to see a crazy
universe of swinging disks, the toiling children of this sedate parent.
He appeared to have an intelligent expression about him of knowing that
he was not a lamp at all; that he was a Pendulum; a pendulum disguised,
for prodigious and inscrutable purposes of his own deep devising, and not
a common pendulum either, but the old original patriarchal Pendulum--the
Abraham Pendulum of the world.

This Baptistery is endowed with the most pleasing echo of all the echoes
we have read of.  The guide sounded two sonorous notes, about half an
octave apart; the echo answered with the most enchanting, the most
melodious, the richest blending of sweet sounds that one can imagine.  It
was like a long-drawn chord of a church organ, infinitely softened by
distance.  I may be extravagant in this matter, but if this be the case
my ear is to blame--not my pen.  I am describing a memory--and one that
will remain long with me.

The peculiar devotional spirit of the olden time, which placed a higher
confidence in outward forms of worship than in the watchful guarding of
the heart against sinful thoughts and the hands against sinful deeds, and
which believed in the protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy
by contact with holy things, is illustrated in a striking manner in one
of the cemeteries of Pisa.  The tombs are set in soil brought in ships
from the Holy Land ages ago.  To be buried in such ground was regarded by
the ancient Pisans as being more potent for salvation than many masses
purchased of the church and the vowing of many candles to the Virgin.

Pisa is believed to be about three thousand years old.  It was one of the
twelve great cities of ancient Etruria, that commonwealth which has left
so many monuments in testimony of its extraordinary advancement, and so
little history of itself that is tangible and comprehensible.  A Pisan
antiquarian gave me an ancient tear-jug which he averred was full four
thousand years old.  It was found among the ruins of one of the oldest of
the Etruscan cities.  He said it came from a tomb, and was used by some
bereaved family in that remote age when even the Pyramids of Egypt were
young, Damascus a village, Abraham a prattling infant and ancient Troy
not yet [dreampt] of, to receive the tears wept for some lost idol of a
household.  It spoke to us in a language of its own; and with a pathos
more tender than any words might bring, its mute eloquence swept down the
long roll of the centuries with its tale of a vacant chair, a familiar
footstep missed from the threshold, a pleasant voice gone from the
chorus, a vanished form!--a tale which is always so new to us, so
startling, so terrible, so benumbing to the senses, and behold how
threadbare and old it is!  No shrewdly-worded history could have brought
the myths and shadows of that old dreamy age before us clothed with human
flesh and warmed with human sympathies so vividly as did this poor little
unsentient vessel of pottery.

Pisa was a republic in the middle ages, with a government of her own,
armies and navies of her own and a great commerce.  She was a warlike
power, and inscribed upon her banners many a brilliant fight with Genoese
and Turks.  It is said that the city once numbered a population of four
hundred thousand; but her sceptre has passed from her grasp, now, her
ships and her armies are gone, her commerce is dead.  Her battle-flags
bear the mold and the dust of centuries, her marts are deserted, she has
shrunken far within her crumbling walls, and her great population has
diminished to twenty thousand souls.  She has but one thing left to boast
of, and that is not much, viz: she is the second city of Tuscany.

We reached Leghorn in time to see all we wished to see of it long before
the city gates were closed for the evening, and then came on board the
ship.

We felt as though we had been away from home an age.  We never entirely
appreciated, before, what a very pleasant den our state-room is; nor how
jolly it is to sit at dinner in one's own seat in one's own cabin, and
hold familiar conversation with friends in one's own language.  Oh, the
rare happiness of comprehending every single word that is said, and
knowing that every word one says in return will be understood as well!
We would talk ourselves to death, now, only there are only about ten
passengers out of the sixty-five to talk to.  The others are wandering,
we hardly know where.  We shall not go ashore in Leghorn.  We are
surfeited with Italian cities for the present, and much prefer to walk
the familiar quarterdeck and view this one from a distance.

The stupid magnates of this Leghorn government can not understand that so
large a steamer as ours could cross the broad Atlantic with no other
purpose than to indulge a party of ladies and gentlemen in a pleasure
excursion.  It looks too improbable.  It is suspicious, they think.
Something more important must be hidden behind it all.  They can not
understand it, and they scorn the evidence of the ship's papers.  They
have decided at last that we are a battalion of incendiary, blood-thirsty
Garibaldians in disguise!  And in all seriousness they have set a
gun-boat to watch the vessel night and day, with orders to close down on
any revolutionary movement in a twinkling!  Police boats are on patrol
duty about us all the time, and it is as much as a sailor's liberty is
worth to show himself in a red shirt.  These policemen follow the
executive officer's boat from shore to ship and from ship to shore and
watch his dark maneuvres with a vigilant eye.  They will arrest him yet
unless he assumes an expression of countenance that shall have less of
carnage, insurrection and sedition in it.  A visit paid in a friendly
way to General Garibaldi yesterday (by cordial invitation,) by some of
our passengers, has gone far to confirm the dread suspicions the
government harbors toward us.  It is thought the friendly visit was only
the cloak of a bloody conspiracy.  These people draw near and watch us
when we bathe in the sea from the ship's side.  Do they think we are
communing with a reserve force of rascals at the bottom?

It is said that we shall probably be quarantined at Naples.  Two or three
of us prefer not to run this risk.  Therefore, when we are rested, we
propose to go in a French steamer to Civita and from thence to Rome, and
by rail to Naples.  They do not quarantine the cars, no matter where they
got their passengers from.



CHAPTER XXV.

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand
--and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can
have such palatial railroad depots and such marvels of turnpikes.  Why,
these latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line, as smooth as
a floor, and as white as snow.  When it is too dark to see any other
object, one can still see the white turnpikes of France and Italy; and
they are clean enough to eat from, without a table-cloth.  And yet no
tolls are charged.

As for the railways--we have none like them.  The cars slide as smoothly
along as if they were on runners.  The depots are vast palaces of cut
marble, with stately colonnades of the same royal stone traversing them
from end to end, and with ample walls and ceilings richly decorated with
frescoes.  The lofty gateways are graced with statues, and the broad
floors are all laid in polished flags of marble.

These things win me more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art
treasures, because I can understand the one and am not competent to
appreciate the other.  In the turnpikes, the railways, the depots, and
the new boulevards of uniform houses in Florence and other cities here, I
see the genius of Louis Napoleon, or rather, I see the works of that
statesman imitated.  But Louis has taken care that in France there shall
be a foundation for these improvements--money.  He has always the
wherewithal to back up his projects; they strengthen France and never
weaken her.  Her material prosperity is genuine.  But here the case is
different.  This country is bankrupt.  There is no real foundation for
these great works.  The prosperity they would seem to indicate is a
pretence.  There is no money in the treasury, and so they enfeeble her
instead of strengthening.  Italy has achieved the dearest wish of her
heart and become an independent State--and in so doing she has drawn an
elephant in the political lottery.  She has nothing to feed it on.
Inexperienced in government, she plunged into all manner of useless
expenditure, and swamped her treasury almost in a day.  She squandered
millions of francs on a navy which she did not need, and the first time
she took her new toy into action she got it knocked higher than
Gilderoy's kite--to use the language of the Pilgrims.

But it is an ill-wind that blows nobody good.  A year ago, when Italy saw
utter ruin staring her in the face and her greenbacks hardly worth the
paper they were printed on, her Parliament ventured upon a 'coup de main'
that would have appalled the stoutest of her statesmen under less
desperate circumstances.  They, in a manner, confiscated the domains of
the Church!  This in priest-ridden Italy!  This in a land which has
groped in the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred
years!  It was a rare good fortune for Italy, the stress of weather that
drove her to break from this prison-house.

They do not call it confiscating the church property.  That would sound
too harshly yet.  But it amounts to that.  There are thousands of
churches in Italy, each with untold millions of treasures stored away in
its closets, and each with its battalion of priests to be supported.
And then there are the estates of the Church--league on league of the
richest lands and the noblest forests in all Italy--all yielding immense
revenues to the Church, and none paying a cent in taxes to the State.
In some great districts the Church owns all the property--lands,
watercourses, woods, mills and factories.  They buy, they sell, they
manufacture, and since they pay no taxes, who can hope to compete with
them?

Well, the Government has seized all this in effect, and will yet seize it
in rigid and unpoetical reality, no doubt.  Something must be done to
feed a starving treasury, and there is no other resource in all Italy
--none but the riches of the Church.  So the Government intends to take to
itself a great portion of the revenues arising from priestly farms,
factories, etc., and also intends to take possession of the churches and
carry them on, after its own fashion and upon its own responsibility.
In a few instances it will leave the establishments of great pet churches
undisturbed, but in all others only a handful of priests will be retained
to preach and pray, a few will be pensioned, and the balance turned
adrift.

Pray glance at some of these churches and their embellishments, and see
whether the Government is doing a righteous thing or not.  In Venice,
today, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, there are twelve hundred
priests.  Heaven only knows how many there were before the Parliament
reduced their numbers.  There was the great Jesuit Church.  Under the old
regime it required sixty priests to engineer it--the Government does it
with five, now, and the others are discharged from service.  All about
that church wretchedness and poverty abound.  At its door a dozen hats
and bonnets were doffed to us, as many heads were humbly bowed, and as
many hands extended, appealing for pennies--appealing with foreign words
we could not understand, but appealing mutely, with sad eyes, and sunken
cheeks, and ragged raiment, that no words were needed to translate.  Then
we passed within the great doors, and it seemed that the riches of the
world were before us!  Huge columns carved out of single masses of
marble, and inlaid from top to bottom with a hundred intricate figures
wrought in costly verde antique; pulpits of the same rich materials,
whose draperies hung down in many a pictured fold, the stony fabric
counterfeiting the delicate work of the loom; the grand altar brilliant
with polished facings and balustrades of oriental agate, jasper, verde
antique, and other precious stones, whose names, even, we seldom hear
--and slabs of priceless lapis lazuli lavished every where as recklessly as
if the church had owned a quarry of it.  In the midst of all this
magnificence, the solid gold and silver furniture of the altar seemed
cheap and trivial.  Even the floors and ceilings cost a princely fortune.

Now, where is the use of allowing all those riches to lie idle, while
half of that community hardly know, from day to day, how they are going
to keep body and soul together?  And, where is the wisdom in permitting
hundreds upon hundreds of millions of francs to be locked up in the
useless trumpery of churches all over Italy, and the people ground to
death with taxation to uphold a perishing Government?

As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her
energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a
vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens
to accomplish it.  She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and
misery.  All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could
hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.  And
for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred--and rags and
vermin to match.  It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.

Look at the grand Duomo of Florence--a vast pile that has been sapping
the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly
finished yet.  Like all other men, I fell down and worshipped it, but
when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking,
too suggestive, and I said, "O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of
enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye?
Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?"

Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that Cathedral.

And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I
can think of.  They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built
to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in.  It sounds
blasphemous, but it is true, and here they act blasphemy.  The dead and
damned Medicis who cruelly tyrannized over Florence and were her curse
for over two hundred years, are salted away in a circle of costly vaults,
and in their midst the Holy Sepulchre was to have been set up.  The
expedition sent to Jerusalem to seize it got into trouble and could not
accomplish the burglary, and so the centre of the mausoleum is vacant
now.  They say the entire mausoleum was intended for the Holy Sepulchre,
and was only turned into a family burying place after the Jerusalem
expedition failed--but you will excuse me.  Some of those Medicis would
have smuggled themselves in sure.--What they had not the effrontery to
do, was not worth doing.  Why, they had their trivial, forgotten exploits
on land and sea pictured out in grand frescoes (as did also the ancient
Doges of Venice) with the Saviour and the Virgin throwing bouquets to
them out of the clouds, and the Deity himself applauding from his throne
in Heaven!  And who painted these things?  Why, Titian, Tintoretto, Paul
Veronese, Raphael--none other than the world's idols, the "old masters."

Andrea del Sarto glorified his princes in pictures that must save them
for ever from the oblivion they merited, and they let him starve.  Served
him right.  Raphael pictured such infernal villains as Catherine and
Marie de Medicis seated in heaven and conversing familiarly with the
Virgin Mary and the angels, (to say nothing of higher personages,) and
yet my friends abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old
masters--because I fail sometimes to see the beauty that is in their
productions.  I can not help but see it, now and then, but I keep on
protesting against the groveling spirit that could persuade those masters
to prostitute their noble talents to the adulation of such monsters as
the French, Venetian and Florentine Princes of two and three hundred
years ago, all the same.

I am told that the old masters had to do these shameful things for bread,
the princes and potentates being the only patrons of art.  If a grandly
gifted man may drag his pride and his manhood in the dirt for bread
rather than starve with the nobility that is in him untainted, the excuse
is a valid one.  It would excuse theft in Washingtons and Wellingtons,
and unchastity in women as well.

But somehow, I can not keep that Medici mausoleum out of my memory.  It
is as large as a church; its pavement is rich enough for the pavement of
a King's palace; its great dome is gorgeous with frescoes; its walls are
made of--what?  Marble?--plaster?--wood?--paper?  No.  Red porphyry
--verde antique--jasper--oriental agate--alabaster--mother-of-pearl
--chalcedony--red coral--lapis lazuli!  All the vast walls are made wholly
of these precious stones, worked in, and in and in together in elaborate
pattern s and figures, and polished till they glow like great mirrors
with the pictured splendors reflected from the dome overhead.  And before
a statue of one of those dead Medicis reposes a crown that blazes with
diamonds and emeralds enough to buy a ship-of-the-line, almost.  These
are the things the Government has its evil eye upon, and a happy thing it
will be for Italy when they melt away in the public treasury.

And now----.  However, another beggar approaches.  I will go out and
destroy him, and then come back and write another chapter of
vituperation.

Having eaten the friendless orphan--having driven away his comrades
--having grown calm and reflective at length--I now feel in a kindlier
mood.  I feel that after talking so freely about the priests and the
churches, justice demands that if I know any thing good about either I
ought to say it.  I have heard of many things that redound to the credit
of the priesthood, but the most notable matter that occurs to me now is
the devotion one of the mendicant orders showed during the prevalence of
the cholera last year.  I speak of the Dominican friars--men who wear a
coarse, heavy brown robe and a cowl, in this hot climate, and go
barefoot.  They live on alms altogether, I believe.  They must
unquestionably love their religion, to suffer so much for it.  When the
cholera was raging in Naples; when the people were dying by hundreds and
hundreds every day; when every concern for the public welfare was
swallowed up in selfish private interest, and every citizen made the
taking care of himself his sole object, these men banded themselves
together and went about nursing the sick and burying the dead.  Their
noble efforts cost many of them their lives.  They laid them down
cheerfully, and well they might.  Creeds mathematically precise, and
hair-splitting niceties of doctrine, are absolutely necessary for the
salvation of some kinds of souls, but surely the charity, the purity, the
unselfishness that are in the hearts of men like these would save their
souls though they were bankrupt in the true religion--which is ours.

One of these fat bare-footed rascals came here to Civita Vecchia with us
in the little French steamer.  There were only half a dozen of us in the
cabin.  He belonged in the steerage.  He was the life of the ship, the
bloody-minded son of the Inquisition!  He and the leader of the marine
band of a French man-of-war played on the piano and sang opera turn
about; they sang duets together; they rigged impromptu theatrical
costumes and gave us extravagant farces and pantomimes.  We got along
first-rate with the friar, and were excessively conversational, albeit he
could not understand what we said, and certainly he never uttered a word
that we could guess the meaning of.

This Civita Vecchia is the finest nest of dirt, vermin and ignorance we
have found yet, except that African perdition they call Tangier, which is
just like it.  The people here live in alleys two yards wide, which have
a smell about them which is peculiar but not entertaining.  It is well
the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person
can stand, and of course, if they were wider they would hold more, and
then the people would die.  These alleys are paved with stone, and
carpeted with deceased cats, and decayed rags, and decomposed
vegetable-tops, and remnants of old boots, all soaked with dish-water,
and the people sit around on stools and enjoy it.  They are indolent, as
a general thing, and yet have few pastimes.  They work two or three
hours at a time, but not hard, and then they knock off and catch flies.
This does not require any talent, because they only have to grab--if
they do not get the one they are after, they get another.  It is all the
same to them.  They have no partialities.  Whichever one they get is the
one they want.

They have other kinds of insects, but it does not make them arrogant.
They are very quiet, unpretending people.  They have more of these kind
of things than other communities, but they do not boast.

They are very uncleanly--these people--in face, in person and dress.
When they see any body with a clean shirt on, it arouses their scorn.
The women wash clothes, half the day, at the public tanks in the streets,
but they are probably somebody else's.  Or may be they keep one set to
wear and another to wash; because they never put on any that have ever
been washed.  When they get done washing, they sit in the alleys and
nurse their cubs.  They nurse one ash-cat at a time, and the others
scratch their backs against the door-post and are happy.

All this country belongs to the Papal States.  They do not appear to have
any schools here, and only one billiard table.  Their education is at a
very low stage.  One portion of the men go into the military, another
into the priesthood, and the rest into the shoe-making business.

They keep up the passport system here, but so they do in Turkey.  This
shows that the Papal States are as far advanced as Turkey.  This fact
will be alone sufficient to silence the tongues of malignant
calumniators.  I had to get my passport vised for Rome in Florence, and
then they would not let me come ashore here until a policeman had
examined it on the wharf and sent me a permit.  They did not even dare to
let me take my passport in my hands for twelve hours, I looked so
formidable.  They judged it best to let me cool down.  They thought I
wanted to take the town, likely.  Little did they know me.  I wouldn't
have it.  They examined my baggage at the depot.  They took one of my
ablest jokes and read it over carefully twice and then read it backwards.
But it was too deep for them.  They passed it around, and every body
speculated on it awhile, but it mastered them all.

It was no common joke.  At length a veteran officer spelled it over
deliberately and shook his head three or four times and said that in his
opinion it was seditious.  That was the first time I felt alarmed.  I
immediately said I would explain the document, and they crowded around.
And so I explained and explained and explained, and they took notes of
all I said, but the more I explained the more they could not understand
it, and when they desisted at last, I could not even understand it
myself.  They said they believed it was an incendiary document, leveled
at the government.  I declared solemnly that it was not, but they only
shook their heads and would not be satisfied.  Then they consulted a good
while; and finally they confiscated it.  I was very sorry for this,
because I had worked a long time on that joke, and took a good deal of
pride in it, and now I suppose I shall never see it any more.  I suppose
it will be sent up and filed away among the criminal archives of Rome,
and will always be regarded as a mysterious infernal machine which would
have blown up like a mine and scattered the good Pope all around, but for
a miraculous providential interference.  And I suppose that all the time
I am in Rome the police will dog me about from place to place because
they think I am a dangerous character.

It is fearfully hot in Civita Vecchia.  The streets are made very narrow
and the houses built very solid and heavy and high, as a protection
against the heat.  This is the first Italian town I have seen which does
not appear to have a patron saint.  I suppose no saint but the one that
went up in the chariot of fire could stand the climate.

There is nothing here to see.  They have not even a cathedral, with
eleven tons of solid silver archbishops in the back room; and they do not
show you any moldy buildings that are seven thousand years old; nor any
smoke-dried old fire-screens which are chef d'oeuvres of Reubens or
Simpson, or Titian or Ferguson, or any of those parties; and they haven't
any bottled fragments of saints, and not even a nail from the true cross.
We are going to Rome.  There is nothing to see here.



CHAPTER XXVI.

What is it that confers the noblest delight?  What is that which swells a
man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring
to him?  Discovery!  To know that you are walking where none others have
walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that
you are breathing a virgin atmosphere.  To give birth to an idea--to
discover a great thought--an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of
a field that many a brain--plow had gone over before.  To find a new
planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings
carry your messages.  To be the first--that is the idea.  To do
something, say something, see something, before any body else--these are
the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are
tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.  Morse, with his
first message, brought by his servant, the lightning; Fulton, in that
long-drawn century of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the
throttle-valve and lo, the steamboat moved; Jenner, when his patient with
the cow's virus in his blood, walked through the smallpox hospitals
unscathed; Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for a hundred
and twenty generations the eye had been bored through the wrong end of
the needle; the nameless lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old
age that is forgotten, now, and gloated upon the finished Laocoon;
Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding in the zenith, to print the
landscape upon his insignificant silvered plate, and he obeyed; Columbus,
in the Pinta's shrouds, when he swung his hat above a fabled sea and
gazed abroad upon an unknown world!  These are the men who have really
lived--who have actually comprehended what pleasure is--who have crowded
long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment.

What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me?
What is there for me to touch that others have not touched?  What is
there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me
before it pass to others?  What can I discover?--Nothing.  Nothing
whatsoever.  One charm of travel dies here.  But if I were only a Roman!
--If, added to my own I could be gifted with modern Roman sloth, modern
Roman superstition, and modern Roman boundlessness of ignorance, what
bewildering worlds of unsuspected wonders I would discover!  Ah, if I
were only a habitant of the Campagna five and twenty miles from Rome!
Then I would travel.

I would go to America, and see, and learn, and return to the Campagna and
stand before my countrymen an illustrious discoverer.  I would say:

"I saw there a country which has no overshadowing Mother Church, and yet
the people survive.  I saw a government which never was protected by
foreign soldiers at a cost greater than that required to carry on the
government itself.  I saw common men and common women who could read;
I even saw small children of common country people reading from books;
if I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write,
also.

"In the cities I saw people drinking a delicious beverage made of chalk
and water, but never once saw goats driven through their Broadway or
their Pennsylvania Avenue or their Montgomery street and milked at the
doors of the houses.  I saw real glass windows in the houses of even the
commonest people.  Some of the houses are not of stone, nor yet of
bricks; I solemnly swear they are made of wood.  Houses there will take
fire and burn, sometimes--actually burn entirely down, and not leave a
single vestige behind.  I could state that for a truth, upon my
death-bed.  And as a proof that the circumstance is not rare, I aver
that they have a thing which they call a fire-engine, which vomits forth
great streams of water, and is kept always in readiness, by night and by
day, to rush to houses that are burning.  You would think one engine
would be sufficient, but some great cities have a hundred; they keep men
hired, and pay them by the month to do nothing but put out fires.  For a
certain sum of money other men will insure that your house shall not
burn down; and if it burns they will pay you for it.  There are hundreds
and thousands of schools, and any body may go and learn to be wise, like
a priest.  In that singular country if a rich man dies a sinner, he is
damned; he can not buy salvation with money for masses.  There is really
not much use in being rich, there.  Not much use as far as the other
world is concerned, but much, very much use, as concerns this; because
there, if a man be rich, he is very greatly honored, and can become a
legislator, a governor, a general, a senator, no matter how ignorant an
ass he is--just as in our beloved Italy the nobles hold all the great
places, even though sometimes they are born noble idiots.  There, if a
man be rich, they give him costly presents, they ask him to feasts, they
invite him to drink complicated beverages; but if he be poor and in
debt, they require him to do that which they term to "settle."  The
women put on a different dress almost every day; the dress is usually
fine, but absurd in shape; the very shape and fashion of it changes
twice in a hundred years; and did I but covet to be called an
extravagant falsifier, I would say it changed even oftener.  Hair does
not grow upon the American women's heads; it is made for them by cunning
workmen in the shops, and is curled and frizzled into scandalous and
ungodly forms. Some persons wear eyes of glass which they see through
with facility perhaps, else they would not use them; and in the mouths
of some are teeth made by the sacrilegious hand of man.  The dress of
the men is laughably grotesque.  They carry no musket in ordinary life,
nor no long-pointed pole; they wear no wide green-lined cloak; they wear
no peaked black felt hat, no leathern gaiters reaching to the knee, no
goat-skin breeches with the hair side out, no hob-nailed shoes, no
prodigious spurs.  They wear a conical hat termed a "nail-kag;" a coat
of saddest black; a shirt which shows dirt so easily that it has to be
changed every month, and is very troublesome; things called pantaloons,
which are held up by shoulder straps, and on their feet they wear boots
which are ridiculous in pattern and can stand no wear.  Yet dressed in
this fantastic garb, these people laughed at my costume.  In that
country, books are so common that it is really no curiosity to see one.
Newspapers also.  They have a great machine which prints such things by
thousands every hour.

"I saw common men, there--men who were neither priests nor princes--who
yet absolutely owned the land they tilled.  It was not rented from the
church, nor from the nobles.  I am ready to take my oath of this.  In
that country you might fall from a third story window three several
times, and not mash either a soldier or a priest.--The scarcity of such
people is astonishing.  In the cities you will see a dozen civilians for
every soldier, and as many for every priest or preacher.  Jews, there,
are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs.  They can work at
any business they please; they can sell brand new goods if they want to;
they can keep drug-stores; they can practice medicine among Christians;
they can even shake hands with Christians if they choose; they can
associate with them, just the same as one human being does with another
human being; they don't have to stay shut up in one corner of the towns;
they can live in any part of a town they like best; it is said they even
have the privilege of buying land and houses, and owning them themselves,
though I doubt that, myself; they never have had to run races naked
through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in
carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a
church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their
religion especially and particularly cursed; at this very day, in that
curious country, a Jew is allowed to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a
rostrum in the public street and express his opinion of the government if
the government don't suit him!  Ah, it is wonderful.  The common people
there know a great deal; they even have the effrontery to complain if
they are not properly governed, and to take hold and help conduct the
government themselves; if they had laws like ours, which give one dollar
of every three a crop produces to the government for taxes, they would
have that law altered: instead of paying thirty-three dollars in taxes,
out of every one hundred they receive, they complain if they have to pay
seven.  They are curious people.  They do not know when they are well
off.  Mendicant priests do not prowl among them with baskets begging for
the church and eating up their substance.  One hardly ever sees a
minister of the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a
basket, begging for subsistence.  In that country the preachers are not
like our mendicant orders of friars--they have two or three suits of
clothing, and they wash sometimes.  In that land are mountains far higher
than the Alban mountains; the vast Roman Campagna, a hundred miles long
and full forty broad, is really small compared to the United States of
America; the Tiber, that celebrated river of ours, which stretches its
mighty course almost two hundred miles, and which a lad can scarcely
throw a stone across at Rome, is not so long, nor yet so wide, as the
American Mississippi--nor yet the Ohio, nor even the Hudson.  In America
the people are absolutely wiser and know much more than their
grandfathers did.  They do not plow with a sharpened stick, nor yet with
a three-cornered block of wood that merely scratches the top of the
ground.  We do that because our fathers did, three thousand years ago, I
suppose.  But those people have no holy reverence for their ancestors.
They plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron, and it cuts
into the earth full five inches.  And this is not all.  They cut their
grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day.  If I
dared, I would say that sometimes they use a blasphemous plow that works
by fire and vapor and tears up an acre of ground in a single hour--but
--but--I see by your looks that you do not believe the things I am telling
you.  Alas, my character is ruined, and I am a branded speaker of
untruths!"

Of course we have been to the monster Church of St. Peter, frequently.
I knew its dimensions.  I knew it was a prodigious structure.  I knew it
was just about the length of the capitol at Washington--say seven hundred
and thirty feet.  I knew it was three hundred and sixty-four feet wide,
and consequently wider than the capitol.  I knew that the cross on the
top of the dome of the church was four hundred and thirty-eight feet
above the ground, and therefore about a hundred or may be a hundred and
twenty-five feet higher than the dome of the capitol.--Thus I had one
gauge.  I wished to come as near forming a correct idea of how it was
going to look, as possible; I had a curiosity to see how much I would
err.  I erred considerably.  St. Peter's did not look nearly so large as
the capitol, and certainly not a twentieth part as beautiful, from the
outside.

When we reached the door, and stood fairly within the church, it was
impossible to comprehend that it was a very large building.  I had to
cipher a comprehension of it.  I had to ransack my memory for some more
similes.  St. Peter's is bulky.  Its height and size would represent two
of the Washington capitol set one on top of the other--if the capitol
were wider; or two blocks or two blocks and a half of ordinary buildings
set one on top of the other.  St. Peter's was that large, but it could
and would not look so.  The trouble was that every thing in it and about
it was on such a scale of uniform vastness that there were no contrasts
to judge by--none but the people, and I had not noticed them.  They were
insects.  The statues of children holding vases of holy water were
immense, according to the tables of figures, but so was every thing else
around them.  The mosaic pictures in the dome were huge, and were made of
thousands and thousands of cubes of glass as large as the end of my
little finger, but those pictures looked smooth, and gaudy of color, and
in good proportion to the dome.  Evidently they would not answer to
measure by.  Away down toward the far end of the church (I thought it was
really clear at the far end, but discovered afterward that it was in the
centre, under the dome,) stood the thing they call the baldacchino--a
great bronze pyramidal frame-work like that which upholds a mosquito bar.
It only looked like a considerably magnified bedstead--nothing more.  Yet
I knew it was a good deal more than half as high as Niagara Falls.  It
was overshadowed by a dome so mighty that its own height was snubbed.
The four great square piers or pillars that stand equidistant from each
other in the church, and support the roof, I could not work up to their
real dimensions by any method of comparison.  I knew that the faces of
each were about the width of a very large dwelling-house front, (fifty or
sixty feet,) and that they were twice as high as an ordinary three-story
dwelling, but still they looked small.  I tried all the different ways I
could think of to compel myself to understand how large St. Peter's was,
but with small success.  The mosaic portrait of an Apostle who was
writing with a pen six feet long seemed only an ordinary Apostle.

But the people attracted my attention after a while.  To stand in the
door of St. Peter's and look at men down toward its further extremity,
two blocks away, has a diminishing effect on them; surrounded by the
prodigious pictures and statues, and lost in the vast spaces, they look
very much smaller than they would if they stood two blocks away in the
open air.  I "averaged" a man as he passed me and watched him as he
drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond--watched him dwindle to an
insignificant school-boy, and then, in the midst of the silent throng of
human pigmies gliding about him, I lost him.  The church had lately been
decorated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of St. Peter, and
men were engaged, now, in removing the flowers and gilt paper from the
walls and pillars.  As no ladders could reach the great heights, the men
swung themselves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by
ropes, to do this work.  The upper gallery which encircles the inner
sweep of the dome is two hundred and forty feet above the floor of the
church--very few steeples in America could reach up to it.  Visitors
always go up there to look down into the church because one gets the best
idea of some of the heights and distances from that point.  While we
stood on the floor one of the workmen swung loose from that gallery at
the end of a long rope.  I had not supposed, before, that a man could
look so much like a spider.  He was insignificant in size, and his rope
seemed only a thread.  Seeing that he took up so little space, I could
believe the story, then, that ten thousand troops went to St. Peter's,
once, to hear mass, and their commanding officer came afterward, and not
finding them, supposed they had not yet arrived.  But they were in the
church, nevertheless--they were in one of the transepts.  Nearly fifty
thousand persons assembled in St. Peter's to hear the publishing of the
dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  It is estimated that the floor of
the church affords standing room for--for a large number of people; I
have forgotten the exact figures.  But it is no matter--it is near
enough.

They have twelve small pillars, in St. Peter's, which came from Solomon's
Temple.  They have, also--which was far more interesting to me--a piece
of the true cross, and some nails, and a part of the crown of thorns.

Of course we ascended to the summit of the dome, and of course we also
went up into the gilt copper ball which is above it.--There was room
there for a dozen persons, with a little crowding, and it was as close
and hot as an oven.  Some of those people who are so fond of writing
their names in prominent places had been there before us--a million or
two, I should think.  From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every
notable object in Rome, from the Castle of St. Angelo to the Coliseum.
He can discern the seven hills upon which Rome is built.  He can see the
Tiber, and the locality of the bridge which Horatius kept "in the brave
days of old" when Lars Porsena attempted to cross it with his invading
host.  He can see the spot where the Horatii and the Curatii fought their
famous battle.  He can see the broad green Campagna, stretching away
toward the mountains, with its scattered arches and broken aqueducts of
the olden time, so picturesque in their gray ruin, and so daintily
festooned with vines.  He can see the Alban Mountains, the Appenines, the
Sabine Hills, and the blue Mediterranean.  He can see a panorama that is
varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history
than any other in Europe.--About his feet is spread the remnant of a
city that once had a population of four million souls; and among its
massed edifices stand the ruins of temples, columns, and triumphal arches
that knew the Caesars, and the noonday of Roman splendor; and close by
them, in unimpaired strength, is a drain of arched and heavy masonry that
belonged to that older city which stood here before Romulus and Remus
were born or Rome thought of.  The Appian Way is here yet, and looking
much as it did, perhaps, when the triumphal processions of the Emperors
moved over it in other days bringing fettered princes from the confines
of the earth.  We can not see the long array of chariots and mail-clad
men laden with the spoils of conquest, but we can imagine the pageant,
after a fashion.  We look out upon many objects of interest from the dome
of St. Peter's; and last of all, almost at our feet, our eyes rest upon
the building which was once the Inquisition.  How times changed, between
the older ages and the new!  Some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago,
the ignorant men of Rome were wont to put Christians in the arena of the
Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild beasts in upon them for a show.  It
was for a lesson as well.  It was to teach the people to abhor and fear
the new doctrine the followers of Christ were teaching.  The beasts tore
the victims limb from limb and made poor mangled corpses of them in the
twinkling of an eye.  But when the Christians came into power, when the
holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the
error of their ways by no such means.  No, she put them in this pleasant
Inquisition and pointed to the Blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so
merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and
they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him--first by
twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their
flesh with pincers--red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable
in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by
roasting them in public.  They always convinced those barbarians.  The
true religion, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to
administer it, is very, very soothing.  It is wonderfully persuasive,
also.  There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts
and stirring up their finer feelings in an Inquisition.  One is the
system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized
people.  It is a great pity the playful Inquisition is no more.

I prefer not to describe St. Peter's.  It has been done before.  The
ashes of Peter, the disciple of the Saviour, repose in a crypt under the
baldacchino.  We stood reverently in that place; so did we also in the
Mamertine Prison, where he was confined, where he converted the soldiers,
and where tradition says he caused a spring of water to flow in order
that he might baptize them.  But when they showed us the print of Peter's
face in the hard stone of the prison wall and said he made that by
falling up against it, we doubted.  And when, also, the monk at the
church of San Sebastian showed us a paving-stone with two great
footprints in it and said that Peter's feet made those, we lacked
confidence again.  Such things do not impress one.  The monk said that
angels came and liberated Peter from prison by night, and he started away
from Rome by the Appian Way.  The Saviour met him and told him to go
back, which he did.  Peter left those footprints in the stone upon which
he stood at the time.  It was not stated how it was ever discovered whose
footprints they were, seeing the interview occurred secretly and at
night.  The print of the face in the prison was that of a man of common
size; the footprints were those of a man ten or twelve feet high.  The
discrepancy confirmed our unbelief.

We necessarily visited the Forum, where Caesar was assassinated, and also
the Tarpeian Rock.  We saw the Dying Gladiator at the Capitol, and I
think that even we appreciated that wonder of art; as much, perhaps, as
we did that fearful story wrought in marble, in the Vatican--the Laocoon.
And then the Coliseum.

Every body knows the picture of the Coliseum; every body recognizes at
once that "looped and windowed" band-box with a side bitten out.  Being
rather isolated, it shows to better advantage than any other of the
monuments of ancient Rome.  Even the beautiful Pantheon, whose pagan
altars uphold the cross, now, and whose Venus, tricked out in consecrated
gimcracks, does reluctant duty as a Virgin Mary to-day, is built about
with shabby houses and its stateliness sadly marred.  But the monarch of
all European ruins, the Coliseum, maintains that reserve and that royal
seclusion which is proper to majesty.  Weeds and flowers spring from its
massy arches and its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes from
its lofty walls.  An impressive silence broods over the monstrous
structure where such multitudes of men and women were wont to assemble in
other days.  The butterflies have taken the places of the queens of
fashion and beauty of eighteen centuries ago, and the lizards sun
themselves in the sacred seat of the Emperor.  More vividly than all the
written histories, the Coliseum tells the story of Rome's grandeur and
Rome's decay.  It is the worthiest type of both that exists.  Moving
about the Rome of to-day, we might find it hard to believe in her old
magnificence and her millions of population; but with this stubborn
evidence before us that she was obliged to have a theatre with sitting
room for eighty thousand persons and standing room for twenty thousand
more, to accommodate such of her citizens as required amusement, we find
belief less difficult.  The Coliseum is over one thousand six hundred
feet long, seven hundred and fifty wide, and one hundred and sixty-five
high.  Its shape is oval.

In America we make convicts useful at the same time that we punish them
for their crimes.  We farm them out and compel them to earn money for the
State by making barrels and building roads.  Thus we combine business
with retribution, and all things are lovely.  But in ancient Rome they
combined religious duty with pleasure.  Since it was necessary that the
new sect called Christians should be exterminated, the people judged it
wise to make this work profitable to the State at the same time, and
entertaining to the public.  In addition to the gladiatorial combats and
other shows, they sometimes threw members of the hated sect into the
arena of the Coliseum and turned wild beasts in upon them.  It is
estimated that seventy thousand Christians suffered martyrdom in this
place.  This has made the Coliseum holy ground, in the eyes of the
followers of the Saviour.  And well it might; for if the chain that bound
a saint, and the footprints a saint has left upon a stone he chanced to
stand upon, be holy, surely the spot where a man gave up his life for his
faith is holy.

Seventeen or eighteen centuries ago this Coliseum was the theatre of
Rome, and Rome was mistress of the world.  Splendid pageants were
exhibited here, in presence of the Emperor, the great ministers of State,
the nobles, and vast audiences of citizens of smaller consequence.
Gladiators fought with gladiators and at times with warrior prisoners
from many a distant land.  It was the theatre of Rome--of the world--and
the man of fashion who could not let fall in a casual and unintentional
manner something about "my private box at the Coliseum" could not move in
the first circles.  When the clothing-store merchant wished to consume
the corner grocery man with envy, he bought secured seats in the front
row and let the thing be known.  When the irresistible dry goods clerk
wished to blight and destroy, according to his native instinct, he got
himself up regardless of expense and took some other fellow's young lady
to the Coliseum, and then accented the affront by cramming her with ice
cream between the acts, or by approaching the cage and stirring up the
martyrs with his whalebone cane for her edification.  The Roman swell was
in his true element only when he stood up against a pillar and fingered
his moustache unconscious of the ladies; when he viewed the bloody
combats through an opera-glass two inches long; when he excited the envy
of provincials by criticisms which showed that he had been to the
Coliseum many and many a time and was long ago over the novelty of it;
when he turned away with a yawn at last and said,

"He a star! handles his sword like an apprentice brigand! he'll do for
the country, may be, but he don't answer for the metropolis!"

Glad was the contraband that had a seat in the pit at the Saturday
matinee, and happy the Roman street-boy who ate his peanuts and guyed the
gladiators from the dizzy gallery.

For me was reserved the high honor of discovering among the rubbish of
the ruined Coliseum the only playbill of that establishment now extant.
There was a suggestive smell of mint-drops about it still, a corner of it
had evidently been chewed, and on the margin, in choice Latin, these
words were written in a delicate female hand:

     "Meet me on the Tarpeian Rock tomorrow evening, dear, at sharp
     seven.  Mother will be absent on a visit to her friends in the
     Sabine Hills.        CLAUDIA."

Ah, where is that lucky youth to-day, and where the little hand that
wrote those dainty lines?  Dust and ashes these seventeen hundred years!

Thus reads the bill:


                            ROMAN COLISEUM.
                        UNPARALLELED ATTRACTION!
               NEW PROPERTIES!  NEW LIONS!  NEW GLADIATORS!
                       Engagement of the renowned
                        MARCUS MARCELLUS VALERIAN!
                           FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY!

The management beg leave to offer to the public an entertainment
surpassing in magnificence any thing that has heretofore been attempted
on any stage.  No expense has been spared to make the opening season one
which shall be worthy the generous patronage which the management feel
sure will crown their efforts.  The management beg leave to state that
they have succeeded in securing the services of a

                            GALAXY OF TALENT!
such as has not been beheld in Rome before.

The performance will commence this evening with a

                         GRAND BROADSWORD COMBAT!
between two young and promising amateurs and a celebrated Parthian
gladiator who has just arrived a prisoner from the Camp of Verus.

This will be followed by a grand moral

                          BATTLE-AX ENGAGEMENT!
between the renowned Valerian (with one hand tied behind him,) and two
gigantic savages from Britain.

After which the renowned Valerian (if he survive,) will fight with the
broad-sword,

                               LEFT HANDED!
against six Sophomores and a Freshman from the Gladiatorial College!

A long series of brilliant engagements will follow, in which the finest
talent of the Empire will take part

After which the celebrated Infant Prodigy known as

                          "THE YOUNG ACHILLES,"
will engage four tiger whelps in combat, armed with no other weapon than
his little spear!

The whole to conclude with a chaste and elegant

                            GENERAL SLAUGHTER!
In which thirteen African Lions and twenty-two Barbarian Prisoners will
war with each other until all are exterminated.

                           BOX OFFICE NOW OPEN.

Dress Circle One Dollar; Children and Servants half price.

An efficient police force will be on hand to preserve order and keep the
wild beasts from leaping the railings and discommoding the audience.

Doors open at 7; performance begins at 8.

POSITIVELY NO FREE LIST.

                          Diodorus Job Press.


It was as singular as it was gratifying that I was also so fortunate as
to find among the rubbish of the arena, a stained and mutilated copy of
the Roman Daily Battle-Ax, containing a critique upon this very
performance.  It comes to hand too late by many centuries to rank as
news, and therefore I translate and publish it simply to show how very
little the general style and phraseology of dramatic criticism has
altered in the ages that have dragged their slow length along since the
carriers laid this one damp and fresh before their Roman patrons:

     "THE OPENING SEASON.--COLISEUM.--Notwithstanding the inclemency of
     the weather, quite a respectable number of the rank and fashion of
     the city assembled last night to witness the debut upon metropolitan
     boards of the young tragedian who has of late been winning such
     golden opinions in the amphitheatres of the provinces.  Some sixty
     thousand persons were present, and but for the fact that the streets
     were almost impassable, it is fair to presume that the house would
     have been full.  His august Majesty, the Emperor Aurelius, occupied
     the imperial box, and was the cynosure of all eyes.  Many
     illustrious nobles and generals of the Empire graced the occasion
     with their presence, and not the least among them was the young
     patrician lieutenant whose laurels, won in the ranks of the
     "Thundering Legion," are still so green upon his brow.  The cheer
     which greeted his entrance was heard beyond the Tiber!

     "The late repairs and decorations add both to the comeliness and the
     comfort of the Coliseum.  The new cushions are a great improvement
     upon the hard marble seats we have been so long accustomed to.  The
     present management deserve well of the public.  They have restored
     to the Coliseum the gilding, the rich upholstery and the uniform
     magnificence which old Coliseum frequenters tell us Rome was so
     proud of fifty years ago.

     "The opening scene last night--the broadsword combat between two
     young amateurs and a famous Parthian gladiator who was sent here a
     prisoner--was very fine.  The elder of the two young gentlemen
     handled his weapon with a grace that marked the possession of
     extraordinary talent.  His feint of thrusting, followed instantly by
     a happily delivered blow which unhelmeted the Parthian, was received
     with hearty applause.  He was not thoroughly up in the backhanded
     stroke, but it was very gratifying to his numerous friends to know
     that, in time, practice would have overcome this defect.  However,
     he was killed.  His sisters, who were present, expressed
     considerable regret.  His mother left the Coliseum.  The other youth
     maintained the contest with such spirit as to call forth
     enthusiastic bursts of applause.  When at last he fell a corpse, his
     aged mother ran screaming, with hair disheveled and tears streaming
     from her eyes, and swooned away just as her hands were clutching at
     the railings of the arena.  She was promptly removed by the police.
     Under the circumstances the woman's conduct was pardonable, perhaps,
     but we suggest that such exhibitions interfere with the decorum
     which should be preserved during the performances, and are highly
     improper in the presence of the Emperor.  The Parthian prisoner
     fought bravely and well; and well he might, for he was fighting for
     both life and liberty.  His wife and children were there to nerve
     his arm with their love, and to remind him of the old home he should
     see again if he conquered.  When his second assailant fell, the
     woman clasped her children to her breast and wept for joy.  But it
     was only a transient happiness.  The captive staggered toward her
     and she saw that the liberty he had earned was earned too late.  He
     was wounded unto death.  Thus the first act closed in a manner which
     was entirely satisfactory.  The manager was called before the
     curtain and returned his thanks for the honor done him, in a speech
     which was replete with wit and humor, and closed by hoping that his
     humble efforts to afford cheerful and instructive entertainment
     would continue to meet with the approbation of the Roman public

     "The star now appeared, and was received with vociferous applause
     and the simultaneous waving of sixty thousand handkerchiefs.  Marcus
     Marcellus Valerian (stage name--his real name is Smith,) is a
     splendid specimen of physical development, and an artist of rare
     merit.  His management of the battle-ax is wonderful.  His gayety
     and his playfulness are irresistible, in his comic parts, and yet
     they are inferior to his sublime conceptions in the grave realm of
     tragedy.  When his ax was describing fiery circles about the heads
     of the bewildered barbarians, in exact time with his springing body
     and his prancing legs, the audience gave way to uncontrollable
     bursts of laughter; but when the back of his weapon broke the skull
     of one and almost in the same instant its edge clove the other's
     body in twain, the howl of enthusiastic applause that shook the
     building, was the acknowledgment of a critical assemblage that he
     was a master of the noblest department of his profession.  If he has
     a fault, (and we are sorry to even intimate that he has,) it is that
     of glancing at the audience, in the midst of the most exciting
     moments of the performance, as if seeking admiration.  The pausing
     in a fight to bow when bouquets are thrown to him is also in bad
     taste.  In the great left-handed combat he appeared to be looking at
     the audience half the time, instead of carving his adversaries; and
     when he had slain all the sophomores and was dallying with the
     freshman, he stooped and snatched a bouquet as it fell, and offered
     it to his adversary at a time when a blow was descending which
     promised favorably to be his death-warrant.  Such levity is proper
     enough in the provinces, we make no doubt, but it ill suits the
     dignity of the metropolis.  We trust our young friend will take
     these remarks in good part, for we mean them solely for his benefit.
     All who know us are aware that although we are at times justly
     severe upon tigers and martyrs, we never intentionally offend
     gladiators.

     "The Infant Prodigy performed wonders.  He overcame his four tiger
     whelps with ease, and with no other hurt than the loss of a portion
     of his scalp.  The General Slaughter was rendered with a
     faithfulness to details which reflects the highest credit upon the
     late participants in it.

     "Upon the whole, last night's performances shed honor not only upon
     the management but upon the city that encourages and sustains such
     wholesome and instructive entertainments.  We would simply suggest
     that the practice of vulgar young boys in the gallery of shying
     peanuts and paper pellets at the tigers, and saying "Hi-yi!" and
     manifesting approbation or dissatisfaction by such observations as
     "Bully for the lion!"  "Go it, Gladdy!"  "Boots!"  "Speech!"  "Take
     a walk round the block!"  and so on, are extremely reprehensible,
     when the Emperor is present, and ought to be stopped by the police.
     Several times last night, when the supernumeraries entered the arena
     to drag out the bodies, the young ruffians in the gallery shouted,
     "Supe! supe!"  and also, "Oh, what a coat!"  and "Why don't you pad
     them shanks?"  and made use of various other remarks expressive of
     derision.  These things are very annoying to the audience.

     "A matinee for the little folks is promised for this afternoon, on
     which occasion several martyrs will be eaten by the tigers.  The
     regular performance will continue every night till further notice.
     Material change of programme every evening.  Benefit of Valerian,
     Tuesday, 29th, if he lives."


I have been a dramatic critic myself, in my time, and I was often
surprised to notice how much more I knew about Hamlet than Forrest did;
and it gratifies me to observe, now, how much better my brethren of
ancient times knew how a broad sword battle ought to be fought than the
gladiators.



CHAPTER XXVII.

So far, good.  If any man has a right to feel proud of himself, and
satisfied, surely it is I.  For I have written about the Coliseum, and
the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never once used
the phrase "butchered to make a Roman holiday."  I am the only free white
man of mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated the
expression.

Butchered to make a Roman holiday sounds well for the first seventeen or
eighteen hundred thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it
begins to grow tiresome.  I find it in all the books concerning Rome--and
here latterly it reminds me of Judge Oliver.  Oliver was a young lawyer,
fresh from the schools, who had gone out to the deserts of Nevada to
begin life.  He found that country, and our ways of life, there, in those
early days, different from life in New England or Paris.  But he put on a
woollen shirt and strapped a navy revolver to his person, took to the
bacon and beans of the country, and determined to do in Nevada as Nevada
did.  Oliver accepted the situation so completely that although he must
have sorrowed over many of his trials, he never complained--that is, he
never complained but once.  He, two others, and myself, started to the
new silver mines in the Humboldt mountains--he to be Probate Judge of
Humboldt county, and we to mine.  The distance was two hundred miles.  It
was dead of winter.  We bought a two-horse wagon and put eighteen hundred
pounds of bacon, flour, beans, blasting-powder, picks and shovels in it;
we bought two sorry-looking Mexican "plugs," with the hair turned the
wrong way and more corners on their bodies than there are on the mosque
of Omar; we hitched up and started.  It was a dreadful trip.  But Oliver
did not complain.  The horses dragged the wagon two miles from town and
then gave out.  Then we three pushed the wagon seven miles, and Oliver
moved ahead and pulled the horses after him by the bits.  We complained,
but Oliver did not.  The ground was frozen, and it froze our backs while
we slept; the wind swept across our faces and froze our noses.  Oliver
did not complain.  Five days of pushing the wagon by day and freezing by
night brought us to the bad part of the journey--the Forty Mile Desert,
or the Great American Desert, if you please.  Still, this
mildest-mannered man that ever was, had not complained.  We started across
at eight in the morning, pushing through sand that had no bottom; toiling
all day long by the wrecks of a thousand wagons, the skeletons of ten
thousand oxen; by wagon-tires enough to hoop the Washington Monument to
the top, and ox-chains enough to girdle Long Island; by human graves;
with our throats parched always, with thirst; lips bleeding from the
alkali dust; hungry, perspiring, and very, very weary--so weary that when
we dropped in the sand every fifty yards to rest the horses, we could
hardly keep from going to sleep--no complaints from Oliver: none the next
morning at three o'clock, when we got across, tired to death.

Awakened two or three nights afterward at midnight, in a narrow canon, by
the snow falling on our faces, and appalled at the imminent danger of
being "snowed in," we harnessed up and pushed on till eight in the
morning, passed the "Divide" and knew we were saved.  No complaints.
Fifteen days of hardship and fatigue brought us to the end of the two
hundred miles, and the Judge had not complained.  We wondered if any
thing could exasperate him.  We built a Humboldt house.  It is done in
this way.  You dig a square in the steep base of the mountain, and set up
two uprights and top them with two joists.  Then you stretch a great
sheet of "cotton domestic" from the point where the joists join the
hill-side down over the joists to the ground; this makes the roof and the
front of the mansion; the sides and back are the dirt walls your digging
has left.  A chimney is easily made by turning up one corner of the roof.
Oliver was sitting alone in this dismal den, one night, by a sage-brush
fire, writing poetry; he was very fond of digging poetry out of himself
--or blasting it out when it came hard.  He heard an animal's footsteps
close to the roof; a stone or two and some dirt came through and fell by
him.  He grew uneasy and said "Hi!--clear out from there, can't you!"
--from time to time.  But by and by he fell asleep where he sat, and pretty
soon a mule fell down the chimney!  The fire flew in every direction, and
Oliver went over backwards.  About ten nights after that, he recovered
confidence enough to go to writing poetry again.  Again he dozed off to
sleep, and again a mule fell down the chimney.  This time, about half of
that side of the house came in with the mule.  Struggling to get up, the
mule kicked the candle out and smashed most of the kitchen furniture, and
raised considerable dust.  These violent awakenings must have been
annoying to Oliver, but he never complained.  He moved to a mansion on
the opposite side of the canon, because he had noticed the mules did not
go there.  One night about eight o'clock he was endeavoring to finish his
poem, when a stone rolled in--then a hoof appeared below the canvas--then
part of a cow--the after part.  He leaned back in dread, and shouted
"Hooy! hooy! get out of this!"  and the cow struggled manfully--lost
ground steadily--dirt and dust streamed down, and before Oliver could get
well away, the entire cow crashed through on to the table and made a
shapeless wreck of every thing!

Then, for the first time in his life, I think, Oliver complained.  He
said,

"This thing is growing monotonous!"

Then he resigned his judgeship and left Humboldt county.  "Butchered to
make a Roman holyday" has grown monotonous to me.

In this connection I wish to say one word about Michael Angelo
Buonarotti.  I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo--that
man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture--great in
every thing he undertook.  But I do not want Michael Angelo for
breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between
meals.  I like a change, occasionally.  In Genoa, he designed every
thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the
Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of,
from guides, but Michael Angelo?  In Florence, he painted every thing,
designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit
on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone.  In Pisa
he designed every thing but the old shot-tower, and they would have
attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the
perpendicular.  He designed the piers of Leghorn and the custom house
regulations of Civita Vecchia.  But, here--here it is frightful.  He
designed St. Peter's; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the
uniform of the Pope's soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the
Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the
Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the
Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima--the eternal bore designed the
Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted every thing
in it!  Dan said the other day to the guide, "Enough, enough, enough!
Say no more!  Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from
designs by Michael Angelo!"

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled
with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael
Angelo was dead.

But we have taken it out of this guide.  He has marched us through miles
of pictures and sculpture in the vast corridors of the Vatican; and
through miles of pictures and sculpture in twenty other palaces; he has
shown us the great picture in the Sistine Chapel, and frescoes enough to
frescoe the heavens--pretty much all done by Michael Angelo.  So with him
we have played that game which has vanquished so many guides for us
--imbecility and idiotic questions.  These creatures never suspect--they
have no idea of a sarcasm.

He shows us a figure and says: "Statoo brunzo."  (Bronze statue.)

We look at it indifferently and the doctor asks: "By Michael Angelo?"

"No--not know who."

Then he shows us the ancient Roman Forum.  The doctor asks: "Michael
Angelo?"

A stare from the guide.  "No--thousan' year before he is born."

Then an Egyptian obelisk.  Again: "Michael Angelo?"

"Oh, mon dieu, genteelmen!  Zis is two thousan' year before he is born!"

He grows so tired of that unceasing question sometimes, that he dreads to
show us any thing at all.  The wretch has tried all the ways he can think
of to make us comprehend that Michael Angelo is only responsible for the
creation of a part of the world, but somehow he has not succeeded yet.
Relief for overtasked eyes and brain from study and sightseeing is
necessary, or we shall become idiotic sure enough.  Therefore this guide
must continue to suffer.  If he does not enjoy it, so much the worse for
him.  We do.

In this place I may as well jot down a chapter concerning those necessary
nuisances, European guides.  Many a man has wished in his heart he could
do without his guide; but knowing he could not, has wished he could get
some amusement out of him as a remuneration for the affliction of his
society.  We accomplished this latter matter, and if our experience can
be made useful to others they are welcome to it.

Guides know about enough English to tangle every thing up so that a man
can make neither head or tail of it.  They know their story by heart--the
history of every statue, painting, cathedral or other wonder they show
you.  They know it and tell it as a parrot would--and if you interrupt,
and throw them off the track, they have to go back and begin over again.
All their lives long, they are employed in showing strange things to
foreigners and listening to their bursts of admiration.  It is human
nature to take delight in exciting admiration.  It is what prompts
children to say "smart" things, and do absurd ones, and in other ways
"show off" when company is present.  It is what makes gossips turn out in
rain and storm to go and be the first to tell a startling bit of news.
Think, then, what a passion it becomes with a guide, whose privilege it
is, every day, to show to strangers wonders that throw them into perfect
ecstasies of admiration!  He gets so that he could not by any possibility
live in a soberer atmosphere.  After we discovered this, we never went
into ecstasies any more--we never admired any thing--we never showed any
but impassible faces and stupid indifference in the presence of the
sublimest wonders a guide had to display.  We had found their weak point.
We have made good use of it ever since.  We have made some of those
people savage, at times, but we have never lost our own serenity.

The doctor asks the questions, generally, because he can keep his
countenance, and look more like an inspired idiot, and throw more
imbecility into the tone of his voice than any man that lives.  It comes
natural to him.

The guides in Genoa are delighted to secure an American party, because
Americans so much wonder, and deal so much in sentiment and emotion
before any relic of Columbus.  Our guide there fidgeted about as if he
had swallowed a spring mattress.  He was full of animation--full of
impatience.  He said:

"Come wis me, genteelmen!--come!  I show you ze letter writing by
Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!--write it wis his own hand!
--come!"

He took us to the municipal palace.  After much impressive fumbling of
keys and opening of locks, the stained and aged document was spread
before us.  The guide's eyes sparkled.  He danced about us and tapped the
parchment with his finger:

"What I tell you, genteelmen!  Is it not so?  See! handwriting
Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!"

We looked indifferent--unconcerned.  The doctor examined the document
very deliberately, during a painful pause.--Then he said, without any
show of interest:

"Ah--Ferguson--what--what did you say was the name of the party who wrote
this?"

"Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!"

Another deliberate examination.

"Ah--did he write it himself; or--or how?"

"He write it himself!--Christopher Colombo!  He's own hand-writing, write
by himself!"

Then the doctor laid the document down and said:

"Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could
write better than that."

"But zis is ze great Christo--"

"I don't care who it is!  It's the worst writing I ever saw.  Now you
musn't think you can impose on us because we are strangers.  We are not
fools, by a good deal.  If you have got any specimens of penmanship of
real merit, trot them out!--and if you haven't, drive on!"

We drove on.  The guide was considerably shaken up, but he made one more
venture.  He had something which he thought would overcome us.  He said:

"Ah, genteelmen, you come wis me!  I show you beautiful, O, magnificent
bust Christopher Colombo!--splendid, grand, magnificent!"

He brought us before the beautiful bust--for it was beautiful--and sprang
back and struck an attitude:

"Ah, look, genteelmen!--beautiful, grand,--bust Christopher Colombo!
--beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!"

The doctor put up his eye-glass--procured for such occasions:

"Ah--what did you say this gentleman's name was?"

"Christopher Colombo!--ze great Christopher Colombo!"

"Christopher Colombo--the great Christopher Colombo.  Well, what did he
do?"

"Discover America!--discover America, Oh, ze devil!"

"Discover America.  No--that statement will hardly wash.  We are just
from America ourselves.  We heard nothing about it.  Christopher Colombo
--pleasant name--is--is he dead?"

"Oh, corpo di Baccho!--three hundred year!"

"What did he die of?"

"I do not know!--I can not tell."

"Small-pox, think?"

"I do not know, genteelmen!--I do not know what he die of!"

"Measles, likely?"

"May be--may be--I do not know--I think he die of somethings."

"Parents living?"

"Im-poseeeble!"

"Ah--which is the bust and which is the pedestal?"

"Santa Maria!--zis ze bust!--zis ze pedestal!"

"Ah, I see, I see--happy combination--very happy combination, indeed.
Is--is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust?"

That joke was lost on the foreigner--guides can not master the subtleties
of the American joke.

We have made it interesting for this Roman guide.  Yesterday we spent
three or four hours in the Vatican, again, that wonderful world of
curiosities.  We came very near expressing interest, sometimes--even
admiration--it was very hard to keep from it.  We succeeded though.
Nobody else ever did, in the Vatican museums.  The guide was bewildered
--non-plussed.  He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary
things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we
never showed any interest in any thing.  He had reserved what he
considered to be his greatest wonder till the last--a royal Egyptian
mummy, the best preserved in the world, perhaps.  He took us there.  He
felt so sure, this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to
him:

"See, genteelmen!--Mummy!  Mummy!"

The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.

"Ah,--Ferguson--what did I understand you to say the gentleman's name
was?"

"Name?--he got no name!--Mummy!--'Gyptian mummy!"

"Yes, yes.  Born here?"

"No! 'Gyptian mummy!"

"Ah, just so.  Frenchman, I presume?"

"No!--not Frenchman, not Roman!--born in Egypta!"

"Born in Egypta.  Never heard of Egypta before.  Foreign locality,
likely.  Mummy--mummy.  How calm he is--how self-possessed.  Is, ah--is
he dead?"

"Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan' year!"

The doctor turned on him savagely:

"Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this!  Playing us for
Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn!  Trying to impose
your vile second-hand carcasses on us!--thunder and lightning, I've a
notion to--to--if you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!--or by
George we'll brain you!"

We make it exceedingly interesting for this Frenchman.  However, he has
paid us back, partly, without knowing it.  He came to the hotel this
morning to ask if we were up, and he endeavored as well as he could to
describe us, so that the landlord would know which persons he meant.  He
finished with the casual remark that we were lunatics.  The observation
was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very good thing for a
guide to say.

There is one remark (already mentioned,) which never yet has failed to
disgust these guides.  We use it always, when we can think of nothing
else to say.  After they have exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out
to us and praising the beauties of some ancient bronze image or
broken-legged statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five,
ten, fifteen minutes--as long as we can hold out, in fact--and then ask:

"Is--is he dead?"

That conquers the serenest of them.  It is not what they are looking for
--especially a new guide.  Our Roman Ferguson is the most patient,
unsuspecting, long-suffering subject we have had yet.  We shall be sorry
to part with him.  We have enjoyed his society very much.  We trust he
has enjoyed ours, but we are harassed with doubts.

We have been in the catacombs.  It was like going down into a very deep
cellar, only it was a cellar which had no end to it.  The narrow passages
are roughly hewn in the rock, and on each hand as you pass along, the
hollowed shelves are carved out, from three to fourteen deep; each held a
corpse once.  There are names, and Christian symbols, and prayers, or
sentences expressive of Christian hopes, carved upon nearly every
sarcophagus.  The dates belong away back in the dawn of the Christian
era, of course.  Here, in these holes in the ground, the first Christians
sometimes burrowed to escape persecution.  They crawled out at night to
get food, but remained under cover in the day time.  The priest told us
that St. Sebastian lived under ground for some time while he was being
hunted; he went out one day, and the soldiery discovered and shot him to
death with arrows.  Five or six of the early Popes--those who reigned
about sixteen hundred years ago--held their papal courts and advised with
their clergy in the bowels of the earth.  During seventeen years--from
A.D. 235 to A.D. 252--the Popes did not appear above ground.  Four were
raised to the great office during that period.  Four years apiece, or
thereabouts.  It is very suggestive of the unhealthiness of underground
graveyards as places of residence.  One Pope afterward spent his entire
pontificate in the catacombs--eight years.  Another was discovered in
them and murdered in the episcopal chair.  There was no satisfaction in
being a Pope in those days.  There were too many annoyances.  There are
one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each with its maze of narrow
passages crossing and recrossing each other and each passage walled to
the top with scooped graves its entire length.  A careful estimate makes
the length of the passages of all the catacombs combined foot up nine
hundred miles, and their graves number seven millions.  We did not go
through all the passages of all the catacombs.  We were very anxious to
do it, and made the necessary arrangements, but our too limited time
obliged us to give up the idea.  So we only groped through the dismal
labyrinth of St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian.  In the
various catacombs are small chapels rudely hewn in the stones, and here
the early Christians often held their religious services by dim, ghostly
lights.  Think of mass and a sermon away down in those tangled caverns
under ground!

In the catacombs were buried St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and several other of
the most celebrated of the saints.  In the catacomb of St. Callixtus, St.
Bridget used to remain long hours in holy contemplation, and St. Charles
Borromeo was wont to spend whole nights in prayer there.  It was also the
scene of a very marvelous thing.

     "Here the heart of St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with divine love
     as to burst his ribs."

I find that grave statement in a book published in New York in 1808, and
written by "Rev. William H. Neligan, LL.D., M. A., Trinity College,
Dublin; Member of the Archaeological Society of Great Britain."
Therefore, I believe it.  Otherwise, I could not.  Under other
circumstances I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for
dinner.

This author puts my credulity on its mettle every now and then.  He tells
of one St. Joseph Calasanctius whose house in Rome he visited; he visited
only the house--the priest has been dead two hundred years.  He says the
Virgin Mary appeared to this saint.  Then he continues:

     "His tongue and his heart, which were found after nearly a century
     to be whole, when the body was disinterred before his canonization,
     are still preserved in a glass case, and after two centuries the
     heart is still whole.  When the French troops came to Rome, and when
     Pius VII. was carried away prisoner, blood dropped from it."

To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages,
would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is
seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of
finished education, an LL.D., M. A., and an Archaeological magnate, it
sounds strangely enough.  Still, I would gladly change my unbelief for
Neligan's faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.

The old gentleman's undoubting, unquestioning simplicity has a rare
freshness about it in these matter-of-fact railroading and telegraphing
days.  Hear him, concerning the church of Ara Coeli:

     "In the roof of the church, directly above the high altar, is
     engraved, 'Regina Coeli laetare Alleluia."  In the sixth century
     Rome was visited by a fearful pestilence.  Gregory the Great urged
     the people to do penance, and a general procession was formed.  It
     was to proceed from Ara Coeli to St. Peter's.  As it passed before
     the mole of Adrian, now the Castle of St. Angelo, the sound of
     heavenly voices was heard singing (it was Easter morn,) Regina
     Coeli, laetare! alleluia! quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia!
     resurrexit sicut dixit; alleluia!"  The Pontiff, carrying in his
     hands the portrait of the Virgin, (which is over the high altar and
     is said to have been painted by St. Luke,) answered, with the
     astonished people, 'Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia!'  At the same time
     an angel was seen to put up a sword in a scabbard, and the
     pestilence ceased on the same day.  There are four circumstances
     which 'CONFIRM'--[The italics are mine--M. T.]--this miracle: the
     annual procession which takes place in the western church on the
     feast of St Mark; the statue of St. Michael, placed on the mole of
     Adrian, which has since that time been called the Castle of St.
     Angelo; the antiphon Regina Coeli which the Catholic church sings
     during paschal time; and the inscription in the church."



CHAPTER XXVIII.

From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the
Coliseum; and the dismal tombs of the Catacombs, I naturally pass to the
picturesque horrors of the Capuchin Convent.  We stopped a moment in a
small chapel in the church to admire a picture of St. Michael vanquishing
Satan--a picture which is so beautiful that I can not but think it
belongs to the reviled "Renaissance," notwithstanding I believe they told
us one of the ancient old masters painted it--and then we descended into
the vast vault underneath.

Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves!  Evidently the old masters had
been at work in this place.  There were six divisions in the apartment,
and each division was ornamented with a style of decoration peculiar to
itself--and these decorations were in every instance formed of human
bones!  There were shapely arches, built wholly of thigh bones; there
were startling pyramids, built wholly of grinning skulls; there were
quaint architectural structures of various kinds, built of shin bones and
the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving
vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were
made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and
toe-nails.  Every lasting portion of the human frame was represented in
these intricate designs (they were by Michael Angelo, I think,) and there
was a careful finish about the work, and an attention to details that
betrayed the artist's love of his labors as well as his schooled ability.
I asked the good-natured monk who accompanied us, who did this?  And he
said, "We did it"--meaning himself and his brethren up stairs.  I could
see that the old friar took a high pride in his curious show.  We made
him talkative by exhibiting an interest we never betrayed to guides.

"Who were these people?"

"We--up stairs--Monks of the Capuchin order--my brethren."

"How many departed monks were required to upholster these six parlors?"

"These are the bones of four thousand."

"It took a long time to get enough?"

"Many, many centuries."

"Their different parts are well separated--skulls in one room, legs in
another, ribs in another--there would be stirring times here for a while
if the last trump should blow.  Some of the brethren might get hold of
the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and find themselves
limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer
together than they were used to.  You can not tell any of these parties
apart, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes, I know many of them."

He put his finger on a skull.  "This was Brother Anselmo--dead three
hundred years--a good man."

He touched another.  "This was Brother Alexander--dead two hundred and
eighty years.  This was Brother Carlo--dead about as long."

Then he took a skull and held it in his hand, and looked reflectively
upon it, after the manner of the grave-digger when he discourses of
Yorick.

"This," he said, "was Brother Thomas.  He was a young prince, the scion
of a proud house that traced its lineage back to the grand old days of
Rome well nigh two thousand years ago.  He loved beneath his estate.  His
family persecuted him; persecuted the girl, as well.  They drove her from
Rome; he followed; he sought her far and wide; he found no trace of her.
He came back and offered his broken heart at our altar and his weary life
to the service of God.  But look you.  Shortly his father died, and
likewise his mother.  The girl returned, rejoicing.  She sought every
where for him whose eyes had used to look tenderly into hers out of this
poor skull, but she could not find him.  At last, in this coarse garb we
wear, she recognized him in the street.  He knew her.  It was too late.
He fell where he stood.  They took him up and brought him here.  He never
spoke afterward.  Within the week he died.  You can see the color of his
hair--faded, somewhat--by this thin shred that clings still to the
temple.  This, [taking up a thigh bone,] was his.  The veins of this
leaf in the decorations over your head, were his finger-joints, a hundred
and fifty years ago."

This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by
laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was
as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed.  I
hardly knew whether to smile or shudder.  There are nerves and muscles in
our frames whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort
of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgical
technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me something of this
kind.  Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting tendons, muscles and
such things into view, out of the complex machinery of a corpse, and
observing, "Now this little nerve quivers--the vibration is imparted to
this muscle--from here it is passed to this fibrous substance; here its
ingredients are separated by the chemical action of the blood--one part
goes to the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion,
another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates
intelligence of a startling character--the third part glides along this
passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid receptacles that
lie in the rear of the eye.  Thus, by this simple and beautiful process,
the party is informed that his mother is dead, and he weeps."  Horrible!

I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this
place when they died.  He answered quietly:

"We must all lie here at last."

See what one can accustom himself to.--The reflection that he must some
day be taken apart like an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner
is gone, and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did
not distress this monk in the least.  I thought he even looked as if he
were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well
on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which
possibly they lacked at present.

Here and there, in ornamental alcoves, stretched upon beds of bones, lay
dead and dried-up monks, with lank frames dressed in the black robes one
sees ordinarily upon priests.  We examined one closely.  The skinny hands
were clasped upon the breast; two lustreless tufts of hair stuck to the
skull; the skin was brown and sunken; it stretched tightly over the cheek
bones and made them stand out sharply; the crisp dead eyes were deep in
the sockets; the nostrils were painfully prominent, the end of the nose
being gone; the lips had shriveled away from the yellow teeth: and
brought down to us through the circling years, and petrified there, was a
weird laugh a full century old!

It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can
imagine.  Surely, I thought, it must have been a most extraordinary joke
this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not got done
laughing at it yet.  At this moment I saw that the old instinct was
strong upon the boys, and I said we had better hurry to St. Peter's.
They were trying to keep from asking, "Is--is he dead?"

It makes me dizzy, to think of the Vatican--of its wilderness of statues,
paintings, and curiosities of every description and every age.  The "old
masters" (especially in sculpture,) fairly swarm, there.  I can not write
about the Vatican.  I think I shall never remember any thing I saw there
distinctly but the mummies, and the Transfiguration, by Raphael, and some
other things it is not necessary to mention now.  I shall remember the
Transfiguration partly because it was placed in a room almost by itself;
partly because it is acknowledged by all to be the first oil painting in
the world; and partly because it was wonderfully beautiful.  The colors
are fresh and rich, the "expression," I am told, is fine, the "feeling"
is lively, the "tone" is good, the "depth" is profound, and the width is
about four and a half feet, I should judge.  It is a picture that really
holds one's attention; its beauty is fascinating.  It is fine enough to
be a Renaissance.  A remark I made a while ago suggests a thought--and a
hope.  Is it not possible that the reason I find such charms in this
picture is because it is out of the crazy chaos of the galleries?  If
some of the others were set apart, might not they be beautiful?  If this
were set in the midst of the tempest of pictures one finds in the vast
galleries of the Roman palaces, would I think it so handsome?  If, up to
this time, I had seen only one "old master" in each palace, instead of
acres and acres of walls and ceilings fairly papered with them, might I
not have a more civilized opinion of the old masters than I have now?  I
think so.  When I was a school-boy and was to have a new knife, I could
not make up my mind as to which was the prettiest in the show-case, and I
did not think any of them were particularly pretty; and so I chose with a
heavy heart.  But when I looked at my purchase, at home, where no
glittering blades came into competition with it, I was astonished to see
how handsome it was.  To this day my new hats look better out of the shop
than they did in it with other new hats.  It begins to dawn upon me, now,
that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the
galleries may be uniform beauty after all.  I honestly hope it is, to
others, but certainly it is not to me.  Perhaps the reason I used to
enjoy going to the Academy of Fine Arts in New York was because there
were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go
through the list.  I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the
Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen
courses.  One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen
frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.

There is one thing I am certain of, though.  With all the Michael
Angelos, the Raphaels, the Guidos and the other old masters, the sublime
history of Rome remains unpainted!  They painted Virgins enough, and
popes enough and saintly scarecrows enough, to people Paradise, almost,
and these things are all they did paint.  "Nero fiddling o'er burning
Rome," the assassination of Caesar, the stirring spectacle of a hundred
thousand people bending forward with rapt interest, in the coliseum, to
see two skillful gladiators hacking away each others' lives, a tiger
springing upon a kneeling martyr--these and a thousand other matters
which we read of with a living interest, must be sought for only in
books--not among the rubbish left by the old masters--who are no more, I
have the satisfaction of informing the public.

They did paint, and they did carve in marble, one historical scene, and
one only, (of any great historical consequence.) And what was it and why
did they choose it, particularly?  It was the Rape of the Sabines, and
they chose it for the legs and busts.

I like to look at statues, however, and I like to look at pictures, also
--even of monks looking up in sacred ecstacy, and monks looking down in
meditation, and monks skirmishing for something to eat--and therefore I
drop ill nature to thank the papal government for so jealously guarding
and so industriously gathering up these things; and for permitting me, a
stranger and not an entirely friendly one, to roam at will and unmolested
among them, charging me nothing, and only requiring that I shall behave
myself simply as well as I ought to behave in any other man's house.  I
thank the Holy Father right heartily, and I wish him long life and plenty
of happiness.

The Popes have long been the patrons and preservers of art, just as our
new, practical Republic is the encourager and upholder of mechanics.  In
their Vatican is stored up all that is curious and beautiful in art; in
our Patent Office is hoarded all that is curious or useful in mechanics.
When a man invents a new style of horse-collar or discovers a new and
superior method of telegraphing, our government issues a patent to him
that is worth a fortune; when a man digs up an ancient statue in the
Campagna, the Pope gives him a fortune in gold coin.  We can make
something of a guess at a man's character by the style of nose he carries
on his face.  The Vatican and the Patent Office are governmental noses,
and they bear a deal of character about them.

The guide showed us a colossal statue of Jupiter, in the Vatican, which
he said looked so damaged and rusty--so like the God of the Vagabonds
--because it had but recently been dug up in the Campagna.  He asked how
much we supposed this Jupiter was worth?  I replied, with intelligent
promptness, that he was probably worth about four dollars--may be four
and a half.  "A hundred thousand dollars!"  Ferguson said.  Ferguson
said, further, that the Pope permits no ancient work of this kind to
leave his dominions.  He appoints a commission to examine discoveries
like this and report upon the value; then the Pope pays the discoverer
one-half of that assessed value and takes the statue.  He said this
Jupiter was dug from a field which had just been bought for thirty-six
thousand dollars, so the first crop was a good one for the new farmer.
I do not know whether Ferguson always tells the truth or not, but I
suppose he does.  I know that an exorbitant export duty is exacted upon
all pictures painted by the old masters, in order to discourage the sale
of those in the private collections.  I am satisfied, also, that genuine
old masters hardly exist at all, in America, because the cheapest and
most insignificant of them are valued at the price of a fine farm.  I
proposed to buy a small trifle of a Raphael, myself, but the price of it
was eighty thousand dollars, the export duty would have made it
considerably over a hundred, and so I studied on it awhile and concluded
not to take it.

I wish here to mention an inscription I have seen, before I forget it:

"Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth TO MEN OF GOOD WILL!"  It is
not good scripture, but it is sound Catholic and human nature.

This is in letters of gold around the apsis of a mosaic group at the side
of the 'scala santa', church of St. John Lateran, the Mother and Mistress
of all the Catholic churches of the world.  The group represents the
Saviour, St. Peter, Pope Leo, St. Silvester, Constantine and Charlemagne.
Peter is giving the pallium to the Pope, and a standard to Charlemagne.
The Saviour is giving the keys to St. Silvester, and a standard to
Constantine.  No prayer is offered to the Saviour, who seems to be of
little importance any where in Rome; but an inscription below says,
"Blessed Peter, give life to Pope Leo and victory to king Charles."  It
does not say, "Intercede for us, through the Saviour, with the Father,
for this boon," but "Blessed Peter, give it us."

In all seriousness--without meaning to be frivolous--without meaning to
be irreverent, and more than all, without meaning to be blasphemous,--I
state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I
have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:

First--"The Mother of God"--otherwise the Virgin Mary.

Second--The Deity.

Third--Peter.

Fourth--Some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and martyrs.

Fifth--Jesus Christ the Saviour--(but always as an infant in arms.)

I may be wrong in this--my judgment errs often, just as is the case with
other men's--but it is my judgment, be it good or bad.

Just here I will mention something that seems curious to me.  There are
no "Christ's Churches" in Rome, and no "Churches of the Holy Ghost," that
I can discover.  There are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth
of them seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter.  There are so
many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by all sorts of
affixes, if I understand the matter rightly.  Then we have churches of
St. Louis; St. Augustine; St. Agnes; St. Calixtus; St. Lorenzo in Lucina;
St. Lorenzo in Damaso; St. Cecilia; St. Athanasius; St. Philip Neri; St.
Catherine, St. Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are
not familiar in the world--and away down, clear out of the list of the
churches, comes a couple of hospitals: one of them is named for the
Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost!

Day after day and night after night we have wandered among the crumbling
wonders of Rome; day after day and night after night we have fed upon the
dust and decay of five-and-twenty centuries--have brooded over them by
day and dreampt of them by night till sometimes we seemed moldering away
ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless, and liable at any moment
to fall a prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and
"restored" with an unseemly nose, and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and
set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble
their names on forever and forevermore.

But the surest way to stop writing about Rome is to stop.  I wished to
write a real "guide-book" chapter on this fascinating city, but I could
not do it, because I have felt all the time like a boy in a candy-shop
--there was every thing to choose from, and yet no choice.  I have drifted
along hopelessly for a hundred pages of manuscript without knowing where
to commence.  I will not commence at all.  Our passports have been
examined.  We will go to Naples.



CHAPTER XXIX.

The ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples--quarantined.  She has
been here several days and will remain several more.  We that came by
rail from Rome have escaped this misfortune.  Of course no one is allowed
to go on board the ship, or come ashore from her.  She is a prison, now.
The passengers probably spend the long, blazing days looking out from
under the awnings at Vesuvius and the beautiful city--and in swearing.
Think of ten days of this sort of pastime!--We go out every day in a boat
and request them to come ashore.  It soothes them.  We lie ten steps from
the ship and tell them how splendid the city is; and how much better the
hotel fare is here than any where else in Europe; and how cool it is; and
what frozen continents of ice cream there are; and what a time we are
having cavorting about the country and sailing to the islands in the Bay.
This tranquilizes them.

                           ASCENT OF VESUVIUS.

I shall remember our trip to Vesuvius for many a day--partly because of
its sight-seeing experiences, but chiefly on account of the fatigue of
the journey.  Two or three of us had been resting ourselves among the
tranquil and beautiful scenery of the island of Ischia, eighteen miles
out in the harbor, for two days; we called it "resting," but I do not
remember now what the resting consisted of, for when we got back to
Naples we had not slept for forty-eight hours.  We were just about to go
to bed early in the evening, and catch up on some of the sleep we had
lost, when we heard of this Vesuvius expedition.  There was to be eight
of us in the party, and we were to leave Naples at midnight.  We laid in
some provisions for the trip, engaged carriages to take us to
Annunciation, and then moved about the city, to keep awake, till twelve.
We got away punctually, and in the course of an hour and a half arrived
at the town of Annunciation.  Annunciation is the very last place under
the sun.  In other towns in Italy the people lie around quietly and wait
for you to ask them a question or do some overt act that can be charged
for--but in Annunciation they have lost even that fragment of delicacy;
they seize a lady's shawl from a chair and hand it to her and charge a
penny; they open a carriage door, and charge for it--shut it when you get
out, and charge for it; they help you to take off a duster--two cents;
brush your clothes and make them worse than they were before--two cents;
smile upon you--two cents; bow, with a lick-spittle smirk, hat in hand
--two cents; they volunteer all information, such as that the mules will
arrive presently--two cents--warm day, sir--two cents--take you four
hours to make the ascent--two cents.  And so they go.  They crowd you
--infest you--swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look
sneaking and mean, and obsequious.  There is no office too degrading for
them to perform, for money.  I have had no opportunity to find out any
thing about the upper classes by my own observation, but from what I hear
said about them I judge that what they lack in one or two of the bad
traits the canaille have, they make up in one or two others that are
worse.  How the people beg!--many of them very well dressed, too.

I said I knew nothing against the upper classes by personal observation.
I must recall it!  I had forgotten.  What I saw their bravest and their
fairest do last night, the lowest multitude that could be scraped up out
of the purlieus of Christendom would blush to do, I think.  They
assembled by hundreds, and even thousands, in the great Theatre of San
Carlo, to do--what?  Why, simply, to make fun of an old woman--to deride,
to hiss, to jeer at an actress they once worshipped, but whose beauty is
faded now and whose voice has lost its former richness.  Every body spoke
of the rare sport there was to be.  They said the theatre would be
crammed, because Frezzolini was going to sing.  It was said she could not
sing well, now, but then the people liked to see her, anyhow.  And so we
went.  And every time the woman sang they hissed and laughed--the whole
magnificent house--and as soon as she left the stage they called her on
again with applause.  Once or twice she was encored five and six times in
succession, and received with hisses when she appeared, and discharged
with hisses and laughter when she had finished--then instantly encored
and insulted again!  And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it!
White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and
clapped their hands in very ecstacy when that unhappy old woman would
come meekly out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet
a storm of hisses!  It was the cruelest exhibition--the most wanton, the
most unfeeling.  The singer would have conquered an audience of American
rowdies by her brave, unflinching tranquillity (for she answered encore
after encore, and smiled and bowed pleasantly, and sang the best she
possibly could, and went bowing off, through all the jeers and hisses,
without ever losing countenance or temper:) and surely in any other land
than Italy her sex and her helplessness must have been an ample
protection to her--she could have needed no other.  Think what a
multitude of small souls were crowded into that theatre last night.  If
the manager could have filled his theatre with Neapolitan souls alone,
without the bodies, he could not have cleared less than ninety millions
of dollars.  What traits of character must a man have to enable him to
help three thousand miscreants to hiss, and jeer, and laugh at one
friendless old woman, and shamefully humiliate her?  He must have all
the vile, mean traits there are.  My observation persuades me (I do not
like to venture beyond my own personal observation,) that the upper
classes of Naples possess those traits of character.  Otherwise they may
be very good people; I can not say.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

In this city of Naples, they believe in and support one of the
wretchedest of all the religious impostures one can find in Italy--the
miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius.  Twice a year the
priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out this vial
of clotted blood and let them see it slowly dissolve and become liquid
--and every day for eight days, this dismal farce is repeated, while the
priests go among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition.  The
first day, the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes--the church is
crammed, then, and time must be allowed the collectors to get around:
after that it liquefies a little quicker and a little quicker, every day,
as the houses grow smaller, till on the eighth day, with only a few
dozens present to see the miracle, it liquefies in four minutes.

And here, also, they used to have a grand procession, of priests,
citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the City
Government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up Madonna--a
stuffed and painted image, like a milliner's dummy--whose hair
miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months.  They still
kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years ago.  It
was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the remarkable
effigy, and the ceremony of the public barbering of her was always
carried out with the greatest possible eclat and display--the more the
better, because the more excitement there was about it the larger the
crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it produced--but at last a
day came when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the
City Government stopped the Madonna's annual show.

There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans--two of the silliest
possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully
believed, and the other half either believed also or else said nothing
about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture.  I am
very well satisfied to think the whole population believed in those poor,
cheap miracles--a people who want two cents every time they bow to you,
and who abuse a woman, are capable of it, I think.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

These Neapolitans always ask four times as much money as they intend to
take, but if you give them what they first demand, they feel ashamed of
themselves for aiming so low, and immediately ask more.  When money is to
be paid and received, there is always some vehement jawing and
gesticulating about it.  One can not buy and pay for two cents' worth of
clams without trouble and a quarrel.  One "course," in a two-horse
carriage, costs a franc--that is law--but the hackman always demands
more, on some pretence or other, and if he gets it he makes a new demand.
It is said that a stranger took a one-horse carriage for a course
--tariff, half a franc.  He gave the man five francs, by way of experiment.
He demanded more, and received another franc.  Again he demanded more,
and got a franc--demanded more, and it was refused.  He grew vehement
--was again refused, and became noisy.  The stranger said, "Well, give me
the seven francs again, and I will see what I can do"--and when he got
them, he handed the hackman half a franc, and he immediately asked for
two cents to buy a drink with.  It may be thought that I am prejudiced.

Perhaps I am.  I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

Well, as I was saying, we got our mules and horses, after an hour and a
half of bargaining with the population of Annunciation, and started
sleepily up the mountain, with a vagrant at each mule's tail who
pretended to be driving the brute along, but was really holding on and
getting himself dragged up instead.  I made slow headway at first, but I
began to get dissatisfied at the idea of paying my minion five francs to
hold my mule back by the tail and keep him from going up the hill, and so
I discharged him.  I got along faster then.

We had one magnificent picture of Naples from a high point on the
mountain side.  We saw nothing but the gas lamps, of course--two-thirds
of a circle, skirting the great Bay--a necklace of diamonds glinting up
through the darkness from the remote distance--less brilliant than the
stars overhead, but more softly, richly beautiful--and over all the great
city the lights crossed and recrossed each other in many and many a
sparkling line and curve.  And back of the town, far around and abroad
over the miles of level campagna, were scattered rows, and circles, and
clusters of lights, all glowing like so many gems, and marking where a
score of villages were sleeping.  About this time, the fellow who was
hanging on to the tail of the horse in front of me and practicing all
sorts of unnecessary cruelty upon the animal, got kicked some fourteen
rods, and this incident, together with the fairy spectacle of the lights
far in the distance, made me serenely happy, and I was glad I started to
Vesuvius.


                  ASCENT OF MOUNT VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

This subject will be excellent matter for a chapter, and tomorrow or next
day I will write it.



CHAPTER XXX.

                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

"See Naples and die."  Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die
after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a
little differently.  To see Naples as we saw it in the early dawn from
far up on the side of Vesuvius, is to see a picture of wonderful beauty.
At that distance its dingy buildings looked white--and so, rank on rank
of balconies, windows and roofs, they piled themselves up from the blue
ocean till the colossal castle of St. Elmo topped the grand white pyramid
and gave the picture symmetry, emphasis and completeness.  And when its
lilies turned to roses--when it blushed under the sun's first kiss--it
was beautiful beyond all description.  One might well say, then, "See
Naples and die."  The frame of the picture was charming, itself.  In
front, the smooth sea--a vast mosaic of many colors; the lofty islands
swimming in a dreamy haze in the distance; at our end of the city the
stately double peak of Vesuvius, and its strong black ribs and seams of
lava stretching down to the limitless level campagna--a green carpet that
enchants the eye and leads it on and on, past clusters of trees, and
isolated houses, and snowy villages, until it shreds out in a fringe of
mist and general vagueness far away.  It is from the Hermitage, there on
the side of Vesuvius, that one should "see Naples and die."

But do not go within the walls and look at it in detail.  That takes away
some of the romance of the thing.  The people are filthy in their habits,
and this makes filthy streets and breeds disagreeable sights and smells.
There never was a community so prejudiced against the cholera as these
Neapolitans are.  But they have good reason to be.  The cholera generally
vanquishes a Neapolitan when it seizes him, because, you understand,
before the doctor can dig through the dirt and get at the disease the man
dies.  The upper classes take a sea-bath every day, and are pretty
decent.

The streets are generally about wide enough for one wagon, and how they
do swarm with people!  It is Broadway repeated in every street, in every
court, in every alley!  Such masses, such throngs, such multitudes of
hurrying, bustling, struggling humanity!  We never saw the like of it,
hardly even in New York, I think.  There are seldom any sidewalks, and
when there are, they are not often wide enough to pass a man on without
caroming on him.  So everybody walks in the street--and where the street
is wide enough, carriages are forever dashing along.  Why a thousand
people are not run over and crippled every day is a mystery that no man
can solve.  But if there is an eighth wonder in the world, it must be the
dwelling-houses of Naples.  I honestly believe a good majority of them
are a hundred feet high!  And the solid brick walls are seven feet
through.  You go up nine flights of stairs before you get to the "first"
floor.  No, not nine, but there or thereabouts.  There is a little
bird-cage of an iron railing in front of every window clear away up, up,
up, among the eternal clouds, where the roof is, and there is always
somebody looking out of every window--people of ordinary size looking
out from the first floor, people a shade smaller from the second, people
that look a little smaller yet from the third--and from thence upward
they grow smaller and smaller by a regularly graduated diminution, till
the folks in the topmost windows seem more like birds in an uncommonly
tall martin-box than any thing else.  The perspective of one of these
narrow cracks of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away
till they come together in the distance like railway tracks; its
clothes-lines crossing over at all altitudes and waving their bannered
raggedness over the swarms of people below; and the white-dressed women
perched in balcony railings all the way from the pavement up to the
heavens--a perspective like that is really worth going into Neapolitan
details to see.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

Naples, with its immediate suburbs, contains six hundred and twenty-five
thousand inhabitants, but I am satisfied it covers no more ground than an
American city of one hundred and fifty thousand.  It reaches up into the
air infinitely higher than three American cities, though, and there is
where the secret of it lies.  I will observe here, in passing, that the
contrasts between opulence and poverty, and magnificence and misery, are
more frequent and more striking in Naples than in Paris even.  One must
go to the Bois de Boulogne to see fashionable dressing, splendid
equipages and stunning liveries, and to the Faubourg St. Antoine to see
vice, misery, hunger, rags, dirt--but in the thoroughfares of Naples
these things are all mixed together.  Naked boys of nine years and the
fancy-dressed children of luxury; shreds and tatters, and brilliant
uniforms; jackass-carts and state-carriages; beggars, Princes and
Bishops, jostle each other in every street.  At six o'clock every
evening, all Naples turns out to drive on the 'Riviere di Chiaja',
(whatever that may mean;) and for two hours one may stand there and see
the motliest and the worst mixed procession go by that ever eyes beheld.
Princes (there are more Princes than policemen in Naples--the city is
infested with them)--Princes who live up seven flights of stairs and
don't own any principalities, will keep a carriage and go hungry; and
clerks, mechanics, milliners and strumpets will go without their dinners
and squander the money on a hack-ride in the Chiaja; the rag-tag and
rubbish of the city stack themselves up, to the number of twenty or
thirty, on a rickety little go-cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger
than a cat, and they drive in the Chiaja; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous
carriages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, and so
the furious procession goes.  For two hours rank and wealth, and
obscurity and poverty clatter along side by side in the wild procession,
and then go home serene, happy, covered with glory!

I was looking at a magnificent marble staircase in the King's palace, the
other day, which, it was said, cost five million francs, and I suppose it
did cost half a million, may be.  I felt as if it must be a fine thing to
live in a country where there was such comfort and such luxury as this.
And then I stepped out musing, and almost walked over a vagabond who was
eating his dinner on the curbstone--a piece of bread and a bunch of
grapes.  When I found that this mustang was clerking in a fruit
establishment (he had the establishment along with him in a basket,) at
two cents a day, and that he had no palace at home where he lived, I lost
some of my enthusiasm concerning the happiness of living in Italy.

This naturally suggests to me a thought about wages here.  Lieutenants in
the army get about a dollar a day, and common soldiers a couple of cents.
I only know one clerk--he gets four dollars a month.  Printers get six
dollars and a half a month, but I have heard of a foreman who gets
thirteen.

To be growing suddenly and violently rich, as this man is, naturally
makes him a bloated aristocrat.  The airs he puts on are insufferable.

And, speaking of wages, reminds me of prices of merchandise.  In Paris
you pay twelve dollars a dozen for Jouvin's best kid gloves; gloves of
about as good quality sell here at three or four dollars a dozen.  You
pay five and six dollars apiece for fine linen shirts in Paris; here and
in Leghorn you pay two and a half.  In Marseilles you pay forty dollars
for a first-class dress coat made by a good tailor, but in Leghorn you
can get a full dress suit for the same money.  Here you get handsome
business suits at from ten to twenty dollars, and in Leghorn you can get
an overcoat for fifteen dollars that would cost you seventy in New York.
Fine kid boots are worth eight dollars in Marseilles and four dollars
here.  Lyons velvets rank higher in America than those of Genoa.  Yet the
bulk of Lyons velvets you buy in the States are made in Genoa and
imported into Lyons, where they receive the Lyons stamp and are then
exported to America.  You can buy enough velvet in Genoa for twenty-five
dollars to make a five hundred dollar cloak in New York--so the ladies
tell me.  Of course these things bring me back, by a natural and easy
transition, to the

                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

And thus the wonderful Blue Grotto is suggested to me.  It is situated on
the Island of Capri, twenty-two miles from Naples.  We chartered a little
steamer and went out there.  Of course, the police boarded us and put us
through a health examination, and inquired into our politics, before they
would let us land.  The airs these little insect Governments put on are
in the last degree ridiculous.  They even put a policeman on board of our
boat to keep an eye on us as long as we were in the Capri dominions.
They thought we wanted to steal the grotto, I suppose.  It was worth
stealing.  The entrance to the cave is four feet high and four feet wide,
and is in the face of a lofty perpendicular cliff--the sea-wall.  You
enter in small boats--and a tight squeeze it is, too.  You can not go in
at all when the tide is up.  Once within, you find yourself in an arched
cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred and twenty
wide, and about seventy high.  How deep it is no man knows.  It goes down
to the bottom of the ocean.  The waters of this placid subterranean lake
are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined.  They are as
transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest
sky that ever bent over Italy.  No tint could be more ravishing, no
lustre more superb.  Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny
bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical
fires.  Dip an oar, and its blade turns to splendid frosted silver,
tinted with blue.  Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an
armor more gorgeous than ever kingly Crusader wore.

Then we went to Ischia, but I had already been to that island and tired
myself to death "resting" a couple of days and studying human villainy,
with the landlord of the Grande Sentinelle for a model.  So we went to
Procida, and from thence to Pozzuoli, where St. Paul landed after he
sailed from Samos.  I landed at precisely the same spot where St. Paul
landed, and so did Dan and the others.  It was a remarkable coincidence.
St. Paul preached to these people seven days before he started to Rome.

Nero's Baths, the ruins of Baiae, the Temple of Serapis; Cumae, where the
Cumaen Sybil interpreted the oracles, the Lake Agnano, with its ancient
submerged city still visible far down in its depths--these and a hundred
other points of interest we examined with critical imbecility, but the
Grotto of the Dog claimed our chief attention, because we had heard and
read so much about it.  Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane
and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has
held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the
place.  The dog dies in a minute and a half--a chicken instantly.  As a
general thing, strangers who crawl in there to sleep do not get up until
they are called.  And then they don't either.  The stranger that ventures
to sleep there takes a permanent contract.  I longed to see this grotto.
I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and
time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him.  We reached the
grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the
experiments.  But now, an important difficulty presented itself.  We had
no dog.

                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

At the Hermitage we were about fifteen or eighteen hundred feet above the
sea, and thus far a portion of the ascent had been pretty abrupt.  For
the next two miles the road was a mixture--sometimes the ascent was
abrupt and sometimes it was not: but one characteristic it possessed all
the time, without failure--without modification--it was all
uncompromisingly and unspeakably infamous.  It was a rough, narrow trail,
and led over an old lava flow--a black ocean which was tumbled into a
thousand fantastic shapes--a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, and
barrenness--a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of
miniature mountains rent asunder--of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and
twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines,
trunks of trees, all interlaced and mingled together: and all these weird
shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far-stretching
waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action,
of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!--all stricken dead
and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!--fettered, paralyzed, and
left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore!

Finally we stood in a level, narrow valley (a valley that had been
created by the terrific march of some old time irruption) and on either
hand towered the two steep peaks of Vesuvius.  The one we had to climb
--the one that contains the active volcano--seemed about eight hundred or
one thousand feet high, and looked almost too straight-up-and-down for
any man to climb, and certainly no mule could climb it with a man on his
back.  Four of these native pirates will carry you to the top in a sedan
chair, if you wish it, but suppose they were to slip and let you fall,
--is it likely that you would ever stop rolling?  Not this side of
eternity, perhaps.  We left the mules, sharpened our finger-nails, and
began the ascent I have been writing about so long, at twenty minutes to
six in the morning.  The path led straight up a rugged sweep of loose
chunks of pumice-stone, and for about every two steps forward we took, we
slid back one.  It was so excessively steep that we had to stop, every
fifty or sixty steps, and rest a moment.  To see our comrades, we had to
look very nearly straight up at those above us, and very nearly straight
down at those below.  We stood on the summit at last--it had taken an
hour and fifteen minutes to make the trip.

What we saw there was simply a circular crater--a circular ditch, if you
please--about two hundred feet deep, and four or five hundred feet wide,
whose inner wall was about half a mile in circumference.  In the centre
of the great circus ring thus formed, was a torn and ragged upheaval a
hundred feet high, all snowed over with a sulphur crust of many and many
a brilliant and beautiful color, and the ditch inclosed this like the
moat of a castle, or surrounded it as a little river does a little
island, if the simile is better.  The sulphur coating of that island was
gaudy in the extreme--all mingled together in the richest confusion were
red, blue, brown, black, yellow, white--I do not know that there was a
color, or shade of a color, or combination of colors, unrepresented--and
when the sun burst through the morning mists and fired this tinted
magnificence, it topped imperial Vesuvius like a jeweled crown!

The crater itself--the ditch--was not so variegated in coloring, but yet,
in its softness, richness, and unpretentious elegance, it was more
charming, more fascinating to the eye.  There was nothing "loud" about
its well-bred and well-creased look.  Beautiful?  One could stand and
look down upon it for a week without getting tired of it.  It had the
semblance of a pleasant meadow, whose slender grasses and whose velvety
mosses were frosted with a shining dust, and tinted with palest green
that deepened gradually to the darkest hue of the orange leaf, and
deepened yet again into gravest brown, then faded into orange, then into
brightest gold, and culminated in the delicate pink of a new-blown rose.
Where portions of the meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been
broken up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the
ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with a lace-work of
soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed their deformities into
quaint shapes and figures that were full of grace and beauty.

The walls of the ditch were brilliant with yellow banks of sulphur and
with lava and pumice-stone of many colors.  No fire was visible any
where, but gusts of sulphurous steam issued silently and invisibly from a
thousand little cracks and fissures in the crater, and were wafted to our
noses with every breeze.  But so long as we kept our nostrils buried in
our handkerchiefs, there was small danger of suffocation.

Some of the boys thrust long slips of paper down into holes and set them
on fire, and so achieved the glory of lighting their cigars by the flames
of Vesuvius, and others cooked eggs over fissures in the rocks and were
happy.

The view from the summit would have been superb but for the fact that the
sun could only pierce the mists at long intervals.  Thus the glimpses we
had of the grand panorama below were only fitful and unsatisfactory.

                               THE DESCENT.

The descent of the mountain was a labor of only four minutes.  Instead of
stalking down the rugged path we ascended, we chose one which was bedded
knee-deep in loose ashes, and ploughed our way with prodigious strides
that would almost have shamed the performance of him of the seven-league
boots.

The Vesuvius of today is a very poor affair compared to the mighty
volcano of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, but I am glad I visited it.
It was well worth it.

It is said that during one of the grand eruptions of Vesuvius it
discharged massy rocks weighing many tons a thousand feet into the air,
its vast jets of smoke and steam ascended thirty miles toward the
firmament, and clouds of its ashes were wafted abroad and fell upon the
decks of ships seven hundred and fifty miles at sea!  I will take the
ashes at a moderate discount, if any one will take the thirty miles of
smoke, but I do not feel able to take a commanding interest in the whole
story by myself.



CHAPTER XXXI.

                        THE BURIED CITY OF POMPEII

They pronounce it Pom-pay-e.  I always had an idea that you went down
into Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, dark stairways, just as
you do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with lava overhead
and something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the
solid earth, that faintly resembled houses.  But you do nothing the kind.
Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and
thrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of
solidly-built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred
years ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors,
clean-swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or waiting of the
labored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, and birds, and
flowers which we copy in perishable carpets to-day; and here are the
Venuses, and Bacchuses, and Adonises, making love and getting drunk in
many-hued frescoes on the walls of saloon and bed-chamber; and there are
the narrow streets and narrower sidewalks, paved with flags of good hard
lava, the one deeply rutted with the chariot-wheels, and the other with
the passing feet of the Pompeiians of by-gone centuries; and there are
the bake-shops, the temples, the halls of justice, the baths, the
theatres--all clean-scraped and neat, and suggesting nothing of the
nature of a silver mine away down in the bowels of the earth.  The
broken pillars lying about, the doorless doorways and the crumbled tops
of the wilderness of walls, were wonderfully suggestive of the "burnt
district" in one of our cities, and if there had been any charred
timbers, shattered windows, heaps of debris, and general blackness and
smokiness about the place, the resemblance would have been perfect.  But
no--the sun shines as brightly down on old Pompeii to-day as it did when
Christ was born in Bethlehem, and its streets are cleaner a hundred
times than ever Pompeiian saw them in her prime.  I know whereof I
speak--for in the great, chief thoroughfares (Merchant street and the
Street of Fortune) have I not seen with my own eyes how for two hundred
years at least the pavements were not repaired!--how ruts five and even
ten inches deep were worn into the thick flagstones by the
chariot-wheels of generations of swindled tax-payers?  And do I not know
by these signs that Street Commissioners of Pompeii never attended to
their business, and that if they never mended the pavements they never
cleaned them?  And, besides, is it not the inborn nature of Street
Commissioners to avoid their duty whenever they get a chance?  I wish I
knew the name of the last one that held office in Pompeii so that I
could give him a blast.  I speak with feeling on this subject, because I
caught my foot in one of those ruts, and the sadness that came over me
when I saw the first poor skeleton, with ashes and lava sticking to it,
was tempered by the reflection that may be that party was the Street
Commissioner.

No--Pompeii is no longer a buried city.  It is a city of hundreds and
hundreds of roofless houses, and a tangled maze of streets where one
could easily get lost, without a guide, and have to sleep in some ghostly
palace that had known no living tenant since that awful November night of
eighteen centuries ago.

We passed through the gate which faces the Mediterranean, (called the
"Marine Gate,") and by the rusty, broken image of Minerva, still keeping
tireless watch and ward over the possessions it was powerless to save,
and went up a long street and stood in the broad court of the Forum of
Justice.  The floor was level and clean, and up and down either side was
a noble colonnade of broken pillars, with their beautiful Ionic and
Corinthian columns scattered about them.  At the upper end were the
vacant seats of the Judges, and behind them we descended into a dungeon
where the ashes and cinders had found two prisoners chained on that
memorable November night, and tortured them to death.  How they must have
tugged at the pitiless fetters as the fierce fires surged around them!

Then we lounged through many and many a sumptuous private mansion which
we could not have entered without a formal invitation in incomprehensible
Latin, in the olden time, when the owners lived there--and we probably
wouldn't have got it.  These people built their houses a good deal alike.
The floors were laid in fanciful figures wrought in mosaics of
many-colored marbles.  At the threshold your eyes fall upon a Latin
sentence of welcome, sometimes, or a picture of a dog, with the legend
"Beware of the Dog," and sometimes a picture of a bear or a faun with no
inscription at all.  Then you enter a sort of vestibule, where they used
to keep the hat-rack, I suppose; next a room with a large marble basin
in the midst and the pipes of a fountain; on either side are bedrooms;
beyond the fountain is a reception-room, then a little garden,
dining-room, and so forth and so on.  The floors were all mosaic, the
walls were stuccoed, or frescoed, or ornamented with bas-reliefs, and
here and there were statues, large and small, and little fish-pools, and
cascades of sparkling water that sprang from secret places in the
colonnade of handsome pillars that surrounded the court, and kept the
flower-beds fresh and the air cool.  Those Pompeiians were very
luxurious in their tastes and habits.  The most exquisite bronzes we
have seen in Europe, came from the exhumed cities of Herculaneum and
Pompeii, and also the finest cameos and the most delicate engravings on
precious stones; their pictures, eighteen or nineteen centuries old, are
often much more pleasing than the celebrated rubbish of the old masters
of three centuries ago.  They were well up in art.  From the creation of
these works of the first, clear up to the eleventh century, art seems
hardly to have existed at all--at least no remnants of it are left--and
it was curious to see how far (in some things, at any rate,) these old
time pagans excelled the remote generations of masters that came after
them. The pride of the world in sculptures seem to be the Laocoon and
the Dying Gladiator, in Rome.  They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from
the earth like Pompeii; but their exact age or who made them can only be
conjectured.  But worn, and cracked, without a history, and with the
blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, they still mutely
mock at all efforts to rival their perfections.

It was a quaint and curious pastime, wandering through this old silent
city of the dead--lounging through utterly deserted streets where
thousands and thousands of human beings once bought and sold, and walked
and rode, and made the place resound with the noise and confusion of
traffic and pleasure.  They were not lazy.  They hurried in those days.
We had evidence of that.  There was a temple on one corner, and it was a
shorter cut to go between the columns of that temple from one street to
the other than to go around--and behold that pathway had been worn deep
into the heavy flagstone floor of the building by generations of
time-saving feet!  They would not go around when it was quicker to go
through.  We do that way in our cities.

Every where, you see things that make you wonder how old these old houses
were before the night of destruction came--things, too, which bring back
those long dead inhabitants and place the living before your eyes.  For
instance: The steps (two feet thick--lava blocks) that lead up out of the
school, and the same kind of steps that lead up into the dress circle of
the principal theatre, are almost worn through!  For ages the boys
hurried out of that school, and for ages their parents hurried into that
theatre, and the nervous feet that have been dust and ashes for eighteen
centuries have left their record for us to read to-day.  I imagined I
could see crowds of gentlemen and ladies thronging into the theatre, with
tickets for secured seats in their hands, and on the wall, I read the
imaginary placard, in infamous grammar, "POSITIVELY NO FREE LIST, EXCEPT
MEMBERS OF THE PRESS!"  Hanging about the doorway (I fancied,) were
slouchy Pompeiian street-boys uttering slang and profanity, and keeping a
wary eye out for checks.  I entered the theatre, and sat down in one of
the long rows of stone benches in the dress circle, and looked at the
place for the orchestra, and the ruined stage, and around at the wide
sweep of empty boxes, and thought to myself, "This house won't pay."  I
tried to imagine the music in full blast, the leader of the orchestra
beating time, and the "versatile" So-and-So (who had "just returned from
a most successful tour in the provinces to play his last and farewell
engagement of positively six nights only, in Pompeii, previous to his
departure for Herculaneum,") charging around the stage and piling the
agony mountains high--but I could not do it with such a "house" as that;
those empty benches tied my fancy down to dull reality.  I said, these
people that ought to be here have been dead, and still, and moldering to
dust for ages and ages, and will never care for the trifles and follies
of life any more for ever--"Owing to circumstances, etc., etc., there
will not be any performance to-night."  Close down the curtain.  Put out
the lights.

And so I turned away and went through shop after shop and store after
store, far down the long street of the merchants, and called for the
wares of Rome and the East, but the tradesmen were gone, the marts were
silent, and nothing was left but the broken jars all set in cement of
cinders and ashes: the wine and the oil that once had filled them were
gone with their owners.

In a bake-shop was a mill for grinding the grain, and the furnaces for
baking the bread: and they say that here, in the same furnaces, the
exhumers of Pompeii found nice, well baked loaves which the baker had not
found time to remove from the ovens the last time he left his shop,
because circumstances compelled him to leave in such a hurry.

In one house (the only building in Pompeii which no woman is now allowed
to enter,) were the small rooms and short beds of solid masonry, just as
they were in the old times, and on the walls were pictures which looked
almost as fresh as if they were painted yesterday, but which no pen could
have the hardihood to describe; and here and there were Latin
inscriptions--obscene scintillations of wit, scratched by hands that
possibly were uplifted to Heaven for succor in the midst of a driving
storm of fire before the night was done.

In one of the principal streets was a ponderous stone tank, and a
water-spout that supplied it, and where the tired, heated toilers from the
Campagna used to rest their right hands when they bent over to put their
lips to the spout, the thick stone was worn down to a broad groove an
inch or two deep.  Think of the countless thousands of hands that had
pressed that spot in the ages that are gone, to so reduce a stone that
is as hard as iron!

They had a great public bulletin board in Pompeii--a place where
announcements for gladiatorial combats, elections, and such things, were
posted--not on perishable paper, but carved in enduring stone.  One lady,
who, I take it, was rich and well brought up, advertised a dwelling or so
to rent, with baths and all the modern improvements, and several hundred
shops, stipulating that the dwellings should not be put to immoral
purposes.  You can find out who lived in many a house in Pompeii by the
carved stone door-plates affixed to them: and in the same way you can
tell who they were that occupy the tombs.  Every where around are things
that reveal to you something of the customs and history of this forgotten
people.  But what would a volcano leave of an American city, if it once
rained its cinders on it?  Hardly a sign or a symbol to tell its story.

In one of these long Pompeiian halls the skeleton of a man was found,
with ten pieces of gold in one hand and a large key in the other.  He had
seized his money and started toward the door, but the fiery tempest
caught him at the very threshold, and he sank down and died.  One more
minute of precious time would have saved him.  I saw the skeletons of a
man, a woman, and two young girls.  The woman had her hands spread wide
apart, as if in mortal terror, and I imagined I could still trace upon
her shapeless face something of the expression of wild despair that
distorted it when the heavens rained fire in these streets, so many ages
ago.  The girls and the man lay with their faces upon their arms, as if
they had tried to shield them from the enveloping cinders.  In one
apartment eighteen skeletons were found, all in sitting postures, and
blackened places on the walls still mark their shapes and show their
attitudes, like shadows.  One of them, a woman, still wore upon her
skeleton throat a necklace, with her name engraved upon it--JULIE DI
DIOMEDE.

But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern
research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, clad in complete
armor; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of
Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its
glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till
the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could
not conquer.

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write
of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so
well deserves.  Let us remember that he was a soldier--not a policeman
--and so, praise him.  Being a soldier, he staid,--because the warrior
instinct forbade him to fly.  Had he been a policeman he would have
staid, also--because he would have been asleep.

There are not half a dozen flights of stairs in Pompeii, and no other
evidences that the houses were more than one story high.  The people did
not live in the clouds, as do the Venetians, the Genoese and Neapolitans
of to-day.

We came out from under the solemn mysteries of this city of the Venerable
Past--this city which perished, with all its old ways and its quaint old
fashions about it, remote centuries ago, when the Disciples were
preaching the new religion, which is as old as the hills to us now--and
went dreaming among the trees that grow over acres and acres of its still
buried streets and squares, till a shrill whistle and the cry of "All
aboard--last train for Naples!"  woke me up and reminded me that I
belonged in the nineteenth century, and was not a dusty mummy, caked with
ashes and cinders, eighteen hundred years old.  The transition was
startling.  The idea of a railroad train actually running to old dead
Pompeii, and whistling irreverently, and calling for passengers in the
most bustling and business-like way, was as strange a thing as one could
imagine, and as unpoetical and disagreeable as it was strange.

Compare the cheerful life and the sunshine of this day with the horrors
the younger Pliny saw here, the 9th of November, A.D. 79, when he was so
bravely striving to remove his mother out of reach of harm, while she
begged him, with all a mother's unselfishness, to leave her to perish and
save himself.

     'By this time the murky darkness had so increased that one might
     have believed himself abroad in a black and moonless night, or in a
     chamber where all the lights had been extinguished.  On every hand
     was heard the complaints of women, the wailing of children, and the
     cries of men.  One called his father, another his son, and another
     his wife, and only by their voices could they know each other.  Many
     in their despair begged that death would come and end their
     distress.

     "Some implored the gods to succor them, and some believed that this
     night was the last, the eternal night which should engulf the
     universe!

     "Even so it seemed to me--and I consoled myself for the coming death
     with the reflection: BEHOLD, THE WORLD IS PASSING AWAY!"

                              * * * * * * * *

After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiae, of Pompeii, and
after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless
imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing
strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting
character of fame.  Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and
struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in
generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in
the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name.  Well, twenty
little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things?  A crazy
inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and
tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell
wrong)--no history, no tradition, no poetry--nothing that can give it
even a passing interest.  What may be left of General Grant's great name
forty centuries hence?  This--in the Encyclopedia for A. D. 5868,
possibly:

     "URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT--popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec
     provinces of the United States of British America.  Some authors say
     flourished about A. D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states
     that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and
     flourished about A. D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan
     war instead of before it.  He wrote 'Rock me to Sleep, Mother.'"

These thoughts sadden me.  I will to bed.



CHAPTER XXXII.

Home, again!  For the first time, in many weeks, the ship's entire family
met and shook hands on the quarter-deck.  They had gathered from many
points of the compass and from many lands, but not one was missing; there
was no tale of sickness or death among the flock to dampen the pleasure
of the reunion.  Once more there was a full audience on deck to listen to
the sailors' chorus as they got the anchor up, and to wave an adieu to
the land as we sped away from Naples.  The seats were full at dinner
again, the domino parties were complete, and the life and bustle on the
upper deck in the fine moonlight at night was like old times--old times
that had been gone weeks only, but yet they were weeks so crowded with
incident, adventure and excitement, that they seemed almost like years.
There was no lack of cheerfulness on board the Quaker City.  For once,
her title was a misnomer.

At seven in the evening, with the western horizon all golden from the
sunken sun, and specked with distant ships, the full moon sailing high
over head, the dark blue of the sea under foot, and a strange sort of
twilight affected by all these different lights and colors around us and
about us, we sighted superb Stromboli.  With what majesty the monarch
held his lonely state above the level sea!  Distance clothed him in a
purple gloom, and added a veil of shimmering mist that so softened his
rugged features that we seemed to see him through a web of silver gauze.
His torch was out; his fires were smoldering; a tall column of smoke that
rose up and lost itself in the growing moonlight was all the sign he gave
that he was a living Autocrat of the Sea and not the spectre of a dead
one.

At two in the morning we swept through the Straits of Messina, and so
bright was the moonlight that Italy on the one hand and Sicily on the
other seemed almost as distinctly visible as though we looked at them
from the middle of a street we were traversing.  The city of Messina,
milk-white, and starred and spangled all over with gaslights, was a fairy
spectacle.  A great party of us were on deck smoking and making a noise,
and waiting to see famous Scylla and Charybdis.  And presently the Oracle
stepped out with his eternal spy-glass and squared himself on the deck
like another Colossus of Rhodes.  It was a surprise to see him abroad at
such an hour.  Nobody supposed he cared anything about an old fable like
that of Scylla and Charybdis.  One of the boys said:

"Hello, doctor, what are you doing up here at this time of night?--What
do you want to see this place for?"

"What do I want to see this place for?  Young man, little do you know me,
or you wouldn't ask such a question.  I wish to see all the places that's
mentioned in the Bible."

"Stuff--this place isn't mentioned in the Bible."

"It ain't mentioned in the Bible!--this place ain't--well now, what place
is this, since you know so much about it?"

"Why it's Scylla and Charybdis."

"Scylla and Cha--confound it, I thought it was Sodom and Gomorrah!"

And he closed up his glass and went below.  The above is the ship story.
Its plausibility is marred a little by the fact that the Oracle was not a
biblical student, and did not spend much of his time instructing himself
about Scriptural localities.--They say the Oracle complains, in this hot
weather, lately, that the only beverage in the ship that is passable, is
the butter.  He did not mean butter, of course, but inasmuch as that
article remains in a melted state now since we are out of ice, it is fair
to give him the credit of getting one long word in the right place,
anyhow, for once in his life.  He said, in Rome, that the Pope was a
noble-looking old man, but he never did think much of his Iliad.

We spent one pleasant day skirting along the Isles of Greece.  They are
very mountainous.  Their prevailing tints are gray and brown, approaching
to red.  Little white villages surrounded by trees, nestle in the valleys
or roost upon the lofty perpendicular sea-walls.

We had one fine sunset--a rich carmine flush that suffused the western
sky and cast a ruddy glow far over the sea.--Fine sunsets seem to be
rare in this part of the world--or at least, striking ones.  They are
soft, sensuous, lovely--they are exquisite refined, effeminate, but we
have seen no sunsets here yet like the gorgeous conflagrations that flame
in the track of the sinking sun in our high northern latitudes.

But what were sunsets to us, with the wild excitement upon us of
approaching the most renowned of cities!  What cared we for outward
visions, when Agamemnon, Achilles, and a thousand other heroes of the
great Past were marching in ghostly procession through our fancies?  What
were sunsets to us, who were about to live and breathe and walk in actual
Athens; yea, and go far down into the dead centuries and bid in person
for the slaves, Diogenes and Plato, in the public market-place, or gossip
with the neighbors about the siege of Troy or the splendid deeds of
Marathon?  We scorned to consider sunsets.

We arrived, and entered the ancient harbor of the Piraeus at last.  We
dropped anchor within half a mile of the village.  Away off, across the
undulating Plain of Attica, could be seen a little square-topped hill
with a something on it, which our glasses soon discovered to be the
ruined edifices of the citadel of the Athenians, and most prominent among
them loomed the venerable Parthenon.  So exquisitely clear and pure is
this wonderful atmosphere that every column of the noble structure was
discernible through the telescope, and even the smaller ruins about it
assumed some semblance of shape.  This at a distance of five or six
miles.  In the valley, near the Acropolis, (the square-topped hill before
spoken of,) Athens itself could be vaguely made out with an ordinary
lorgnette.  Every body was anxious to get ashore and visit these classic
localities as quickly as possible.  No land we had yet seen had aroused
such universal interest among the passengers.

But bad news came.  The commandant of the Piraeus came in his boat, and
said we must either depart or else get outside the harbor and remain
imprisoned in our ship, under rigid quarantine, for eleven days!  So we
took up the anchor and moved outside, to lie a dozen hours or so, taking
in supplies, and then sail for Constantinople.  It was the bitterest
disappointment we had yet experienced.  To lie a whole day in sight of
the Acropolis, and yet be obliged to go away without visiting Athens!
Disappointment was hardly a strong enough word to describe the
circumstances.

All hands were on deck, all the afternoon, with books and maps and
glasses, trying to determine which "narrow rocky ridge" was the
Areopagus, which sloping hill the Pnyx, which elevation the Museum Hill,
and so on.  And we got things confused.  Discussion became heated, and
party spirit ran high.  Church members were gazing with emotion upon a
hill which they said was the one St. Paul preached from, and another
faction claimed that that hill was Hymettus, and another that it was
Pentelicon!  After all the trouble, we could be certain of only one
thing--the square-topped hill was the Acropolis, and the grand ruin that
crowned it was the Parthenon, whose picture we knew in infancy in the
school books.

We inquired of every body who came near the ship, whether there were
guards in the Piraeus, whether they were strict, what the chances were of
capture should any of us slip ashore, and in case any of us made the
venture and were caught, what would be probably done to us?  The answers
were discouraging: There was a strong guard or police force; the Piraeus
was a small town, and any stranger seen in it would surely attract
attention--capture would be certain.  The commandant said the punishment
would be "heavy;" when asked "how heavy?" he said it would be "very
severe"--that was all we could get out of him.

At eleven o'clock at night, when most of the ship's company were abed,
four of us stole softly ashore in a small boat, a clouded moon favoring
the enterprise, and started two and two, and far apart, over a low hill,
intending to go clear around the Piraeus, out of the range of its police.
Picking our way so stealthily over that rocky, nettle-grown eminence,
made me feel a good deal as if I were on my way somewhere to steal
something.  My immediate comrade and I talked in an undertone about
quarantine laws and their penalties, but we found nothing cheering in the
subject.  I was posted.  Only a few days before, I was talking with our
captain, and he mentioned the case of a man who swam ashore from a
quarantined ship somewhere, and got imprisoned six months for it; and
when he was in Genoa a few years ago, a captain of a quarantined ship
went in his boat to a departing ship, which was already outside of the
harbor, and put a letter on board to be taken to his family, and the
authorities imprisoned him three months for it, and then conducted him
and his ship fairly to sea, and warned him never to show himself in that
port again while he lived.  This kind of conversation did no good,
further than to give a sort of dismal interest to our quarantine-breaking
expedition, and so we dropped it.  We made the entire circuit of the town
without seeing any body but one man, who stared at us curiously, but said
nothing, and a dozen persons asleep on the ground before their doors,
whom we walked among and never woke--but we woke up dogs enough, in all
conscience--we always had one or two barking at our heels, and several
times we had as many as ten and twelve at once.  They made such a
preposterous din that persons aboard our ship said they could tell how we
were progressing for a long time, and where we were, by the barking of
the dogs.  The clouded moon still favored us.  When we had made the whole
circuit, and were passing among the houses on the further side of the
town, the moon came out splendidly, but we no longer feared the light.
As we approached a well, near a house, to get a drink, the owner merely
glanced at us and went within.  He left the quiet, slumbering town at our
mercy.  I record it here proudly, that we didn't do any thing to it.

Seeing no road, we took a tall hill to the left of the distant Acropolis
for a mark, and steered straight for it over all obstructions, and over a
little rougher piece of country than exists any where else outside of the
State of Nevada, perhaps.  Part of the way it was covered with small,
loose stones--we trod on six at a time, and they all rolled.  Another
part of it was dry, loose, newly-ploughed ground.  Still another part of
it was a long stretch of low grape-vines, which were tanglesome and
troublesome, and which we took to be brambles.  The Attic Plain, barring
the grape-vines, was a barren, desolate, unpoetical waste--I wonder what
it was in Greece's Age of Glory, five hundred years before Christ?

In the neighborhood of one o'clock in the morning, when we were heated
with fast walking and parched with thirst, Denny exclaimed, "Why, these
weeds are grape-vines!"  and in five minutes we had a score of bunches of
large, white, delicious grapes, and were reaching down for more when a
dark shape rose mysteriously up out of the shadows beside us and said
"Ho!"  And so we left.

In ten minutes more we struck into a beautiful road, and unlike some
others we had stumbled upon at intervals, it led in the right direction.
We followed it.  It was broad, and smooth, and white--handsome and in
perfect repair, and shaded on both sides for a mile or so with single
ranks of trees, and also with luxuriant vineyards.  Twice we entered and
stole grapes, and the second time somebody shouted at us from some
invisible place.  Whereupon we left again.  We speculated in grapes no
more on that side of Athens.

Shortly we came upon an ancient stone aqueduct, built upon arches, and
from that time forth we had ruins all about us--we were approaching our
journey's end.  We could not see the Acropolis now or the high hill,
either, and I wanted to follow the road till we were abreast of them, but
the others overruled me, and we toiled laboriously up the stony hill
immediately in our front--and from its summit saw another--climbed it and
saw another!  It was an hour of exhausting work.  Soon we came upon a row
of open graves, cut in the solid rock--(for a while one of them served
Socrates for a prison)--we passed around the shoulder of the hill, and
the citadel, in all its ruined magnificence, burst upon us!  We hurried
across the ravine and up a winding road, and stood on the old Acropolis,
with the prodigious walls of the citadel towering above our heads.  We
did not stop to inspect their massive blocks of marble, or measure their
height, or guess at their extraordinary thickness, but passed at once
through a great arched passage like a railway tunnel, and went straight
to the gate that leads to the ancient temples.  It was locked!  So, after
all, it seemed that we were not to see the great Parthenon face to face.
We sat down and held a council of war.  Result: the gate was only a
flimsy structure of wood--we would break it down.  It seemed like
desecration, but then we had traveled far, and our necessities were
urgent.  We could not hunt up guides and keepers--we must be on the ship
before daylight.  So we argued.  This was all very fine, but when we came
to break the gate, we could not do it.  We moved around an angle of the
wall and found a low bastion--eight feet high without--ten or twelve
within.  Denny prepared to scale it, and we got ready to follow.  By dint
of hard scrambling he finally straddled the top, but some loose stones
crumbled away and fell with a crash into the court within.  There was
instantly a banging of doors and a shout.  Denny dropped from the wall in
a twinkling, and we retreated in disorder to the gate.  Xerxes took that
mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, when his five
millions of soldiers and camp-followers followed him to Greece, and if we
four Americans could have remained unmolested five minutes longer, we
would have taken it too.

The garrison had turned out--four Greeks.  We clamored at the gate, and
they admitted us.  [Bribery and corruption.]

We crossed a large court, entered a great door, and stood upon a pavement
of purest white marble, deeply worn by footprints.  Before us, in the
flooding moonlight, rose the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon--the
Propylae; a small Temple of Minerva; the Temple of Hercules, and the
grand Parthenon.  [We got these names from the Greek guide, who didn't
seem to know more than seven men ought to know.] These edifices were all
built of the whitest Pentelic marble, but have a pinkish stain upon them
now.  Where any part is broken, however, the fracture looks like fine
loaf sugar.  Six caryatides, or marble women, clad in flowing robes,
support the portico of the Temple of Hercules, but the porticos and
colonnades of the other structures are formed of massive Doric and Ionic
pillars, whose flutings and capitals are still measurably perfect,
notwithstanding the centuries that have gone over them and the sieges
they have suffered.  The Parthenon, originally, was two hundred and
twenty-six feet long, one hundred wide, and seventy high, and had two
rows of great columns, eight in each, at either end, and single rows of
seventeen each down the sides, and was one of the most graceful and
beautiful edifices ever erected.

Most of the Parthenon's imposing columns are still standing, but the roof
is gone.  It was a perfect building two hundred and fifty years ago, when
a shell dropped into the Venetian magazine stored here, and the explosion
which followed wrecked and unroofed it.  I remember but little about the
Parthenon, and I have put in one or two facts and figures for the use of
other people with short memories.  Got them from the guide-book.

As we wandered thoughtfully down the marble-paved length of this stately
temple, the scene about us was strangely impressive.  Here and there, in
lavish profusion, were gleaming white statues of men and women, propped
against blocks of marble, some of them armless, some without legs, others
headless--but all looking mournful in the moonlight, and startlingly
human!  They rose up and confronted the midnight intruder on every side
--they stared at him with stony eyes from unlooked-for nooks and recesses;
they peered at him over fragmentary heaps far down the desolate
corridors; they barred his way in the midst of the broad forum, and
solemnly pointed with handless arms the way from the sacred fane; and
through the roofless temple the moon looked down, and banded the floor
and darkened the scattered fragments and broken statues with the slanting
shadows of the columns.

What a world of ruined sculpture was about us!  Set up in rows--stacked
up in piles--scattered broadcast over the wide area of the Acropolis
--were hundreds of crippled statues of all sizes and of the most exquisite
workmanship; and vast fragments of marble that once belonged to the
entablatures, covered with bas-reliefs representing battles and sieges,
ships of war with three and four tiers of oars, pageants and processions
--every thing one could think of.  History says that the temples of the
Acropolis were filled with the noblest works of Praxiteles and Phidias,
and of many a great master in sculpture besides--and surely these elegant
fragments attest it.

We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court beyond the
Parthenon.  It startled us, every now and then, to see a stony white face
stare suddenly up at us out of the grass with its dead eyes.  The place
seemed alive with ghosts.  I half expected to see the Athenian heroes of
twenty centuries ago glide out of the shadows and steal into the old
temple they knew so well and regarded with such boundless pride.

The full moon was riding high in the cloudless heavens, now.  We
sauntered carelessly and unthinkingly to the edge of the lofty
battlements of the citadel, and looked down--a vision!  And such a
vision!  Athens by moonlight!  The prophet that thought the splendors of
the New Jerusalem were revealed to him, surely saw this instead!  It lay
in the level plain right under our feet--all spread abroad like a
picture--and we looked down upon it as we might have looked from a
balloon.  We saw no semblance of a street, but every house, every window,
every clinging vine, every projection was as distinct and sharply marked
as if the time were noon-day; and yet there was no glare, no glitter,
nothing harsh or repulsive--the noiseless city was flooded with the
mellowest light that ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some
living creature wrapped in peaceful slumber.  On its further side was a
little temple, whose delicate pillars and ornate front glowed with a rich
lustre that chained the eye like a spell; and nearer by, the palace of
the king reared its creamy walls out of the midst of a great garden of
shrubbery that was flecked all over with a random shower of amber lights
--a spray of golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the
moon, and glinted softly upon the sea of dark foliage like the pallid
stars of the milky-way.  Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in
their ruin--under foot the dreaming city--in the distance the silver sea
--not on the broad earth is there an other picture half so beautiful!

As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished that the
illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages could visit it again
and reveal themselves to our curious eyes--Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes,
Socrates, Phocion, Pythagoras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon, Herodotus,
Praxiteles and Phidias, Zeuxis the painter.  What a constellation of
celebrated names!  But more than all, I wished that old Diogenes, groping
so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously for one solitary
honest man in all the world, might meander along and stumble on our
party.  I ought not to say it, may be, but still I suppose he would have
put out his light.

We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as it had kept
it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and stood outside the walls
of the citadel.  In the distance was the ancient, but still almost
perfect Temple of Theseus, and close by, looking to the west, was the
Bema, from whence Demosthenes thundered his philippics and fired the
wavering patriotism of his countrymen.  To the right was Mars Hill, where
the Areopagus sat in ancient times and where St. Paul defined his
position, and below was the market-place where he "disputed daily" with
the gossip-loving Athenians.  We climbed the stone steps St. Paul
ascended, and stood in the square-cut place he stood in, and tried to
recollect the Bible account of the matter--but for certain reasons, I
could not recall the words.  I have found them since:

     "Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in
     him, when he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry.  "Therefore
     disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout
     persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.
                         * * * * * * * * *
     "And they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we
     know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is?
                         * * * * * * * * *
     "Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars hill, and said, Ye men of
     Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious; "For
     as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this
     inscription: To THE UNKNOWN GOD.  Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly
     worship, him declare I unto you."--Acts, ch. xvii."

It occurred to us, after a while, that if we wanted to get home before
daylight betrayed us, we had better be moving.  So we hurried away.  When
far on our road, we had a parting view of the Parthenon, with the
moonlight streaming through its open colonnades and touching its capitals
with silver.  As it looked then, solemn, grand, and beautiful it will
always remain in our memories.

As we marched along, we began to get over our fears, and ceased to care
much about quarantine scouts or any body else.  We grew bold and
reckless; and once, in a sudden burst of courage, I even threw a stone at
a dog.  It was a pleasant reflection, though, that I did not hit him,
because his master might just possibly have been a policeman.  Inspired
by this happy failure, my valor became utterly uncontrollable, and at
intervals I absolutely whistled, though on a moderate key.  But boldness
breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light
of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the
presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule.  Denny and Birch followed my
example.

Now I had grapes enough for a dozen, but then Jackson was all swollen up
with courage, too, and he was obliged to enter a vineyard presently.  The
first bunch he seized brought trouble.  A frowsy, bearded brigand sprang
into the road with a shout, and flourished a musket in the light of the
moon!  We sidled toward the Piraeus--not running you understand, but only
advancing with celerity.  The brigand shouted again, but still we
advanced.  It was getting late, and we had no time to fool away on every
ass that wanted to drivel Greek platitudes to us.  We would just as soon
have talked with him as not if we had not been in a hurry.  Presently
Denny said, "Those fellows are following us!"

We turned, and, sure enough, there they were--three fantastic pirates
armed with guns.  We slackened our pace to let them come up, and in the
meantime I got out my cargo of grapes and dropped them firmly but
reluctantly into the shadows by the wayside.  But I was not afraid.  I
only felt that it was not right to steal grapes.  And all the more so
when the owner was around--and not only around, but with his friends
around also.  The villains came up and searched a bundle Dr. Birch had in
his hand, and scowled upon him when they found it had nothing in it but
some holy rocks from Mars Hill, and these were not contraband.  They
evidently suspected him of playing some wretched fraud upon them, and
seemed half inclined to scalp the party.  But finally they dismissed us
with a warning, couched in excellent Greek, I suppose, and dropped
tranquilly in our wake.  When they had gone three hundred yards they
stopped, and we went on rejoiced.  But behold, another armed rascal came
out of the shadows and took their place, and followed us two hundred
yards.  Then he delivered us over to another miscreant, who emerged from
some mysterious place, and he in turn to another!  For a mile and a half
our rear was guarded all the while by armed men.  I never traveled in so
much state before in all my life.

It was a good while after that before we ventured to steal any more
grapes, and when we did we stirred up another troublesome brigand, and
then we ceased all further speculation in that line.  I suppose that
fellow that rode by on the mule posted all the sentinels, from Athens to
the Piraeus, about us.

Every field on that long route was watched by an armed sentinel, some of
whom had fallen asleep, no doubt, but were on hand, nevertheless.  This
shows what sort of a country modern Attica is--a community of
questionable characters.  These men were not there to guard their
possessions against strangers, but against each other; for strangers
seldom visit Athens and the Piraeus, and when they do, they go in
daylight, and can buy all the grapes they want for a trifle.  The modern
inhabitants are confiscators and falsifiers of high repute, if gossip
speaks truly concerning them, and I freely believe it does.

Just as the earliest tinges of the dawn flushed the eastern sky and
turned the pillared Parthenon to a broken harp hung in the pearly
horizon, we closed our thirteenth mile of weary, round-about marching,
and emerged upon the sea-shore abreast the ships, with our usual escort
of fifteen hundred Piraean dogs howling at our heels.  We hailed a boat
that was two or three hundred yards from shore, and discovered
in a moment that it was a police-boat on the lookout for any
quarantine-breakers that might chance to be abroad.  So we dodged--we
were used to that by this time--and when the scouts reached the spot we
had so lately occupied, we were absent.  They cruised along the shore,
but in the wrong direction, and shortly our own boat issued from the
gloom and took us aboard.  They had heard our signal on the ship.  We
rowed noiselessly away, and before the police-boat came in sight again,
we were safe at home once more.

Four more of our passengers were anxious to visit Athens, and started
half an hour after we returned; but they had not been ashore five minutes
till the police discovered and chased them so hotly that they barely
escaped to their boat again, and that was all.  They pursued the
enterprise no further.

We set sail for Constantinople to-day, but some of us little care for
that.  We have seen all there was to see in the old city that had its
birth sixteen hundred years before Christ was born, and was an old town
before the foundations of Troy were laid--and saw it in its most
attractive aspect.  Wherefore, why should we worry?

Two other passengers ran the blockade successfully last night.  So we
learned this morning.  They slipped away so quietly that they were not
missed from the ship for several hours.  They had the hardihood to march
into the Piraeus in the early dusk and hire a carriage.  They ran some
danger of adding two or three months' imprisonment to the other novelties
of their Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.  I admire "cheek."--[Quotation
from the Pilgrims.]--But they went and came safely, and never walked a
step.



CHAPTER XXXIII.

From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw
little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by
three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and
deserted--a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all
Greece in these latter ages.  We saw no ploughed fields, very few
villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and
hardly ever an isolated house.  Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert,
without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently.  What supports
its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, furnish the
most extravagant contrast to be found in history.  George I., an infant
of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the
places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and
generals of the Golden Age of Greece.  The fleets that were the wonder of
the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of
fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that performed such miracles of
valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day.  The
classic Illyssus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian
wealth and greatness.  The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand
souls, and there is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them
to furnish forty millions and be liberal about it.  Under King Otho the
revenues of the State were five millions of dollars--raised from a tax
of one-tenth of all the agricultural products of the land (which tenth
the farmer had to bring to the royal granaries on pack-mules any
distance not exceeding six leagues) and from extravagant taxes on trade
and commerce.  Out of that five millions the small tyrant tried to keep
an army of ten thousand men, pay all the hundreds of useless Grand
Equerries in Waiting, First Grooms of the Bedchamber, Lord High
Chancellors of the Exploded Exchequer, and all the other absurdities
which these puppy-kingdoms indulge in, in imitation of the great
monarchies; and in addition he set about building a white marble palace
to cost about five millions itself. The result was, simply: ten into
five goes no times and none over.  All these things could not be done
with five millions, and Otho fell into trouble.

The Greek throne, with its unpromising adjuncts of a ragged population of
ingenious rascals who were out of employment eight months in the year
because there was little for them to borrow and less to confiscate, and a
waste of barren hills and weed-grown deserts, went begging for a good
while.  It was offered to one of Victoria's sons, and afterwards to
various other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and were out of
business, but they all had the charity to decline the dreary honor, and
veneration enough for Greece's ancient greatness to refuse to mock her
sorrowful rags and dirt with a tinsel throne in this day of her
humiliation--till they came to this young Danish George, and he took it.
He has finished the splendid palace I saw in the radiant moonlight the
other night, and is doing many other things for the salvation of Greece,
they say.

We sailed through the barren Archipelago, and into the narrow channel
they sometimes call the Dardanelles and sometimes the Hellespont.  This
part of the country is rich in historic reminiscences, and poor as Sahara
in every thing else.  For instance, as we approached the Dardanelles, we
coasted along the Plains of Troy and past the mouth of the Scamander; we
saw where Troy had stood (in the distance,) and where it does not stand
now--a city that perished when the world was young.  The poor Trojans are
all dead, now.  They were born too late to see Noah's ark, and died too
soon to see our menagerie.  We saw where Agamemnon's fleets rendezvoused,
and away inland a mountain which the map said was Mount Ida.  Within the
Hellespont we saw where the original first shoddy contract mentioned in
history was carried out, and the "parties of the second part" gently
rebuked by Xerxes.  I speak of the famous bridge of boats which Xerxes
ordered to be built over the narrowest part of the Hellespont (where it
is only two or three miles wide.) A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy
structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the contractors
might have a good effect on the next set, called them out before the army
and had them beheaded.  In the next ten minutes he let a new contract for
the bridge.  It has been observed by ancient writers that the second
bridge was a very good bridge.  Xerxes crossed his host of five millions
of men on it, and if it had not been purposely destroyed, it would
probably have been there yet.  If our Government would rebuke some of our
shoddy contractors occasionally, it might work much good.  In the
Hellespont we saw where Leander and Lord Byron swam across, the one to
see her upon whom his soul's affections were fixed with a devotion that
only death could impair, and the other merely for a flyer, as Jack says.
We had two noted tombs near us, too.  On one shore slept Ajax, and on the
other Hecuba.

We had water batteries and forts on both sides of the Hellespont, flying
the crimson flag of Turkey, with its white crescent, and occasionally a
village, and sometimes a train of camels; we had all these to look at
till we entered the broad sea of Marmora, and then the land soon fading
from view, we resumed euchre and whist once more.

We dropped anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn at daylight in the
morning.  Only three or four of us were up to see the great Ottoman
capital.  The passengers do not turn out at unseasonable hours, as they
used to, to get the earliest possible glimpse of strange foreign cities.
They are well over that.  If we were lying in sight of the Pyramids of
Egypt, they would not come on deck until after breakfast, now-a-days.

The Golden Horn is a narrow arm of the sea, which branches from the
Bosporus (a sort of broad river which connects the Marmora and Black
Seas,) and, curving around, divides the city in the middle.  Galata and
Pera are on one side of the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn; Stamboul
(ancient Byzantium) is upon the other.  On the other bank of the Bosporus
is Scutari and other suburbs of Constantinople.  This great city contains
a million inhabitants, but so narrow are its streets, and so crowded
together are its houses, that it does not cover much more than half as
much ground as New York City.  Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or
so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen.  Its
dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads
over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and
there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that
meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental
aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel.
Constantinople makes a noble picture.

But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness.  From
the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it.  The
boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built
for.  It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it
well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the
Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water.
It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a
knife blade at the other.  They make that long sharp end the bow, and you
can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about.  It has two oars,
and sometimes four, and no rudder.  You start to go to a given point and
you run in fifty different directions before you get there.  First one
oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are
going ahead at once.  This kind of boating is calculated to drive an
impatient man mad in a week.  The boatmen are the awkwardest, the
stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without question.

Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus.  People were thicker than
bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the
outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning
costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils
could conceive of.  There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged
in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged
diabolism too fantastic to be attempted.  No two men were dressed alike.
It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes--every struggling
throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts.  Some
patriarchs wore awful turbans, but the grand mass of the infidel horde
wore the fiery red skull-cap they call a fez.  All the remainder of the
raiment they indulged in was utterly indescribable.

The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, closets--any thing
you please to call them--on the first floor.  The Turks sit cross-legged
in them, and work and trade and smoke long pipes, and smell like--like
Turks.  That covers the ground.  Crowding the narrow streets in front of
them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing; and
wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, almost;
vagabonds driving laden asses; porters carrying dry-goods boxes as large
as cottages on their backs; peddlers of grapes, hot corn, pumpkin seeds,
and a hundred other things, yelling like fiends; and sleeping happily,
comfortably, serenely, among the hurrying feet, are the famed dogs of
Constantinople; drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women,
draped from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound
about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, shadowy
notion of their features.  Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched
aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have
looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and
thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the
Crucifixion.  A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to
see once--not oftener.

And then there was the goose-rancher--a fellow who drove a hundred geese
before him about the city, and tried to sell them.  He had a pole ten
feet long, with a crook in the end of it, and occasionally a goose would
branch out from the flock and make a lively break around the corner, with
wings half lifted and neck stretched to its utmost.  Did the
goose-merchant get excited?  No.  He took his pole and reached after
that goose with unspeakable sang froid--took a hitch round his neck, and
"yanked" him back to his place in the flock without an effort.  He
steered his geese with that stick as easily as another man would steer a
yawl.  A few hours afterward we saw him sitting on a stone at a corner,
in the midst of the turmoil, sound asleep in the sun, with his geese
squatting around him, or dodging out of the way of asses and men.  We
came by again, within the hour, and he was taking account of stock, to
see whether any of his flock had strayed or been stolen.  The way he did
it was unique. He put the end of his stick within six or eight inches of
a stone wall, and made the geese march in single file between it and the
wall.  He counted them as they went by.  There was no dodging that
arrangement.

If you want dwarfs--I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity--go to
Genoa.  If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan.
There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy, but it did seem to me that in
Milan the crop was luxuriant.  If you would see a fair average style of
assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States.
But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human
monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople.  A beggar in Naples who
can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one
shapeless nail on it, has a fortune--but such an exhibition as that would
not provoke any notice in Constantinople.  The man would starve.  Who
would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters
that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities
in the gutters of Stamboul?  O, wretched impostor!  How could he stand
against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek?
How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow?
Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each
hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty?
Bismillah!  The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud.  The truly
gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.

That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so
disposed as to command the most striking effect--one natural leg, and two
long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else's
fore-arm.  Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose
face was the color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted
like a lava-flow--and verily so tumbled and distorted were his features
that no man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his
cheek-bones. In Stamboul was a man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly
long body, legs eight inches long and feet like snow-shoes.  He traveled
on those feet and his hands, and was as sway-backed as if the Colossus
of Rhodes had been riding him.  Ah, a beggar has to have exceedingly
good points to make a living in Constantinople.  A blue-faced man, who
had nothing to offer except that he had been blown up in a mine, would
be regarded as a rank impostor, and a mere damaged soldier on crutches
would never make a cent.  It would pay him to get apiece of his head
taken off, and cultivate a wen like a carpet sack.

The Mosque of St. Sophia is the chief lion of Constantinople.  You must
get a firman and hurry there the first thing.  We did that.  We did not
get a firman, but we took along four or five francs apiece, which is much
the same thing.

I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia.  I suppose I lack
appreciation.  We will let it go at that.  It is the rustiest old barn in
heathendom.  I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from
the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a
mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the
land.  They made me take off my boots and walk into the place in my
stocking-feet.  I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a
complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more
than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting my boots off that night, and
even then some Christian hide peeled off with them.  I abate not a single
boot-jack.

St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old,
and unsightly enough to be very, very much older.  Its immense dome is
said to be more wonderful than St. Peter's, but its dirt is much more
wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it.  The church has a
hundred and seventy pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly
marbles of various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baalbec,
Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, ugly and repulsive.
They were a thousand years old when this church was new, and then the
contrast must have been ghastly--if Justinian's architects did not trim
them any.  The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous
inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as
glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are
all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every where by a web of
ropes that depend from the dizzy height of the dome, and suspend
countless dingy, coarse oil lamps, and ostrich-eggs, six or seven feet
above the floor.  Squatting and sitting in groups, here and there and far
and near, were ragged Turks reading books, hearing sermons, or receiving
lessons like children.  and in fifty places were more of the same sort
bowing and straightening up, bowing again and getting down to kiss the
earth, muttering prayers the while, and keeping up their gymnastics till
they ought to have been tired, if they were not.

Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; every where
were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing touching or beautiful
about it; every where were those groups of fantastic pagans; overhead the
gaudy mosaics and the web of lamp-ropes--nowhere was there any thing to
win one's love or challenge his admiration.

The people who go into ecstasies over St. Sophia must surely get them out
of the guide-book (where every church is spoken of as being "considered
by good judges to be the most marvelous structure, in many respects, that
the world has ever seen.")  Or else they are those old connoisseurs from
the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a
fresco and a fire-plug and from that day forward feel privileged to void
their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and architecture forever
more.

We visited the Dancing Dervishes.  There were twenty-one of them.  They
wore a long, light-colored loose robe that hung to their heels.  Each in
his turn went up to the priest (they were all within a large circular
railing) and bowed profoundly and then went spinning away deliriously and
took his appointed place in the circle, and continued to spin.  When all
had spun themselves to their places, they were about five or six feet
apart--and so situated, the entire circle of spinning pagans spun itself
three separate times around the room.  It took twenty-five minutes to do
it.  They spun on the left foot, and kept themselves going by passing the
right rapidly before it and digging it against the waxed floor.  Some of
them made incredible "time."  Most of them spun around forty times in a
minute, and one artist averaged about sixty-one times a minute, and kept
it up during the whole twenty-five.  His robe filled with air and stood
out all around him like a balloon.

They made no noise of any kind, and most of them tilted their heads back
and closed their eyes, entranced with a sort of devotional ecstacy.
There was a rude kind of music, part of the time, but the musicians were
not visible.  None but spinners were allowed within the circle.  A man
had to either spin or stay outside.  It was about as barbarous an
exhibition as we have witnessed yet.  Then sick persons came and lay
down, and beside them women laid their sick children (one a babe at the
breast,) and the patriarch of the Dervishes walked upon their bodies.  He
was supposed to cure their diseases by trampling upon their breasts or
backs or standing on the back of their necks.  This is well enough for a
people who think all their affairs are made or marred by viewless spirits
of the air--by giants, gnomes, and genii--and who still believe, to this
day, all the wild tales in the Arabian Nights.  Even so an intelligent
missionary tells me.

We visited the Thousand and One Columns.  I do not know what it was
originally intended for, but they said it was built for a reservoir.  It
is situated in the centre of Constantinople.  You go down a flight of
stone steps in the middle of a barren place, and there you are.  You are
forty feet under ground, and in the midst of a perfect wilderness of
tall, slender, granite columns, of Byzantine architecture.  Stand where
you would, or change your position as often as you pleased, you were
always a centre from which radiated a dozen long archways and colonnades
that lost themselves in distance and the sombre twilight of the place.
This old dried-up reservoir is occupied by a few ghostly silk-spinners
now, and one of them showed me a cross cut high up in one of the pillars.
I suppose he meant me to understand that the institution was there before
the Turkish occupation, and I thought he made a remark to that effect;
but he must have had an impediment in his speech, for I did not
understand him.

We took off our shoes and went into the marble mausoleum of the Sultan
Mahmoud, the neatest piece of architecture, inside, that I have seen
lately.  Mahmoud's tomb was covered with a black velvet pall, which was
elaborately embroidered with silver; it stood within a fancy silver
railing; at the sides and corners were silver candlesticks that would
weigh more than a hundred pounds, and they supported candles as large as
a man's leg; on the top of the sarcophagus was a fez, with a handsome
diamond ornament upon it, which an attendant said cost a hundred thousand
pounds, and lied like a Turk when he said it.  Mahmoud's whole family
were comfortably planted around him.

We went to the great Bazaar in Stamboul, of course, and I shall not
describe it further than to say it is a monstrous hive of little shops
--thousands, I should say--all under one roof, and cut up into innumerable
little blocks by narrow streets which are arched overhead.  One street is
devoted to a particular kind of merchandise, another to another, and so
on.

When you wish to buy a pair of shoes you have the swing of the whole
street--you do not have to walk yourself down hunting stores in different
localities.  It is the same with silks, antiquities, shawls, etc.  The
place is crowded with people all the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern
fabrics are lavishly displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of
Stamboul is one of the sights that are worth seeing.  It is full of life,
and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters,
dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking
and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces
--and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great
Bazaar, is something which smells good.



CHAPTER XXXIV.

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but
morals and whiskey are scarce.  The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to
drink.  Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral.  They say
the Sultan has eight hundred wives.  This almost amounts to bigamy.  It
makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in
Turkey.  We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.

Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their
parents, but not publicly.  The great slave marts we have all read so
much about--where tender young girls were stripped for inspection, and
criticised and discussed just as if they were horses at an agricultural
fair--no longer exist.  The exhibition and the sales are private now.
Stocks are up, just at present, partly because of a brisk demand created
by the recent return of the Sultan's suite from the courts of Europe;
partly on account of an unusual abundance of bread-stuffs, which leaves
holders untortured by hunger and enables them to hold back for high
prices; and partly because buyers are too weak to bear the market, while
sellers are amply prepared to bull it.  Under these circumstances, if the
American metropolitan newspapers were published here in Constantinople,
their next commercial report would read about as follows, I suppose:

                        SLAVE GIRL MARKET REPORT.

     "Best brands Circassians, crop of 1850, L200; 1852, L250; 1854,
     L300.  Best brands Georgian, none in market; second quality, 1851,
     L180.  Nineteen fair to middling Wallachian girls offered at L130 @
     150, but no takers; sixteen prime A 1 sold in small lots to close
     out--terms private.

     "Sales of one lot Circassians, prime to good, 1852 to 1854, at L240
     @ 242, buyer 30; one forty-niner--damaged--at L23, seller ten, no
     deposit.  Several Georgians, fancy brands, 1852, changed hands to
     fill orders.  The Georgians now on hand are mostly last year's crop,
     which was unusually poor.  The new crop is a little backward, but
     will be coming in shortly.  As regards its quantity and quality, the
     accounts are most encouraging.  In this connection we can safely
     say, also, that the new crop of Circassians is looking extremely
     well.  His Majesty the Sultan has already sent in large orders for
     his new harem, which will be finished within a fortnight, and this
     has naturally strengthened the market and given Circassian stock a
     strong upward tendency.  Taking advantage of the inflated market,
     many of our shrewdest operators are selling short.  There are hints
     of a "corner" on Wallachians.

     "There is nothing new in Nubians.  Slow sale.

     "Eunuchs--None offering; however, large cargoes are expected from
     Egypt today."


I think the above would be about the style of the commercial report.
Prices are pretty high now, and holders firm; but, two or three years
ago, parents in a starving condition brought their young daughters down
here and sold them for even twenty and thirty dollars, when they could do
no better, simply to save themselves and the girls from dying of want.
It is sad to think of so distressing a thing as this, and I for one am
sincerely glad the prices are up again.

Commercial morals, especially, are bad.  There is no gainsaying that.
Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only in attending church
regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten commandments
all the balance of the week.  It comes natural to them to lie and cheat
in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they
arrive at perfection.  In recommending his son to a merchant as a
valuable salesman, a father does not say he is a nice, moral, upright
boy, and goes to Sunday School and is honest, but he says, "This boy is
worth his weight in broad pieces of a hundred--for behold, he will cheat
whomsoever hath dealings with him, and from the Euxine to the waters of
Marmora there abideth not so gifted a liar!"  How is that for a
recommendation?  The Missionaries tell me that they hear encomiums like
that passed upon people every day.  They say of a person they admire,
"Ah, he is a charming swindler, and a most exquisite liar!"

Every body lies and cheats--every body who is in business, at any rate.
Even foreigners soon have to come down to the custom of the country, and
they do not buy and sell long in Constantinople till they lie and cheat
like a Greek.  I say like a Greek, because the Greeks are called the
worst transgressors in this line.  Several Americans long resident in
Constantinople contend that most Turks are pretty trustworthy, but few
claim that the Greeks have any virtues that a man can discover--at least
without a fire assay.

I am half willing to believe that the celebrated dogs of Constantinople
have been misrepresented--slandered.  I have always been led to suppose
that they were so thick in the streets that they blocked the way; that
they moved about in organized companies, platoons and regiments, and took
what they wanted by determined and ferocious assault; and that at night
they drowned all other sounds with their terrible howlings.  The dogs I
see here can not be those I have read of.

I find them every where, but not in strong force.  The most I have found
together has been about ten or twenty.  And night or day a fair
proportion of them were sound asleep.  Those that were not asleep always
looked as if they wanted to be.  I never saw such utterly wretched,
starving, sad-visaged, broken-hearted looking curs in my life.  It seemed
a grim satire to accuse such brutes as these of taking things by force of
arms.  They hardly seemed to have strength enough or ambition enough to
walk across the street--I do not know that I have seen one walk that far
yet.  They are mangy and bruised and mutilated, and often you see one
with the hair singed off him in such wide and well defined tracts that he
looks like a map of the new Territories.  They are the sorriest beasts
that breathe--the most abject--the most pitiful.  In their faces is a
settled expression of melancholy, an air of hopeless despondency.  The
hairless patches on a scalded dog are preferred by the fleas of
Constantinople to a wider range on a healthier dog; and the exposed
places suit the fleas exactly.  I saw a dog of this kind start to nibble
at a flea--a fly attracted his attention, and he made a snatch at him;
the flea called for him once more, and that forever unsettled him; he
looked sadly at his flea-pasture, then sadly looked at his bald spot.
Then he heaved a sigh and dropped his head resignedly upon his paws.  He
was not equal to the situation.

The dogs sleep in the streets, all over the city.  From one end of the
street to the other, I suppose they will average about eight or ten to a
block.  Sometimes, of course, there are fifteen or twenty to a block.
They do not belong to any body, and they seem to have no close personal
friendships among each other.  But they district the city themselves, and
the dogs of each district, whether it be half a block in extent, or ten
blocks, have to remain within its bounds.  Woe to a dog if he crosses the
line!  His neighbors would snatch the balance of his hair off in a
second.  So it is said.  But they don't look it.

They sleep in the streets these days.  They are my compass--my guide.
When I see the dogs sleep placidly on, while men, sheep, geese, and all
moving things turn out and go around them, I know I am not in the great
street where the hotel is, and must go further.  In the Grand Rue the
dogs have a sort of air of being on the lookout--an air born of being
obliged to get out of the way of many carriages every day--and that
expression one recognizes in a moment.  It does not exist upon the face
of any dog without the confines of that street.  All others sleep
placidly and keep no watch.  They would not move, though the Sultan
himself passed by.

In one narrow street (but none of them are wide) I saw three dogs lying
coiled up, about a foot or two apart.  End to end they lay, and so they
just bridged the street neatly, from gutter to gutter.  A drove of a
hundred sheep came along.  They stepped right over the dogs, the rear
crowding the front, impatient to get on.  The dogs looked lazily up,
flinched a little when the impatient feet of the sheep touched their raw
backs--sighed, and lay peacefully down again.  No talk could be plainer
than that.  So some of the sheep jumped over them and others scrambled
between, occasionally chipping a leg with their sharp hoofs, and when the
whole flock had made the trip, the dogs sneezed a little, in the cloud of
dust, but never budged their bodies an inch.  I thought I was lazy, but I
am a steam-engine compared to a Constantinople dog.  But was not that a
singular scene for a city of a million inhabitants?

These dogs are the scavengers of the city.  That is their official
position, and a hard one it is.  However, it is their protection.  But
for their usefulness in partially cleansing these terrible streets, they
would not be tolerated long.  They eat any thing and every thing that
comes in their way, from melon rinds and spoiled grapes up through all
the grades and species of dirt and refuse to their own dead friends and
relatives--and yet they are always lean, always hungry, always
despondent.  The people are loath to kill them--do not kill them, in
fact.  The Turks have an innate antipathy to taking the life of any dumb
animal, it is said.  But they do worse.  They hang and kick and stone and
scald these wretched creatures to the very verge of death, and then leave
them to live and suffer.

Once a Sultan proposed to kill off all the dogs here, and did begin the
work--but the populace raised such a howl of horror about it that the
massacre was stayed.  After a while, he proposed to remove them all to an
island in the Sea of Marmora.  No objection was offered, and a ship-load
or so was taken away.  But when it came to be known that somehow or other
the dogs never got to the island, but always fell overboard in the night
and perished, another howl was raised and the transportation scheme was
dropped.

So the dogs remain in peaceable possession of the streets.  I do not say
that they do not howl at night, nor that they do not attack people who
have not a red fez on their heads.  I only say that it would be mean for
me to accuse them of these unseemly things who have not seen them do them
with my own eyes or heard them with my own ears.

I was a little surprised to see Turks and Greeks playing newsboy right
here in the mysterious land where the giants and genii of the Arabian
Nights once dwelt--where winged horses and hydra-headed dragons guarded
enchanted castles--where Princes and Princesses flew through the air on
carpets that obeyed a mystic talisman--where cities whose houses were
made of precious stones sprang up in a night under the hand of the
magician, and where busy marts were suddenly stricken with a spell and
each citizen lay or sat, or stood with weapon raised or foot advanced,
just as he was, speechless and motionless, till time had told a hundred
years!

It was curious to see newsboys selling papers in so dreamy a land as
that.  And, to say truly, it is comparatively a new thing here.  The
selling of newspapers had its birth in Constantinople about a year ago,
and was a child of the Prussian and Austrian war.

There is one paper published here in the English language--The Levant
Herald--and there are generally a number of Greek and a few French papers
rising and falling, struggling up and falling again.  Newspapers are not
popular with the Sultan's Government.  They do not understand journalism.
The proverb says, "The unknown is always great."  To the court, the
newspaper is a mysterious and rascally institution.  They know what a
pestilence is, because they have one occasionally that thins the people
out at the rate of two thousand a day, and they regard a newspaper as a
mild form of pestilence.  When it goes astray, they suppress it--pounce
upon it without warning, and throttle it.  When it don't go astray for a
long time, they get suspicious and throttle it anyhow, because they think
it is hatching deviltry.  Imagine the Grand Vizier in solemn council with
the magnates of the realm, spelling his way through the hated newspaper,
and finally delivering his profound decision: "This thing means mischief
--it is too darkly, too suspiciously inoffensive--suppress it!  Warn the
publisher that we can not have this sort of thing: put the editor in
prison!"

The newspaper business has its inconveniences in Constantinople.  Two
Greek papers and one French one were suppressed here within a few days of
each other.  No victories of the Cretans are allowed to be printed.  From
time to time the Grand Vizier sends a notice to the various editors that
the Cretan insurrection is entirely suppressed, and although that editor
knows better, he still has to print the notice.  The Levant Herald is too
fond of speaking praisefully of Americans to be popular with the Sultan,
who does not relish our sympathy with the Cretans, and therefore that
paper has to be particularly circumspect in order to keep out of trouble.
Once the editor, forgetting the official notice in his paper that the
Cretans were crushed out, printed a letter of a very different tenor,
from the American Consul in Crete, and was fined two hundred and fifty
dollars for it.  Shortly he printed another from the same source and was
imprisoned three months for his pains.  I think I could get the assistant
editorship of the Levant Herald, but I am going to try to worry along
without it.

To suppress a paper here involves the ruin of the publisher, almost.  But
in Naples I think they speculate on misfortunes of that kind.  Papers are
suppressed there every day, and spring up the next day under a new name.
During the ten days or a fortnight we staid there one paper was murdered
and resurrected twice.  The newsboys are smart there, just as they are
elsewhere.  They take advantage of popular weaknesses.  When they find
they are not likely to sell out, they approach a citizen mysteriously,
and say in a low voice--"Last copy, sir: double price; paper just been
suppressed!"  The man buys it, of course, and finds nothing in it.  They
do say--I do not vouch for it--but they do say that men sometimes print a
vast edition of a paper, with a ferociously seditious article in it,
distribute it quickly among the newsboys, and clear out till the
Government's indignation cools.  It pays well.  Confiscation don't amount
to any thing.  The type and presses are not worth taking care of.

There is only one English newspaper in Naples.  It has seventy
subscribers.  The publisher is getting rich very deliberately--very
deliberately indeed.

I never shall want another Turkish lunch.  The cooking apparatus was in
the little lunch room, near the bazaar, and it was all open to the
street.  The cook was slovenly, and so was the table, and it had no cloth
on it.  The fellow took a mass of sausage meat and coated it round a wire
and laid it on a charcoal fire to cook.  When it was done, he laid it
aside and a dog walked sadly in and nipped it.  He smelt it first, and
probably recognized the remains of a friend.  The cook took it away from
him and laid it before us.  Jack said, "I pass"--he plays euchre
sometimes--and we all passed in turn.  Then the cook baked a broad, flat,
wheaten cake, greased it well with the sausage, and started towards us
with it.  It dropped in the dirt, and he picked it up and polished it on
his breeches, and laid it before us.  Jack said, "I pass."  We all
passed.  He put some eggs in a frying pan, and stood pensively prying
slabs of meat from between his teeth with a fork.  Then he used the fork
to turn the eggs with--and brought them along.  Jack said "Pass again."
All followed suit.  We did not know what to do, and so we ordered a new
ration of sausage.  The cook got out his wire, apportioned a proper
amount of sausage-meat, spat it on his hands and fell to work!  This
time, with one accord, we all passed out.  We paid and left.  That is
all I learned about Turkish lunches.  A Turkish lunch is good, no doubt,
but it has its little drawbacks.

When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want
a tourist for breakfast.  For years and years I have dreamed of the
wonders of the Turkish bath; for years and years I have promised myself
that I would yet enjoy one.  Many and many a time, in fancy, I have lain
in the marble bath, and breathed the slumbrous fragrance of Eastern
spices that filled the air; then passed through a weird and complicated
system of pulling and hauling, and drenching and scrubbing, by a gang of
naked savages who loomed vast and vaguely through the steaming mists,
like demons; then rested for a while on a divan fit for a king; then
passed through another complex ordeal, and one more fearful than the
first; and, finally, swathed in soft fabrics, been conveyed to a princely
saloon and laid on a bed of eider down, where eunuchs, gorgeous of
costume, fanned me while I drowsed and dreamed, or contentedly gazed at
the rich hangings of the apartment, the soft carpets, the sumptuous
furniture, the pictures, and drank delicious coffee, smoked the soothing
narghili, and dropped, at the last, into tranquil repose, lulled by
sensuous odors from unseen censers, by the gentle influence of the
narghili's Persian tobacco, and by the music of fountains that
counterfeited the pattering of summer rain.

That was the picture, just as I got it from incendiary books of travel.
It was a poor, miserable imposture.  The reality is no more like it than
the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden.  They received me in a great
court, paved with marble slabs; around it were broad galleries, one above
another, carpeted with seedy matting, railed with unpainted balustrades,
and furnished with huge rickety chairs, cushioned with rusty old
mattresses, indented with impressions left by the forms of nine
successive generations of men who had reposed upon them.  The place was
vast, naked, dreary; its court a barn, its galleries stalls for human
horses.  The cadaverous, half nude varlets that served in the
establishment had nothing of poetry in their appearance, nothing of
romance, nothing of Oriental splendor.  They shed no entrancing odors
--just the contrary.  Their hungry eyes and their lank forms continually
suggested one glaring, unsentimental fact--they wanted what they term in
California "a square meal."

I went into one of the racks and undressed.  An unclean starveling
wrapped a gaudy table-cloth about his loins, and hung a white rag over my
shoulders.  If I had had a tub then, it would have come natural to me to
take in washing.  I was then conducted down stairs into the wet, slippery
court, and the first things that attracted my attention were my heels.
My fall excited no comment.  They expected it, no doubt.  It belonged in
the list of softening, sensuous influences peculiar to this home of
Eastern luxury.  It was softening enough, certainly, but its application
was not happy.  They now gave me a pair of wooden clogs--benches in
miniature, with leather straps over them to confine my feet (which they
would have done, only I do not wear No. 13s.) These things dangled
uncomfortably by the straps when I lifted up my feet, and came down in
awkward and unexpected places when I put them on the floor again, and
sometimes turned sideways and wrenched my ankles out of joint.  However,
it was all Oriental luxury, and I did what I could to enjoy it.

They put me in another part of the barn and laid me on a stuffy sort of
pallet, which was not made of cloth of gold, or Persian shawls, but was
merely the unpretending sort of thing I have seen in the negro quarters
of Arkansas.  There was nothing whatever in this dim marble prison but
five more of these biers.  It was a very solemn place.  I expected that
the spiced odors of Araby were going to steal over my senses now, but
they did not.  A copper-colored skeleton, with a rag around him, brought
me a glass decanter of water, with a lighted tobacco pipe in the top of
it, and a pliant stem a yard long, with a brass mouth-piece to it.

It was the famous "narghili" of the East--the thing the Grand Turk smokes
in the pictures.  This began to look like luxury.  I took one blast at
it, and it was sufficient; the smoke went in a great volume down into my
stomach, my lungs, even into the uttermost parts of my frame.  I exploded
one mighty cough, and it was as if Vesuvius had let go.  For the next
five minutes I smoked at every pore, like a frame house that is on fire
on the inside.  Not any more narghili for me.  The smoke had a vile
taste, and the taste of a thousand infidel tongues that remained on that
brass mouthpiece was viler still.  I was getting discouraged.  Whenever,
hereafter, I see the cross-legged Grand Turk smoking his narghili, in
pretended bliss, on the outside of a paper of Connecticut tobacco, I
shall know him for the shameless humbug he is.

This prison was filled with hot air.  When I had got warmed up
sufficiently to prepare me for a still warmer temperature, they took me
where it was--into a marble room, wet, slippery and steamy, and laid me
out on a raised platform in the centre.  It was very warm.  Presently my
man sat me down by a tank of hot water, drenched me well, gloved his hand
with a coarse mitten, and began to polish me all over with it.  I began
to smell disagreeably.  The more he polished the worse I smelt.  It was
alarming.  I said to him:

"I perceive that I am pretty far gone.  It is plain that I ought to be
buried without any unnecessary delay.  Perhaps you had better go after my
friends at once, because the weather is warm, and I can not 'keep' long."

He went on scrubbing, and paid no attention.  I soon saw that he was
reducing my size.  He bore hard on his mitten, and from under it rolled
little cylinders, like maccaroni.  It could not be dirt, for it was too
white.  He pared me down in this way for a long time.  Finally I said:

"It is a tedious process.  It will take hours to trim me to the size you
want me; I will wait; go and borrow a jack-plane."

He paid no attention at all.

After a while he brought a basin, some soap, and something that seemed to
be the tail of a horse.  He made up a prodigious quantity of soap-suds,
deluged me with them from head to foot, without warning me to shut my
eyes, and then swabbed me viciously with the horse-tail.  Then he left me
there, a snowy statue of lather, and went away.  When I got tired of
waiting I went and hunted him up.  He was propped against the wall, in
another room, asleep.  I woke him.  He was not disconcerted.  He took me
back and flooded me with hot water, then turbaned my head, swathed me
with dry table-cloths, and conducted me to a latticed chicken-coop in one
of the galleries, and pointed to one of those Arkansas beds.  I mounted
it, and vaguely expected the odors of Araby a gain.  They did not come.

The blank, unornamented coop had nothing about it of that oriental
voluptuousness one reads of so much.  It was more suggestive of the
county hospital than any thing else.  The skinny servitor brought a
narghili, and I got him to take it out again without wasting any time
about it.  Then he brought the world-renowned Turkish coffee that poets
have sung so rapturously for many generations, and I seized upon it as
the last hope that was left of my old dreams of Eastern luxury.  It was
another fraud.  Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my
lips, Turkish coffee is the worst.  The cup is small, it is smeared with
grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in
taste.  The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch
deep.  This goes down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way,
and produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and coughing
for an hour.

Here endeth my experience of the celebrated Turkish bath, and here also
endeth my dream of the bliss the mortal revels in who passes through it.
It is a malignant swindle.  The man who enjoys it is qualified to enjoy
any thing that is repulsive to sight or sense, and he that can invest it
with a charm of poetry is able to do the same with any thing else in the
world that is tedious, and wretched, and dismal, and nasty.



CHAPTER XXXV.

We left a dozen passengers in Constantinople, and sailed through the
beautiful Bosporus and far up into the Black Sea.  We left them in the
clutches of the celebrated Turkish guide, "FAR-AWAY MOSES," who will
seduce them into buying a ship-load of ottar of roses, splendid Turkish
vestments, and ail manner of curious things they can never have any use
for.  Murray's invaluable guide-books have mentioned 'Far-away Moses'
name, and he is a made man.  He rejoices daily in the fact that he is a
recognized celebrity.  However, we can not alter our established customs
to please the whims of guides; we can not show partialities this late in
the day.  Therefore, ignoring this fellow's brilliant fame, and ignoring
the fanciful name he takes such pride in, we called him Ferguson, just as
we had done with all other guides.  It has kept him in a state of
smothered exasperation all the time.  Yet we meant him no harm.  After he
has gotten himself up regardless of expense, in showy, baggy trowsers,
yellow, pointed slippers, fiery fez, silken jacket of blue, voluminous
waist-sash of fancy Persian stuff filled with a battery of silver-mounted
horse-pistols, and has strapped on his terrible scimitar, he considers it
an unspeakable humiliation to be called Ferguson.  It can not be helped.
All guides are Fergusons to us.  We can not master their dreadful foreign
names.

Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or any where
else.  But we ought to be pleased with it, nevertheless, for we have been
in no country yet where we have been so kindly received, and where we
felt that to be Americans was a sufficient visa for our passports.  The
moment the anchor was down, the Governor of the town immediately
dispatched an officer on board to inquire if he could be of any
assistance to us, and to invite us to make ourselves at home in
Sebastopol!  If you know Russia, you know that this was a wild stretch of
hospitality.  They are usually so suspicious of strangers that they worry
them excessively with the delays and aggravations incident to a
complicated passport system.  Had we come from any other country we could
not have had permission to enter Sebastopol and leave again under three
days--but as it was, we were at liberty to go and come when and where we
pleased.  Every body in Constantinople warned us to be very careful about
our passports, see that they were strictly 'en regle', and never to
mislay them for a moment: and they told us of numerous instances of
Englishmen and others who were delayed days, weeks, and even months, in
Sebastopol, on account of trifling informalities in their passports, and
for which they were not to blame.  I had lost my passport, and was
traveling under my room-mate's, who stayed behind in Constantinople to
await our return.  To read the description of him in that passport and
then look at me, any man could see that I was no more like him than I am
like Hercules.  So I went into the harbor of Sebastopol with fear and
trembling--full of a vague, horrible apprehension that I was going to be
found out and hanged.  But all that time my true passport had been
floating gallantly overhead--and behold it was only our flag.  They never
asked us for any other.

We have had a great many Russian and English gentlemen and ladies on
board to-day, and the time has passed cheerfully away.  They were all
happy-spirited people, and I never heard our mother tongue sound so
pleasantly as it did when it fell from those English lips in this far-off
land.  I talked to the Russians a good deal, just to be friendly, and
they talked to me from the same motive; I am sure that both enjoyed the
conversation, but never a word of it either of us understood.  I did most
of my talking to those English people though, and I am sorry we can not
carry some of them along with us.

We have gone whithersoever we chose, to-day, and have met with nothing
but the kindest attentions.  Nobody inquired whether we had any passports
or not.

Several of the officers of the Government have suggested that we take the
ship to a little watering-place thirty miles from here, and pay the
Emperor of Russia a visit.  He is rusticating there.  These officers said
they would take it upon themselves to insure us a cordial reception.
They said if we would go, they would not only telegraph the Emperor, but
send a special courier overland to announce our coming.  Our time is so
short, though, and more especially our coal is so nearly out, that we
judged it best to forego the rare pleasure of holding social intercourse
with an Emperor.

Ruined Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sebastopol.  Here, you
may look in whatsoever direction you please, and your eye encounters
scarcely any thing but ruin, ruin, ruin!--fragments of houses, crumbled
walls, torn and ragged hills, devastation every where!  It is as if a
mighty earthquake had spent all its terrible forces upon this one little
spot.  For eighteen long months the storms of war beat upon the helpless
town, and left it at last the saddest wreck that ever the sun has looked
upon.  Not one solitary house escaped unscathed--not one remained
habitable, even.  Such utter and complete ruin one could hardly conceive
of.  The houses had all been solid, dressed stone structures; most of
them were ploughed through and through by cannon balls--unroofed and
sliced down from eaves to foundation--and now a row of them, half a mile
long, looks merely like an endless procession of battered chimneys.  No
semblance of a house remains in such as these.  Some of the larger
buildings had corners knocked off; pillars cut in two; cornices smashed;
holes driven straight through the walls.  Many of these holes are as
round and as cleanly cut as if they had been made with an auger.  Others
are half pierced through, and the clean impression is there in the rock,
as smooth and as shapely as if it were done in putty.  Here and there a
ball still sticks in a wall, and from it iron tears trickle down and
discolor the stone.

The battle-fields were pretty close together.  The Malakoff tower is on
a hill which is right in the edge of the town.  The Redan was within
rifle-shot of the Malakoff; Inkerman was a mile away; and Balaklava
removed but an hour's ride.  The French trenches, by which they
approached and invested the Malakoff were carried so close under its
sloping sides that one might have stood by the Russian guns and tossed a
stone into them. Repeatedly, during three terrible days, they swarmed up
the little Malakoff hill, and were beaten back with terrible slaughter.
Finally, they captured the place, and drove the Russians out, who then
tried to retreat into the town, but the English had taken the Redan, and
shut them off with a wall of flame; there was nothing for them to do but
go back and retake the Malakoff or die under its guns.  They did go
back; they took the Malakoff and retook it two or three times, but their
desperate valor could not avail, and they had to give up at last.

These fearful fields, where such tempests of death used to rage, are
peaceful enough now; no sound is heard, hardly a living thing moves about
them, they are lonely and silent--their desolation is complete.

There was nothing else to do, and so every body went to hunting relics.
They have stocked the ship with them.  They brought them from the
Malakoff, from the Redan, Inkerman, Balaklava--every where.  They have
brought cannon balls, broken ramrods, fragments of shell--iron enough to
freight a sloop.  Some have even brought bones--brought them laboriously
from great distances, and were grieved to hear the surgeon pronounce them
only bones of mules and oxen.  I knew Blucher would not lose an
opportunity like this.  He brought a sack full on board and was going for
another.  I prevailed upon him not to go.  He has already turned his
state-room into a museum of worthless trumpery, which he has gathered up
in his travels.  He is labeling his trophies, now.  I picked up one a
while ago, and found it marked "Fragment of a Russian General."  I
carried it out to get a better light upon it--it was nothing but a couple
of teeth and part of the jaw-bone of a horse.  I said with some asperity:

"Fragment of a Russian General!  This is absurd.  Are you never going to
learn any sense?"

He only said: "Go slow--the old woman won't know any different."  [His
aunt.]

This person gathers mementoes with a perfect recklessness, now-a-days;
mixes them all up together, and then serenely labels them without any
regard to truth, propriety, or even plausibility.  I have found him
breaking a stone in two, and labeling half of it "Chunk busted from the
pulpit of Demosthenes," and the other half "Darnick from the Tomb of
Abelard and Heloise."  I have known him to gather up a handful of pebbles
by the roadside, and bring them on board ship and label them as coming
from twenty celebrated localities five hundred miles apart.  I
remonstrate against these outrages upon reason and truth, of course, but
it does no good.  I get the same tranquil, unanswerable reply every time:

"It don't signify--the old woman won't know any different."

Ever since we three or four fortunate ones made the midnight trip to
Athens, it has afforded him genuine satisfaction to give every body in
the ship a pebble from the Mars-hill where St. Paul preached.  He got all
those pebbles on the sea shore, abreast the ship, but professes to have
gathered them from one of our party.  However, it is not of any use for
me to expose the deception--it affords him pleasure, and does no harm to
any body.  He says he never expects to run out of mementoes of St. Paul
as long as he is in reach of a sand-bank.  Well, he is no worse than
others.  I notice that all travelers supply deficiencies in their
collections in the same way.  I shall never have any confidence in such
things again while I live.



CHAPTER XXXVI.

We have got so far east, now--a hundred and fifty-five degrees of
longitude from San Francisco--that my watch can not "keep the hang" of
the time any more.  It has grown discouraged, and stopped.  I think it
did a wise thing.  The difference in time between Sebastopol and the
Pacific coast is enormous.  When it is six o'clock in the morning here,
it is somewhere about week before last in California.  We are excusable
for getting a little tangled as to time.  These distractions and
distresses about the time have worried me so much that I was afraid my
mind was so much affected that I never would have any appreciation of
time again; but when I noticed how handy I was yet about comprehending
when it was dinner-time, a blessed tranquillity settled down upon me, and
I am tortured with doubts and fears no more.

Odessa is about twenty hours' run from Sebastopol, and is the most
northerly port in the Black Sea.  We came here to get coal, principally.
The city has a population of one hundred and thirty-three thousand, and
is growing faster than any other small city out of America.  It is a free
port, and is the great grain mart of this particular part of the world.
Its roadstead is full of ships.  Engineers are at work, now, turning the
open roadstead into a spacious artificial harbor.  It is to be almost
inclosed by massive stone piers, one of which will extend into the sea
over three thousand feet in a straight line.

I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I "raised
the hill" and stood in Odessa for the first time.  It looked just like an
American city; fine, broad streets, and straight as well; low houses,
(two or three stories,) wide, neat, and free from any quaintness of
architectural ornamentation; locust trees bordering the sidewalks (they
call them acacias;) a stirring, business-look about the streets and the
stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and every
thing; yea, and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that was so like a
message from our own dear native land that we could hardly refrain from
shedding a few grateful tears and execrations in the old time-honored
American way.  Look up the street or down the street, this way or that
way, we saw only America!  There was not one thing to remind us that we
were in Russia.  We walked for some little distance, reveling in this
home vision, and then we came upon a church and a hack-driver, and
presto! the illusion vanished!  The church had a slender-spired dome that
rounded inward at its base, and looked like a turnip turned upside down,
and the hackman seemed to be dressed in a long petticoat with out any
hoops.  These things were essentially foreign, and so were the carriages
--but every body knows about these things, and there is no occasion for
my describing them.

We were only to stay here a day and a night and take in coal; we
consulted the guide-books and were rejoiced to know that there were no
sights in Odessa to see; and so we had one good, untrammeled holyday on
our hands, with nothing to do but idle about the city and enjoy
ourselves.  We sauntered through the markets and criticised the fearful
and wonderful costumes from the back country; examined the populace as
far as eyes could do it; and closed the entertainment with an ice-cream
debauch.  We do not get ice-cream every where, and so, when we do, we are
apt to dissipate to excess.  We never cared any thing about ice-cream at
home, but we look upon it with a sort of idolatry now that it is so
scarce in these red-hot climates of the East.

We only found two pieces of statuary, and this was another blessing.  One
was a bronze image of the Duc de Richelieu, grand-nephew of the splendid
Cardinal.  It stood in a spacious, handsome promenade, overlooking the
sea, and from its base a vast flight of stone steps led down to the
harbor--two hundred of them, fifty feet long, and a wide landing at the
bottom of every twenty.  It is a noble staircase, and from a distance the
people toiling up it looked like insects.  I mention this statue and this
stairway because they have their story.  Richelieu founded Odessa
--watched over it with paternal care--labored with a fertile brain and a
wise understanding for its best interests--spent his fortune freely to
the same end--endowed it with a sound prosperity, and one which will yet
make it one of the great cities of the Old World--built this noble
stairway with money from his own private purse--and--.  Well, the people
for whom he had done so much, let him walk down these same steps, one
day, unattended, old, poor, without a second coat to his back; and when,
years afterwards, he died in Sebastopol in poverty and neglect, they
called a meeting, subscribed liberally, and immediately erected this
tasteful monument to his memory, and named a great street after him.
It reminds me of what Robert Burns' mother said when they erected a
stately monument to his memory: "Ah, Robbie, ye asked them for bread and
they hae gi'en ye a stane."

The people of Odessa have warmly recommended us to go and call on the
Emperor, as did the Sebastopolians.  They have telegraphed his Majesty,
and he has signified his willingness to grant us an audience.  So we are
getting up the anchors and preparing to sail to his watering-place.  What
a scratching around there will be, now! what a holding of important
meetings and appointing of solemn committees!--and what a furbishing up
of claw-hammer coats and white silk neck-ties!  As this fearful ordeal we
are about to pass through pictures itself to my fancy in all its dread
sublimity, I begin to feel my fierce desire to converse with a genuine
Emperor cooling down and passing away.  What am I to do with my hands?
What am I to do with my feet?  What in the world am I to do with myself?



CHAPTER XXXVII.

We anchored here at Yalta, Russia, two or three days ago.  To me the
place was a vision of the Sierras.  The tall, gray mountains that back
it, their sides bristling with pines--cloven with ravines--here and there
a hoary rock towering into view--long, straight streaks sweeping down
from the summit to the sea, marking the passage of some avalanche of
former times--all these were as like what one sees in the Sierras as if
the one were a portrait of the other.  The little village of Yalta
nestles at the foot of an amphitheatre which slopes backward and upward
to the wall of hills, and looks as if it might have sunk quietly down to
its present position from a higher elevation.  This depression is covered
with the great parks and gardens of noblemen, and through the mass of
green foliage the bright colors of their palaces bud out here and there
like flowers.  It is a beautiful spot.

We had the United States Consul on board--the Odessa Consul.  We
assembled in the cabin and commanded him to tell us what we must do to be
saved, and tell us quickly.  He made a speech.  The first thing he said
fell like a blight on every hopeful spirit: he had never seen a court
reception.  (Three groans for the Consul.)  But he said he had seen
receptions at the Governor General's in Odessa, and had often listened to
people's experiences of receptions at the Russian and other courts, and
believed he knew very well what sort of ordeal we were about to essay.
(Hope budded again.)  He said we were many; the summer palace was small
--a mere mansion; doubtless we should be received in summer fashion--in the
garden; we would stand in a row, all the gentlemen in swallow-tail coats,
white kids, and white neck-ties, and the ladies in light-colored silks,
or something of that kind; at the proper moment--12 meridian--the
Emperor, attended by his suite arrayed in splendid uniforms, would appear
and walk slowly along the line, bowing to some, and saying two or three
words to others.  At the moment his Majesty appeared, a universal,
delighted, enthusiastic smile ought to break out like a rash among the
passengers--a smile of love, of gratification, of admiration--and with
one accord, the party must begin to bow--not obsequiously, but
respectfully, and with dignity; at the end of fifteen minutes the Emperor
would go in the house, and we could run along home again.  We felt
immensely relieved.  It seemed, in a manner, easy.  There was not a man
in the party but believed that with a little practice he could stand in a
row, especially if there were others along; there was not a man but
believed he could bow without tripping on his coat tail and breaking his
neck; in a word, we came to believe we were equal to any item in the
performance except that complicated smile.  The Consul also said we ought
to draft a little address to the Emperor, and present it to one of his
aides-de-camp, who would forward it to him at the proper time.
Therefore, five gentlemen were appointed to prepare the document, and the
fifty others went sadly smiling about the ship--practicing.  During the
next twelve hours we had the general appearance, somehow, of being at a
funeral, where every body was sorry the death had occurred, but glad it
was over--where every body was smiling, and yet broken-hearted.

A committee went ashore to wait on his Excellency the Governor-General,
and learn our fate.  At the end of three hours of boding suspense, they
came back and said the Emperor would receive us at noon the next day
--would send carriages for us--would hear the address in person.  The Grand
Duke Michael had sent to invite us to his palace also.  Any man could see
that there was an intention here to show that Russia's friendship for
America was so genuine as to render even her private citizens objects
worthy of kindly attentions.

At the appointed hour we drove out three miles, and assembled in the
handsome garden in front of the Emperor's palace.

We formed a circle under the trees before the door, for there was no one
room in the house able to accommodate our three-score persons
comfortably, and in a few minutes the imperial family came out bowing and
smiling, and stood in our midst.  A number of great dignitaries of the
Empire, in undress unit forms, came with them.  With every bow, his
Majesty said a word of welcome.  I copy these speeches.  There is
character in them--Russian character--which is politeness itself, and the
genuine article.  The French are polite, but it is often mere ceremonious
politeness.  A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness, both
of phrase and expression, that compels belief in their sincerity.  As I
was saying, the Czar punctuated his speeches with bows:

"Good morning--I am glad to see you--I am gratified--I am delighted--I am
happy to receive you!"

All took off their hats, and the Consul inflicted the address on him.  He
bore it with unflinching fortitude; then took the rusty-looking document
and handed it to some great officer or other, to be filed away among the
archives of Russia--in the stove.  He thanked us for the address, and
said he was very much pleased to see us, especially as such friendly
relations existed between Russia and the United States.  The Empress said
the Americans were favorites in Russia, and she hoped the Russians were
similarly regarded in America.  These were all the speeches that were
made, and I recommend them to parties who present policemen with gold
watches, as models of brevity and point.  After this the Empress went and
talked sociably (for an Empress) with various ladies around the circle;
several gentlemen entered into a disjointed general conversation with the
Emperor; the Dukes and Princes, Admirals and Maids of Honor dropped into
free-and-easy chat with first one and then another of our party, and
whoever chose stepped forward and spoke with the modest little Grand
Duchess Marie, the Czar's daughter.  She is fourteen years old,
light-haired, blue-eyed, unassuming and pretty.  Every body talks
English.

The Emperor wore a cap, frock coat and pantaloons, all of some kind of
plain white drilling--cotton or linen and sported no jewelry or any
insignia whatever of rank.  No costume could be less ostentatious.  He is
very tall and spare, and a determined-looking man, though a very
pleasant-looking one nevertheless.  It is easy to see that he is kind and
affectionate There is something very noble in his expression when his cap
is off.  There is none of that cunning in his eye that all of us noticed
in Louis Napoleon's.

The Empress and the little Grand Duchess wore simple suits of foulard
(or foulard silk, I don't know which is proper,) with a small blue spot
in it; the dresses were trimmed with blue; both ladies wore broad blue
sashes about their waists; linen collars and clerical ties of muslin;
low-crowned straw-hats trimmed with blue velvet; parasols and
flesh-colored gloves.  The Grand Duchess had no heels on her shoes.  I
do not know this of my own knowledge, but one of our ladies told me so.
I was not looking at her shoes.  I was glad to observe that she wore her
own hair, plaited in thick braids against the back of her head, instead
of the uncomely thing they call a waterfall, which is about as much like
a waterfall as a canvas-covered ham is like a cataract.  Taking the kind
expression that is in the Emperor's face and the gentleness that is in
his young daughter's into consideration, I wondered if it would not tax
the Czar's firmness to the utmost to condemn a supplicating wretch to
misery in the wastes of Siberia if she pleaded for him.  Every time
their eyes met, I saw more and more what a tremendous power that weak,
diffident school-girl could wield if she chose to do it.  Many and many
a time she might rule the Autocrat of Russia, whose lightest word is law
to seventy millions of human beings!  She was only a girl, and she
looked like a thousand others I have seen, but never a girl provoked
such a novel and peculiar interest in me before.  A strange, new
sensation is a rare thing in this hum-drum life, and I had it here.
There was nothing stale or worn out about the thoughts and feelings the
situation and the circumstances created.  It seemed strange--stranger
than I can tell--to think that the central figure in the cluster of men
and women, chatting here under the trees like the most ordinary
individual in the land, was a man who could open his lips and ships
would fly through the waves, locomotives would speed over the plains,
couriers would hurry from village to village, a hundred telegraphs would
flash the word to the four corners of an Empire that stretches its vast
proportions over a seventh part of the habitable globe, and a countless
multitude of men would spring to do his bidding.  I had a sort of vague
desire to examine his hands and see if they were of flesh and blood,
like other men's.  Here was a man who could do this wonderful thing, and
yet if I chose I could knock him down.  The case was plain, but it
seemed preposterous, nevertheless--as preposterous as trying to knock
down a mountain or wipe out a continent.  If this man sprained his
ankle, a million miles of telegraph would carry the news over mountains
--valleys--uninhabited deserts--under the trackless sea--and ten thousand
newspapers would prate of it; if he were grievously ill, all the nations
would know it before the sun rose again; if he dropped lifeless where he
stood, his fall might shake the thrones of half a world!  If I could
have stolen his coat, I would have done it.  When I meet a man like
that, I want something to remember him by.

As a general thing, we have been shown through palaces by some
plush-legged filagreed flunkey or other, who charged a franc for it; but
after talking with the company half an hour, the Emperor of Russia and
his family conducted us all through their mansion themselves.  They made
no charge.  They seemed to take a real pleasure in it.

We spent half an hour idling through the palace, admiring the cosy
apartments and the rich but eminently home-like appointments of the
place, and then the Imperial family bade our party a kind good-bye, and
proceeded to count the spoons.

An invitation was extended to us to visit the palace of the eldest son,
the Crown Prince of Russia, which was near at hand.  The young man was
absent, but the Dukes and Countesses and Princes went over the premises
with us as leisurely as was the case at the Emperor's, and conversation
continued as lively as ever.

It was a little after one o'clock, now.  We drove to the Grand Duke
Michael's, a mile away, in response to his invitation, previously given.

We arrived in twenty minutes from the Emperor's.  It is a lovely place.
The beautiful palace nestles among the grand old groves of the park, the
park sits in the lap of the picturesque crags and hills, and both look
out upon the breezy ocean.  In the park are rustic seats, here and there,
in secluded nooks that are dark with shade; there are rivulets of crystal
water; there are lakelets, with inviting, grassy banks; there are
glimpses of sparkling cascades through openings in the wilderness of
foliage; there are streams of clear water gushing from mimic knots on the
trunks of forest trees; there are miniature marble temples perched upon
gray old crags; there are airy lookouts whence one may gaze upon a broad
expanse of landscape and ocean.  The palace is modeled after the choicest
forms of Grecian architecture, and its wide colonnades surround a central
court that is banked with rare flowers that fill the place with their
fragrance, and in their midst springs a fountain that cools the summer
air, and may possibly breed mosquitoes, but I do not think it does.

The Grand Duke and his Duchess came out, and the presentation ceremonies
were as simple as they had been at the Emperor's.  In a few minutes,
conversation was under way, as before.  The Empress appeared in the
verandah, and the little Grand Duchess came out into the crowd.  They had
beaten us there.  In a few minutes, the Emperor came himself on
horseback.  It was very pleasant.  You can appreciate it if you have ever
visited royalty and felt occasionally that possibly you might be wearing
out your welcome--though as a general thing, I believe, royalty is not
scrupulous about discharging you when it is done with you.

The Grand Duke is the third brother of the Emperor, is about thirty-seven
years old, perhaps, and is the princeliest figure in Russia.  He is even
taller than the Czar, as straight as an Indian, and bears himself like
one of those gorgeous knights we read about in romances of the Crusades.
He looks like a great-hearted fellow who would pitch an enemy into the
river in a moment, and then jump in and risk his life fishing him out
again.  The stories they tell of him show him to be of a brave and
generous nature.  He must have been desirous of proving that Americans
were welcome guests in the imperial palaces of Russia, because he rode
all the way to Yalta and escorted our procession to the Emperor's
himself, and kept his aids scurrying about, clearing the road and
offering assistance wherever it could be needed.  We were rather familiar
with him then, because we did not know who he was.  We recognized him
now, and appreciated the friendly spirit that prompted him to do us a
favor that any other Grand Duke in the world would have doubtless
declined to do.  He had plenty of servitors whom he could have sent, but
he chose to attend to the matter himself.

The Grand Duke was dressed in the handsome and showy uniform of a Cossack
officer.  The Grand Duchess had on a white alpaca robe, with the seams
and gores trimmed with black barb lace, and a little gray hat with a
feather of the same color.  She is young, rather pretty modest and
unpretending, and full of winning politeness.

Our party walked all through the house, and then the nobility escorted
them all over the grounds, and finally brought them back to the palace
about half-past two o'clock to breakfast.  They called it breakfast, but
we would have called it luncheon.  It consisted of two kinds of wine;
tea, bread, cheese, and cold meats, and was served on the centre-tables
in the reception room and the verandahs--anywhere that was convenient;
there was no ceremony.  It was a sort of picnic.  I had heard before that
we were to breakfast there, but Blucher said he believed Baker's boy had
suggested it to his Imperial Highness.  I think not--though it would be
like him.  Baker's boy is the famine-breeder of the ship.  He is always
hungry.  They say he goes about the state-rooms when the passengers are
out, and eats up all the soap.  And they say he eats oakum.  They say he
will eat any thing he can get between meals, but he prefers oakum.  He
does not like oakum for dinner, but he likes it for a lunch, at odd
hours, or any thing that way.  It makes him very disagreeable, because it
makes his breath bad, and keeps his teeth all stuck up with tar.  Baker's
boy may have suggested the breakfast, but I hope he did not.  It went off
well, anyhow.  The illustrious host moved about from place to place, and
helped to destroy the provisions and keep the conversation lively, and
the Grand Duchess talked with the verandah parties and such as had
satisfied their appetites and straggled out from the reception room.

The Grand Duke's tea was delicious.  They give one a lemon to squeeze
into it, or iced milk, if he prefers it.  The former is best.  This tea
is brought overland from China.  It injures the article to transport it
by sea.

When it was time to go, we bade our distinguished hosts good-bye, and
they retired happy and contented to their apartments to count their
spoons.

We had spent the best part of half a day in the home of royalty, and had
been as cheerful and comfortable all the time as we could have been in
the ship.  I would as soon have thought of being cheerful in Abraham's
bosom as in the palace of an Emperor.  I supposed that Emperors were
terrible people.  I thought they never did any thing but wear magnificent
crowns and red velvet dressing-gowns with dabs of wool sewed on them in
spots, and sit on thrones and scowl at the flunkies and the people in the
parquette, and order Dukes and Duchesses off to execution.  I find,
however, that when one is so fortunate as to get behind the scenes and
see them at home and in the privacy of their firesides, they are
strangely like common mortals.  They are pleasanter to look upon then
than they are in their theatrical aspect.  It seems to come as natural to
them to dress and act like other people as it is to put a friend's cedar
pencil in your pocket when you are done using it.  But I can never have
any confidence in the tinsel kings of the theatre after this.  It will be
a great loss.  I used to take such a thrilling pleasure in them.  But,
hereafter, I will turn me sadly away and say;

"This does not answer--this isn't the style of king that I am acquainted
with."

When they swagger around the stage in jeweled crowns and splendid robes,
I shall feel bound to observe that all the Emperors that ever I was
personally acquainted with wore the commonest sort of clothes, and did
not swagger.  And when they come on the stage attended by a vast
body-guard of supes in helmets and tin breastplates, it will be my duty
as well as my pleasure to inform the ignorant that no crowned head of my
acquaintance has a soldier any where about his house or his person.

Possibly it may be thought that our party tarried too long, or did other
improper things, but such was not the case.  The company felt that they
were occupying an unusually responsible position--they were representing
the people of America, not the Government--and therefore they were
careful to do their best to perform their high mission with credit.

On the other hand, the Imperial families, no doubt, considered that in
entertaining us they were more especially entertaining the people of
America than they could by showering attentions on a whole platoon of
ministers plenipotentiary and therefore they gave to the event its
fullest significance, as an expression of good will and friendly feeling
toward the entire country.  We took the kindnesses we received as
attentions thus directed, of course, and not to ourselves as a party.
That we felt a personal pride in being received as the representatives of
a nation, we do not deny; that we felt a national pride in the warm
cordiality of that reception, can not be doubted.

Our poet has been rigidly suppressed, from the time we let go the anchor.
When it was announced that we were going to visit the Emperor of Russia,
the fountains of his great deep were broken up, and he rained ineffable
bosh for four-and-twenty hours.  Our original anxiety as to what we were
going to do with ourselves, was suddenly transformed into anxiety about
what we were going to do with our poet.  The problem was solved at last.
Two alternatives were offered him--he must either swear a dreadful oath
that he would not issue a line of his poetry while he was in the Czar's
dominions, or else remain under guard on board the ship until we were
safe at Constantinople again.  He fought the dilemma long, but yielded at
last.  It was a great deliverance.  Perhaps the savage reader would like
a specimen of his style.  I do not mean this term to be offensive.  I
only use it because "the gentle reader" has been used so often that any
change from it can not but be refreshing:

          "Save us and sanctify us, and finally, then,
          See good provisions we enjoy while we journey to Jerusalem.
          For so man proposes, which it is most true
          And time will wait for none, nor for us too."

The sea has been unusually rough all day.  However, we have had a
lively time of it, anyhow.  We have had quite a run of visitors.  The
Governor-General came, and we received him with a salute of nine guns.
He brought his family with him.  I observed that carpets were spread
from the pier-head to his carriage for him to walk on, though I have
seen him walk there without any carpet when he was not on business.  I
thought may be he had what the accidental insurance people might call an
extra-hazardous polish ("policy" joke, but not above mediocrity,) on his
boots, and wished to protect them, but I examined and could not see that
they were blacked any better than usual.  It may have been that he had
forgotten his carpet, before, but he did not have it with him, anyhow.
He was an exceedingly pleasant old gentleman; we all liked him,
especially Blucher. When he went away, Blucher invited him to come
again and fetch his carpet along.

Prince Dolgorouki and a Grand Admiral or two, whom we had seen yesterday
at the reception, came on board also.  I was a little distant with these
parties, at first, because when I have been visiting Emperors I do not
like to be too familiar with people I only know by reputation, and whose
moral characters and standing in society I can not be thoroughly
acquainted with.  I judged it best to be a little offish, at first.  I
said to myself, Princes and Counts and Grand Admirals are very well, but
they are not Emperors, and one can not be too particular about who he
associates with.

Baron Wrangel came, also.  He used to be Russian Ambassador at
Washington.  I told him I had an uncle who fell down a shaft and broke
himself in two, as much as a year before that.  That was a falsehood, but
then I was not going to let any man eclipse me on surprising adventures,
merely for the want of a little invention.  The Baron is a fine man, and
is said to stand high in the Emperor's confidence and esteem.

Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a boisterous, whole-souled old nobleman, came
with the rest.  He is a man of progress and enterprise--a representative
man of the age.  He is the Chief Director of the railway system of
Russia--a sort of railroad king.  In his line he is making things move
along in this country He has traveled extensively in America.  He says he
has tried convict labor on his railroads, and with perfect success.  He
says the convicts work well, and are quiet and peaceable.  He observed
that he employs nearly ten thousand of them now.

This appeared to be another call on my resources.  I was equal to the
emergency.  I said we had eighty thousand convicts employed on the
railways in America--all of them under sentence of death for murder in
the first degree.  That closed him out.

We had General Todtleben (the famous defender of Sebastopol, during the
siege,) and many inferior army and also navy officers, and a number of
unofficial Russian ladies and gentlemen.  Naturally, a champagne luncheon
was in order, and was accomplished without loss of life.  Toasts and
jokes were discharged freely, but no speeches were made save one thanking
the Emperor and the Grand Duke, through the Governor-General, for our
hospitable reception, and one by the Governor-General in reply, in which
he returned the Emperor's thanks for the speech, etc., etc.



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

We returned to Constantinople, and after a day or two spent in exhausting
marches about the city and voyages up the Golden Horn in caiques, we
steamed away again.  We passed through the Sea of Marmora and the
Dardanelles, and steered for a new land--a new one to us, at least--Asia.
We had as yet only acquired a bowing acquaintance with it, through
pleasure excursions to Scutari and the regions round about.

We passed between Lemnos and Mytilene, and saw them as we had seen Elba
and the Balearic Isles--mere bulky shapes, with the softening mists of
distance upon them--whales in a fog, as it were.  Then we held our course
southward, and began to "read up" celebrated Smyrna.

At all hours of the day and night the sailors in the forecastle amused
themselves and aggravated us by burlesquing our visit to royalty.  The
opening paragraph of our Address to the Emperor was framed as follows:

     "We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
     for recreation--and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
     state--and, therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting
     ourselves before your Majesty, save the desire of offering our
     grateful acknowledgments to the lord of a realm, which, through good
     and through evil report, has been the steadfast friend of the land
     we love so well."

The third cook, crowned with a resplendent tin basin and wrapped royally
in a table-cloth mottled with grease-spots and coffee stains, and bearing
a sceptre that looked strangely like a belaying-pin, walked upon a
dilapidated carpet and perched himself on the capstan, careless of the
flying spray; his tarred and weather-beaten Chamberlains, Dukes and Lord
High Admirals surrounded him, arrayed in all the pomp that spare
tarpaulins and remnants of old sails could furnish.  Then the visiting
"watch below," transformed into graceless ladies and uncouth pilgrims, by
rude travesties upon waterfalls, hoopskirts, white kid gloves and
swallow-tail coats, moved solemnly up the companion way, and bowing low,
began a system of complicated and extraordinary smiling which few
monarchs could look upon and live.  Then the mock consul, a
slush-plastered deck-sweep, drew out a soiled fragment of paper and
proceeded to read, laboriously:

"To His Imperial Majesty, Alexander II., Emperor of Russia:

"We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for
recreation,--and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial state--and
therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting ourselves before
your Majesty--"

The Emperor--"Then what the devil did you come for?"

--"Save the desire of offering our grateful acknowledgments to the lord
of a realm which--"

The Emperor--" Oh, d--n the Address!--read it to the police.
Chamberlain, take these people over to my brother, the Grand Duke's, and
give them a square meal.  Adieu!  I am happy--I am gratified--I am
delighted--I am bored.  Adieu, adieu--vamos the ranch!  The First Groom
of the Palace will proceed to count the portable articles of value
belonging to the premises."

The farce then closed, to be repeated again with every change of the
watches, and embellished with new and still more extravagant inventions
of pomp and conversation.

At all times of the day and night the phraseology of that tiresome
address fell upon our ears.  Grimy sailors came down out of the foretop
placidly announcing themselves as "a handful of private citizens of
America, traveling simply for recreation and unostentatiously," etc.; the
coal passers moved to their duties in the profound depths of the ship,
explaining the blackness of their faces and their uncouthness of dress,
with the reminder that they were "a handful of private citizens,
traveling simply for recreation," etc., and when the cry rang through the
vessel at midnight: "EIGHT BELLS!--LARBOARD WATCH, TURN OUT!"  the
larboard watch came gaping and stretching out of their den, with the
everlasting formula: "Aye-aye, sir!  We are a handful of private citizens
of America, traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as
becomes our unofficial state!"

As I was a member of the committee, and helped to frame the Address,
these sarcasms came home to me.  I never heard a sailor proclaiming
himself as a handful of American citizens traveling for recreation, but I
wished he might trip and fall overboard, and so reduce his handful by one
individual, at least.  I never was so tired of any one phrase as the
sailors made me of the opening sentence of the Address to the Emperor of
Russia.

This seaport of Smyrna, our first notable acquaintance in Asia, is a
closely packed city of one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and,
like Constantinople, it has no outskirts.  It is as closely packed at its
outer edges as it is in the centre, and then the habitations leave
suddenly off and the plain beyond seems houseless.  It is just like any
other Oriental city.  That is to say, its Moslem houses are heavy and
dark, and as comfortless as so many tombs; its streets are crooked,
rudely and roughly paved, and as narrow as an ordinary staircase; the
streets uniformly carry a man to any other place than the one he wants to
go to, and surprise him by landing him in the most unexpected localities;
business is chiefly carried on in great covered bazaars, celled like a
honeycomb with innumerable shops no larger than a common closet, and the
whole hive cut up into a maze of alleys about wide enough to accommodate
a laden camel, and well calculated to confuse a stranger and eventually
lose him; every where there is dirt, every where there are fleas, every
where there are lean, broken-hearted dogs; every alley is thronged with
people; wherever you look, your eye rests upon a wild masquerade of
extravagant costumes; the workshops are all open to the streets, and the
workmen visible; all manner of sounds assail the ear, and over them all
rings out the muezzin's cry from some tall minaret, calling the faithful
vagabonds to prayer; and superior to the call to prayer, the noises in
the streets, the interest of the costumes--superior to every thing, and
claiming the bulk of attention first, last, and all the time--is a
combination of Mohammedan stenches, to which the smell of even a Chinese
quarter would be as pleasant as the roasting odors of the fatted calf to
the nostrils of the returning Prodigal.  Such is Oriental luxury--such is
Oriental splendor!  We read about it all our days, but we comprehend it
not until we see it.  Smyrna is a very old city.  Its name occurs several
times in the Bible, one or two of the disciples of Christ visited it, and
here was located one of the original seven apocalyptic churches spoken of
in Revelations.  These churches were symbolized in the Scriptures as
candlesticks, and on certain conditions there was a sort of implied
promise that Smyrna should be endowed with a "crown of life."  She was to
"be faithful unto death"--those were the terms.  She has not kept up her
faith straight along, but the pilgrims that wander hither consider that
she has come near enough to it to save her, and so they point to the fact
that Smyrna to-day wears her crown of life, and is a great city, with a
great commerce and full of energy, while the cities wherein were located
the other six churches, and to which no crown of life was promised, have
vanished from the earth.  So Smyrna really still possesses her crown of
life, in a business point of view.  Her career, for eighteen centuries,
has been a chequered one, and she has been under the rule of princes of
many creeds, yet there has been no season during all that time, as far as
we know, (and during such seasons as she was inhabited at all,) that she
has been without her little community of Christians "faithful unto
death."  Hers was the only church against which no threats were implied
in the Revelations, and the only one which survived.

With Ephesus, forty miles from here, where was located another of the
seven churches, the case was different.  The "candlestick" has been
removed from Ephesus.  Her light has been put out.  Pilgrims, always
prone to find prophecies in the Bible, and often where none exist, speak
cheerfully and complacently of poor, ruined Ephesus as the victim of
prophecy.  And yet there is no sentence that promises, without due
qualification, the destruction of the city.  The words are:

     "Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and
     do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will
     remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."

That is all; the other verses are singularly complimentary to Ephesus.
The threat is qualified.  There is no history to show that she did not
repent.  But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that
one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong
man.  They do it without regard to rhyme or reason.  Both the cases I
have just mentioned are instances in point.  Those "prophecies" are
distinctly leveled at the "churches of Ephesus, Smyrna," etc., and yet
the pilgrims invariably make them refer to the cities instead.  No crown
of life is promised to the town of Smyrna and its commerce, but to the
handful of Christians who formed its "church."  If they were "faithful
unto death," they have their crown now--but no amount of faithfulness and
legal shrewdness combined could legitimately drag the city into a
participation in the promises of the prophecy.  The stately language of
the Bible refers to a crown of life whose lustre will reflect the
day-beams of the endless ages of eternity, not the butterfly existence
of a city built by men's hands, which must pass to dust with the
builders and be forgotten even in the mere handful of centuries
vouchsafed to the solid world itself between its cradle and its grave.

The fashion of delving out fulfillments of prophecy where that prophecy
consists of mere "ifs," trenches upon the absurd.  Suppose, a thousand
years from now, a malarious swamp builds itself up in the shallow harbor
of Smyrna, or something else kills the town; and suppose, also, that
within that time the swamp that has filled the renowned harbor of Ephesus
and rendered her ancient site deadly and uninhabitable to-day, becomes
hard and healthy ground; suppose the natural consequence ensues, to wit:
that Smyrna becomes a melancholy ruin, and Ephesus is rebuilt.  What
would the prophecy-savans say?  They would coolly skip over our age of
the world, and say: "Smyrna was not faithful unto death, and so her crown
of life was denied her; Ephesus repented, and lo! her candle-stick was
not removed.  Behold these evidences!  How wonderful is prophecy!"

Smyrna has been utterly destroyed six times.  If her crown of life had
been an insurance policy, she would have had an opportunity to collect on
it the first time she fell.  But she holds it on sufferance and by a
complimentary construction of language which does not refer to
her.  Six different times, however, I suppose some infatuated
prophecy-enthusiast blundered along and said, to the infinite disgust of
Smyrna and the Smyrniotes: "In sooth, here is astounding fulfillment of
prophecy!  Smyrna hath not been faithful unto death, and behold her
crown of life is vanished from her head.  Verily, these things be
astonishing!"

Such things have a bad influence.  They provoke worldly men into using
light conversation concerning sacred subjects.  Thick-headed commentators
upon the Bible, and stupid preachers and teachers, work more damage to
religion than sensible, cool-brained clergymen can fight away again, toil
as they may.  It is not good judgment to fit a crown of life upon a city
which has been destroyed six times.  That other class of wiseacres who
twist prophecy in such a manner as to make it promise the destruction and
desolation of the same city, use judgment just as bad, since the city is
in a very flourishing condition now, unhappily for them.  These things
put arguments into the mouth of infidelity.

A portion of the city is pretty exclusively Turkish; the Jews have a
quarter to themselves; the Franks another quarter; so, also, with the
Armenians.  The Armenians, of course, are Christians.  Their houses are
large, clean, airy, handsomely paved with black and white squares of
marble, and in the centre of many of them is a square court, which has in
it a luxuriant flower-garden and a sparkling fountain; the doors of all
the rooms open on this.  A very wide hall leads to the street door, and
in this the women sit, the most of the day.  In the cool of the evening
they dress up in their best raiment and show themselves at the door.
They are all comely of countenance, and exceedingly neat and cleanly;
they look as if they were just out of a band-box.  Some of the young
ladies--many of them, I may say--are even very beautiful; they average a
shade better than American girls--which treasonable words I pray may be
forgiven me.  They are very sociable, and will smile back when a stranger
smiles at them, bow back when he bows, and talk back if he speaks to
them.  No introduction is required.  An hour's chat at the door with a
pretty girl one never saw before, is easily obtained, and is very
pleasant.  I have tried it.  I could not talk anything but English, and
the girl knew nothing but Greek, or Armenian, or some such barbarous
tongue, but we got along very well.  I find that in cases like these, the
fact that you can not comprehend each other isn't much of a drawback.
In that Russia n town of Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an
hour long, and one I had not heard of before, with a very pretty girl,
and we talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever
knew what the other was driving at.  But it was splendid.  There were
twenty people in the set, and the dance was very lively and complicated.
It was complicated enough without me--with me it was more so.  I threw in
a figure now and then that surprised those Russians.  But I have never
ceased to think of that girl.  I have written to her, but I can not
direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed Russian
affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alphabet to hold out.
I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce it when I am awake, but I
make a stagger at it in my dreams, and get up with the lockjaw in the
morning.  I am fading.  I do not take my meals now, with any sort of
regularity.  Her dear name haunts me still in my dreams.  It is awful on
teeth.  It never comes out of my mouth but it fetches an old snag along
with it.  And then the lockjaw closes down and nips off a couple of the
last syllables--but they taste good.

Coming through the Dardanelles, we saw camel trains on shore with the
glasses, but we were never close to one till we got to Smyrna.  These
camels are very much larger than the scrawny specimens one sees in the
menagerie.  They stride along these streets, in single file, a dozen in a
train, with heavy loads on their backs, and a fancy-looking negro in
Turkish costume, or an Arab, preceding them on a little donkey and
completely overshadowed and rendered insignificant by the huge beasts.
To see a camel train laden with the spices of Arabia and the rare fabrics
of Persia come marching through the narrow alleys of the bazaar, among
porters with their burdens, money-changers, lamp-merchants, Al-naschars
in the glassware business, portly cross-legged Turks smoking the famous
narghili; and the crowds drifting to and fro in the fanciful costumes of
the East, is a genuine revelation of the Orient.  The picture lacks
nothing.  It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and
again you dream over the wonders of the Arabian Nights; again your
companions are princes, your lord is the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid, and
your servants are terrific giants and genii that come with smoke and
lightning and thunder, and go as a storm goes when they depart!



CHAPTER XXXIX.

We inquired, and learned that the lions of Smyrna consisted of the ruins
of the ancient citadel, whose broken and prodigious battlements frown
upon the city from a lofty hill just in the edge of the town--the Mount
Pagus of Scripture, they call it; the site of that one of the Seven
Apocalyptic Churches of Asia which was located here in the first century
of the Christian era; and the grave and the place of martyrdom of the
venerable Polycarp, who suffered in Smyrna for his religion some eighteen
hundred years ago.

We took little donkeys and started.  We saw Polycarp's tomb, and then
hurried on.

The "Seven Churches"--thus they abbreviate it--came next on the list.  We
rode there--about a mile and a half in the sweltering sun--and visited a
little Greek church which they said was built upon the ancient site; and
we paid a small fee, and the holy attendant gave each of us a little wax
candle as a remembrancer of the place, and I put mine in my hat and the
sun melted it and the grease all ran down the back of my neck; and so now
I have not any thing left but the wick, and it is a sorry and a
wilted-looking wick at that.

Several of us argued as well as we could that the "church" mentioned in
the Bible meant a party of Christians, and not a building; that the Bible
spoke of them as being very poor--so poor, I thought, and so subject to
persecution (as per Polycarp's martyrdom) that in the first place they
probably could not have afforded a church edifice, and in the second
would not have dared to build it in the open light of day if they could;
and finally, that if they had had the privilege of building it, common
judgment would have suggested that they build it somewhere near the town.
But the elders of the ship's family ruled us down and scouted our
evidences.  However, retribution came to them afterward.  They found that
they had been led astray and had gone to the wrong place; they discovered
that the accepted site is in the city.

Riding through the town, we could see marks of the six Smyrnas that have
existed here and been burned up by fire or knocked down by earthquakes.
The hills and the rocks are rent asunder in places, excavations expose
great blocks of building-stone that have lain buried for ages, and all
the mean houses and walls of modern Smyrna along the way are spotted
white with broken pillars, capitals and fragments of sculptured marble
that once adorned the lordly palaces that were the glory of the city in
the olden time.

The ascent of the hill of the citadel is very steep, and we proceeded
rather slowly.  But there were matters of interest about us.  In one
place, five hundred feet above the sea, the perpendicular bank on the
upper side of the road was ten or fifteen feet high, and the cut exposed
three veins of oyster shells, just as we have seen quartz veins exposed
in the cutting of a road in Nevada or Montana.  The veins were about
eighteen inches thick and two or three feet apart, and they slanted along
downward for a distance of thirty feet or more, and then disappeared
where the cut joined the road.  Heaven only knows how far a man might
trace them by "stripping."  They were clean, nice oyster shells, large,
and just like any other oyster shells.  They were thickly massed
together, and none were scattered above or below the veins.  Each one was
a well-defined lead by itself, and without a spur.  My first instinct was
to set up the usual--
                                 NOTICE:

     "We, the undersigned, claim five claims of two hundred feet each,
     (and one for discovery,) on this ledge or lode of oyster-shells,
     with all its dips, spurs, angles, variations and sinuosities, and
     fifty feet on each side of the same, to work it, etc., etc.,
     according to the mining laws of Smyrna."

They were such perfectly natural-looking leads that I could hardly keep
from "taking them up."  Among the oyster-shells were mixed many fragments
of ancient, broken crockery ware.  Now how did those masses of
oyster-shells get there?  I can not determine.  Broken crockery and
oyster-shells are suggestive of restaurants--but then they could have
had no such places away up there on that mountain side in our time,
because nobody has lived up there.  A restaurant would not pay in such a
stony, forbidding, desolate place.  And besides, there were no champagne
corks among the shells.  If there ever was a restaurant there, it must
have been in Smyrna's palmy days, when the hills were covered with
palaces. I could believe in one restaurant, on those terms; but then how
about the three?  Did they have restaurants there at three different
periods of the world?--because there are two or three feet of solid
earth between the oyster leads.  Evidently, the restaurant solution will
not answer.

The hill might have been the bottom of the sea, once, and been lifted up,
with its oyster-beds, by an earthquake--but, then, how about the
crockery?  And moreover, how about three oyster beds, one above another,
and thick strata of good honest earth between?

That theory will not do.  It is just possible that this hill is Mount
Ararat, and that Noah's Ark rested here, and he ate oysters and threw the
shells overboard.  But that will not do, either.  There are the three
layers again and the solid earth between--and, besides, there were only
eight in Noah's family, and they could not have eaten all these oysters
in the two or three months they staid on top of that mountain.  The
beasts--however, it is simply absurd to suppose he did not know any more
than to feed the beasts on oyster suppers.

It is painful--it is even humiliating--but I am reduced at last to one
slender theory: that the oysters climbed up there of their own accord.
But what object could they have had in view?--what did they want up
there?  What could any oyster want to climb a hill for?  To climb a hill
must necessarily be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster.  The
most natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there to
look at the scenery.  Yet when one comes to reflect upon the nature of an
oyster, it seems plain that he does not care for scenery.  An oyster has
no taste for such things; he cares nothing for the beautiful.  An oyster
is of a retiring disposition, and not lively--not even cheerful above the
average, and never enterprising.  But above all, an oyster does not take
any interest in scenery--he scorns it.  What have I arrived at now?
Simply at the point I started from, namely, those oyster shells are
there, in regular layers, five hundred feet above the sea, and no man
knows how they got there.  I have hunted up the guide-books, and the gist
of what they say is this: "They are there, but how they got there is a
mystery."

Twenty-five years ago, a multitude of people in America put on their
ascension robes, took a tearful leave of their friends, and made ready to
fly up into heaven at the first blast of the trumpet.  But the angel did
not blow it.  Miller's resurrection day was a failure.  The Millerites
were disgusted.  I did not suspect that there were Millers in Asia Minor,
but a gentleman tells me that they had it all set for the world to come
to an end in Smyrna one day about three years ago.  There was much
buzzing and preparation for a long time previously, and it culminated in
a wild excitement at the appointed time.  A vast number of the populace
ascended the citadel hill early in the morning, to get out of the way of
the general destruction, and many of the infatuated closed up their shops
and retired from all earthly business.  But the strange part of it was
that about three in the afternoon, while this gentleman and his friends
were at dinner in the hotel, a terrific storm of rain, accompanied by
thunder and lightning, broke forth and continued with dire fury for two
or three hours.  It was a thing unprecedented in Smyrna at that time of
the year, and scared some of the most skeptical.  The streets ran rivers
and the hotel floor was flooded with water.  The dinner had to be
suspended.  When the storm finished and left every body drenched through
and through, and melancholy and half-drowned, the ascensionists came down
from the mountain as dry as so many charity-sermons!  They had been
looking down upon the fearful storm going on below, and really believed
that their proposed destruction of the world was proving a grand success.

A railway here in Asia--in the dreamy realm of the Orient--in the fabled
land of the Arabian Nights--is a strange thing to think of.  And yet they
have one already, and are building another.  The present one is well
built and well conducted, by an English Company, but is not doing an
immense amount of business.  The first year it carried a good many
passengers, but its freight list only comprised eight hundred pounds of
figs!

It runs almost to the very gates of Ephesus--a town great in all ages of
the world--a city familiar to readers of the Bible, and one which was as
old as the very hills when the disciples of Christ preached in its
streets.  It dates back to the shadowy ages of tradition, and was the
birthplace of gods renowned in Grecian mythology.  The idea of a
locomotive tearing through such a place as this, and waking the phantoms
of its old days of romance out of their dreams of dead and gone
centuries, is curious enough.

We journey thither tomorrow to see the celebrated ruins.



CHAPTER XL.

This has been a stirring day.  The Superintendent of the railway put a
train at our disposal, and did us the further kindness of accompanying us
to Ephesus and giving to us his watchful care.  We brought sixty scarcely
perceptible donkeys in the freight cars, for we had much ground to go
over.  We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line
of the railroad, that can be imagined.  I am glad that no possible
combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish
enough to attempt it.

At ancient Ayassalook, in the midst of a forbidding desert, we came upon
long lines of ruined aqueducts, and other remnants of architectural
grandeur, that told us plainly enough we were nearing what had been a
metropolis, once.  We left the train and mounted the donkeys, along with
our invited guests--pleasant young gentlemen from the officers' list of
an American man-of-war.

The little donkeys had saddles upon them which were made very high in
order that the rider's feet might not drag the ground.  The preventative
did not work well in the cases of our tallest pilgrims, however.  There
were no bridles--nothing but a single rope, tied to the bit.  It was
purely ornamental, for the donkey cared nothing for it.  If he were
drifting to starboard, you might put your helm down hard the other way,
if it were any satisfaction to you to do it, but he would continue to
drift to starboard all the same.  There was only one process which could
be depended on, and it was to get down and lift his rear around until his
head pointed in the right direction, or take him under your arm and carry
him to a part of the road which he could not get out of without climbing.
The sun flamed down as hot as a furnace, and neck-scarfs, veils and
umbrellas seemed hardly any protection; they served only to make the long
procession look more than ever fantastic--for be it known the ladies were
all riding astride because they could not stay on the shapeless saddles
sidewise, the men were perspiring and out of temper, their feet were
banging against the rocks, the donkeys were capering in every direction
but the right one and being belabored with clubs for it, and every now
and then a broad umbrella would suddenly go down out of the cavalcade,
announcing to all that one more pilgrim had bitten the dust.  It was a
wilder picture than those solitudes had seen for many a day.  No donkeys
ever existed that were as hard to navigate as these, I think, or that had
so many vile, exasperating instincts.  Occasionally we grew so tired and
breathless with fighting them that we had to desist,--and immediately the
donkey would come down to a deliberate walk.  This, with the fatigue, and
the sun, would put a man asleep; and soon as the man was asleep, the
donkey would lie down.  My donkey shall never see his boyhood's home
again.  He has lain down once too often. He must die.

We all stood in the vast theatre of ancient Ephesus,--the stone-benched
amphitheatre I mean--and had our picture taken.  We looked as proper
there as we would look any where, I suppose.  We do not embellish the
general desolation of a desert much.  We add what dignity we can to a
stately ruin with our green umbrellas and jackasses, but it is little.
However, we mean well.

I wish to say a brief word of the aspect of Ephesus.

On a high, steep hill, toward the sea, is a gray ruin of ponderous blocks
of marble, wherein, tradition says, St. Paul was imprisoned eighteen
centuries ago.  From these old walls you have the finest view of the
desolate scene where once stood Ephesus, the proudest city of ancient
times, and whose Temple of Diana was so noble in design, and so exquisite
of workmanship, that it ranked high in the list of the Seven Wonders of
the World.

Behind you is the sea; in front is a level green valley, (a marsh, in
fact,) extending far away among the mountains; to the right of the front
view is the old citadel of Ayassalook, on a high hill; the ruined Mosque
of the Sultan Selim stands near it in the plain, (this is built over the
grave of St. John, and was formerly Christian Church ;) further toward
you is the hill of Pion, around whose front is clustered all that remains
of the ruins of Ephesus that still stand; divided from it by a narrow
valley is the long, rocky, rugged mountain of Coressus.  The scene is a
pretty one, and yet desolate--for in that wide plain no man can live, and
in it is no human habitation.  But for the crumbling arches and monstrous
piers and broken walls that rise from the foot of the hill of Pion, one
could not believe that in this place once stood a city whose renown is
older than tradition itself.  It is incredible to reflect that things as
familiar all over the world to-day as household words, belong in the
history and in the shadowy legends of this silent, mournful solitude.
We speak of Apollo and of Diana--they were born here; of the
metamorphosis of Syrinx into a reed--it was done here; of the great god
Pan--he dwelt in the caves of this hill of Coressus; of the Amazons--this
was their best prized home; of Bacchus and Hercules both fought the
warlike women here; of the Cyclops--they laid the ponderous marble blocks
of some of the ruins yonder; of Homer--this was one of his many
birthplaces; of Cirmon of Athens; of Alcibiades, Lysander, Agesilaus
--they visited here; so did Alexander the Great; so did Hannibal and
Antiochus, Scipio, Lucullus and Sylla; Brutus, Cassius, Pompey, Cicero,
and Augustus; Antony was a judge in this place, and left his seat in the
open court, while the advocates were speaking, to run after Cleopatra,
who passed the door; from this city these two sailed on pleasure
excursions, in galleys with silver oars and perfumed sails, and with
companies of beautiful girls to serve them, and actors and musicians to
amuse them; in days that seem almost modern, so remote are they from the
early history of this city, Paul the Apostle preached the new religion
here, and so did John, and here it is supposed the former was pitted
against wild beasts, for in 1 Corinthians, xv. 32 he says:

     "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus,"
     &c.,

when many men still lived who had seen the Christ; here Mary Magdalen
died, and here the Virgin Mary ended her days with John, albeit Rome has
since judged it best to locate her grave elsewhere; six or seven hundred
years ago--almost yesterday, as it were--troops of mail-clad Crusaders
thronged the streets; and to come down to trifles, we speak of meandering
streams, and find a new interest in a common word when we discover that
the crooked river Meander, in yonder valley, gave it to our dictionary.
It makes me feel as old as these dreary hills to look down upon these
moss-hung ruins, this historic desolation.  One may read the Scriptures
and believe, but he can not go and stand yonder in the ruined theatre and
in imagination people it again with the vanished multitudes who mobbed
Paul's comrades there and shouted, with one voice, "Great is Diana of the
Ephesians!"  The idea of a shout in such a solitude as this almost makes
one shudder.

It was a wonderful city, this Ephesus.  Go where you will about these
broad plains, you find the most exquisitely sculptured marble fragments
scattered thick among the dust and weeds; and protruding from the ground,
or lying prone upon it, are beautiful fluted columns of porphyry and all
precious marbles; and at every step you find elegantly carved capitals
and massive bases, and polished tablets engraved with Greek inscriptions.
It is a world of precious relics, a wilderness of marred and mutilated
gems.  And yet what are these things to the wonders that lie buried here
under the ground?  At Constantinople, at Pisa, in the cities of Spain,
are great mosques and cathedrals, whose grandest columns came from the
temples and palaces of Ephesus, and yet one has only to scratch the
ground here to match them.  We shall never know what magnificence is,
until this imperial city is laid bare to the sun.

The finest piece of sculpture we have yet seen and the one that impressed
us most, (for we do not know much about art and can not easily work up
ourselves into ecstasies over it,) is one that lies in this old theatre
of Ephesus which St. Paul's riot has made so celebrated.  It is only the
headless body of a man, clad in a coat of mail, with a Medusa head upon
the breast-plate, but we feel persuaded that such dignity and such
majesty were never thrown into a form of stone before.

What builders they were, these men of antiquity!  The massive arches of
some of these ruins rest upon piers that are fifteen feet square and
built entirely of solid blocks of marble, some of which are as large as a
Saratoga trunk, and some the size of a boarding-house sofa.  They are not
shells or shafts of stone filled inside with rubbish, but the whole pier
is a mass of solid masonry.  Vast arches, that may have been the gates of
the city, are built in the same way.  They have braved the storms and
sieges of three thousand years, and have been shaken by many an
earthquake, but still they stand.  When they dig alongside of them, they
find ranges of ponderous masonry that are as perfect in every detail as
they were the day those old Cyclopian giants finished them.  An English
Company is going to excavate Ephesus--and then!

And now am I reminded of--

                    THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SLEEPERS.

In the Mount of Pion, yonder, is the Cave of the Seven Sleepers.  Once
upon a time, about fifteen hundred years ago, seven young men lived near
each other in Ephesus, who belonged to the despised sect of the
Christians.  It came to pass that the good King Maximilianus, (I am
telling this story for nice little boys and girls,) it came to pass, I
say, that the good King Maximilianus fell to persecuting the Christians,
and as time rolled on he made it very warm for them.  So the seven young
men said one to the other, let us get up and travel.  And they got up and
traveled.  They tarried not to bid their fathers and mothers good-bye, or
any friend they knew.  They only took certain moneys which their parents
had, and garments that belonged unto their friends, whereby they might
remember them when far away; and they took also the dog Ketmehr, which
was the property of their neighbor Malchus, because the beast did run his
head into a noose which one of the young men was carrying carelessly, and
they had not time to release him; and they took also certain chickens
that seemed lonely in the neighboring coops, and likewise some bottles of
curious liquors that stood near the grocer's window; and then they
departed from the city.  By-and-by they came to a marvelous cave in the
Hill of Pion and entered into it and feasted, and presently they hurried
on again.  But they forgot the bottles of curious liquors, and left them
behind.  They traveled in many lands, and had many strange adventures.
They were virtuous young men, and lost no opportunity that fell in their
way to make their livelihood.  Their motto was in these words, namely,
"Procrastination is the thief of time."  And so, whenever they did come
upon a man who was alone, they said, Behold, this person hath the
wherewithal--let us go through him.  And they went through him.  At the
end of five years they had waxed tired of travel and adventure, and
longed to revisit their old home again and hear the voices and see the
faces that were dear unto their youth.  Therefore they went through such
parties as fell in their way where they sojourned at that time, and
journeyed back toward Ephesus again.  For the good King Maximilianus was
become converted unto the new faith, and the Christians rejoiced because
they were no longer persecuted.  One day as the sun went down, they came
to the cave in the Mount of Pion, and they said, each to his fellow, Let
us sleep here, and go and feast and make merry with our friends when the
morning cometh.  And each of the seven lifted up his voice and said, It
is a whiz.  So they went in, and lo, where they had put them, there lay
the bottles of strange liquors, and they judged that age had not impaired
their excellence.  Wherein the wanderers were right, and the heads of the
same were level.  So each of the young men drank six bottles, and behold
they felt very tired, then, and lay down and slept soundly.

When they awoke, one of them, Johannes--surnamed Smithianus--said, We are
naked.  And it was so.  Their raiment was all gone, and the money which
they had gotten from a stranger whom they had proceeded through as they
approached the city, was lying upon the ground, corroded and rusted and
defaced.  Likewise the dog Ketmehr was gone, and nothing save the brass
that was upon his collar remained.  They wondered much at these things.
But they took the money, and they wrapped about their bodies some leaves,
and came up to the top of the hill.  Then were they perplexed.  The
wonderful temple of Diana was gone; many grand edifices they had never
seen before stood in the city; men in strange garbs moved about the
streets, and every thing was changed.

Johannes said, It hardly seems like Ephesus.  Yet here is the great
gymnasium; here is the mighty theatre, wherein I have seen seventy
thousand men assembled; here is the Agora; there is the font where the
sainted John the Baptist immersed the converts; yonder is the prison of
the good St. Paul, where we all did use to go to touch the ancient chains
that bound him and be cured of our distempers; I see the tomb of the
disciple Luke, and afar off is the church wherein repose the ashes of the
holy John, where the Christians of Ephesus go twice a year to gather the
dust from the tomb, which is able to make bodies whole again that are
corrupted by disease, and cleanse the soul from sin; but see how the
wharves encroach upon the sea, and what multitudes of ships are anchored
in the bay; see, also, how the city hath stretched abroad, far over the
valley behind Pion, and even unto the walls of Ayassalook; and lo, all
the hills are white with palaces and ribbed with colonnades of marble.
How mighty is Ephesus become!

And wondering at what their eyes had seen, they went down into the city
and purchased garments and clothed themselves.  And when they would have
passed on, the merchant bit the coins which they had given him, with his
teeth, and turned them about and looked curiously upon them, and cast
them upon his counter, and listened if they rang; and then he said, These
be bogus.  And they said, Depart thou to Hades, and went their way.  When
they were come to their houses, they recognized them, albeit they seemed
old and mean; and they rejoiced, and were glad.  They ran to the doors,
and knocked, and strangers opened, and looked inquiringly upon them.  And
they said, with great excitement, while their hearts beat high, and the
color in their faces came and went, Where is my father?  Where is my
mother?  Where are Dionysius and Serapion, and Pericles, and Decius?  And
the strangers that opened said, We know not these.  The Seven said, How,
you know them not?  How long have ye dwelt here, and whither are they
gone that dwelt here before ye?  And the strangers said, Ye play upon us
with a jest, young men; we and our fathers have sojourned under these
roofs these six generations; the names ye utter rot upon the tombs, and
they that bore them have run their brief race, have laughed and sung,
have borne the sorrows and the weariness that were allotted them, and are
at rest; for nine-score years the summers have come and gone, and the
autumn leaves have fallen, since the roses faded out of their cheeks and
they laid them to sleep with the dead.

Then the seven young men turned them away from their homes, and the
strangers shut the doors upon them.  The wanderers marveled greatly, and
looked into the faces of all they met, as hoping to find one that they
knew; but all were strange, and passed them by and spake no friendly
word.  They were sore distressed and sad.  Presently they spake unto a
citizen and said, Who is King in Ephesus?  And the citizen answered and
said, Whence come ye that ye know not that great Laertius reigns in
Ephesus?  They looked one at the other, greatly perplexed, and presently
asked again, Where, then, is the good King Maximilianus?  The citizen
moved him apart, as one who is afraid, and said, Verily these men be mad,
and dream dreams, else would they know that the King whereof they speak
is dead above two hundred years agone.

Then the scales fell from the eyes of the Seven, and one said, Alas, that
we drank of the curious liquors.  They have made us weary, and in
dreamless sleep these two long centuries have we lain.  Our homes are
desolate, our friends are dead.  Behold, the jig is up--let us die.  And
that same day went they forth and laid them down and died.  And in that
self-same day, likewise, the Seven-up did cease in Ephesus, for that the
Seven that were up were down again, and departed and dead withal.  And
the names that be upon their tombs, even unto this time, are Johannes
Smithianus, Trumps, Gift, High, and Low, Jack, and The Game.  And with
the sleepers lie also the bottles wherein were once the curious liquors:
and upon them is writ, in ancient letters, such words as these--Dames of
heathen gods of olden time, perchance: Rumpunch, Jinsling, Egnog.

Such is the story of the Seven Sleepers, (with slight variations,) and I
know it is true, because I have seen the cave myself.

Really, so firm a faith had the ancients this legend, that as late as
eight or nine hundred years ago, learned travelers held it in
superstitious fear.  Two of them record that they ventured into it, but
ran quickly out again, not daring to tarry lest they should fall asleep
and outlive their great grand-children a century or so.  Even at this day
the ignorant denizens of the neighboring country prefer not to sleep in
it.



CHAPTER XLI.

When I last made a memorandum, we were at Ephesus.  We are in Syria, now,
encamped in the mountains of Lebanon.  The interregnum has been long,
both as to time and distance.  We brought not a relic from Ephesus!
After gathering up fragments of sculptured marbles and breaking ornaments
from the interior work of the Mosques; and after bringing them at a cost
of infinite trouble and fatigue, five miles on muleback to the railway
depot, a government officer compelled all who had such things to
disgorge!  He had an order from Constantinople to look out for our party,
and see that we carried nothing off.  It was a wise, a just, and a
well-deserved rebuke, but it created a sensation.  I never resist a
temptation to plunder a stranger's premises without feeling insufferably
vain about it.  This time I felt proud beyond expression.  I was serene
in the midst of the scoldings that were heaped upon the Ottoman
government for its affront offered to a pleasuring party of entirely
respectable gentlemen and ladies I said, "We that have free souls, it
touches us not."  The shoe not only pinched our party, but it pinched
hard; a principal sufferer discovered that the imperial order was
inclosed in an envelop bearing the seal of the British Embassy at
Constantinople, and therefore must have been inspired by the
representative of the Queen.  This was bad--very bad.  Coming solely
from the Ottomans, it might have signified only Ottoman hatred of
Christians, and a vulgar ignorance as to genteel methods of expressing
it; but coming from the Christianized, educated, politic British
legation, it simply intimated that we were a sort of gentlemen and
ladies who would bear watching!  So the party regarded it, and were
incensed accordingly.  The truth doubtless was, that the same
precautions would have been taken against any travelers, because the
English Company who have acquired the right to excavate Ephesus, and
have paid a great sum for that right, need to be protected, and deserve
to be. They can not afford to run the risk of having their hospitality
abused by travelers, especially since travelers are such notorious
scorners of honest behavior.

We sailed from Smyrna, in the wildest spirit of expectancy, for the chief
feature, the grand goal of the expedition, was near at hand--we were
approaching the Holy Land!  Such a burrowing into the hold for trunks
that had lain buried for weeks, yes for months; such a hurrying to and
fro above decks and below; such a riotous system of packing and
unpacking; such a littering up of the cabins with shirts and skirts, and
indescribable and unclassable odds and ends; such a making up of bundles,
and setting apart of umbrellas, green spectacles and thick veils; such a
critical inspection of saddles and bridles that had never yet touched
horses; such a cleaning and loading of revolvers and examining of
bowie-knives; such a half-soling of the seats of pantaloons with
serviceable buckskin; then such a poring over ancient maps; such a
reading up of Bibles and Palestine travels; such a marking out of
routes; such exasperating efforts to divide up the company into little
bands of congenial spirits who might make the long and arduous Journey
without quarreling; and morning, noon and night, such mass-meetings in
the cabins, such speech-making, such sage suggesting, such worrying and
quarreling, and such a general raising of the very mischief, was never
seen in the ship before!

But it is all over now.  We are cut up into parties of six or eight, and
by this time are scattered far and wide.  Ours is the only one, however,
that is venturing on what is called "the long trip"--that is, out into
Syria, by Baalbec to Damascus, and thence down through the full length of
Palestine.  It would be a tedious, and also a too risky journey, at this
hot season of the year, for any but strong, healthy men, accustomed
somewhat to fatigue and rough life in the open air.  The other parties
will take shorter journeys.

For the last two months we have been in a worry about one portion of this
Holy Land pilgrimage.  I refer to transportation service.  We knew very
well that Palestine was a country which did not do a large passenger
business, and every man we came across who knew any thing about it gave
us to understand that not half of our party would be able to get dragomen
and animals.  At Constantinople every body fell to telegraphing the
American Consuls at Alexandria and Beirout to give notice that we wanted
dragomen and transportation.  We were desperate--would take horses,
jackasses, cameleopards, kangaroos--any thing.  At Smyrna, more
telegraphing was done, to the same end.  Also fearing for the worst, we
telegraphed for a large number of seats in the diligence for Damascus,
and horses for the ruins of Baalbec.

As might have been expected, a notion got abroad in Syria and Egypt that
the whole population of the Province of America (the Turks consider us a
trifling little province in some unvisited corner of the world,) were
coming to the Holy Land--and so, when we got to Beirout yesterday, we
found the place full of dragomen and their outfits.  We had all intended
to go by diligence to Damascus, and switch off to Baalbec as we went
along--because we expected to rejoin the ship, go to Mount Carmel, and
take to the woods from there.  However, when our own private party of
eight found that it was possible, and proper enough, to make the "long
trip," we adopted that programme.  We have never been much trouble to a
Consul before, but we have been a fearful nuisance to our Consul at
Beirout.  I mention this because I can not help admiring his patience,
his industry, and his accommodating spirit.  I mention it also, because I
think some of our ship's company did not give him as full credit for his
excellent services as he deserved.

Well, out of our eight, three were selected to attend to all business
connected with the expedition.  The rest of us had nothing to do but look
at the beautiful city of Beirout, with its bright, new houses nestled
among a wilderness of green shrubbery spread abroad over an upland that
sloped gently down to the sea; and also at the mountains of Lebanon that
environ it; and likewise to bathe in the transparent blue water that
rolled its billows about the ship (we did not know there were sharks
there.) We had also to range up and down through the town and look at the
costumes.  These are picturesque and fanciful, but not so varied as at
Constantinople and Smyrna; the women of Beirout add an agony--in the two
former cities the sex wear a thin veil which one can see through (and
they often expose their ancles,) but at Beirout they cover their entire
faces with dark-colored or black veils, so that they look like mummies,
and then expose their breasts to the public.  A young gentleman (I
believe he was a Greek,) volunteered to show us around the city, and said
it would afford him great pleasure, because he was studying English and
wanted practice in that language.  When we had finished the rounds,
however, he called for remuneration--said he hoped the gentlemen would
give him a trifle in the way of a few piastres (equivalent to a few five
cent pieces.)  We did so.  The Consul was surprised when he heard it, and
said he knew the young fellow's family very well, and that they were an
old and highly respectable family and worth a hundred and fifty thousand
dollars!  Some people, so situated, would have been ashamed of the berth
he had with us and his manner of crawling into it.

At the appointed time our business committee reported, and said all
things were in readdress--that we were to start to-day, with horses, pack
animals, and tents, and go to Baalbec, Damascus, the Sea of Tiberias, and
thence southward by the way of the scene of Jacob's Dream and other
notable Bible localities to Jerusalem--from thence probably to the Dead
Sea, but possibly not--and then strike for the ocean and rejoin the ship
three or four weeks hence at Joppa; terms, five dollars a day apiece, in
gold, and every thing to be furnished by the dragoman.  They said we
would lie as well as at a hotel.  I had read something like that before,
and did not shame my judgment by believing a word of it.  I said nothing,
however, but packed up a blanket and a shawl to sleep in, pipes and
tobacco, two or three woollen shirts, a portfolio, a guide-book, and a
Bible.  I also took along a towel and a cake of soap, to inspire respect
in the Arabs, who would take me for a king in disguise.

We were to select our horses at 3 P.M.  At that hour Abraham, the
dragoman, marshaled them before us.  With all solemnity I set it down
here, that those horses were the hardest lot I ever did come across, and
their accoutrements were in exquisite keeping with their style.  One
brute had an eye out; another had his tail sawed off close, like a
rabbit, and was proud of it; another had a bony ridge running from his
neck to his tail, like one of those ruined aqueducts one sees about Rome,
and had a neck on him like a bowsprit; they all limped, and had sore
backs, and likewise raw places and old scales scattered about their
persons like brass nails in a hair trunk; their gaits were marvelous to
contemplate, and replete with variety under way the procession looked
like a fleet in a storm.  It was fearful.  Blucher shook his head and
said:

"That dragon is going to get himself into trouble fetching these old
crates out of the hospital the way they are, unless he has got a permit."

I said nothing.  The display was exactly according to the guide-book, and
were we not traveling by the guide-book?  I selected a certain horse
because I thought I saw him shy, and I thought that a horse that had
spirit enough to shy was not to be despised.

At 6 o'clock P.M., we came to a halt here on the breezy summit of a
shapely mountain overlooking the sea, and the handsome valley where dwelt
some of those enterprising Phoenicians of ancient times we read so much
about; all around us are what were once the dominions of Hiram, King of
Tyre, who furnished timber from the cedars of these Lebanon hills to
build portions of King Solomon's Temple with.

Shortly after six, our pack train arrived.  I had not seen it before, and
a good right I had to be astonished.  We had nineteen serving men and
twenty-six pack mules!  It was a perfect caravan.  It looked like one,
too, as it wound among the rocks.  I wondered what in the very mischief
we wanted with such a vast turn-out as that, for eight men.  I wondered
awhile, but soon I began to long for a tin plate, and some bacon and
beans.  I had camped out many and many a time before, and knew just what
was coming.  I went off, without waiting for serving men, and unsaddled
my horse, and washed such portions of his ribs and his spine as projected
through his hide, and when I came back, behold five stately circus tents
were up--tents that were brilliant, within, with blue, and gold, and
crimson, and all manner of splendid adornment!  I was speechless.  Then
they brought eight little iron bedsteads, and set them up in the tents;
they put a soft mattress and pillows and good blankets and two snow-white
sheets on each bed.  Next, they rigged a table about the centre-pole, and
on it placed pewter pitchers, basins, soap, and the whitest of towels
--one set for each man; they pointed to pockets in the tent, and said we
could put our small trifles in them for convenience, and if we needed
pins or such things, they were sticking every where.  Then came the
finishing touch--they spread carpets on the floor!  I simply said, "If
you call this camping out, all right--but it isn't the style I am used
to; my little baggage that I brought along is at a discount."

It grew dark, and they put candles on the tables--candles set in bright,
new, brazen candlesticks.  And soon the bell--a genuine, simon-pure bell
--rang, and we were invited to "the saloon."  I had thought before that
we had a tent or so too many, but now here was one, at least, provided
for; it was to be used for nothing but an eating-saloon.  Like the
others, it was high enough for a family of giraffes to live in, and was
very handsome and clean and bright-colored within.  It was a gem of a
place.  A table for eight, and eight canvas chairs; a table-cloth and
napkins whose whiteness and whose fineness laughed to scorn the things we
were used to in the great excursion steamer; knives and forks,
soup-plates, dinner-plates--every thing, in the handsomest kind of
style.  It was wonderful!  And they call this camping out.  Those
stately fellows in baggy trowsers and turbaned fezzes brought in a
dinner which consisted of roast mutton, roast chicken, roast goose,
potatoes, bread, tea, pudding, apples, and delicious grapes; the viands
were better cooked than any we had eaten for weeks, and the table made a
finer appearance, with its large German silver candlesticks and other
finery, than any table we had sat down to for a good while, and yet that
polite dragoman, Abraham, came bowing in and apologizing for the whole
affair, on account of the unavoidable confusion of getting under way for
a very long trip, and promising to do a great deal better in future!

It is midnight, now, and we break camp at six in the morning.

They call this camping out.  At this rate it is a glorious privilege to
be a pilgrim to the Holy Land.



CHAPTER XLII.

We are camped near Temnin-el-Foka--a name which the boys have simplified
a good deal, for the sake of convenience in spelling.  They call it
Jacksonville.  It sounds a little strangely, here in the Valley of
Lebanon, but it has the merit of being easier to remember than the Arabic
name.

                     "COME LIKE SPIRITS, SO DEPART."

                 "The night shall be filled with music,
                   And the cares that infest the day
                 Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
                      And as silently steal away."

I slept very soundly last night, yet when the dragoman's bell rang at
half-past five this morning and the cry went abroad of "Ten minutes to
dress for breakfast!"  I heard both.  It surprised me, because I have not
heard the breakfast gong in the ship for a month, and whenever we have
had occasion to fire a salute at daylight, I have only found it out in
the course of conversation afterward.  However, camping out, even though
it be in a gorgeous tent, makes one fresh and lively in the morning
--especially if the air you are breathing is the cool, fresh air of the
mountains.

I was dressed within the ten minutes, and came out.  The saloon tent had
been stripped of its sides, and had nothing left but its roof; so when we
sat down to table we could look out over a noble panorama of mountain,
sea and hazy valley.  And sitting thus, the sun rose slowly up and
suffused the picture with a world of rich coloring.

Hot mutton chops, fried chicken, omelettes, fried potatoes and coffee
--all excellent.  This was the bill of fare.  It was sauced with a savage
appetite purchased by hard riding the day before, and refreshing sleep in
a pure atmosphere.  As I called for a second cup of coffee, I glanced
over my shoulder, and behold our white village was gone--the splendid
tents had vanished like magic!  It was wonderful how quickly those Arabs
had "folded their tents;" and it was wonderful, also, how quickly they
had gathered the thousand odds and ends of the camp together and
disappeared with them.

By half-past six we were under way, and all the Syrian world seemed to be
under way also.  The road was filled with mule trains and long
processions of camels.  This reminds me that we have been trying for some
time to think what a camel looks like, and now we have made it out.  When
he is down on all his knees, flat on his breast to receive his load, he
looks something like a goose swimming; and when he is upright he looks
like an ostrich with an extra set of legs.  Camels are not beautiful, and
their long under lip gives them an exceedingly "gallus"--[Excuse the
slang, no other word will describe it]--expression.  They have immense,
flat, forked cushions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie
with a slice cut out of it.  They are not particular about their diet.
They would eat a tombstone if they could bite it.  A thistle grows about
here which has needles on it that would pierce through leather, I think;
if one touches you, you can find relief in nothing but profanity.  The
camels eat these.  They show by their actions that they enjoy them.  I
suppose it would be a real treat to a camel to have a keg of nails for
supper.

While I am speaking of animals, I will mention that I have a horse now by
the name of "Jericho."  He is a mare.  I have seen remarkable horses
before, but none so remarkable as this.  I wanted a horse that could shy,
and this one fills the bill.  I had an idea that shying indicated spirit.
If I was correct, I have got the most spirited horse on earth.  He shies
at every thing he comes across, with the utmost impartiality.  He appears
to have a mortal dread of telegraph poles, especially; and it is
fortunate that these are on both sides of the road, because as it is now,
I never fall off twice in succession on the same side.  If I fell on the
same side always, it would get to be monotonous after a while.  This
creature has scared at every thing he has seen to-day, except a haystack.
He walked up to that with an intrepidity and a recklessness that were
astonishing.  And it would fill any one with admiration to see how he
preserves his self-possession in the presence of a barley sack.  This
dare-devil bravery will be the death of this horse some day.

He is not particularly fast, but I think he will get me through the Holy
Land.  He has only one fault.  His tail has been chopped off or else he
has sat down on it too hard, some time or other, and he has to fight the
flies with his heels.  This is all very well, but when he tries to kick a
fly off the top of his head with his hind foot, it is too much variety.
He is going to get himself into trouble that way some day.  He reaches
around and bites my legs too.  I do not care particularly about that,
only I do not like to see a horse too sociable.

I think the owner of this prize had a wrong opinion about him.  He had an
idea that he was one of those fiery, untamed steeds, but he is not of
that character.  I know the Arab had this idea, because when he brought
the horse out for inspection in Beirout, he kept jerking at the bridle
and shouting in Arabic, "Ho! will you?  Do you want to run away, you
ferocious beast, and break your neck?" when all the time the horse was
not doing anything in the world, and only looked like he wanted to lean
up against something and think.  Whenever he is not shying at things, or
reaching after a fly, he wants to do that yet.  How it would surprise his
owner to know this.

We have been in a historical section of country all day.  At noon we
camped three hours and took luncheon at Mekseh, near the junction of the
Lebanon Mountains and the Jebel el Kuneiyiseh, and looked down into the
immense, level, garden-like Valley of Lebanon.  To-night we are camping
near the same valley, and have a very wide sweep of it in view.  We can
see the long, whale-backed ridge of Mount Hermon projecting above the
eastern hills.  The "dews of Hermon" are falling upon us now, and the
tents are almost soaked with them.

Over the way from us, and higher up the valley, we can discern, through
the glasses, the faint outlines of the wonderful ruins of Baalbec, the
supposed Baal-Gad of Scripture.  Joshua, and another person, were the two
spies who were sent into this land of Canaan by the children of Israel to
report upon its character--I mean they were the spies who reported
favorably.  They took back with them some specimens of the grapes of this
country, and in the children's picture-books they are always represented
as bearing one monstrous bunch swung to a pole between them, a
respectable load for a pack-train.  The Sunday-school books exaggerated
it a little.  The grapes are most excellent to this day, but the bunches
are not as large as those in the pictures.  I was surprised and hurt when
I saw them, because those colossal bunches of grapes were one of my most
cherished juvenile traditions.

Joshua reported favorably, and the children of Israel journeyed on, with
Moses at the head of the general government, and Joshua in command of the
army of six hundred thousand fighting men.  Of women and children and
civilians there was a countless swarm.  Of all that mighty host, none but
the two faithful spies ever lived to set their feet in the Promised Land.
They and their descendants wandered forty years in the desert, and then
Moses, the gifted warrior, poet, statesman and philosopher, went up into
Pisgah and met his mysterious fate.  Where he was buried no man knows
--for

          "* * * no man dug that sepulchre,
          And no man saw it e'er
--          For the Sons of God upturned the sod
          And laid the dead man there!"

Then Joshua began his terrible raid, and from Jericho clear to this
Baal-Gad, he swept the land like the Genius of Destruction.  He
slaughtered the people, laid waste their soil, and razed their cities to
the ground. He wasted thirty-one kings also.  One may call it that,
though really it can hardly be called wasting them, because there were
always plenty of kings in those days, and to spare.  At any rate, he
destroyed thirty-one kings, and divided up their realms among his
Israelites.  He divided up this valley stretched out here before us, and
so it was once Jewish territory.  The Jews have long since disappeared
from it, however.

Back yonder, an hour's journey from here, we passed through an Arab
village of stone dry-goods boxes (they look like that,) where Noah's tomb
lies under lock and key.  [Noah built the ark.]  Over these old hills and
valleys the ark that contained all that was left of a vanished world once
floated.

I make no apology for detailing the above information.  It will be news
to some of my readers, at any rate.

Noah's tomb is built of stone, and is covered with a long stone building.
Bucksheesh let us in.  The building had to be long, because the grave of
the honored old navigator is two hundred and ten feet long itself!  It is
only about four feet high, though.  He must have cast a shadow like a
lightning-rod.  The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was
buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people.  The
evidence is pretty straight.  Shem, the son of Noah, was present at the
burial, and showed the place to his descendants, who transmitted the
knowledge to their descendants, and the lineal descendants of these
introduced themselves to us to-day.  It was pleasant to make the
acquaintance of members of so respectable a family.  It was a thing to be
proud of.  It was the next thing to being acquainted with Noah himself.

Noah's memorable voyage will always possess a living interest for me,
henceforward.

If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around
us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire.  I wish Europe would
let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it
difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a
diving-bell.  The Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by
a system of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic.  Last
year their taxes were heavy enough, in all conscience--but this year
they have been increased by the addition of taxes that were forgiven
them in times of famine in former years.  On top of this the Government
has levied a tax of one-tenth of the whole proceeds of the land.  This
is only half the story.  The Pacha of a Pachalic does not trouble
himself with appointing tax-collectors.  He figures up what all these
taxes ought to amount to in a certain district.  Then he farms the
collection out.  He calls the rich men together, the highest bidder gets
the speculation, pays the Pacha on the spot, and then sells out to
smaller fry, who sell in turn to a piratical horde of still smaller fry.
These latter compel the peasant to bring his little trifle of grain to
the village, at his own cost.  It must be weighed, the various taxes set
apart, and the remainder returned to the producer.  But the collector
delays this duty day after day, while the producer's family are
perishing for bread; at last the poor wretch, who can not but understand
the game, says, "Take a quarter--take half--take two-thirds if you will,
and let me go!"  It is a most outrageous state of things.

These people are naturally good-hearted and intelligent, and with
education and liberty, would be a happy and contented race.  They often
appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not some day come
to their relief and save them.  The Sultan has been lavishing money like
water in England and Paris, but his subjects are suffering for it now.

This fashion of camping out bewilders me.  We have boot-jacks and a
bath-tub, now, and yet all the mysteries the pack-mules carry are not
revealed.  What next?



CHAPTER XLIII.

We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley
of Lebanon.  It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had
seemed from the hill-sides.  It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered
thickly with stones the size of a man's fist.  Here and there the natives
had scratched the ground and reared a sickly crop of grain, but for the
most part the valley was given up to a handful of shepherds, whose flocks
were doing what they honestly could to get a living, but the chances were
against them.  We saw rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at
intervals, and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which obtained
in Jacob's time.  There were no walls, no fences, no hedges--nothing to
secure a man's possessions but these random heaps of stones.  The
Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal times, and these other
Arabs, their lineal descendants, do so likewise.  An American, of
ordinary intelligence, would soon widely extend his property, at an
outlay of mere manual labor, performed at night, under so loose a system
of fencing as this.

The plows these people use are simply a sharpened stick, such as Abraham
plowed with, and they still winnow their wheat as he did--they pile it on
the house-top, and then toss it by shovel-fulls into the air until the
wind has blown all the chaff away.  They never invent any thing, never
learn any thing.

We had a fine race, of a mile, with an Arab perched on a camel.  Some of
the horses were fast, and made very good time, but the camel scampered by
them without any very great effort.  The yelling and shouting, and
whipping and galloping, of all parties interested, made it an
exhilarating, exciting, and particularly boisterous race.

At eleven o'clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec, a
noble ruin whose history is a sealed book.  It has stood there for
thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travelers; but who built
it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered.  One
thing is very sure, though.  Such grandeur of design, and such grace of
execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled
or even approached in any work of men's hands that has been built within
twenty centuries past.

The great Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Jupiter, and several smaller
temples, are clustered together in the midst of one of these miserable
Syrian villages, and look strangely enough in such plebeian company.
These temples are built upon massive substructions that might support a
world, almost; the materials used are blocks of stone as large as an
omnibus--very few, if any of them, are smaller than a carpenter's tool
chest--and these substructions are traversed by tunnels of masonry
through which a train of cars might pass.  With such foundations as
these, it is little wonder that Baalbec has lasted so long.  The Temple
of the Sun is nearly three hundred feet long and one hundred and sixty
feet wide.  It had fifty-four columns around it, but only six are
standing now--the others lie broken at its base, a confused and
picturesque heap.  The six columns are their bases, Corinthian capitals
and entablature--and six more shapely columns do not exist.  The columns
and the entablature together are ninety feet high--a prodigious altitude
for shafts of stone to reach, truly--and yet one only thinks of their
beauty and symmetry when looking at them; the pillars look slender and
delicate, the entablature, with its elaborate sculpture, looks like rich
stucco-work.  But when you have gazed aloft till your eyes are weary, you
glance at the great fragments of pillars among which you are standing,
and find that they are eight feet through; and with them lie beautiful
capitals apparently as large as a small cottage; and also single slabs of
stone, superbly sculptured, that are four or five feet thick, and would
completely cover the floor of any ordinary parlor.  You wonder where
these monstrous things came from, and it takes some little time to
satisfy yourself that the airy and graceful fabric that towers above your
head is made up of their mates.  It seems too preposterous.

The Temple of Jupiter is a smaller ruin than the one I have been speaking
of, and yet is immense.  It is in a tolerable state of preservation.  One
row of nine columns stands almost uninjured.  They are sixty-five feet
high and support a sort of porch or roof, which connects them with the
roof of the building.  This porch-roof is composed of tremendous slabs of
stone, which are so finely sculptured on the under side that the work
looks like a fresco from below.  One or two of these slabs had fallen,
and again I wondered if the gigantic masses of carved stone that lay
about me were no larger than those above my head.  Within the temple, the
ornamentation was elaborate and colossal.  What a wonder of architectural
beauty and grandeur this edifice must have been when it was new!  And
what a noble picture it and its statelier companion, with the chaos of
mighty fragments scattered about them, yet makes in the moonlight!

I can not conceive how those immense blocks of stone were ever hauled
from the quarries, or how they were ever raised to the dizzy heights they
occupy in the temples.  And yet these sculptured blocks are trifles in
size compared with the rough-hewn blocks that form the wide verandah or
platform which surrounds the Great Temple.  One stretch of that platform,
two hundred feet long, is composed of blocks of stone as large, and some
of them larger, than a street-car.  They surmount a wall about ten or
twelve feet high.  I thought those were large rocks, but they sank into
insignificance compared with those which formed another section of the
platform.  These were three in number, and I thought that each of them
was about as long as three street cars placed end to end, though of
course they are a third wider and a third higher than a street car.
Perhaps two railway freight cars of the largest pattern, placed end to
end, might better represent their size.  In combined length these three
stones stretch nearly two hundred feet; they are thirteen feet square;
two of them are sixty-four feet long each, and the third is sixty-nine.
They are built into the massive wall some twenty feet above the ground.
They are there, but how they got there is the question.  I have seen the
hull of a steamboat that was smaller than one of those stones.  All these
great walls are as exact and shapely as the flimsy things we build of
bricks in these days.  A race of gods or of giants must have inhabited
Baalbec many a century ago.  Men like the men of our day could hardly
rear such temples as these.

We went to the quarry from whence the stones of Baalbec were taken.  It
was about a quarter of a mile off, and down hill.  In a great pit lay the
mate of the largest stone in the ruins.  It lay there just as the giants
of that old forgotten time had left it when they were called hence--just
as they had left it, to remain for thousands of years, an eloquent rebuke
unto such as are prone to think slightingly of the men who lived before
them.  This enormous block lies there, squared and ready for the
builders' hands--a solid mass fourteen feet by seventeen, and but a few
inches less than seventy feet long!  Two buggies could be driven abreast
of each other, on its surface, from one end of it to the other, and leave
room enough for a man or two to walk on either side.

One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wilkinsons, and all
the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Come and Baalbec would
inscribe their poor little names upon the walls of Baalbec's magnificent
ruins, and would add the town, the county and the State they came from
--and swearing thus, be infallibly correct.  It is a pity some great ruin
does not fall in and flatten out some of these reptiles, and scare their
kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments
again, forever.

Properly, with the sorry relics we bestrode, it was a three days' journey
to Damascus.  It was necessary that we should do it in less than two.
It was necessary because our three pilgrims would not travel on the
Sabbath day.  We were all perfectly willing to keep the Sabbath day, but
there are times when to keep the letter of a sacred law whose spirit is
righteous, becomes a sin, and this was a case in point.  We pleaded for
the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faithful
service deserved kindness in return, and their hard lot compassion.  But
when did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?  What were a
few long hours added to the hardships of some over-taxed brutes when
weighed against the peril of those human souls?  It was not the most
promising party to travel with and hope to gain a higher veneration for
religion through the example of its devotees.  We said the Saviour who
pitied dumb beasts and taught that the ox must be rescued from the mire
even on the Sabbath day, would not have counseled a forced march like
this.  We said the "long trip" was exhausting and therefore dangerous in
the blistering heats of summer, even when the ordinary days' stages were
traversed, and if we persisted in this hard march, some of us might be
stricken down with the fevers of the country in consequence of it.
Nothing could move the pilgrims.  They must press on.  Men might die,
horses might die, but they must enter upon holy soil next week, with no
Sabbath-breaking stain upon them.  Thus they were willing to commit a sin
against the spirit of religious law, in order that they might preserve
the letter of it.  It was not worth while to tell them "the letter
kills."  I am talking now about personal friends; men whom I like; men
who are good citizens; who are honorable, upright, conscientious; but
whose idea of the Saviour's religion seems to me distorted.  They lecture
our shortcomings unsparingly, and every night they call us together and
read to us chapters from the Testament that are full of gentleness, of
charity, and of tender mercy; and then all the next day they stick to
their saddles clear up to the summits of these rugged mountains, and
clear down again.  Apply the Testament's gentleness, and charity, and
tender mercy to a toiling, worn and weary horse?--Nonsense--these are for
God's human creatures, not His dumb ones.  What the pilgrims choose to
do, respect for their almost sacred character demands that I should allow
to pass--but I would so like to catch any other member of the party
riding his horse up one of these exhausting hills once!

We have given the pilgrims a good many examples that might benefit them,
but it is virtue thrown away.  They have never heard a cross word out of
our lips toward each other--but they have quarreled once or twice.  We
love to hear them at it, after they have been lecturing us.  The very
first thing they did, coming ashore at Beirout, was to quarrel in the
boat.  I have said I like them, and I do like them--but every time they
read me a scorcher of a lecture I mean to talk back in print.

Not content with doubling the legitimate stages, they switched off the
main road and went away out of the way to visit an absurd fountain called
Figia, because Baalam's ass had drank there once.  So we journeyed on,
through the terrible hills and deserts and the roasting sun, and then far
into the night, seeking the honored pool of Baalam's ass, the patron
saint of all pilgrims like us.  I find no entry but this in my note-book:

     "Rode to-day, altogether, thirteen hours, through deserts, partly,
     and partly over barren, unsightly hills, and latterly through wild,
     rocky scenery, and camped at about eleven o'clock at night on the
     banks of a limpid stream, near a Syrian village.  Do not know its
     name--do not wish to know it--want to go to bed.  Two horses lame
     (mine and Jack's) and the others worn out.  Jack and I walked three
     or four miles, over the hills, and led the horses.  Fun--but of a
     mild type."

Twelve or thirteen hours in the saddle, even in a Christian land and a
Christian climate, and on a good horse, is a tiresome journey; but in an
oven like Syria, in a ragged spoon of a saddle that slips fore-and-aft,
and "thort-ships," and every way, and on a horse that is tired and lame,
and yet must be whipped and spurred with hardly a moment's cessation all
day long, till the blood comes from his side, and your conscience hurts
you every time you strike if you are half a man,--it is a journey to be
remembered in bitterness of spirit and execrated with emphasis for a
liberal division of a man's lifetime.



CHAPTER XLIV.

The next day was an outrage upon men and horses both.  It was another
thirteen-hour stretch (including an hour's "nooning.") It was over the
barrenest chalk-hills and through the baldest canons that even Syria can
show.  The heat quivered in the air every where.  In the canons we almost
smothered in the baking atmosphere.  On high ground, the reflection from
the chalk-hills was blinding.  It was cruel to urge the crippled horses,
but it had to be done in order to make Damascus Saturday night.  We saw
ancient tombs and temples of fanciful architecture carved out of the
solid rock high up in the face of precipices above our heads, but we had
neither time nor strength to climb up there and examine them.  The terse
language of my note-book will answer for the rest of this day's
experiences:

     "Broke camp at 7 A.M., and made a ghastly trip through the Zeb Dana
     valley and the rough mountains--horses limping and that Arab
     screech-owl that does most of the singing and carries the
     water-skins, always a thousand miles ahead, of course, and no water
     to drink--will he never die?  Beautiful stream in a chasm, lined
     thick with pomegranate, fig, olive and quince orchards, and nooned
     an hour at the celebrated Baalam's Ass Fountain of Figia, second in
     size in Syria, and the coldest water out of Siberia--guide-books do
     not say Baalam's ass ever drank there--somebody been imposing on
     the pilgrims, may be.  Bathed in it--Jack and I.  Only a
     second--ice-water.  It is the principal source of the Abana river
     --only one-half mile down to where it joins.  Beautiful
     place--giant trees all around--so shady and cool, if one could keep
     awake--vast stream gushes straight out from under the mountain in a
     torrent.  Over it is a very ancient ruin, with no known history
     --supposed to have been for the worship of the deity of the fountain
     or Baalam's ass or somebody.  Wretched nest of human vermin about
     the fountain--rags, dirt, sunken cheeks, pallor of sickness, sores,
     projecting bones, dull, aching misery in their eyes and ravenous
     hunger speaking from every eloquent fibre and muscle from head to
     foot. How they sprang upon a bone, how they crunched the bread we
     gave them!  Such as these to swarm about one and watch every bite
     he takes, with greedy looks, and swallow unconsciously every time
     he swallows, as if they half fancied the precious morsel went down
     their own throats --hurry up the caravan!--I never shall enjoy a
     meal in this distressful country.  To think of eating three times
     every day under such circumstances for three weeks yet--it is worse
     punishment than riding all day in the sun.  There are sixteen
     starving babies from one to six years old in the party, and their
     legs are no larger than broom handles.  Left the fountain at 1 P.M.
     (the fountain took us at least two hours out of our way,) and
     reached Mahomet's lookout perch, over Damascus, in time to get a
     good long look before it was necessary to move on.  Tired?  Ask of
     the winds that far away with fragments strewed the sea."

As the glare of day mellowed into twilight, we looked down upon a picture
which is celebrated all over the world.  I think I have read about four
hundred times that when Mahomet was a simple camel-driver he reached this
point and looked down upon Damascus for the first time, and then made a
certain renowned remark.  He said man could enter only one paradise; he
preferred to go to the one above.  So he sat down there and feasted his
eyes upon the earthly paradise of Damascus, and then went away without
entering its gates.  They have erected a tower on the hill to mark the
spot where he stood.

Damascus is beautiful from the mountain.  It is beautiful even to
foreigners accustomed to luxuriant vegetation, and I can easily
understand how unspeakably beautiful it must be to eyes that are only
used to the God-forsaken barrenness and desolation of Syria.  I should
think a Syrian would go wild with ecstacy when such a picture bursts upon
him for the first time.

From his high perch, one sees before him and below him, a wall of dreary
mountains, shorn of vegetation, glaring fiercely in the sun; it fences in
a level desert of yellow sand, smooth as velvet and threaded far away
with fine lines that stand for roads, and dotted with creeping mites we
know are camel-trains and journeying men; right in the midst of the
desert is spread a billowy expanse of green foliage; and nestling in its
heart sits the great white city, like an island of pearls and opals
gleaming out of a sea of emeralds.  This is the picture you see spread
far below you, with distance to soften it, the sun to glorify it, strong
contrasts to heighten the effects, and over it and about it a drowsing
air of repose to spiritualize it and make it seem rather a beautiful
estray from the mysterious worlds we visit in dreams than a substantial
tenant of our coarse, dull globe.  And when you think of the leagues of
blighted, blasted, sandy, rocky, sun-burnt, ugly, dreary, infamous
country you have ridden over to get here, you think it is the most
beautiful, beautiful picture that ever human eyes rested upon in all the
broad universe!  If I were to go to Damascus again, I would camp on
Mahomet's hill about a week, and then go away.  There is no need to go
inside the walls.  The Prophet was wise without knowing it when he
decided not to go down into the paradise of Damascus.

There is an honored old tradition that the immense garden which Damascus
stands in was the Garden of Eden, and modern writers have gathered up
many chapters of evidence tending to show that it really was the Garden
of Eden, and that the rivers Pharpar and Abana are the "two rivers" that
watered Adam's Paradise.  It may be so, but it is not paradise now, and
one would be as happy outside of it as he would be likely to be within.
It is so crooked and cramped and dirty that one can not realize that he
is in the splendid city he saw from the hill-top.  The gardens are hidden
by high mud-walls, and the paradise is become a very sink of pollution
and uncomeliness.  Damascus has plenty of clear, pure water in it,
though, and this is enough, of itself, to make an Arab think it beautiful
and blessed.  Water is scarce in blistered Syria.  We run railways by our
large cities in America; in Syria they curve the roads so as to make them
run by the meagre little puddles they call "fountains," and which are not
found oftener on a journey than every four hours.  But the "rivers" of
Pharpar and Abana of Scripture (mere creeks,) run through Damascus, and
so every house and every garden have their sparkling fountains and
rivulets of water.  With her forest of foliage and her abundance of
water, Damascus must be a wonder of wonders to the Bedouin from the
deserts.  Damascus is simply an oasis--that is what it is.  For four
thousand years its waters have not gone dry or its fertility failed.
Now we can understand why the city has existed so long.  It could not
die.  So long as its waters remain to it away out there in the midst of
that howling desert, so long will Damascus live to bless the sight of the
tired and thirsty wayfarer.

     "Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as the breath of
     spring, blooming as thine own rose-bud, and fragrant as thine own
     orange flower, O Damascus, pearl of the East!"

Damascus dates back anterior to the days of Abraham, and is the oldest
city in the world.  It was founded by Uz, the grandson of Noah.  "The
early history of Damascus is shrouded in the mists of a hoary antiquity."
Leave the matters written of in the first eleven chapters of the Old
Testament out, and no recorded event has occurred in the world but
Damascus was in existence to receive the news of it.  Go back as far as
you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus.  In the
writings of every century for more than four thousand years, its name has
been mentioned and its praises sung.  To Damascus, years are only
moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time.  She measures time,
not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise,
and prosper and crumble to ruin.  She is a type of immortality.  She saw
the foundations of Baalbec, and Thebes, and Ephesus laid; she saw these
villages grow into mighty cities, and amaze the world with their
grandeur--and she has lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given
over to the owls and the bats.  She saw the Israelitish empire exalted,
and she saw it annihilated.  She saw Greece rise, and flourish two
thousand years, and die.  In her old age she saw Rome built; she saw it
overshadow the world with its power; she saw it perish.  The few hundreds
of years of Genoese and Venetian might and splendor were, to grave old
Damascus, only a trifling scintillation hardly worth remembering.
Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she
lives.  She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will
see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.  Though another claims
the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.

We reached the city gates just at sundown.  They do say that one can get
into any walled city of Syria, after night, for bucksheesh, except
Damascus.  But Damascus, with its four thousand years of respectability
in the world, has many old fogy notions.  There are no street lamps
there, and the law compels all who go abroad at night to carry lanterns,
just as was the case in old days, when heroes and heroines of the Arabian
Nights walked the streets of Damascus, or flew away toward Bagdad on
enchanted carpets.

It was fairly dark a few minutes after we got within the wall, and we
rode long distances through wonderfully crooked streets, eight to ten
feet wide, and shut in on either side by the high mud-walls of the
gardens.  At last we got to where lanterns could be seen flitting about
here and there, and knew we were in the midst of the curious old city.
In a little narrow street, crowded with our pack-mules and with a swarm
of uncouth Arabs, we alighted, and through a kind of a hole in the wall
entered the hotel.  We stood in a great flagged court, with flowers and
citron trees about us, and a huge tank in the centre that was receiving
the waters of many pipes.  We crossed the court and entered the rooms
prepared to receive four of us.  In a large marble-paved recess between
the two rooms was a tank of clear, cool water, which was kept running
over all the time by the streams that were pouring into it from half a
dozen pipes.  Nothing, in this scorching, desolate land could look so
refreshing as this pure water flashing in the lamp-light; nothing could
look so beautiful, nothing could sound so delicious as this mimic rain to
ears long unaccustomed to sounds of such a nature.  Our rooms were large,
comfortably furnished, and even had their floors clothed with soft,
cheerful-tinted carpets.  It was a pleasant thing to see a carpet again,
for if there is any thing drearier than the tomb-like, stone-paved
parlors and bed-rooms of Europe and Asia, I do not know what it is.
They make one think of the grave all the time.  A very broad, gaily
caparisoned divan, some twelve or fourteen feet long, extended across one
side of each room, and opposite were single beds with spring mattresses.
There were great looking-glasses and marble-top tables.  All this luxury
was as grateful to systems and senses worn out with an exhausting day's
travel, as it was unexpected--for one can not tell what to expect in a
Turkish city of even a quarter of a million inhabitants.

I do not know, but I think they used that tank between the rooms to draw
drinking water from; that did not occur to me, however, until I had
dipped my baking head far down into its cool depths.  I thought of it
then, and superb as the bath was, I was sorry I had taken it, and was
about to go and explain to the landlord.  But a finely curled and scented
poodle dog frisked up and nipped the calf of my leg just then, and before
I had time to think, I had soused him to the bottom of the tank, and when
I saw a servant coming with a pitcher I went off and left the pup trying
to climb out and not succeeding very well.  Satisfied revenge was all I
needed to make me perfectly happy, and when I walked in to supper that
first night in Damascus I was in that condition.  We lay on those divans
a long time, after supper, smoking narghilies and long-stemmed chibouks,
and talking about the dreadful ride of the day, and I knew then what I
had sometimes known before--that it is worth while to get tired out,
because one so enjoys resting afterward.

In the morning we sent for donkeys.  It is worthy of note that we had to
send for these things.  I said Damascus was an old fossil, and she is.
Any where else we would have been assailed by a clamorous army of
donkey-drivers, guides, peddlers and beggars--but in Damascus they so
hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse
whatever with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always
safe in Damascus streets.  It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory
out of Arabia.  Where you see one green turban of a Hadji elsewhere (the
honored sign that my lord has made the pilgrimage to Mecca,) I think you
will see a dozen in Damascus.  The Damascenes are the ugliest, wickedest
looking villains we have seen.  All the veiled women we had seen yet,
nearly, left their eyes exposed, but numbers of these in Damascus
completely hid the face under a close-drawn black veil that made the
woman look like a mummy.  If ever we caught an eye exposed it was
quickly hidden from our contaminating Christian vision; the beggars
actually passed us by without demanding bucksheesh; the merchants in the
bazaars did not hold up their goods and cry out eagerly, "Hey, John!"
or "Look this, Howajji!"  On the contrary, they only scowled at us and
said never a word.

The narrow streets swarmed like a hive with men and women in strange
Oriental costumes, and our small donkeys knocked them right and left as
we plowed through them, urged on by the merciless donkey-boys.  These
persecutors run after the animals, shouting and goading them for hours
together; they keep the donkey in a gallop always, yet never get tired
themselves or fall behind.  The donkeys fell down and spilt us over their
heads occasionally, but there was nothing for it but to mount and hurry
on again.  We were banged against sharp corners, loaded porters, camels,
and citizens generally; and we were so taken up with looking out for
collisions and casualties that we had no chance to look about us at all.
We rode half through the city and through the famous "street which is
called Straight" without seeing any thing, hardly.  Our bones were nearly
knocked out of joint, we were wild with excitement, and our sides ached
with the jolting we had suffered.  I do not like riding in the Damascus
street-cars.

We were on our way to the reputed houses of Judas and Ananias.  About
eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago, Saul, a native of Tarsus, was
particularly bitter against the new sect called Christians, and he left
Jerusalem and started across the country on a furious crusade against
them.  He went forth "breathing threatenings and slaughter against the
disciples of the Lord."

     "And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there
     shined round about him a light from heaven:

     "And he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, 'Saul,
     Saul, why persecutest thou me?'

     "And when he knew that it was Jesus that spoke to him he trembled,
     and was astonished, and said, 'Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?'"

He was told to arise and go into the ancient city and one would tell
him what to do.  In the meantime his soldiers stood speechless and
awe-stricken, for they heard the mysterious voice but saw no man.  Saul
rose up and found that that fierce supernatural light had destroyed his
sight, and he was blind, so "they led him by the hand and brought him to
Damascus."  He was converted.

Paul lay three days, blind, in the house of Judas, and during that time
he neither ate nor drank.

There came a voice to a citizen of Damascus, named Ananias, saying,
"Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and inquire at
the house of Judas, for one called Saul, of Tarsus; for behold, he
prayeth."

Ananias did not wish to go at first, for he had heard of Saul before, and
he had his doubts about that style of a "chosen vessel" to preach the
gospel of peace.  However, in obedience to orders, he went into the
"street called Straight" (how he found his way into it, and after he did,
how he ever found his way out of it again, are mysteries only to be
accounted for by the fact that he was acting under Divine inspiration.)
He found Paul and restored him, and ordained him a preacher; and from
this old house we had hunted up in the street which is miscalled
Straight, he had started out on that bold missionary career which he
prosecuted till his death.  It was not the house of the disciple who sold
the Master for thirty pieces of silver.  I make this explanation in
justice to Judas, who was a far different sort of man from the person
just referred to.  A very different style of man, and lived in a very
good house.  It is a pity we do not know more about him.

I have given, in the above paragraphs, some more information for people
who will not read Bible history until they are defrauded into it by some
such method as this.  I hope that no friend of progress and education
will obstruct or interfere with my peculiar mission.

The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but not as
straight as a rainbow.  St. Luke is careful not to commit himself; he
does not say it is the street which is straight, but the "street which is
called Straight."  It is a fine piece of irony; it is the only facetious
remark in the Bible, I believe.  We traversed the street called Straight
a good way, and then turned off and called at the reputed house of
Ananias.  There is small question that a part of the original house is
there still; it is an old room twelve or fifteen feet under ground, and
its masonry is evidently ancient.  If Ananias did not live there in St.
Paul's time, somebody else did, which is just as well.  I took a drink
out of Ananias' well, and singularly enough, the water was just as fresh
as if the well had been dug yesterday.

We went out toward the north end of the city to see the place where the
disciples let Paul down over the Damascus wall at dead of night--for he
preached Christ so fearlessly in Damascus that the people sought to kill
him, just as they would to-day for the same offense, and he had to escape
and flee to Jerusalem.

Then we called at the tomb of Mahomet's children and at a tomb which
purported to be that of St. George who killed the dragon, and so on out
to the hollow place under a rock where Paul hid during his flight till
his pursuers gave him up; and to the mausoleum of the five thousand
Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks.  They say
those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and
children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all
through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was
dreadful.  All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and
the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the "infidel
dogs."  The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and
Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians
were massacred and their possessions laid waste.  How they hate a
Christian in Damascus!--and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well.  And
how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again!

It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for interposing
to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction it has so richly deserved
for a thousand years.  It hurts my vanity to see these pagans refuse to
eat of food that has been cooked for us; or to eat from a dish we have
eaten from; or to drink from a goatskin which we have polluted with our
Christian lips, except by filtering the water through a rag which they
put over the mouth of it or through a sponge!  I never disliked a
Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia is ready
to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good
breeding or good judgment to interfere.

In Damascus they think there are no such rivers in all the world as their
little Abana and Pharpar.  The Damascenes have always thought that way.
In 2 Kings, chapter v., Naaman boasts extravagantly about them.  That was
three thousand years ago.  He says: "Are not Abana and Pharpar rivers of
Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?  May I not wash in them
and be clean?"  But some of my readers have forgotten who Naaman was,
long ago.  Naaman was the commander of the Syrian armies.  He was the
favorite of the king and lived in great state.  "He was a mighty man of
valor, but he was a leper."  Strangely enough, the house they point out
to you now as his, has been turned into a leper hospital, and the inmates
expose their horrid deformities and hold up their hands and beg for
bucksheesh when a stranger enters.

One can not appreciate the horror of this disease until he looks upon it
in all its ghastliness, in Naaman's ancient dwelling in Damascus.  Bones
all twisted out of shape, great knots protruding from face and body,
joints decaying and dropping away--horrible!



CHAPTER XLV.

The last twenty-four hours we staid in Damascus I lay prostrate with a
violent attack of cholera, or cholera morbus, and therefore had a good
chance and a good excuse to lie there on that wide divan and take an
honest rest.  I had nothing to do but listen to the pattering of the
fountains and take medicine and throw it up again.  It was dangerous
recreation, but it was pleasanter than traveling in Syria.  I had plenty
of snow from Mount Hermon, and as it would not stay on my stomach, there
was nothing to interfere with my eating it--there was always room for
more.  I enjoyed myself very well.  Syrian travel has its interesting
features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break
your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.

We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of hours, and
then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-trees to give me
a chance to rest.  It was the hottest day we had seen yet--the sun-flames
shot down like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe--the
rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge on the head and pass downward like
rain from a roof.  I imagined I could distinguish between the floods of
rays--I thought I could tell when each flood struck my head, when it
reached my shoulders, and when the next one came.  It was terrible.  All
the desert glared so fiercely that my eyes were swimming in tears all the
time.  The boys had white umbrellas heavily lined with dark green.  They
were a priceless blessing.  I thanked fortune that I had one, too,
notwithstanding it was packed up with the baggage and was ten miles
ahead.  It is madness to travel in Syria without an umbrella.  They told
me in Beirout (these people who always gorge you with advice) that it was
madness to travel in Syria without an umbrella.  It was on this account
that I got one.

But, honestly, I think an umbrella is a nuisance any where when its
business is to keep the sun off.  No Arab wears a brim to his fez, or
uses an umbrella, or any thing to shade his eyes or his face, and he
always looks comfortable and proper in the sun.  But of all the
ridiculous sights I ever have seen, our party of eight is the most so
--they do cut such an outlandish figure.  They travel single file; they all
wear the endless white rag of Constantinople wrapped round and round
their hats and dangling down their backs; they all wear thick green
spectacles, with side-glasses to them; they all hold white umbrellas,
lined with green, over their heads; without exception their stirrups are
too short--they are the very worst gang of horsemen on earth, their
animals to a horse trot fearfully hard--and when they get strung out one
after the other; glaring straight ahead and breathless; bouncing high and
out of turn, all along the line; knees well up and stiff, elbows flapping
like a rooster's that is going to crow, and the long file of umbrellas
popping convulsively up and down--when one sees this outrageous picture
exposed to the light of day, he is amazed that the gods don't get out
their thunderbolts and destroy them off the face of the earth!  I do--I
wonder at it.  I wouldn't let any such caravan go through a country of
mine.

And when the sun drops below the horizon and the boys close their
umbrellas and put them under their arms, it is only a variation of the
picture, not a modification of its absurdity.

But may be you can not see the wild extravagance of my panorama.  You
could if you were here.  Here, you feel all the time just as if you were
living about the year 1200 before Christ--or back to the patriarchs--or
forward to the New Era.  The scenery of the Bible is about you--the
customs of the patriarchs are around you--the same people, in the same
flowing robes, and in sandals, cross your path--the same long trains of
stately camels go and come--the same impressive religious solemnity and
silence rest upon the desert and the mountains that were upon them in the
remote ages of antiquity, and behold, intruding upon a scene like this,
comes this fantastic mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping
elbows and bobbing umbrellas!  It is Daniel in the lion's den with a
green cotton umbrella under his arm, all over again.

My umbrella is with the baggage, and so are my green spectacles--and
there they shall stay.  I will not use them.  I will show some respect
for the eternal fitness of things.  It will be bad enough to get
sun-struck, without looking ridiculous into the bargain.  If I fall,
let me fall bearing about me the semblance of a Christian, at least.

Three or four hours out from Damascus we passed the spot where Saul was
so abruptly converted, and from this place we looked back over the
scorching desert, and had our last glimpse of beautiful Damascus, decked
in its robes of shining green.  After nightfall we reached our tents,
just outside of the nasty Arab village of Jonesborough.  Of course the
real name of the place is El something or other, but the boys still
refuse to recognize the Arab names or try to pronounce them.  When I say
that that village is of the usual style, I mean to insinuate that all
Syrian villages within fifty miles of Damascus are alike--so much alike
that it would require more than human intelligence to tell wherein one
differed from another.  A Syrian village is a hive of huts one story high
(the height of a man,) and as square as a dry-goods box; it is
mud-plastered all over, flat roof and all, and generally whitewashed
after a fashion.  The same roof often extends over half the town,
covering many of the streets, which are generally about a yard wide.
When you ride through one of these villages at noon-day, you first meet
a melancholy dog, that looks up at you and silently begs that you won't
run over him, but he does not offer to get out of the way; next you meet
a young boy without any clothes on, and he holds out his hand and says
"Bucksheesh!" --he don't really expect a cent, but then he learned to
say that before he learned to say mother, and now he can not break
himself of it; next you meet a woman with a black veil drawn closely
over her face, and her bust exposed; finally, you come to several
sore-eyed children and children in all stages of mutilation and decay;
and sitting humbly in the dust, and all fringed with filthy rags, is a
poor devil whose arms and legs are gnarled and twisted like grape-vines.
These are all the people you are likely to see.  The balance of the
population are asleep within doors, or abroad tending goats in the
plains and on the hill-sides.  The village is built on some consumptive
little water-course, and about it is a little fresh-looking vegetation.
Beyond this charmed circle, for miles on every side, stretches a weary
desert of sand and gravel, which produces a gray bunchy shrub like
sage-brush.  A Syrian village is the sorriest sight in the world, and
its surroundings are eminently in keeping with it.

I would not have gone into this dissertation upon Syrian villages but for
the fact that Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter of Scriptural notoriety, is
buried in Jonesborough, and I wished the public to know about how he is
located.  Like Homer, he is said to be buried in many other places, but
this is the only true and genuine place his ashes inhabit.

When the original tribes were dispersed, more than four thousand years
ago, Nimrod and a large party traveled three or four hundred miles, and
settled where the great city of Babylon afterwards stood.  Nimrod built
that city.  He also began to build the famous Tower of Babel, but
circumstances over which he had no control put it out of his power to
finish it.  He ran it up eight stories high, however, and two of them
still stand, at this day--a colossal mass of brickwork, rent down the
centre by earthquakes, and seared and vitrified by the lightnings of an
angry God.  But the vast ruin will still stand for ages, to shame the
puny labors of these modern generations of men.  Its huge compartments
are tenanted by owls and lions, and old Nimrod lies neglected in this
wretched village, far from the scene of his grand enterprise.

We left Jonesborough very early in the morning, and rode forever and
forever and forever, it seemed to me, over parched deserts and rocky
hills, hungry, and with no water to drink.  We had drained the goat-skins
dry in a little while.  At noon we halted before the wretched Arab town
of El Yuba Dam, perched on the side of a mountain, but the dragoman said
if we applied there for water we would be attacked by the whole tribe,
for they did not love Christians.  We had to journey on.  Two hours later
we reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain, which is crowned by the
crumbling castle of Banias, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no
doubt.  It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most
symmetrical, and at the same time the most ponderous masonry.  The
massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and have been
sixty.  From the mountain's peak its broken turrets rise above the groves
of ancient oaks and olives, and look wonderfully picturesque.  It is of
such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built.
It is utterly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path
winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis.  The horses'
hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during
the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was garrisoned.  We
wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of
the fortress, and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader
had rang, and where Phenician heroes had walked ages before them.

We wondered how such a solid mass of masonry could be affected even by an
earthquake, and could not understand what agency had made Banias a ruin;
but we found the destroyer, after a while, and then our wonder was
increased tenfold.  Seeds had fallen in crevices in the vast walls; the
seeds had sprouted; the tender, insignificant sprouts had hardened; they
grew larger and larger, and by a steady, imperceptible pressure forced
the great stones apart, and now are bringing sure destruction upon a
giant work that has even mocked the earthquakes to scorn!  Gnarled and
twisted trees spring from the old walls every where, and beautify and
overshadow the gray battlements with a wild luxuriance of foliage.

From these old towers we looked down upon a broad, far-reaching green
plain, glittering with the pools and rivulets which are the sources of
the sacred river Jordan.  It was a grateful vision, after so much desert.

And as the evening drew near, we clambered down the mountain, through
groves of the Biblical oaks of Bashan, (for we were just stepping over
the border and entering the long-sought Holy Land,) and at its extreme
foot, toward the wide valley, we entered this little execrable village of
Banias and camped in a great grove of olive trees near a torrent of
sparkling water whose banks are arrayed in fig-trees, pomegranates and
oleanders in full leaf.  Barring the proximity of the village, it is a
sort of paradise.

The very first thing one feels like doing when he gets into camp, all
burning up and dusty, is to hunt up a bath.  We followed the stream up to
where it gushes out of the mountain side, three hundred yards from the
tents, and took a bath that was so icy that if I did not know this was
the main source of the sacred river, I would expect harm to come of it.
It was bathing at noonday in the chilly source of the Abana, "River of
Damascus," that gave me the cholera, so Dr. B.  said.  However, it
generally does give me the cholera to take a bath.

The incorrigible pilgrims have come in with their pockets full of
specimens broken from the ruins.  I wish this vandalism could be stopped.
They broke off fragments from Noah's tomb; from the exquisite sculptures
of the temples of Baalbec; from the houses of Judas and Ananias, in
Damascus; from the tomb of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter in Jonesborough; from
the worn Greek and Roman inscriptions set in the hoary walls of the
Castle of Banias; and now they have been hacking and chipping these old
arches here that Jesus looked upon in the flesh.  Heaven protect the
Sepulchre when this tribe invades Jerusalem!

The ruins here are not very interesting.  There are the massive walls of
a great square building that was once the citadel; there are many
ponderous old arches that are so smothered with debris that they barely
project above the ground; there are heavy-walled sewers through which the
crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs; in the hill-side are
the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built
here--patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain; there is a
quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod's time, may be;
scattered every where, in the paths and in the woods, are Corinthian
capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture; and
up yonder in the precipice where the fountain gushes out, are well-worn
Greek inscriptions over niches in the rock where in ancient times the
Greeks, and after them the Romans, worshipped the sylvan god Pan.  But
trees and bushes grow above many of these ruins now; the miserable huts
of a little crew of filthy Arabs are perched upon the broken masonry of
antiquity, the whole place has a sleepy, stupid, rural look about it, and
one can hardly bring himself to believe that a busy, substantially built
city once existed here, even two thousand years ago.  The place was
nevertheless the scene of an event whose effects have added page after
page and volume after volume to the world's history.  For in this place
Christ stood when he said to Peter:

     "Thou art Peter; and upon this rock will I build my church, and the
     gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto
     thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt
     bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt
     loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

On those little sentences have been built up the mighty edifice of the
Church of Rome; in them lie the authority for the imperial power of the
Popes over temporal affairs, and their godlike power to curse a soul or
wash it white from sin.  To sustain the position of "the only true
Church," which Rome claims was thus conferred upon her, she has fought
and labored and struggled for many a century, and will continue to keep
herself busy in the same work to the end of time.  The memorable words I
have quoted give to this ruined city about all the interest it possesses
to people of the present day.

It seems curious enough to us to be standing on ground that was once
actually pressed by the feet of the Saviour.  The situation is suggestive
of a reality and a tangibility that seem at variance with the vagueness
and mystery and ghostliness that one naturally attaches to the character
of a god.  I can not comprehend yet that I am sitting where a god has
stood, and looking upon the brook and the mountains which that god looked
upon, and am surrounded by dusky men and women whose ancestors saw him,
and even talked with him, face to face, and carelessly, just as they
would have done with any other stranger.  I can not comprehend this; the
gods of my understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far
away.

This morning, during breakfast, the usual assemblage of squalid humanity
sat patiently without the charmed circle of the camp and waited for such
crumbs as pity might bestow upon their misery.  There were old and young,
brown-skinned and yellow.  Some of the men were tall and stalwart, (for
one hardly sees any where such splendid-looking men as here in the East,)
but all the women and children looked worn and sad, and distressed with
hunger.  They reminded me much of Indians, did these people.  They had
but little clothing, but such as they had was fanciful in character and
fantastic in its arrangement.  Any little absurd gewgaw or gimcrack they
had they disposed in such a way as to make it attract attention most
readily.  They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our
every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly
Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and
savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.

These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have noticed in
the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had
caked on them till it amounted to bark.

The little children were in a pitiable condition--they all had sore eyes,
and were otherwise afflicted in various ways.  They say that hardly a
native child in all the East is free from sore eyes, and that thousands
of them go blind of one eye or both every year.  I think this must be so,
for I see plenty of blind people every day, and I do not remember seeing
any children that hadn't sore eyes.  And, would you suppose that an
American mother could sit for an hour, with her child in her arms, and
let a hundred flies roost upon its eyes all that time undisturbed?  I see
that every day.  It makes my flesh creep.  Yesterday we met a woman
riding on a little jackass, and she had a little child in her arms
--honestly, I thought the child had goggles on as we approached, and I
wondered how its mother could afford so much style.  But when we drew
near, we saw that the goggles were nothing but a camp meeting of flies
assembled around each of the child's eyes, and at the same time there was
a detachment prospecting its nose.  The flies were happy, the child was
contented, and so the mother did not interfere.

As soon as the tribe found out that we had a doctor in our party, they
began to flock in from all quarters.  Dr. B., in the charity of his
nature, had taken a child from a woman who sat near by, and put some sort
of a wash upon its diseased eyes.  That woman went off and started the
whole nation, and it was a sight to see them swarm!  The lame, the halt,
the blind, the leprous--all the distempers that are bred of indolence,
dirt, and iniquity--were represented in the Congress in ten minutes, and
still they came!  Every woman that had a sick baby brought it along, and
every woman that hadn't, borrowed one.  What reverent and what worshiping
looks they bent upon that dread, mysterious power, the Doctor!  They
watched him take his phials out; they watched him measure the particles
of white powder; they watched him add drops of one precious liquid, and
drops of another; they lost not the slightest movement; their eyes were
riveted upon him with a fascination that nothing could distract.
I believe they thought he was gifted like a god.  When each individual
got his portion of medicine, his eyes were radiant with joy
--notwithstanding by nature they are a thankless and impassive race--and
upon his face was written the unquestioning faith that nothing on earth
could prevent the patient from getting well now.

Christ knew how to preach to these simple, superstitious,
disease-tortured creatures: He healed the sick.  They flocked to our
poor human doctor this morning when the fame of what he had done to the
sick child went abroad in the land, and they worshiped him with their
eyes while they did not know as yet whether there was virtue in his
simples or not. The ancestors of these--people precisely like them in
color, dress, manners, customs, simplicity--flocked in vast multitudes
after Christ, and when they saw Him make the afflicted whole with a
word, it is no wonder they worshiped Him.  No wonder His deeds were the
talk of the nation.  No wonder the multitude that followed Him was so
great that at one time--thirty miles from here--they had to let a sick
man down through the roof because no approach could be made to the door;
no wonder His audiences were so great at Galilee that He had to preach
from a ship removed a little distance from the shore; no wonder that
even in the desert places about Bethsaida, five thousand invaded His
solitude, and He had to feed them by a miracle or else see them suffer
for their confiding faith and devotion; no wonder when there was a great
commotion in a city in those days, one neighbor explained it to another
in words to this effect: "They say that Jesus of Nazareth is come!"

Well, as I was saying, the doctor distributed medicine as long as he had
any to distribute, and his reputation is mighty in Galilee this day.
Among his patients was the child of the Shiek's daughter--for even this
poor, ragged handful of sores and sin has its royal Shiek--a poor old
mummy that looked as if he would be more at home in a poor-house than in
the Chief Magistracy of this tribe of hopeless, shirtless savages.  The
princess--I mean the Shiek's daughter--was only thirteen or fourteen
years old, and had a very sweet face and a pretty one.  She was the only
Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she
couldn't smile after ten o'clock Saturday night without breaking the
Sabbath.  Her child was a hard specimen, though--there wasn't enough of
it to make a pie, and the poor little thing looked so pleadingly up at
all who came near it (as if it had an idea that now was its chance or
never,) that we were filled with compassion which was genuine and not put
on.

But this last new horse I have got is trying to break his neck over the
tent-ropes, and I shall have to go out and anchor him.  Jericho and I
have parted company.  The new horse is not much to boast of, I think.
One of his hind legs bends the wrong way, and the other one is as
straight and stiff as a tent-pole.  Most of his teeth are gone, and he is
as blind as bat.  His nose has been broken at some time or other, and is
arched like a culvert now.  His under lip hangs down like a camel's, and
his ears are chopped off close to his head.  I had some trouble at first
to find a name for him, but I finally concluded to call him Baalbec,
because he is such a magnificent ruin.  I can not keep from talking about
my horses, because I have a very long and tedious journey before me, and
they naturally occupy my thoughts about as much as matters of apparently
much greater importance.

We satisfied our pilgrims by making those hard rides from Baalbec to
Damascus, but Dan's horse and Jack's were so crippled we had to leave
them behind and get fresh animals for them.  The dragoman says Jack's
horse died.  I swapped horses with Mohammed, the kingly-looking Egyptian
who is our Ferguson's lieutenant.  By Ferguson I mean our dragoman
Abraham, of course.  I did not take this horse on account of his personal
appearance, but because I have not seen his back.  I do not wish to see
it.  I have seen the backs of all the other horses, and found most of
them covered with dreadful saddle-boils which I know have not been washed
or doctored for years.  The idea of riding all day long over such ghastly
inquisitions of torture is sickening.  My horse must be like the others,
but I have at least the consolation of not knowing it to be so.

I hope that in future I may be spared any more sentimental praises of the
Arab's idolatry of his horse.  In boyhood I longed to be an Arab of the
desert and have a beautiful mare, and call her Selim or Benjamin or
Mohammed, and feed her with my own hands, and let her come into the tent,
and teach her to caress me and look fondly upon me with her great tender
eyes; and I wished that a stranger might come at such a time and offer me
a hundred thousand dollars for her, so that I could do like the other
Arabs--hesitate, yearn for the money, but overcome by my love for my
mare, at last say, "Part with thee, my beautiful one!  Never with my
life!  Away, tempter, I scorn thy gold!"  and then bound into the saddle
and speed over the desert like the wind!

But I recall those aspirations.  If these Arabs be like the other Arabs,
their love for their beautiful mares is a fraud.  These of my
acquaintance have no love for their horses, no sentiment of pity for
them, and no knowledge of how to treat them or care for them.  The Syrian
saddle-blanket is a quilted mattress two or three inches thick.  It is
never removed from the horse, day or night.  It gets full of dirt and
hair, and becomes soaked with sweat.  It is bound to breed sores.  These
pirates never think of washing a horse's back.  They do not shelter the
horses in the tents, either--they must stay out and take the weather as
it comes.  Look at poor cropped and dilapidated "Baalbec," and weep for
the sentiment that has been wasted upon the Selims of romance!



CHAPTER XLVI.

About an hour's ride over a rough, rocky road, half flooded with water,
and through a forest of oaks of Bashan, brought us to Dan.

From a little mound here in the plain issues a broad stream of limpid
water and forms a large shallow pool, and then rushes furiously onward,
augmented in volume.  This puddle is an important source of the Jordan.
Its banks, and those of the brook are respectably adorned with blooming
oleanders, but the unutterable beauty of the spot will not throw a
well-balanced man into convulsions, as the Syrian books of travel would
lead one to suppose.

From the spot I am speaking of, a cannon-ball would carry beyond the
confines of Holy Land and light upon profane ground three miles away.
We were only one little hour's travel within the borders of Holy Land--we
had hardly begun to appreciate yet that we were standing upon any
different sort of earth than that we had always been used to, and see how
the historic names began already to cluster!  Dan--Bashan--Lake Huleh
--the Sources of Jordan--the Sea of Galilee.  They were all in sight but
the last, and it was not far away.  The little township of Bashan was
once the kingdom so famous in Scripture for its bulls and its oaks.
Lake Huleh is the Biblical "Waters of Merom."  Dan was the northern and
Beersheba the southern limit of Palestine--hence the expression "from Dan
to Beersheba."  It is equivalent to our phrases "from Maine to Texas"
--"from Baltimore to San Francisco."  Our expression and that of the
Israelites both mean the same--great distance.  With their slow camels
and asses, it was about a seven days' journey from Dan to Beersheba---say
a hundred and fifty or sixty miles--it was the entire length of their
country, and was not to be undertaken without great preparation and much
ceremony.  When the Prodigal traveled to "a far country," it is not
likely that he went more than eighty or ninety miles.  Palestine is only
from forty to sixty miles wide.  The State of Missouri could be split
into three Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for
part of another--possibly a whole one.  From Baltimore to San Francisco
is several thousand miles, but it will be only a seven days' journey in
the cars when I am two or three years older.--[The railroad has been
completed since the above was written.]--If I live I shall necessarily
have to go across the continent every now and then in those cars, but one
journey from Dan to Beersheba will be sufficient, no doubt.  It must be
the most trying of the two.  Therefore, if we chance to discover that
from Dan to Beersheba seemed a mighty stretch of country to the
Israelites, let us not be airy with them, but reflect that it was and is
a mighty stretch when one can not traverse it by rail.

The small mound I have mentioned a while ago was once occupied by the
Phenician city of Laish.  A party of filibusters from Zorah and Eschol
captured the place, and lived there in a free and easy way, worshiping
gods of their own manufacture and stealing idols from their neighbors
whenever they wore their own out.  Jeroboam set up a golden calf here to
fascinate his people and keep them from making dangerous trips to
Jerusalem to worship, which might result in a return to their rightful
allegiance.  With all respect for those ancient Israelites, I can not
overlook the fact that they were not always virtuous enough to withstand
the seductions of a golden calf.  Human nature has not changed much since
then.

Some forty centuries ago the city of Sodom was pillaged by the Arab
princes of Mesopotamia, and among other prisoners they seized upon the
patriarch Lot and brought him here on their way to their own possessions.
They brought him to Dan, and father Abraham, who was pursuing them, crept
softly in at dead of night, among the whispering oleanders and under the
shadows of the stately oaks, and fell upon the slumbering victors and
startled them from their dreams with the clash of steel.  He recaptured
Lot and all the other plunder.

We moved on.  We were now in a green valley, five or six miles wide and
fifteen long.  The streams which are called the sources of the Jordan
flow through it to Lake Huleh, a shallow pond three miles in diameter,
and from the southern extremity of the Lake the concentrated Jordan flows
out.  The Lake is surrounded by a broad marsh, grown with reeds.  Between
the marsh and the mountains which wall the valley is a respectable strip
of fertile land; at the end of the valley, toward Dan, as much as half
the land is solid and fertile, and watered by Jordan's sources.  There is
enough of it to make a farm.  It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the
spies of that rabble of adventurers who captured Dan.  They said: "We
have seen the land, and behold it is very good.  * * *  A place where
there is no want of any thing that is in the earth."

Their enthusiasm was at least warranted by the fact that they had never
seen a country as good as this.  There was enough of it for the ample
support of their six hundred men and their families, too.

When we got fairly down on the level part of the Danite farm, we came to
places where we could actually run our horses.  It was a notable
circumstance.

We had been painfully clambering over interminable hills and rocks for
days together, and when we suddenly came upon this astonishing piece of
rockless plain, every man drove the spurs into his horse and sped away
with a velocity he could surely enjoy to the utmost, but could never hope
to comprehend in Syria.

Here were evidences of cultivation--a rare sight in this country--an acre
or two of rich soil studded with last season's dead corn-stalks of the
thickness of your thumb and very wide apart.  But in such a land it was a
thrilling spectacle.  Close to it was a stream, and on its banks a great
herd of curious-looking Syrian goats and sheep were gratefully eating
gravel.  I do not state this as a petrified fact--I only suppose they
were eating gravel, because there did not appear to be any thing else for
them to eat.  The shepherds that tended them were the very pictures of
Joseph and his brethren I have no doubt in the world.  They were tall,
muscular, and very dark-skinned Bedouins, with inky black beards.  They
had firm lips, unquailing eyes, and a kingly stateliness of bearing.
They wore the parti-colored half bonnet, half hood, with fringed ends
falling upon their shoulders, and the full, flowing robe barred with
broad black stripes--the dress one sees in all pictures of the swarthy
sons of the desert.  These chaps would sell their younger brothers if
they had a chance, I think.  They have the manners, the customs, the
dress, the occupation and the loose principles of the ancient stock.
[They attacked our camp last night, and I bear them no good will.]
They had with them the pigmy jackasses one sees all over Syria and
remembers in all pictures of the "Flight into Egypt," where Mary and the
Young Child are riding and Joseph is walking alongside, towering high
above the little donkey's shoulders.

But really, here the man rides and carries the child, as a general thing,
and the woman walks.  The customs have not changed since Joseph's time.
We would not have in our houses a picture representing Joseph riding and
Mary walking; we would see profanation in it, but a Syrian Christian
would not.  I know that hereafter the picture I first spoke of will look
odd to me.

We could not stop to rest two or three hours out from our camp, of
course, albeit the brook was beside us.  So we went on an hour longer.
We saw water, then, but nowhere in all the waste around was there a foot
of shade, and we were scorching to death.  "Like unto the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land."  Nothing in the Bible is more beautiful than
that, and surely there is no place we have wandered to that is able to
give it such touching expression as this blistering, naked, treeless
land.

Here you do not stop just when you please, but when you can.  We found
water, but no shade.  We traveled on and found a tree at last, but no
water.  We rested and lunched, and came on to this place, Ain Mellahah
(the boys call it Baldwinsville.) It was a very short day's run, but the
dragoman does not want to go further, and has invented a plausible lie
about the country beyond this being infested by ferocious Arabs, who
would make sleeping in their midst a dangerous pastime.  Well, they ought
to be dangerous.  They carry a rusty old weather-beaten flint-lock gun,
with a barrel that is longer than themselves; it has no sights on it, it
will not carry farther than a brickbat, and is not half so certain.  And
the great sash they wear in many a fold around their waists has two or
three absurd old horse-pistols in it that are rusty from eternal disuse
--weapons that would hang fire just about long enough for you to walk out
of range, and then burst and blow the Arab's head off.  Exceedingly
dangerous these sons of the desert are.

It used to make my blood run cold to read Wm. C. Grimes' hairbreadth
escapes from Bedouins, but I think I could read them now without a
tremor.  He never said he was attacked by Bedouins, I believe, or was
ever treated uncivilly, but then in about every other chapter he
discovered them approaching, any how, and he had a blood-curdling fashion
of working up the peril; and of wondering how his relations far away
would feel could they see their poor wandering boy, with his weary feet
and his dim eyes, in such fearful danger; and of thinking for the last
time of the old homestead, and the dear old church, and the cow, and
those things; and of finally straightening his form to its utmost height
in the saddle, drawing his trusty revolver, and then dashing the spurs
into "Mohammed" and sweeping down upon the ferocious enemy determined to
sell his life as dearly as possible.  True the Bedouins never did any
thing to him when he arrived, and never had any intention of doing any
thing to him in the first place, and wondered what in the mischief he was
making all that to-do about; but still I could not divest myself of the
idea, somehow, that a frightful peril had been escaped through that man's
dare-devil bravery, and so I never could read about Wm. C. Grimes'
Bedouins and sleep comfortably afterward.  But I believe the Bedouins to
be a fraud, now.  I have seen the monster, and I can outrun him.  I shall
never be afraid of his daring to stand behind his own gun and discharge
it.

About fifteen hundred years before Christ, this camp-ground of ours by
the Waters of Merom was the scene of one of Joshua's exterminating
battles.  Jabin, King of Hazor, (up yonder above Dan,) called all the
sheiks about him together, with their hosts, to make ready for Israel's
terrible General who was approaching.

     "And when all these Kings were met together, they came and pitched
     together by the Waters of Merom, to fight against Israel.  And they
     went out, they and all their hosts with them, much people, even as
     the sand that is upon the sea-shore for multitude," etc.

But Joshua fell upon them and utterly destroyed them, root and branch.
That was his usual policy in war.  He never left any chance for newspaper
controversies about who won the battle.  He made this valley, so quiet
now, a reeking slaughter-pen.

Somewhere in this part of the country--I do not know exactly where
--Israel fought another bloody battle a hundred years later.  Deborah, the
prophetess, told Barak to take ten thousand men and sally forth against
another King Jabin who had been doing something.  Barak came down from
Mount Tabor, twenty or twenty-five miles from here, and gave battle to
Jabin's forces, who were in command of Sisera.  Barak won the fight, and
while he was making the victory complete by the usual method of
exterminating the remnant of the defeated host, Sisera fled away on foot,
and when he was nearly exhausted by fatigue and thirst, one Jael, a woman
he seems to have been acquainted with, invited him to come into her tent
and rest himself.  The weary soldier acceded readily enough, and Jael put
him to bed.  He said he was very thirsty, and asked his generous
preserver to get him a cup of water.  She brought him some milk, and he
drank of it gratefully and lay down again, to forget in pleasant dreams
his lost battle and his humbled pride.  Presently when he was asleep she
came softly in with a hammer and drove a hideous tent-pen down through
his brain!

"For he was fast asleep and weary.  So he died."  Such is the touching
language of the Bible.  "The Song of Deborah and Barak" praises Jael for
the memorable service she had rendered, in an exultant strain:

     "Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be,
     blessed shall she be above women in the tent.

     "He asked for water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter
     in a lordly dish.

     "She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman's
     hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head
     when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

     "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed,
     he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more.  There is not a
solitary village throughout its whole extent--not for thirty miles in
either direction.  There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin
tents, but not a single permanent habitation.  One may ride ten miles,
hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.

To this region one of the prophecies is applied:

     "I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies which dwell
     therein shall be astonished at it.  And I will scatter you among the
     heathen, and I will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall
     be desolate and your cities waste."

No man can stand here by deserted Ain Mellahah and say the prophecy has
not been fulfilled.

In a verse from the Bible which I have quoted above, occurs the phrase
"all these kings."  It attracted my attention in a moment, because it
carries to my mind such a vastly different significance from what it
always did at home.  I can see easily enough that if I wish to profit by
this tour and come to a correct understanding of the matters of interest
connected with it, I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many
things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine.  I must begin a
system of reduction.  Like my grapes which the spies bore out of the
Promised Land, I have got every thing in Palestine on too large a scale.
Some of my ideas were wild enough.  The word Palestine always brought to
my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States.
I do not know why, but such was the case.  I suppose it was because I
could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.  I think
I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a
man of only ordinary size.  I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to
a more reasonable shape.  One gets large impressions in boyhood,
sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.  "All these
kings."  When I used to read that in Sunday School, it suggested to me
the several kings of such countries as England, France, Spain, Germany,
Russia, etc., arrayed in splendid robes ablaze with jewels, marching in
grave procession, with sceptres of gold in their hands and flashing
crowns upon their heads.  But here in Ain Mellahah, after coming through
Syria, and after giving serious study to the character and customs of the
country, the phrase "all these kings" loses its grandeur.  It suggests
only a parcel of petty chiefs--ill-clad and ill-conditioned savages much
like our Indians, who lived in full sight of each other and whose
"kingdoms" were large when they were five miles square and contained two
thousand souls.  The combined monarchies of the thirty "kings" destroyed
by Joshua on one of his famous campaigns, only covered an area about
equal to four of our counties of ordinary size.  The poor old sheik we
saw at Cesarea Philippi with his ragged band of a hundred followers,
would have been called a "king" in those ancient times.

It is seven in the morning, and as we are in the country, the grass ought
to be sparkling with dew, the flowers enriching the air with their
fragrance, and the birds singing in the trees.  But alas, there is no dew
here, nor flowers, nor birds, nor trees.  There is a plain and an
unshaded lake, and beyond them some barren mountains.  The tents are
tumbling, the Arabs are quarreling like dogs and cats, as usual, the
campground is strewn with packages and bundles, the labor of packing them
upon the backs of the mules is progressing with great activity, the
horses are saddled, the umbrellas are out, and in ten minutes we shall
mount and the long procession will move again.  The white city of the
Mellahah, resurrected for a moment out of the dead centuries, will have
disappeared again and left no sign.



CHAPTER XLVII.

We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough,
but is given over wholly to weeds--a silent, mournful expanse, wherein we
saw only three persons--Arabs, with nothing on but a long coarse shirt
like the "tow-linen" shirts which used to form the only summer garment of
little negro boys on Southern plantations.  Shepherds they were, and they
charmed their flocks with the traditional shepherd's pipe--a reed
instrument that made music as exquisitely infernal as these same Arabs
create when they sing.

In their pipes lingered no echo of the wonderful music the shepherd
forefathers heard in the Plains of Bethlehem what time the angels sang
"Peace on earth, good will to men."

Part of the ground we came over was not ground at all, but
rocks--cream-colored rocks, worn smooth, as if by water; with seldom an
edge or a corner on them, but scooped out, honey-combed, bored out with
eye-holes, and thus wrought into all manner of quaint shapes, among
which the uncouth imitation of skulls was frequent.  Over this part of
the route were occasional remains of an old Roman road like the Appian
Way, whose paving-stones still clung to their places with Roman
tenacity.

Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided
in and out among the rocks or lay still and sunned themselves.  Where
prosperity has reigned, and fallen; where glory has flamed, and gone out;
where beauty has dwelt, and passed away; where gladness was, and sorrow
is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its
high places, there this reptile makes his home, and mocks at human
vanity.  His coat is the color of ashes: and ashes are the symbol of
hopes that have perished, of aspirations that came to nought, of loves
that are buried.  If he could speak, he would say, Build temples: I will
lord it in their ruins; build palaces: I will inhabit them; erect
empires: I will inherit them; bury your beautiful: I will watch the worms
at their work; and you, who stand here and moralize over me: I will crawl
over your corpse at the last.

A few ants were in this desert place, but merely to spend the summer.
They brought their provisions from Ain Mellahah--eleven miles.

Jack is not very well to-day, it is easy to see; but boy as he is, he is
too much of a man to speak of it.  He exposed himself to the sun too much
yesterday, but since it came of his earnest desire to learn, and to make
this journey as useful as the opportunities will allow, no one seeks to
discourage him by fault-finding.  We missed him an hour from the camp,
and then found him some distance away, by the edge of a brook, and with
no umbrella to protect him from the fierce sun.  If he had been used to
going without his umbrella, it would have been well enough, of course;
but he was not.  He was just in the act of throwing a clod at a
mud-turtle which was sunning itself on a small log in the brook.
We said:

"Don't do that, Jack.  What do you want to harm him for?  What has he
done?"

"Well, then, I won't kill him, but I ought to, because he is a fraud."

We asked him why, but he said it was no matter.  We asked him why, once
or twice, as we walked back to the camp but he still said it was no
matter.  But late at night, when he was sitting in a thoughtful mood on
the bed, we asked him again and he said:

"Well, it don't matter; I don't mind it now, but I did not like it today,
you know, because I don't tell any thing that isn't so, and I don't think
the Colonel ought to, either.  But he did; he told us at prayers in the
Pilgrims' tent, last night, and he seemed as if he was reading it out of
the Bible, too, about this country flowing with milk and honey, and about
the voice of the turtle being heard in the land.  I thought that was
drawing it a little strong, about the turtles, any how, but I asked Mr.
Church if it was so, and he said it was, and what Mr. Church tells me, I
believe.  But I sat there and watched that turtle nearly an hour today,
and I almost burned up in the sun; but I never heard him sing.  I believe
I sweated a double handful of sweat---I know I did--because it got in my
eyes, and it was running down over my nose all the time; and you know my
pants are tighter than any body else's--Paris foolishness--and the
buckskin seat of them got wet with sweat, and then got dry again and
began to draw up and pinch and tear loose--it was awful--but I never
heard him sing.  Finally I said, This is a fraud--that is what it is, it
is a fraud--and if I had had any sense I might have known a cursed
mud-turtle couldn't sing.  And then I said, I don't wish to be hard on
this fellow, and I will just give him ten minutes to commence; ten
minutes --and then if he don't, down goes his building.  But he didn't
commence, you know.  I had staid there all that time, thinking may be he
might, pretty soon, because he kept on raising his head up and letting
it down, and drawing the skin over his eyes for a minute and then
opening them out again, as if he was trying to study up something to
sing, but just as the ten minutes were up and I was all beat out and
blistered, he laid his blamed head down on a knot and went fast asleep."

"It was a little hard, after you had waited so long."

"I should think so.  I said, Well, if you won't sing, you shan't sleep,
any way; and if you fellows had let me alone I would have made him shin
out of Galilee quicker than any turtle ever did yet.  But it isn't any
matter now--let it go.  The skin is all off the back of my neck."

About ten in the morning we halted at Joseph's Pit.  This is a ruined
Khan of the Middle Ages, in one of whose side courts is a great walled
and arched pit with water in it, and this pit, one tradition says, is the
one Joseph's brethren cast him into.  A more authentic tradition, aided
by the geography of the country, places the pit in Dothan, some two days'
journey from here.  However, since there are many who believe in this
present pit as the true one, it has its interest.

It is hard to make a choice of the most beautiful passage in a book which
is so gemmed with beautiful passages as the Bible; but it is certain that
not many things within its lids may take rank above the exquisite story
of Joseph.  Who taught those ancient writers their simplicity of
language, their felicity of expression, their pathos, and above all,
their faculty of sinking themselves entirely out of sight of the reader
and making the narrative stand out alone and seem to tell itself?
Shakspeare is always present when one reads his book; Macaulay is present
when we follow the march of his stately sentences; but the Old Testament
writers are hidden from view.

If the pit I have been speaking of is the right one, a scene transpired
there, long ages ago, which is familiar to us all in pictures.  The sons
of Jacob had been pasturing their flocks near there.  Their father grew
uneasy at their long absence, and sent Joseph, his favorite, to see if
any thing had gone wrong with them.  He traveled six or seven days'
journey; he was only seventeen years old, and, boy like, he toiled
through that long stretch of the vilest, rockiest, dustiest country in
Asia, arrayed in the pride of his heart, his beautiful claw-hammer coat
of many colors.  Joseph was the favorite, and that was one crime in the
eyes of his brethren; he had dreamed dreams, and interpreted them to
foreshadow his elevation far above all his family in the far future, and
that was another; he was dressed well and had doubtless displayed the
harmless vanity of youth in keeping the fact prominently before his
brothers.  These were crimes his elders fretted over among themselves and
proposed to punish when the opportunity should offer.  When they saw him
coming up from the Sea of Galilee, they recognized him and were glad.
They said, "Lo, here is this dreamer--let us kill him."  But Reuben
pleaded for his life, and they spared it.  But they seized the boy, and
stripped the hated coat from his back and pushed him into the pit.  They
intended to let him die there, but Reuben intended to liberate him
secretly.  However, while Reuben was away for a little while, the
brethren sold Joseph to some Ishmaelitish merchants who were journeying
towards Egypt.  Such is the history of the pit.  And the self-same pit is
there in that place, even to this day; and there it will remain until the
next detachment of image-breakers and tomb desecraters arrives from the
Quaker City excursion, and they will infallibly dig it up and carry it
away with them.  For behold in them is no reverence for the solemn
monuments of the past, and whithersoever they go they destroy and spare
not.

Joseph became rich, distinguished, powerful--as the Bible expresses it,
"lord over all the land of Egypt."  Joseph was the real king, the
strength, the brain of the monarchy, though Pharaoh held the title.
Joseph is one of the truly great men of the Old Testament.  And he was
the noblest and the manliest, save Esau.  Why shall we not say a good
word for the princely Bedouin?  The only crime that can be brought
against him is that he was unfortunate.  Why must every body praise
Joseph's great-hearted generosity to his cruel brethren, without stint of
fervent language, and fling only a reluctant bone of praise to Esau for
his still sublimer generosity to the brother who had wronged him?  Jacob
took advantage of Esau's consuming hunger to rob him of his birthright
and the great honor and consideration that belonged to the position; by
treachery and falsehood he robbed him of his father's blessing; he made
of him a stranger in his home, and a wanderer.  Yet after twenty years
had passed away and Jacob met Esau and fell at his feet quaking with fear
and begging piteously to be spared the punishment he knew he deserved,
what did that magnificent savage do?  He fell upon his neck and embraced
him!  When Jacob--who was incapable of comprehending nobility of
character--still doubting, still fearing, insisted upon "finding grace
with my lord" by the bribe of a present of cattle, what did the gorgeous
son of the desert say?

"Nay, I have enough, my brother; keep that thou hast unto thyself!"

Esau found Jacob rich, beloved by wives and children, and traveling in
state, with servants, herds of cattle and trains of camels--but he
himself was still the uncourted outcast this brother had made him.  After
thirteen years of romantic mystery, the brethren who had wronged Joseph,
came, strangers in a strange land, hungry and humble, to buy "a little
food"; and being summoned to a palace, charged with crime, they beheld in
its owner their wronged brother; they were trembling beggars--he, the
lord of a mighty empire!  What Joseph that ever lived would have thrown
away such a chance to "show off?"  Who stands first--outcast Esau
forgiving Jacob in prosperity, or Joseph on a king's throne forgiving the
ragged tremblers whose happy rascality placed him there?

Just before we came to Joseph's Pit, we had "raised" a hill, and there, a
few miles before us, with not a tree or a shrub to interrupt the view,
lay a vision which millions of worshipers in the far lands of the earth
would give half their possessions to see--the sacred Sea of Galilee!

Therefore we tarried only a short time at the pit.  We rested the horses
and ourselves, and felt for a few minutes the blessed shade of the
ancient buildings.  We were out of water, but the two or three scowling
Arabs, with their long guns, who were idling about the place, said they
had none and that there was none in the vicinity.  They knew there was a
little brackish water in the pit, but they venerated a place made sacred
by their ancestor's imprisonment too much to be willing to see Christian
dogs drink from it.  But Ferguson tied rags and handkerchiefs together
till he made a rope long enough to lower a vessel to the bottom, and we
drank and then rode on; and in a short time we dismounted on those shores
which the feet of the Saviour have made holy ground.

At noon we took a swim in the Sea of Galilee--a blessed privilege in this
roasting climate--and then lunched under a neglected old fig-tree at the
fountain they call Ain-et-Tin, a hundred yards from ruined Capernaum.
Every rivulet that gurgles out of the rocks and sands of this part of the
world is dubbed with the title of "fountain," and people familiar with
the Hudson, the great lakes and the Mississippi fall into transports of
admiration over them, and exhaust their powers of composition in writing
their praises.  If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged
upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in
a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn.

During luncheon, the pilgrim enthusiasts of our party, who had been so
light-hearted and so happy ever since they touched holy ground that they
did little but mutter incoherent rhapsodies, could scarcely eat, so
anxious were they to "take shipping" and sail in very person upon the
waters that had borne the vessels of the Apostles.  Their anxiety grew
and their excitement augmented with every fleeting moment, until my fears
were aroused and I began to have misgivings that in their present
condition they might break recklessly loose from all considerations of
prudence and buy a whole fleet of ships to sail in instead of hiring a
single one for an hour, as quiet folk are wont to do.  I trembled to
think of the ruined purses this day's performances might result in.
I could not help reflecting bodingly upon the intemperate zeal with which
middle-aged men are apt to surfeit themselves upon a seductive folly
which they have tasted for the first time.  And yet I did not feel that
I had a right to be surprised at the state of things which was giving me
so much concern.  These men had been taught from infancy to revere,
almost to worship, the holy places whereon their happy eyes were resting
now.  For many and many a year this very picture had visited their
thoughts by day and floated through their dreams by night.  To stand
before it in the flesh--to see it as they saw it now--to sail upon the
hallowed sea, and kiss the holy soil that compassed it about: these were
aspirations they had cherished while a generation dragged its lagging
seasons by and left its furrows in their faces and its frosts upon their
hair.  To look upon this picture, and sail upon this sea, they had
forsaken home and its idols and journeyed thousands and thousands of
miles, in weariness and tribulation.  What wonder that the sordid lights
of work-day prudence should pale before the glory of a hope like theirs
in the full splendor of its fruition?  Let them squander millions!
I said--who speaks of money at a time like this?

In this frame of mind I followed, as fast as I could, the eager footsteps
of the pilgrims, and stood upon the shore of the lake, and swelled, with
hat and voice, the frantic hail they sent after the "ship" that was
speeding by.  It was a success.  The toilers of the sea ran in and
beached their barque.  Joy sat upon every countenance.

"How much?--ask him how much, Ferguson!--how much to take us all--eight
of us, and you--to Bethsaida, yonder, and to the mouth of Jordan, and to
the place where the swine ran down into the sea--quick!--and we want to
coast around every where--every where!--all day long!--I could sail a
year in these waters!--and tell him we'll stop at Magdala and finish at
Tiberias!--ask him how much?--any thing--any thing whatever!--tell him we
don't care what the expense is!"  [I said to myself, I knew how it would
be.]

Ferguson--(interpreting)--"He says two Napoleons--eight dollars."

One or two countenances fell.  Then a pause.

"Too much!--we'll give him one!"

I never shall know how it was--I shudder yet when I think how the place
is given to miracles--but in a single instant of time, as it seemed to
me, that ship was twenty paces from the shore, and speeding away like a
frightened thing!  Eight crestfallen creatures stood upon the shore, and
O, to think of it! this--this--after all that overmastering ecstacy!
Oh, shameful, shameful ending, after such unseemly boasting!  It was too
much like "Ho! let me at him!"  followed by a prudent "Two of you hold
him--one can hold me!"

Instantly there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp.  The two
Napoleons were offered--more if necessary--and pilgrims and dragoman
shouted themselves hoarse with pleadings to the retreating boatmen to
come back.  But they sailed serenely away and paid no further heed to
pilgrims who had dreamed all their lives of some day skimming over the
sacred waters of Galilee and listening to its hallowed story in the
whisperings of its waves, and had journeyed countless leagues to do it,
and--and then concluded that the fare was too high.  Impertinent
Mohammedan Arabs, to think such things of gentlemen of another faith!

Well, there was nothing to do but just submit and forego the privilege of
voyaging on Genessaret, after coming half around the globe to taste that
pleasure.  There was a time, when the Saviour taught here, that boats
were plenty among the fishermen of the coasts--but boats and fishermen
both are gone, now; and old Josephus had a fleet of men-of-war in these
waters eighteen centuries ago--a hundred and thirty bold canoes--but
they, also, have passed away and left no sign.  They battle here no more
by sea, and the commercial marine of Galilee numbers only two small
ships, just of a pattern with the little skiffs the disciples knew.  One
was lost to us for good--the other was miles away and far out of hail.
So we mounted the horses and rode grimly on toward Magdala, cantering
along in the edge of the water for want of the means of passing over it.

How the pilgrims abused each other!  Each said it was the other's fault,
and each in turn denied it.  No word was spoken by the sinners--even the
mildest sarcasm might have been dangerous at such a time.  Sinners that
have been kept down and had examples held up to them, and suffered
frequent lectures, and been so put upon in a moral way and in the matter
of going slow and being serious and bottling up slang, and so crowded in
regard to the matter of being proper and always and forever behaving,
that their lives have become a burden to them, would not lag behind
pilgrims at such a time as this, and wink furtively, and be joyful, and
commit other such crimes--because it would not occur to them to do it.
Otherwise they would.  But they did do it, though--and it did them a
world of good to hear the pilgrims abuse each other, too.  We took an
unworthy satisfaction in seeing them fall out, now and then, because it
showed that they were only poor human people like us, after all.

So we all rode down to Magdala, while the gnashing of teeth waxed and
waned by turns, and harsh words troubled the holy calm of Galilee.

Lest any man think I mean to be ill-natured when I talk about our
pilgrims as I have been talking, I wish to say in all sincerity that I do
not.  I would not listen to lectures from men I did not like and could
not respect; and none of these can say I ever took their lectures
unkindly, or was restive under the infliction, or failed to try to profit
by what they said to me.  They are better men than I am; I can say that
honestly; they are good friends of mine, too--and besides, if they did
not wish to be stirred up occasionally in print, why in the mischief did
they travel with me?  They knew me.  They knew my liberal way--that I
like to give and take--when it is for me to give and other people to
take.  When one of them threatened to leave me in Damascus when I had the
cholera, he had no real idea of doing it--I know his passionate nature
and the good impulses that underlie it.  And did I not overhear Church,
another pilgrim, say he did not care who went or who staid, he would
stand by me till I walked out of Damascus on my own feet or was carried
out in a coffin, if it was a year?  And do I not include Church every
time I abuse the pilgrims--and would I be likely to speak ill-naturedly
of him?  I wish to stir them up and make them healthy; that is all.

We had left Capernaum behind us.  It was only a shapeless ruin.  It bore
no semblance to a town, and had nothing about it to suggest that it had
ever been a town.  But all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was
illustrious ground.  From it sprang that tree of Christianity whose broad
arms overshadow so many distant lands to-day.  After Christ was tempted
of the devil in the desert, he came here and began his teachings; and
during the three or four years he lived afterward, this place was his
home almost altogether.  He began to heal the sick, and his fame soon
spread so widely that sufferers came from Syria and beyond Jordan, and
even from Jerusalem, several days' journey away, to be cured of their
diseases.  Here he healed the centurion's servant and Peter's
mother-in-law, and multitudes of the lame and the blind and persons
possessed of devils; and here, also, he raised Jairus's daughter from
the dead.  He went into a ship with his disciples, and when they roused
him from sleep in the midst of a storm, he quieted the winds and lulled
the troubled sea to rest with his voice.  He passed over to the other
side, a few miles away and relieved two men of devils, which passed into
some swine.  After his return he called Matthew from the receipt of
customs, performed some cures, and created scandal by eating with
publicans and sinners.  Then he went healing and teaching through
Galilee, and even journeyed to Tyre and Sidon.  He chose the twelve
disciples, and sent them abroad to preach the new gospel.  He worked
miracles in Bethsaida and Chorazin--villages two or three miles from
Capernaum.  It was near one of them that the miraculous draft of fishes
is supposed to have been taken, and it was in the desert places near the
other that he fed the thousands by the miracles of the loaves and
fishes.  He cursed them both, and Capernaum also, for not repenting,
after all the great works he had done in their midst, and prophesied
against them.  They are all in ruins, now--which is gratifying to the
pilgrims, for, as usual, they fit the eternal words of gods to the
evanescent things of this earth; Christ, it is more probable, referred
to the people, not their shabby villages of wigwams: he said it would be
sad for them at "the day of judgment"--and what business have mud-hovels
at the Day of Judgment?  It would not affect the prophecy in the least
--it would neither prove it or disprove it--if these towns were splendid
cities now instead of the almost vanished ruins they are. Christ visited
Magdala, which is near by Capernaum, and he also visited Cesarea
Philippi.  He went up to his old home at Nazareth, and saw his brothers
Joses, and Judas, and James, and Simon--those persons who, being own
brothers to Jesus Christ, one would expect to hear mentioned sometimes,
yet who ever saw their names in a newspaper or heard them from a pulpit?
Who ever inquires what manner of youths they were; and whether they
slept with Jesus, played with him and romped about him; quarreled with
him concerning toys and trifles; struck him in anger, not suspecting
what he was?  Who ever wonders what they thought when they saw him come
back to Nazareth a celebrity, and looked long at his unfamiliar face to
make sure, and then said, "It is Jesus?"  Who wonders what passed in
their minds when they saw this brother, (who was only a brother to them,
however much he might be to others a mysterious stranger who was a god
and had stood face to face with God above the clouds,) doing strange
miracles with crowds of astonished people for witnesses?  Who wonders if
the brothers of Jesus asked him to come home with them, and said his
mother and his sisters were grieved at his long absence, and would be
wild with delight to see his face again?  Who ever gives a thought to
the sisters of Jesus at all?--yet he had sisters; and memories of them
must have stolen into his mind often when he was ill-treated among
strangers; when he was homeless and said he had not where to lay his
head; when all deserted him, even Peter, and he stood alone among his
enemies.

Christ did few miracles in Nazareth, and staid but a little while.  The
people said, "This the Son of God!  Why, his father is nothing but a
carpenter.  We know the family.  We see them every day.  Are not his
brothers named so and so, and his sisters so and so, and is not his
mother the person they call Mary?  This is absurd."  He did not curse his
home, but he shook its dust from his feet and went away.

Capernaum lies close to the edge of the little sea, in a small plain some
five miles long and a mile or two wide, which is mildly adorned with
oleanders which look all the better contrasted with the bald hills and
the howling deserts which surround them, but they are not as deliriously
beautiful as the books paint them.  If one be calm and resolute he can
look upon their comeliness and live.

One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen under our
observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which
sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity.  The longest journey
our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem--about one hundred
to one hundred and twenty miles.  The next longest was from here to
Sidon--say about sixty or seventy miles.  Instead of being wide apart--as
American appreciation of distances would naturally suggest--the places
made most particularly celebrated by the presence of Christ are nearly
all right here in full view, and within cannon-shot of Capernaum.
Leaving out two or three short journeys of the Saviour, he spent his
life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no
larger than an ordinary county in the United States.  It is as much as I
can do to comprehend this stupefying fact.  How it wears a man out to
have to read up a hundred pages of history every two or three miles--for
verily the celebrated localities of Palestine occur that close together.
How wearily, how bewilderingly they swarm about your path!

In due time we reached the ancient village of Magdala.



CHAPTER XLVIII.

Magdala is not a beautiful place.  It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is
to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable,
and filthy--just the style of cities that have adorned the country since
Adam's time, as all writers have labored hard to prove, and have
succeeded.  The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet
wide, and reeking with uncleanliness.  The houses are from five to seven
feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of
a dry-goods box.  The sides are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and
tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there
to dry.  This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been
riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very warlike aspect.  When
the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just proportion
--the small and the large flakes in alternate rows, and separated by
carefully-considered intervals--I know of nothing more cheerful to look
upon than a spirited Syrian fresco.  The flat, plastered roof is
garnished by picturesque stacks of fresco materials, which, having
become thoroughly dried and cured, are placed there where it will be
convenient.  It is used for fuel.  There is no timber of any consequence
in Palestine--none at all to waste upon fires--and neither are there any
mines of coal. If my description has been intelligible, you will
perceive, now, that a square, flat-roofed hovel, neatly frescoed, with
its wall-tops gallantly bastioned and turreted with dried camel-refuse,
gives to a landscape a feature that is exceedingly festive and
picturesque, especially if one is careful to remember to stick in a cat
wherever, about the premises, there is room for a cat to sit.  There are
no windows to a Syrian hut, and no chimneys.  When I used to read that
they let a bed-ridden man down through the roof of a house in Capernaum
to get him into the presence of the Saviour, I generally had a
three-story brick in my mind, and marveled that they did not break his
neck with the strange experiment.  I perceive now, however, that they
might have taken him by the heels and thrown him clear over the house
without discommoding him very much.  Palestine is not changed any since
those days, in manners, customs, architecture, or people.

As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible.  But the ring of the
horses' hoofs roused the stupid population, and they all came trooping
out--old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the
crippled, all in ragged, soiled and scanty raiment, and all abject
beggars by nature, instinct and education.  How the vermin-tortured
vagabonds did swarm!  How they showed their scars and sores, and
piteously pointed to their maimed and crooked limbs, and begged with
their pleading eyes for charity!  We had invoked a spirit we could not
lay.  They hung to the horses's tails, clung to their manes and the
stirrups, closed in on every aide in scorn of dangerous hoofs--and out of
their infidel throats, with one accord, burst an agonizing and most
infernal chorus: "Howajji, bucksheesh! howajji, bucksheesh! howajji,
bucksheesh! bucksheesh! bucksheesh!"  I never was in a storm like that
before.

As we paid the bucksheesh out to sore-eyed children and brown, buxom
girls with repulsively tattooed lips and chins, we filed through the town
and by many an exquisite fresco, till we came to a bramble-infested
inclosure and a Roman-looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling
of St. Mary Magdalene, the friend and follower of Jesus.  The guide
believed it, and so did I.  I could not well do otherwise, with the house
right there before my eyes as plain as day.  The pilgrims took down
portions of the front wall for specimens, as is their honored custom, and
then we departed.

We are camped in this place, now, just within the city walls of Tiberias.
We went into the town before nightfall and looked at its people--we cared
nothing about its houses.  Its people are best examined at a distance.
They are particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and negroes.  Squalor and
poverty are the pride of Tiberias.  The young women wear their dower
strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top of the head
to the jaw--Turkish silver coins which they have raked together or
inherited.  Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but some few had been
very kindly dealt with by fortune.  I saw heiresses there worth, in their
own right--worth, well, I suppose I might venture to say, as much as nine
dollars and a half.  But such cases are rare.  When you come across one
of these, she naturally puts on airs.  She will not ask for bucksheesh.
She will not even permit of undue familiarity.  She assumes a crushing
dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and
quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all.  Some
people can not stand prosperity.

They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers,
with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of
each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in
the Scriptures.  Verily, they look it.  Judging merely by their general
style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that
self-righteousness was their specialty.

From various authorities I have culled information concerning Tiberias.
It was built by Herod Antipas, the murderer of John the Baptist, and
named after the Emperor Tiberius.  It is believed that it stands upon the
site of what must have been, ages ago, a city of considerable
architectural pretensions, judging by the fine porphyry pillars that are
scattered through Tiberias and down the lake shore southward.  These were
fluted, once, and yet, although the stone is about as hard as iron, the
flutings are almost worn away.  These pillars are small, and doubtless
the edifices they adorned were distinguished more for elegance than
grandeur.  This modern town--Tiberias--is only mentioned in the New
Testament; never in the Old.

The Sanhedrim met here last, and for three hundred years Tiberias was the
metropolis of the Jews in Palestine.  It is one of the four holy cities
of the Israelites, and is to them what Mecca is to the Mohammedan and
Jerusalem to the Christian.  It has been the abiding place of many
learned and famous Jewish rabbins.  They lie buried here, and near them
lie also twenty-five thousand of their faith who traveled far to be near
them while they lived and lie with them when they died.  The great Rabbi
Ben Israel spent three years here in the early part of the third century.
He is dead, now.

The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe
--[I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because I am far more familiar with
it than with any other, and partly because I have such a high admiration
for it and such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very
nearly impossible for me to speak of lakes and not mention it.]--by a
good deal--it is just about two-thirds as large.  And when we come to
speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a
meridian of longitude is to a rainbow.  The dim waters of this pool can
not suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow
hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the
grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed
fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as
they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far
upward, where they join the everlasting snows.  Silence and solitude
brood over Tahoe; and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of
Genessaret.  But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating
as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellant.

In the early morning one watches the silent battle of dawn and darkness
upon the waters of Tahoe with a placid interest; but when the shadows
sulk away and one by one the hidden beauties of the shore unfold
themselves in the full splendor of noon; when the still surface is belted
like a rainbow with broad bars of blue and green and white, half the
distance from circumference to centre; when, in the lazy summer
afternoon, he lies in a boat, far out to where the dead blue of the deep
water begins, and smokes the pipe of peace and idly winks at the
distant crags and patches of snow from under his cap-brim; when the boat
drifts shoreward to the white water, and he lolls over the gunwale and
gazes by the hour down through the crystal depths and notes the colors of
the pebbles and reviews the finny armies gliding in procession a hundred
feet below; when at night he sees moon and stars, mountain ridges
feathered with pines, jutting white capes, bold promontories, grand
sweeps of rugged scenery topped with bald, glimmering peaks, all
magnificently pictured in the polished mirror of the lake, in richest,
softest detail, the tranquil interest that was born with the morning
deepens and deepens, by sure degrees, till it culminates at last in
resistless fascination!

It is solitude, for birds and squirrels on the shore and fishes in the
water are all the creatures that are near to make it otherwise, but it is
not the sort of solitude to make one dreary.  Come to Galilee for that.
If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never,
never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and
faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this
stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal plumes of
palms; yonder desolate declivity where the swine of the miracle ran down
into the sea, and doubtless thought it was better to swallow a devil or
two and get drowned into the bargain than have to live longer in such a
place; this cloudless, blistering sky; this solemn, sailless, tintless
lake, reposing within its rim of yellow hills and low, steep banks, and
looking just as expressionless and unpoetical (when we leave its sublime
history out of the question,) as any metropolitan reservoir in
Christendom--if these things are not food for rock me to sleep, mother,
none exist, I think.

But I should not offer the evidence for the prosecution and leave the
defense unheard.  Wm. C. Grimes deposes as follows:--

     "We had taken ship to go over to the other side.  The sea was not
     more than six miles wide.  Of the beauty of the scene, however, I
     can not say enough, nor can I imagine where those travelers carried
     their eyes who have described the scenery of the lake as tame or
     uninteresting.  The first great characteristic of it is the deep
     basin in which it lies.  This is from three to four hundred feet
     deep on all sides except at the lower end, and the sharp slope of
     the banks, which are all of the richest green, is broken and
     diversified by the wadys and water-courses which work their way down
     through the sides of the basin, forming dark chasms or light sunny
     valleys.  Near Tiberias these banks are rocky, and ancient
     sepulchres open in them, with their doors toward the water.  They
     selected grand spots, as did the Egyptians of old, for burial
     places, as if they designed that when the voice of God should reach
     the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes
     of glorious beauty.  On the east, the wild and desolate mountains
     contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north,
     sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his
     white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the
     departing footsteps of a hundred generations.  On the north-east
     shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any
     size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms
     in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more
     attention than would a forest.  The whole appearance of the scene is
     precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genessaret
     to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm.  The very mountains are calm."

It is an ingeniously written description, and well calculated to deceive.
But if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a
skeleton will be found beneath.

So stripped, there remains a lake six miles wide and neutral in color;
with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare,
unsightly rocks, with (almost invisible) holes in them of no consequence
to the picture; eastward, "wild and desolate mountains;" (low, desolate
hills, he should have said;) in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with
snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, "calmness;" its prominent
feature, one tree.

No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful--to one's actual vision.

I claim the right to correct misstatements, and have so corrected the
color of the water in the above recapitulation.  The waters of Genessaret
are of an exceedingly mild blue, even from a high elevation and a
distance of five miles.  Close at hand (the witness was sailing on the
lake,) it is hardly proper to call them blue at all, much less "deep"
blue.  I wish to state, also, not as a correction, but as matter of
opinion, that Mount Hermon is not a striking or picturesque mountain by
any means, being too near the height of its immediate neighbors to be so.
That is all.  I do not object to the witness dragging a mountain
forty-five miles to help the scenery under consideration, because it is
entirely proper to do it, and besides, the picture needs it.

"C. W. E.," (of "Life in the Holy Land,") deposes as follows:--

     "A beautiful sea lies unbosomed among the Galilean hills, in the
     midst of that land once possessed by Zebulon and Naphtali, Asher and
     Dan.  The azure of the sky penetrates the depths of the lake, and
     the waters are sweet and cool.  On the west, stretch broad fertile
     plains; on the north the rocky shores rise step by step until in the
     far distance tower the snowy heights of Hermon; on the east through
     a misty veil are seen the high plains of Perea, which stretch away
     in rugged mountains leading the mind by varied paths toward
     Jerusalem the Holy.  Flowers bloom in this terrestrial paradise,
     once beautiful and verdant with waving trees; singing birds enchant
     the ear; the turtle-dove soothes with its soft note; the crested
     lark sends up its song toward heaven, and the grave and stately
     stork inspires the mind with thought, and leads it on to meditation
     and repose.  Life here was once idyllic, charming; here were once no
     rich, no poor, no high, no low.  It was a world of ease, simplicity,
     and beauty; now it is a scene of desolation and misery."

This is not an ingenious picture.  It is the worst I ever saw.  It
describes in elaborate detail what it terms a "terrestrial paradise," and
closes with the startling information that this paradise is "a scene of
desolation and misery."

I have given two fair, average specimens of the character of the
testimony offered by the majority of the writers who visit this region.
One says, "Of the beauty of the scene I can not say enough," and then
proceeds to cover up with a woof of glittering sentences a thing which,
when stripped for inspection, proves to be only an unobtrusive basin of
water, some mountainous desolation, and one tree.  The other, after a
conscientious effort to build a terrestrial paradise out of the same
materials, with the addition of a "grave and stately stork," spoils it
all by blundering upon the ghastly truth at the last.

Nearly every book concerning Galilee and its lake describes the scenery
as beautiful.  No--not always so straightforward as that.  Sometimes the
impression intentionally conveyed is that it is beautiful, at the same
time that the author is careful not to say that it is, in plain Saxon.
But a careful analysis of these descriptions will show that the materials
of which they are formed are not individually beautiful and can not be
wrought into combinations that are beautiful.  The veneration and the
affection which some of these men felt for the scenes they were speaking
of, heated their fancies and biased their judgment; but the pleasant
falsities they wrote were full of honest sincerity, at any rate.  Others
wrote as they did, because they feared it would be unpopular to write
otherwise.  Others were hypocrites and deliberately meant to deceive.
Any of them would say in a moment, if asked, that it was always right and
always best to tell the truth.  They would say that, at any rate, if they
did not perceive the drift of the question.

But why should not the truth be spoken of this region?  Is the truth
harmful?  Has it ever needed to hide its face?  God made the Sea of
Galilee and its surroundings as they are.  Is it the province of Mr.
Grimes to improve upon the work?

I am sure, from the tenor of books I have read, that many who have
visited this land in years gone by, were Presbyterians, and came seeking
evidences in support of their particular creed; they found a Presbyterian
Palestine, and they had already made up their minds to find no other,
though possibly they did not know it, being blinded by their zeal.
Others were Baptists, seeking Baptist evidences and a Baptist Palestine.
Others were Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, seeking evidences
indorsing their several creeds, and a Catholic, a Methodist, an
Episcopalian Palestine.  Honest as these men's intentions may have been,
they were full of partialities and prejudices, they entered the country
with their verdicts already prepared, and they could no more write
dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about their own
wives and children.  Our pilgrims have brought their verdicts with them.
They have shown it in their conversation ever since we left Beirout.
I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see Tabor,
Nazareth, Jericho and Jerusalem--because I have the books they will
"smouch" their ideas from.  These authors write pictures and frame
rhapsodies, and lesser men follow and see with the author's eyes instead
of their own, and speak with his tongue.  What the pilgrims said at
Cesarea Philippi surprised me with its wisdom.  I found it afterwards in
Robinson.  What they said when Genessaret burst upon their vision,
charmed me with its grace.  I find it in Mr. Thompson's "Land and the
Book."  They have spoken often, in happily worded language which never
varied, of how they mean to lay their weary heads upon a stone at Bethel,
as Jacob did, and close their dim eyes, and dream, perchance, of angels
descending out of heaven on a ladder.  It was very pretty.  But I have
recognized the weary head and the dim eyes, finally.  They borrowed the
idea--and the words--and the construction--and the punctuation--from
Grimes.  The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get home, not as
it appeared to them, but as it appeared to Thompson and Robinson and
Grimes--with the tints varied to suit each pilgrim's creed.

Pilgrims, sinners and Arabs are all abed, now, and the camp is still.
Labor in loneliness is irksome.  Since I made my last few notes, I have
been sitting outside the tent for half an hour.  Night is the time to see
Galilee.  Genessaret under these lustrous stars has nothing repulsive
about it.  Genessaret with the glittering reflections of the
constellations flecking its surface, almost makes me regret that I ever
saw the rude glare of the day upon it.  Its history and its associations
are its chiefest charm, in any eyes, and the spells they weave are feeble
in the searching light of the sun.  Then, we scarcely feel the fetters.
Our thoughts wander constantly to the practical concerns of life, and
refuse to dwell upon things that seem vague and unreal.  But when the day
is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences
of this tranquil starlight.  The old traditions of the place steal upon
his memory and haunt his reveries, and then his fancy clothes all sights
and sounds with the supernatural.  In the lapping of the waves upon the
beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the
night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush
of invisible wings.  Phantom ships are on the sea, the dead of twenty
centuries come forth from the tombs, and in the dirges of the night wind
the songs of old forgotten ages find utterance again.

In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad compass of the
heavens, and is a theatre meet for great events; meet for the birth of a
religion able to save a world; and meet for the stately Figure appointed
to stand upon its stage and proclaim its high decrees.  But in the
sunlight, one says: Is it for the deeds which were done and the words
which were spoken in this little acre of rocks and sand eighteen
centuries gone, that the bells are ringing to-day in the remote islands
of the sea and far and wide over continents that clasp the circumference
of the huge globe?

One can comprehend it only when night has hidden all incongruities and
created a theatre proper for so grand a drama.



CHAPTER XLIX.

We took another swim in the Sea of Galilee at twilight yesterday, and
another at sunrise this morning.  We have not sailed, but three swims are
equal to a sail, are they not?  There were plenty of fish visible in the
water, but we have no outside aids in this pilgrimage but "Tent Life in
the Holy Land," "The Land and the Book," and other literature of like
description--no fishing-tackle.  There were no fish to be had in the
village of Tiberias.  True, we saw two or three vagabonds mending their
nets, but never trying to catch any thing with them.

We did not go to the ancient warm baths two miles below Tiberias.  I had
no desire in the world to go there.  This seemed a little strange, and
prompted me to try to discover what the cause of this unreasonable
indifference was.  It turned out to be simply because Pliny mentions
them.  I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward
Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a place
that I can have to myself.  It always and eternally transpires that St.
Paul has been to that place, and Pliny has "mentioned" it.

In the early morning we mounted and started.  And then a weird apparition
marched forth at the head of the procession--a pirate, I thought, if ever
a pirate dwelt upon land.  It was a tall Arab, as swarthy as an Indian;
young-say thirty years of age.  On his head he had closely bound a
gorgeous yellow and red striped silk scarf, whose ends, lavishly fringed
with tassels, hung down between his shoulders and dallied with the wind.
From his neck to his knees, in ample folds, a robe swept down that was a
very star-spangled banner of curved and sinuous bars of black and white.
Out of his back, somewhere, apparently, the long stem of a chibouk
projected, and reached far above his right shoulder.  Athwart his back,
diagonally, and extending high above his left shoulder, was an Arab gum
of Saladin's time, that was splendid with silver plating from stock clear
up to the end of its measureless stretch of barrel.  About his waist was
bound many and many a yard of elaborately figured but sadly tarnished
stuff that came from sumptuous Persia, and among the baggy folds in front
the sunbeams glinted from a formidable battery of old brass-mounted
horse-pistols and the gilded hilts of blood-thirsty knives.  There were
holsters for more pistols appended to the wonderful stack of long-haired
goat-skins and Persian carpets, which the man had been taught to regard
in the light of a saddle; and down among the pendulous rank of vast
tassels that swung from that saddle, and clanging against the iron shovel
of a stirrup that propped the warrior's knees up toward his chin, was a
crooked, silver-clad scimitar of such awful dimensions and such
implacable expression that no man might hope to look upon it and not
shudder.  The fringed and bedizened prince whose privilege it is to ride
the pony and lead the elephant into a country village is poor and naked
compared to this chaos of paraphernalia, and the happy vanity of the one
is the very poverty of satisfaction compared to the majestic serenity,
the overwhelming complacency of the other.

"Who is this?  What is this?"  That was the trembling inquiry all down
the line.

"Our guard!  From Galilee to the birthplace of the Savior, the country is
infested with fierce Bedouins, whose sole happiness it is, in this life,
to cut and stab and mangle and murder unoffending Christians.  Allah be
with us!"

"Then hire a regiment!  Would you send us out among these desperate
hordes, with no salvation in our utmost need but this old turret?"

The dragoman laughed--not at the facetiousness of the simile, for verily,
that guide or that courier or that dragoman never yet lived upon earth
who had in him the faintest appreciation of a joke, even though that joke
were so broad and so ponderous that if it fell on him it would flatten
him out like a postage stamp--the dragoman laughed, and then, emboldened
by some thought that was in his brain, no doubt, proceeded to extremities
and winked.

In straits like these, when a man laughs, it is encouraging when he
winks, it is positively reassuring.  He finally intimated that one guard
would be sufficient to protect us, but that that one was an absolute
necessity.  It was because of the moral weight his awful panoply would
have with the Bedouins.  Then I said we didn't want any guard at all.
If one fantastic vagabond could protect eight armed Christians and a pack
of Arab servants from all harm, surely that detachment could protect
themselves.  He shook his head doubtfully.  Then I said, just think of
how it looks--think of how it would read, to self-reliant Americans, that
we went sneaking through this deserted wilderness under the protection of
this masquerading Arab, who would break his neck getting out of the
country if a man that was a man ever started after him.  It was a mean,
low, degrading position.  Why were we ever told to bring navy revolvers
with us if we had to be protected at last by this infamous star-spangled
scum of the desert?  These appeals were vain--the dragoman only smiled
and shook his head.

I rode to the front and struck up an acquaintance with King
Solomon-in-all-his-glory, and got him to show me his lingering eternity
of a gun. It had a rusty flint lock; it was ringed and barred and plated
with silver from end to end, but it was as desperately out of the
perpendicular as are the billiard cues of '49 that one finds yet in
service in the ancient mining camps of California.  The muzzle was eaten
by the rust of centuries into a ragged filigree-work, like the end of a
burnt-out stove-pipe.  I shut one eye and peered within--it was flaked
with iron rust like an old steamboat boiler.  I borrowed the ponderous
pistols and snapped them.  They were rusty inside, too--had not been
loaded for a generation.  I went back, full of encouragement, and
reported to the guide, and asked him to discharge this dismantled
fortress.  It came out, then.  This fellow was a retainer of the Sheik
of Tiberias.  He was a source of Government revenue.  He was to the
Empire of Tiberias what the customs are to America.  The Sheik imposed
guards upon travelers and charged them for it.  It is a lucrative source
of emolument, and sometimes brings into the national treasury as much as
thirty-five or forty dollars a year.

I knew the warrior's secret now; I knew the hollow vanity of his rusty
trumpery, and despised his asinine complacency.  I told on him, and with
reckless daring the cavalcade straight ahead into the perilous solitudes
of the desert, and scorned his frantic warnings of the mutilation and
death that hovered about them on every side.

Arrived at an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the lake, (I ought
to mention that the lake lies six hundred feet below the level of the
Mediterranean--no traveler ever neglects to flourish that fragment of
news in his letters,) as bald and unthrilling a panorama as any land can
afford, perhaps, was spread out before us.  Yet it was so crowded with
historical interest, that if all the pages that have been written about
it were spread upon its surface, they would flag it from horizon to
horizon like a pavement.  Among the localities comprised in this view,
were Mount Hermon; the hills that border Cesarea Philippi, Dan, the
Sources of the Jordan and the Waters of Merom; Tiberias; the Sea of
Galilee; Joseph's Pit; Capernaum; Bethsaida; the supposed scenes of the
Sermon on the Mount, the feeding of the multitudes and the miraculous
draught of fishes; the declivity down which the swine ran to the sea; the
entrance and the exit of the Jordan; Safed, "the city set upon a hill,"
one of the four holy cities of the Jews, and the place where they believe
the real Messiah will appear when he comes to redeem the world; part of
the battle-field of Hattin, where the knightly Crusaders fought their
last fight, and in a blaze of glory passed from the stage and ended their
splendid career forever; Mount Tabor, the traditional scene of the Lord's
Transfiguration.  And down toward the southeast lay a landscape that
suggested to my mind a quotation (imperfectly remembered, no doubt:)

     "The Ephraimites, not being called upon to share in the rich spoils
     of the Ammonitish war, assembled a mighty host to fight against
     Jeptha, Judge of Israel; who, being apprised of their approach,
     gathered together the men of Israel and gave them battle and put
     them to flight.  To make his victory the more secure, he stationed
     guards at the different fords and passages of the Jordan, with
     instructions to let none pass who could not say Shibboleth.  The
     Ephraimites, being of a different tribe, could not frame to
     pronounce the word right, but called it Sibboleth, which proved them
     enemies and cost them their lives; wherefore, forty and two thousand
     fell at the different fords and passages of the Jordan that day."

We jogged along peacefully over the great caravan route from Damascus to
Jerusalem and Egypt, past Lubia and other Syrian hamlets, perched, in the
unvarying style, upon the summit of steep mounds and hills, and fenced
round about with giant cactuses, (the sign of worthless land,) with
prickly pears upon them like hams, and came at last to the battle-field
of Hattin.

It is a grand, irregular plateau, and looks as if it might have been
created for a battle-field.  Here the peerless Saladin met the Christian
host some seven hundred years ago, and broke their power in Palestine for
all time to come.  There had long been a truce between the opposing
forces, but according to the Guide-Book, Raynauld of Chatillon, Lord of
Kerak, broke it by plundering a Damascus caravan, and refusing to give up
either the merchants or their goods when Saladin demanded them.  This
conduct of an insolent petty chieftain stung the Sultan to the quick, and
he swore that he would slaughter Raynauld with his own hand, no matter
how, or when, or where he found him.  Both armies prepared for war.
Under the weak King of Jerusalem was the very flower of the Christian
chivalry.  He foolishly compelled them to undergo a long, exhausting
march, in the scorching sun, and then, without water or other
refreshment, ordered them to encamp in this open plain.  The splendidly
mounted masses of Moslem soldiers swept round the north end of
Genessaret, burning and destroying as they came, and pitched their camp
in front of the opposing lines.  At dawn the terrific fight began.
Surrounded on all sides by the Sultan's swarming battalions, the
Christian Knights fought on without a hope for their lives.  They fought
with desperate valor, but to no purpose; the odds of heat and numbers,
and consuming thirst, were too great against them.  Towards the middle of
the day the bravest of their band cut their way through the Moslem ranks
and gained the summit of a little hill, and there, hour after hour, they
closed around the banner of the Cross, and beat back the charging
squadrons of the enemy.

But the doom of the Christian power was sealed.  Sunset found Saladin
Lord of Palestine, the Christian chivalry strewn in heaps upon the field,
and the King of Jerusalem, the Grand Master of the Templars, and Raynauld
of Chatillon, captives in the Sultan's tent.  Saladin treated two of the
prisoners with princely courtesy, and ordered refreshments to be set
before them.  When the King handed an iced Sherbet to Chatillon, the
Sultan said," It is thou that givest it to him, not I."  He remembered
his oath, and slaughtered the hapless Knight of Chatillon with his own
hand.

It was hard to realize that this silent plain had once resounded with
martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men.  It was hard to
people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid
pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the
flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war.  A desolation
is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and
action.

We reached Tabor safely, and considerably in advance of that old
iron-clad swindle of a guard.  We never saw a human being on the whole
route, much less lawless hordes of Bedouins.  Tabor stands solitary and
alone, a giant sentinel above the Plain of Esdraelon.  It rises some
fourteen hundred feet above the surrounding level, a green, wooden cone,
symmetrical and full of grace--a prominent landmark, and one that is
exceedingly pleasant to eyes surfeited with the repulsive monotony of
desert Syria.  We climbed the steep path to its summit, through breezy
glades of thorn and oak.  The view presented from its highest peak was
almost beautiful.  Below, was the broad, level plain of Esdraelon,
checkered with fields like a chess-board, and full as smooth and level,
seemingly; dotted about its borders with white, compact villages, and
faintly penciled, far and near, with the curving lines of roads and
trails.  When it is robed in the fresh verdure of spring, it must form a
charming picture, even by itself.  Skirting its southern border rises
"Little Hermon," over whose summit a glimpse of Gilboa is caught.  Nain,
famous for the raising of the widow's son, and Endor, as famous for the
performances of her witch are in view.  To the eastward lies the Valley
of the Jordan and beyond it the mountains of Gilead.  Westward is Mount
Carmel.  Hermon in the north--the table-lands of Bashan--Safed, the holy
city, gleaming white upon a tall spur of the mountains of Lebanon
--a steel-blue corner of the Sea of Galilee--saddle-peaked Hattin,
traditional "Mount of Beatitudes" and mute witness brave fights of the
Crusading host for Holy Cross--these fill up the picture.

To glance at the salient features of this landscape through the
picturesque framework of a ragged and ruined stone window--arch of the
time of Christ, thus hiding from sight all that is unattractive, is to
secure to yourself a pleasure worth climbing the mountain to enjoy.  One
must stand on his head to get the best effect in a fine sunset, and set a
landscape in a bold, strong framework that is very close at hand, to
bring out all its beauty.  One learns this latter truth never more to
forget it, in that mimic land of enchantment, the wonderful garden of my
lord the Count Pallavicini, near Genoa.  You go wandering for hours among
hills and wooded glens, artfully contrived to leave the impression that
Nature shaped them and not man; following winding paths and coming
suddenly upon leaping cascades and rustic bridges; finding sylvan lakes
where you expected them not; loitering through battered mediaeval castles
in miniature that seem hoary with age and yet were built a dozen years
ago; meditating over ancient crumbling tombs, whose marble columns were
marred and broken purposely by the modern artist that made them;
stumbling unawares upon toy palaces, wrought of rare and costly
materials, and again upon a peasant's hut, whose dilapidated furniture
would never suggest that it was made so to order; sweeping round and
round in the midst of a forest on an enchanted wooden horse that is moved
by some invisible agency; traversing Roman roads and passing under
majestic triumphal arches; resting in quaint bowers where unseen spirits
discharge jets of water on you from every possible direction, and where
even the flowers you touch assail you with a shower; boating on a
subterranean lake among caverns and arches royally draped with clustering
stalactites, and passing out into open day upon another lake, which is
bordered with sloping banks of grass and gay with patrician barges that
swim at anchor in the shadow of a miniature marble temple that rises out
of the clear water and glasses its white statues, its rich capitals and
fluted columns in the tranquil depths.  So, from marvel to marvel you
have drifted on, thinking all the time that the one last seen must be the
chiefest.  And, verily, the chiefest wonder is reserved until the last,
but you do not see it until you step ashore, and passing through a
wilderness of rare flowers, collected from every corner of the earth, you
stand at the door of one more mimic temple.  Right in this place the
artist taxed his genius to the utmost, and fairly opened the gates of
fairy land.  You look through an unpretending pane of glass, stained
yellow--the first thing you see is a mass of quivering foliage, ten short
steps before you, in the midst of which is a ragged opening like a
gateway-a thing that is common enough in nature, and not apt to excite
suspicions of a deep human design--and above the bottom of the gateway,
project, in the most careless way! a few broad tropic leaves and
brilliant flowers.  All of a sudden, through this bright, bold gateway,
you catch a glimpse of the faintest, softest, richest picture that ever
graced the dream of a dying Saint, since John saw the New Jerusalem
glimmering above the clouds of Heaven.  A broad sweep of sea, flecked
with careening sails; a sharp, jutting cape, and a lofty lighthouse on
it; a sloping lawn behind it; beyond, a portion of the old "city of
palaces," with its parks and hills and stately mansions; beyond these, a
prodigious mountain, with its strong outlines sharply cut against ocean
and sky; and over all, vagrant shreds and flakes of cloud, floating in a
sea of gold.  The ocean is gold, the city is gold, the meadow, the
mountain, the sky--every thing is golden-rich, and mellow, and dreamy as
a vision of Paradise.  No artist could put upon canvas, its entrancing
beauty, and yet, without the yellow glass, and the carefully contrived
accident of a framework that cast it into enchanted distance and shut out
from it all unattractive features, it was not a picture to fall into
ecstasies over.  Such is life, and the trail of the serpent is over us
all.

There is nothing for it now but to come back to old Tabor, though the
subject is tiresome enough, and I can not stick to it for wandering off
to scenes that are pleasanter to remember.  I think I will skip, any how.
There is nothing about Tabor (except we concede that it was the scene of
the Transfiguration,) but some gray old ruins, stacked up there in all
ages of the world from the days of stout Gideon and parties that
flourished thirty centuries ago to the fresh yesterday of Crusading
times.  It has its Greek Convent, and the coffee there is good, but never
a splinter of the true cross or bone of a hallowed saint to arrest the
idle thoughts of worldlings and turn them into graver channels.
A Catholic church is nothing to me that has no relics.

The plain of Esdraelon--"the battle-field of the nations"--only sets one
to dreaming of Joshua, and Benhadad, and Saul, and Gideon; Tamerlane,
Tancred, Coeur de Lion, and Saladin; the warrior Kings of Persia, Egypt's
heroes, and Napoleon--for they all fought here.  If the magic of the
moonlight could summon from the graves of forgotten centuries and many
lands the countless myriads that have battled on this wide, far-reaching
floor, and array them in the thousand strange Costumes of their hundred
nationalities, and send the vast host sweeping down the plain, splendid
with plumes and banners and glittering lances, I could stay here an age
to see the phantom pageant.  But the magic of the moonlight is a vanity
and a fraud; and whoso putteth his trust in it shall suffer sorrow and
disappointment.

Down at the foot of Tabor, and just at the edge of the storied Plain of
Esdraelon, is the insignificant village of Deburieh, where Deborah,
prophetess of Israel, lived.  It is just like Magdala.



CHAPTER L.

We descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a deep ravine, followed a hilly,
rocky road to Nazareth--distant two hours.  All distances in the East are
measured by hours, not miles.  A good horse will walk three miles an hour
over nearly any kind of a road; therefore, an hour, here, always stands
for three miles.  This method of computation is bothersome and annoying;
and until one gets thoroughly accustomed to it, it carries no
intelligence to his mind until he has stopped and translated the pagan
hours into Christian miles, just as people do with the spoken words of a
foreign language they are acquainted with, but not familiarly enough to
catch the meaning in a moment.  Distances traveled by human feet are also
estimated by hours and minutes, though I do not know what the base of the
calculation is.  In Constantinople you ask, "How far is it to the
Consulate?" and they answer, "About ten minutes."  "How far is it to the
Lloyds' Agency?"  "Quarter of an hour."  "How far is it to the lower
bridge?"  "Four minutes."  I can not be positive about it, but I think
that there, when a man orders a pair of pantaloons, he says he wants them
a quarter of a minute in the legs and nine seconds around the waist.

Two hours from Tabor to Nazareth--and as it was an uncommonly narrow,
crooked trail, we necessarily met all the camel trains and jackass
caravans between Jericho and Jacksonville in that particular place and
nowhere else.  The donkeys do not matter so much, because they are so
small that you can jump your horse over them if he is an animal of
spirit, but a camel is not jumpable.  A camel is as tall as any ordinary
dwelling-house in Syria--which is to say a camel is from one to two, and
sometimes nearly three feet taller than a good-sized man.  In this part
of the country his load is oftenest in the shape of colossal sacks--one
on each side.  He and his cargo take up as much room as a carriage.
Think of meeting this style of obstruction in a narrow trail.  The camel
would not turn out for a king.  He stalks serenely along, bringing his
cushioned stilts forward with the long, regular swing of a pendulum, and
whatever is in the way must get out of the way peaceably, or be wiped out
forcibly by the bulky sacks.  It was a tiresome ride to us, and perfectly
exhausting to the horses.  We were compelled to jump over upwards of
eighteen hundred donkeys, and only one person in the party was unseated
less than sixty times by the camels.  This seems like a powerful
statement, but the poet has said, "Things are not what they seem."  I can
not think of any thing, now, more certain to make one shudder, than to
have a soft-footed camel sneak up behind him and touch him on the ear
with its cold, flabby under-lip.  A camel did this for one of the boys,
who was drooping over his saddle in a brown study.  He glanced up and saw
the majestic apparition hovering above him, and made frantic efforts to
get out of the way, but the camel reached out and bit him on the shoulder
before he accomplished it.  This was the only pleasant incident of the
journey.

At Nazareth we camped in an olive grove near the Virgin Mary's fountain,
and that wonderful Arab "guard" came to collect some bucksheesh for his
"services" in following us from Tiberias and warding off invisible
dangers with the terrors of his armament.  The dragoman had paid his
master, but that counted as nothing--if you hire a man to sneeze for you,
here, and another man chooses to help him, you have got to pay both.
They do nothing whatever without pay.  How it must have surprised these
people to hear the way of salvation offered to them "without money and
without price."  If the manners, the people or the customs of this
country have changed since the Saviour's time, the figures and metaphors
of the Bible are not the evidences to prove it by.

We entered the great Latin Convent which is built over the traditional
dwelling-place of the Holy Family.  We went down a flight of fifteen
steps below the ground level, and stood in a small chapel tricked out
with tapestry hangings, silver lamps, and oil paintings.  A spot marked
by a cross, in the marble floor, under the altar, was exhibited as the
place made forever holy by the feet of the Virgin when she stood up to
receive the message of the angel.  So simple, so unpretending a locality,
to be the scene of so mighty an event!  The very scene of the
Annunciation--an event which has been commemorated by splendid shrines
and august temples all over the civilized world, and one which the
princes of art have made it their loftiest ambition to picture worthily
on their canvas; a spot whose history is familiar to the very children of
every house, and city, and obscure hamlet of the furthest lands of
Christendom; a spot which myriads of men would toil across the breadth of
a world to see, would consider it a priceless privilege to look upon.
It was easy to think these thoughts.  But it was not easy to bring myself
up to the magnitude of the situation.  I could sit off several thousand
miles and imagine the angel appearing, with shadowy wings and lustrous
countenance, and note the glory that streamed downward upon the Virgin's
head while the message from the Throne of God fell upon her ears--any one
can do that, beyond the ocean, but few can do it here.  I saw the little
recess from which the angel stepped, but could not fill its void.  The
angels that I know are creatures of unstable fancy--they will not fit in
niches of substantial stone.  Imagination labors best in distant fields.
I doubt if any man can stand in the Grotto of the Annunciation and people
with the phantom images of his mind its too tangible walls of stone.

They showed us a broken granite pillar, depending from the roof, which
they said was hacked in two by the Moslem conquerors of Nazareth, in the
vain hope of pulling down the sanctuary.  But the pillar remained
miraculously suspended in the air, and, unsupported itself, supported
then and still supports the roof.  By dividing this statement up among
eight, it was found not difficult to believe it.

These gifted Latin monks never do any thing by halves.  If they were to
show you the Brazen Serpent that was elevated in the wilderness, you
could depend upon it that they had on hand the pole it was elevated on
also, and even the hole it stood in.  They have got the "Grotto" of the
Annunciation here; and just as convenient to it as one's throat is to his
mouth, they have also the Virgin's Kitchen, and even her sitting-room,
where she and Joseph watched the infant Saviour play with Hebrew toys
eighteen hundred years ago.  All under one roof, and all clean, spacious,
comfortable "grottoes."  It seems curious that personages intimately
connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes--in Nazareth, in
Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus--and yet nobody else in their day and
generation thought of doing any thing of the kind.  If they ever did,
their grottoes are all gone, and I suppose we ought to wonder at the
peculiar marvel of the preservation of these I speak of.  When the Virgin
fled from Herod's wrath, she hid in a grotto in Bethlehem, and the same
is there to this day.  The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem was
done in a grotto; the Saviour was born in a grotto--both are shown to
pilgrims yet.  It is exceedingly strange that these tremendous events all
happened in grottoes--and exceedingly fortunate, likewise, because the
strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living
rock will last forever.  It is an imposture--this grotto stuff--but it is
one that all men ought to thank the Catholics for.  Wherever they ferret
out a lost locality made holy by some Scriptural event, they straightway
build a massive--almost imperishable--church there, and preserve the
memory of that locality for the gratification of future generations.  If
it had been left to Protestants to do this most worthy work, we would not
even know where Jerusalem is to-day, and the man who could go and put his
finger on Nazareth would be too wise for this world.  The world owes the
Catholics its good will even for the happy rascality of hewing out these
bogus grottoes in the rock; for it is infinitely more satisfactory to
look at a grotto, where people have faithfully believed for centuries
that the Virgin once lived, than to have to imagine a dwelling-place for
her somewhere, any where, nowhere, loose and at large all over this town
of Nazareth.  There is too large a scope of country.  The imagination can
not work.  There is no one particular spot to chain your eye, rivet your
interest, and make you think.  The memory of the Pilgrims can not perish
while Plymouth Rock remains to us.  The old monks are wise.  They know
how to drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to
its place forever.

We visited the places where Jesus worked for fifteen years as a
carpenter, and where he attempted to teach in the synagogue and was
driven out by a mob.  Catholic chapels stand upon these sites and protect
the little fragments of the ancient walls which remain.  Our pilgrims
broke off specimens.  We visited, also, a new chapel, in the midst of the
town, which is built around a boulder some twelve feet long by four feet
thick; the priests discovered, a few years ago, that the disciples had
sat upon this rock to rest, once, when they had walked up from Capernaum.
They hastened to preserve the relic.  Relics are very good property.
Travelers are expected to pay for seeing them, and they do it cheerfully.
We like the idea.  One's conscience can never be the worse for the
knowledge that he has paid his way like a man.  Our pilgrims would have
liked very well to get out their lampblack and stencil-plates and paint
their names on that rock, together with the names of the villages they
hail from in America, but the priests permit nothing of that kind.
To speak the strict truth, however, our party seldom offend in that way,
though we have men in the ship who never lose an opportunity to do it.
Our pilgrims' chief sin is their lust for "specimens."  I suppose that by
this time they know the dimensions of that rock to an inch, and its
weight to a ton; and I do not hesitate to charge that they will go back
there to-night and try to carry it off.

This "Fountain of the Virgin" is the one which tradition says Mary used
to get water from, twenty times a day, when she was a girl, and bear it
away in a jar upon her head.  The water streams through faucets in the
face of a wall of ancient masonry which stands removed from the houses of
the village.  The young girls of Nazareth still collect about it by the
dozen and keep up a riotous laughter and sky-larking.  The Nazarene girls
are homely.  Some of them have large, lustrous eyes, but none of them
have pretty faces.  These girls wear a single garment, usually, and it is
loose, shapeless, of undecided color; it is generally out of repair, too.
They wear, from crown to jaw, curious strings of old coins, after the
manner of the belles of Tiberias, and brass jewelry upon their wrists and
in their ears.  They wear no shoes and stockings.  They are the most
human girls we have found in the country yet, and the best natured.
But there is no question that these picturesque maidens sadly lack
comeliness.

A pilgrim--the "Enthusiast"--said: "See that tall, graceful girl! look at
the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance!"

Another pilgrim came along presently and said: "Observe that tall,
graceful girl; what queenly Madonna-like gracefulness of beauty is in her
countenance."

I said: "She is not tall, she is short; she is not beautiful, she is
homely; she is graceful enough, I grant, but she is rather boisterous."

The third and last pilgrim moved by, before long, and he said: "Ah, what
a tall, graceful girl! what Madonna-like gracefulness of queenly beauty!"

The verdicts were all in.  It was time, now, to look up the authorities
for all these opinions.  I found this paragraph, which follows.  Written
by whom?  Wm. C. Grimes:

     "After we were in the saddle, we rode down to the spring to have a
     last look at the women of Nazareth, who were, as a class, much the
     prettiest that we had seen in the East.  As we approached the crowd
     a tall girl of nineteen advanced toward Miriam and offered her a cup
     of water.  Her movement was graceful and queenly.  We exclaimed on
     the spot at the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance.  Whitely was
     suddenly thirsty, and begged for water, and drank it slowly, with
     his eyes over the top of the cup, fixed on her large black eyes,
     which gazed on him quite as curiously as he on her.  Then Moreright
     wanted water.  She gave it to him and he managed to spill it so as
     to ask for another cup, and by the time she came to me she saw
     through the operation; her eyes were full of fun as she looked at
     me.  I laughed outright, and she joined me in as gay a shout as ever
     country maiden in old Orange county.  I wished for a picture of her.
     A Madonna, whose face was a portrait of that beautiful Nazareth
     girl, would be a 'thing of beauty' and 'a joy forever.'"

That is the kind of gruel which has been served out from Palestine for
ages.  Commend me to Fennimore Cooper to find beauty in the Indians, and
to Grimes to find it in the Arabs.  Arab men are often fine looking, but
Arab women are not.  We can all believe that the Virgin Mary was
beautiful; it is not natural to think otherwise; but does it follow that
it is our duty to find beauty in these present women of Nazareth?

I love to quote from Grimes, because he is so dramatic.  And because he
is so romantic.  And because he seems to care but little whether he tells
the truth or not, so he scares the reader or excites his envy or his
admiration.

He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver,
and the other on his pocket-handkerchief.  Always, when he was not on the
point of crying over a holy place, he was on the point of killing an
Arab.  More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever
happened to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died.

At Beit Jin, where nobody had interfered with him, he crept out of his
tent at dead of night and shot at what he took to be an Arab lying on a
rock, some distance away, planning evil.  The ball killed a wolf.  Just
before he fired, he makes a dramatic picture of himself--as usual, to
scare the reader:

     "Was it imagination, or did I see a moving object on the surface of
     the rock?  If it were a man, why did he not now drop me?  He had a
     beautiful shot as I stood out in my black boornoose against the
     white tent.  I had the sensation of an entering bullet in my throat,
     breast, brain."

Reckless creature!

Riding toward Genessaret, they saw two Bedouins, and "we looked to our
pistols and loosened them quietly in our shawls," etc.  Always cool.

In Samaria, he charged up a hill, in the face of a volley of stones; he
fired into the crowd of men who threw them.  He says:

     "I never lost an opportunity of impressing the Arabs with the
     perfection of American and English weapons, and the danger of
     attacking any one of the armed Franks.  I think the lesson of that
     ball not lost."

At Beit Jin he gave his whole band of Arab muleteers a piece of his mind,
and then--

     "I contented myself with a solemn assurance that if there occurred
     another instance of disobedience to orders I would thrash the
     responsible party as he never dreamed of being thrashed, and if I
     could not find who was responsible, I would whip them all, from
     first to last, whether there was a governor at hand to do it or I
     had to do it myself"

Perfectly fearless, this man.

He rode down the perpendicular path in the rocks, from the Castle of
Banias to the oak grove, at a flying gallop, his horse striding "thirty
feet" at every bound.  I stand prepared to bring thirty reliable
witnesses to prove that Putnam's famous feat at Horseneck was
insignificant compared to this.

Behold him--always theatrical--looking at Jerusalem--this time, by an
oversight, with his hand off his pistol for once.

     "I stood in the road, my hand on my horse's neck, and with my dim
     eyes sought to trace the outlines of the holy places which I had
     long before fixed in my mind, but the fast-flowing tears forbade my
     succeeding.  There were our Mohammedan servants, a Latin monk, two
     Armenians and a Jew in our cortege, and all alike gazed with
     overflowing eyes."

If Latin monks and Arabs cried, I know to a moral certainty that the
horses cried also, and so the picture is complete.

But when necessity demanded, he could be firm as adamant.  In the Lebanon
Valley an Arab youth--a Christian; he is particular to explain that
Mohammedans do not steal--robbed him of a paltry ten dollars' worth of
powder and shot.  He convicted him before a sheik and looked on while he
was punished by the terrible bastinado.  Hear him:

     "He (Mousa) was on his back in a twinkling, howling, shouting,
     screaming, but he was carried out to the piazza before the door,
     where we could see the operation, and laid face down.  One man sat
     on his back and one on his legs, the latter holding up his feet,
     while a third laid on the bare soles a rhinoceros-hide koorbash
     --["A Koorbash is Arabic for cowhide, the cow being a rhinoceros.
     It is the most cruel whip known to fame.  Heavy as lead, and
     flexible as India-rubber, usually about forty inches long and
     tapering gradually from an inch in diameter to a point, it
     administers a blow which leaves its mark for time."--Scow Life in
     Egypt, by the same author.]--that whizzed through the air at every
     stroke.  Poor Moreright was in agony, and Nama and Nama the Second
     (mother and sister of Mousa,) were on their faces begging and
     wailing, now embracing my knees and now Whitely's, while the
     brother, outside, made the air ring with cries louder than Mousa's.
     Even Yusef came and asked me on his knees to relent, and last of
     all, Betuni--the rascal had lost a feed-bag in their house and had
     been loudest in his denunciations that morning--besought the Howajji
     to have mercy on the fellow."

But not he!  The punishment was "suspended," at the fifteenth blow to
hear the confession.  Then Grimes and his party rode away, and left the
entire Christian family to be fined and as severely punished as the
Mohammedan sheik should deem proper.

     "As I mounted, Yusef once more begged me to interfere and have mercy
     on them, but I looked around at the dark faces of the crowd, and I
     couldn't find one drop of pity in my heart for them."

He closes his picture with a rollicking burst of humor which contrasts
finely with the grief of the mother and her children.

One more paragraph:

     "Then once more I bowed my head.  It is no shame to have wept in
     Palestine.  I wept, when I saw Jerusalem, I wept when I lay in the
     starlight at Bethlehem.  I wept on the blessed shores of Galilee.
     My hand was no less firm on the rein, my anger did not tremble on
     the trigger of my pistol when I rode with it in my right hand along
     the shore of the blue sea" (weeping.) "My eye was not dimmed by
     those tears nor my heart in aught weakened.  Let him who would sneer
     at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his
     taste in my journeyings through Holy Land."

He never bored but he struck water.

I am aware that this is a pretty voluminous notice of Mr. Grimes' book.
However, it is proper and legitimate to speak of it, for "Nomadic Life in
Palestine" is a representative book--the representative of a class of
Palestine books--and a criticism upon it will serve for a criticism upon
them all.  And since I am treating it in the comprehensive capacity of a
representative book, I have taken the liberty of giving to both book and
author fictitious names.  Perhaps it is in better taste, any how, to do
this.



CHAPTER LI.

Nazareth is wonderfully interesting because the town has an air about it
of being precisely as Jesus left it, and one finds himself saying, all
the time, "The boy Jesus has stood in this doorway--has played in that
street--has touched these stones with his hands--has rambled over these
chalky hills."  Whoever shall write the boyhood of Jesus ingeniously will
make a book which will possess a vivid interest for young and old alike.
I judge so from the greater interest we found in Nazareth than any of our
speculations upon Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee gave rise to.  It was
not possible, standing by the Sea of Galilee, to frame more than a vague,
far-away idea of the majestic Personage who walked upon the crested waves
as if they had been solid earth, and who touched the dead and they rose
up and spoke.  I read among my notes, now, with a new interest, some
sentences from an edition of 1621 of the Apocryphal New Testament.
[Extract.]

     "Christ, kissed by a bride made dumb by sorcerers, cures her.  A
     leprous girl cured by the water in which the infant Christ was
     washed, and becomes the servant of Joseph and Mary.  The leprous son
     of a Prince cured in like manner.

     "A young man who had been bewitched and turned into a mule,
     miraculously cured by the infant Savior being put on his back, and
     is married to the girl who had been cured of leprosy.  Whereupon the
     bystanders praise God.

     "Chapter 16.  Christ miraculously widens or contracts gates,
     milk-pails, sieves or boxes, not properly made by Joseph, he not
     being skillful at his carpenter's trade.  The King of Jerusalem
     gives Joseph an order for a throne.  Joseph works on it for two
     years and makes it two spans too short.  The King being angry with
     him, Jesus comforts him--commands him to pull one side of the
     throne while he pulls the other, and brings it to its proper
     dimensions.

     "Chapter 19.  Jesus, charged with throwing a boy from the roof of a
     house, miraculously causes the dead boy to speak and acquit him;
     fetches water for his mother, breaks the pitcher and miraculously
     gathers the water in his mantle and brings it home.

     "Sent to a schoolmaster, refuses to tell his letters, and the
     schoolmaster going to whip him, his hand withers."

Further on in this quaint volume of rejected gospels is an epistle of St.
Clement to the Corinthians, which was used in the churches and considered
genuine fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago.  In it this account of the
fabled phoenix occurs:

     "1.  Let us consider that wonderful type of the resurrection, which
     is seen in the Eastern countries, that is to say, in Arabia.

     "2.  There is a certain bird called a phoenix.  Of this there is
     never but one at a time, and that lives five hundred years.  And
     when the time of its dissolution draws near, that it must die, it
     makes itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices,
     into which, when its time is fulfilled, it enters and dies.

     "3.  But its flesh, putrefying, breeds a certain worm, which, being
     nourished by the juice of the dead bird, brings forth feathers; and
     when it is grown to a perfect state, it takes up the nest in which
     the bones of its parent lie, and carries it from Arabia into Egypt,
     to a city called Heliopolis:

     "4.  And flying in open day in the sight of all men, lays it upon
     the altar of the sun, and so returns from whence it came.

     "5.  The priests then search into the records of the time, and find
     that it returned precisely at the end of five hundred years."

Business is business, and there is nothing like punctuality, especially
in a phoenix.

The few chapters relating to the infancy of the Saviour contain many
things which seem frivolous and not worth preserving.  A large part of
the remaining portions of the book read like good Scripture, however.
There is one verse that ought not to have been rejected, because it so
evidently prophetically refers to the general run of Congresses of the
United States:

     "199.  They carry themselves high, and as prudent men; and though
     they are fools, yet would seem to be teachers."

I have set these extracts down, as I found them.  Everywhere among the
cathedrals of France and Italy, one finds traditions of personages that
do not figure in the Bible, and of miracles that are not mentioned in its
pages.  But they are all in this Apocryphal New Testament, and though
they have been ruled out of our modern Bible, it is claimed that they
were accepted gospel twelve or fifteen centuries ago, and ranked as high
in credit as any.  One needs to read this book before he visits those
venerable cathedrals, with their treasures of tabooed and forgotten
tradition.

They imposed another pirate upon us at Nazareth--another invincible Arab
guard.  We took our last look at the city, clinging like a whitewashed
wasp's nest to the hill-side, and at eight o'clock in the morning
departed.  We dismounted and drove the horses down a bridle-path which I
think was fully as crooked as a corkscrew, which I know to be as steep as
the downward sweep of a rainbow, and which I believe to be the worst
piece of road in the geography, except one in the Sandwich Islands, which
I remember painfully, and possibly one or two mountain trails in the
Sierra Nevadas.  Often, in this narrow path the horse had to poise
himself nicely on a rude stone step and then drop his fore-feet over the
edge and down something more than half his own height.  This brought his
nose near the ground, while his tail pointed up toward the sky somewhere,
and gave him the appearance of preparing to stand on his head.  A horse
cannot look dignified in this position.  We accomplished the long descent
at last, and trotted across the great Plain of Esdraelon.

Some of us will be shot before we finish this pilgrimage.  The pilgrims
read "Nomadic Life" and keep themselves in a constant state of Quixotic
heroism.  They have their hands on their pistols all the time, and every
now and then, when you least expect it, they snatch them out and take aim
at Bedouins who are not visible, and draw their knives and make savage
passes at other Bedouins who do not exist.  I am in deadly peril always,
for these spasms are sudden and irregular, and of course I cannot tell
when to be getting out of the way.  If I am accidentally murdered, some
time, during one of these romantic frenzies of the pilgrims, Mr. Grimes
must be rigidly held to answer as an accessory before the fact.  If the
pilgrims would take deliberate aim and shoot at a man, it would be all
right and proper--because that man would not be in any danger; but these
random assaults are what I object to.  I do not wish to see any more
places like Esdraelon, where the ground is level and people can gallop.
It puts melodramatic nonsense into the pilgrims' heads.  All at once,
when one is jogging along stupidly in the sun, and thinking about
something ever so far away, here they come, at a stormy gallop, spurring
and whooping at those ridgy old sore-backed plugs till their heels fly
higher than their heads, and as they whiz by, out comes a little
potato-gun of a revolver, there is a startling little pop, and a small pellet
goes singing through the air.  Now that I have begun this pilgrimage, I
intend to go through with it, though sooth to say, nothing but the most
desperate valor has kept me to my purpose up to the present time.  I do
not mind Bedouins,--I am not afraid of them; because neither Bedouins nor
ordinary Arabs have shown any disposition to harm us, but I do feel
afraid of my own comrades.

Arriving at the furthest verge of the Plain, we rode a little way up a
hill and found ourselves at Endor, famous for its witch.  Her descendants
are there yet.  They were the wildest horde of half-naked savages we have
found thus far.  They swarmed out of mud bee-hives; out of hovels of the
dry-goods box pattern; out of gaping caves under shelving rocks; out of
crevices in the earth.  In five minutes the dead solitude and silence of
the place were no more, and a begging, screeching, shouting mob were
struggling about the horses' feet and blocking the way.  "Bucksheesh!
bucksheesh! bucksheesh! howajji, bucksheesh!"  It was Magdala over
again, only here the glare from the infidel eyes was fierce and full of
hate.  The population numbers two hundred and fifty, and more than half
the citizens live in caves in the rock.  Dirt, degradation and savagery
are Endor's specialty.  We say no more about Magdala and Deburieh now.
Endor heads the list.  It is worse than any Indian 'campoodie'.  The hill
is barren, rocky, and forbidding.  No sprig of grass is visible, and only
one tree.  This is a fig-tree, which maintains a precarious footing among
the rocks at the mouth of the dismal cavern once occupied by the
veritable Witch of Endor.  In this cavern, tradition says, Saul, the
king, sat at midnight, and stared and trembled, while the earth shook,
the thunders crashed among the hills, and out of the midst of fire and
smoke the spirit of the dead prophet rose up and confronted him.  Saul
had crept to this place in the darkness, while his army slept, to learn
what fate awaited him in the morrow's battle.  He went away a sad man, to
meet disgrace and death.

A spring trickles out of the rock in the gloomy recesses of the cavern,
and we were thirsty.  The citizens of Endor objected to our going in
there.  They do not mind dirt; they do not mind rags; they do not mind
vermin; they do not mind barbarous ignorance and savagery; they do not
mind a reasonable degree of starvation, but they do like to be pure and
holy before their god, whoever he may be, and therefore they shudder and
grow almost pale at the idea of Christian lips polluting a spring whose
waters must descend into their sanctified gullets.  We had no wanton
desire to wound even their feelings or trample upon their prejudices, but
we were out of water, thus early in the day, and were burning up with
thirst.  It was at this time, and under these circumstances, that I
framed an aphorism which has already become celebrated.  I said:
"Necessity knows no law."  We went in and drank.

We got away from the noisy wretches, finally, dropping them in squads and
couples as we filed over the hills--the aged first, the infants next, the
young girls further on; the strong men ran beside us a mile, and only
left when they had secured the last possible piastre in the way of
bucksheesh.

In an hour, we reached Nain, where Christ raised the widow's son to life.
Nain is Magdala on a small scale.  It has no population of any
consequence.  Within a hundred yards of it is the original graveyard, for
aught I know; the tombstones lie flat on the ground, which is Jewish
fashion in Syria.  I believe the Moslems do not allow them to have
upright tombstones.  A Moslem grave is usually roughly plastered over and
whitewashed, and has at one end an upright projection which is shaped
into exceedingly rude attempts at ornamentation.  In the cities, there is
often no appearance of a grave at all; a tall, slender marble tombstone,
elaborately lettred, gilded and painted, marks the burial place, and this
is surmounted by a turban, so carved and shaped as to signify the dead
man's rank in life.

They showed a fragment of ancient wall which they said was one side of
the gate out of which the widow's dead son was being brought so many
centuries ago when Jesus met the procession:

     "Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold there was a
     dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a
     widow: and much people of the city was with her.

     "And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said, Weep
     not.

     "And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood
     still.  And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, arise.

     "And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak.  And he delivered
     him to his mother.

     "And there came a fear on all.  And they glorified God, saying, That
     a great prophet is risen up among us; and That God hath visited his
     people."

A little mosque stands upon the spot which tradition says was occupied by
the widow's dwelling.  Two or three aged Arabs sat about its door.  We
entered, and the pilgrims broke specimens from the foundation walls,
though they had to touch, and even step, upon the "praying carpets" to do
it.  It was almost the same as breaking pieces from the hearts of those
old Arabs.  To step rudely upon the sacred praying mats, with booted
feet--a thing not done by any Arab--was to inflict pain upon men who had
not offended us in any way.  Suppose a party of armed foreigners were to
enter a village church in America and break ornaments from the altar
railings for curiosities, and climb up and walk upon the Bible and the
pulpit cushions?  However, the cases are different.  One is the
profanation of a temple of our faith--the other only the profanation of a
pagan one.

We descended to the Plain again, and halted a moment at a well--of
Abraham's time, no doubt.  It was in a desert place.  It was walled three
feet above ground with squared and heavy blocks of stone, after the
manner of Bible pictures.  Around it some camels stood, and others knelt.
There was a group of sober little donkeys with naked, dusky children
clambering about them, or sitting astride their rumps, or pulling their
tails.  Tawny, black-eyed, barefooted maids, arrayed in rags and adorned
with brazen armlets and pinchbeck ear-rings, were poising water-jars upon
their heads, or drawing water from the well.  A flock of sheep stood by,
waiting for the shepherds to fill the hollowed stones with water, so that
they might drink--stones which, like those that walled the well, were
worn smooth and deeply creased by the chafing chins of a hundred
generations of thirsty animals.  Picturesque Arabs sat upon the ground,
in groups, and solemnly smoked their long-stemmed chibouks.  Other Arabs
were filling black hog-skins with water--skins which, well filled, and
distended with water till the short legs projected painfully out of the
proper line, looked like the corpses of hogs bloated by drowning.  Here
was a grand Oriental picture which I had worshiped a thousand times in
soft, rich steel engravings!  But in the engraving there was no
desolation; no dirt; no rags; no fleas; no ugly features; no sore eyes;
no feasting flies; no besotted ignorance in the countenances; no raw
places on the donkeys' backs; no disagreeable jabbering in unknown
tongues; no stench of camels; no suggestion that a couple of tons of
powder placed under the party and touched off would heighten the effect
and give to the scene a genuine interest and a charm which it would
always be pleasant to recall, even though a man lived a thousand years.
Oriental scenes look best in steel engravings.  I cannot be imposed upon
any more by that picture of the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon.  I shall
say to myself, You look fine, Madam but your feet are not clean and you
smell like a camel.

Presently a wild Arab in charge of a camel train recognized an old friend
in Ferguson, and they ran and fell upon each other's necks and kissed
each other's grimy, bearded faces upon both cheeks.  It explained
instantly a something which had always seemed to me only a farfetched
Oriental figure of speech.  I refer to the circumstance of Christ's
rebuking a Pharisee, or some such character, and reminding him that from
him he had received no "kiss of welcome."  It did not seem reasonable to
me that men should kiss each other, but I am aware, now, that they did.
There was reason in it, too.  The custom was natural and proper; because
people must kiss, and a man would not be likely to kiss one of the women
of this country of his own free will and accord.  One must travel, to
learn.  Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any
significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.

We journeyed around the base of the mountain--"Little Hermon,"--past the
old Crusaders' castle of El Fuleh, and arrived at Shunem.  This was
another Magdala, to a fraction, frescoes and all.  Here, tradition says,
the prophet Samuel was born, and here the Shunamite woman built a little
house upon the city wall for the accommodation of the prophet Elisha.
Elisha asked her what she expected in return.  It was a perfectly natural
question, for these people are and were in the habit of proffering favors
and services and then expecting and begging for pay.  Elisha knew them
well.  He could not comprehend that any body should build for him that
humble little chamber for the mere sake of old friendship, and with no
selfish motive whatever.  It used to seem a very impolite, not to say a
rude, question, for Elisha to ask the woman, but it does not seem so to
me now.  The woman said she expected nothing.  Then for her goodness and
her unselfishness, he rejoiced her heart with the news that she should
bear a son.  It was a high reward--but she would not have thanked him for
a daughter--daughters have always been unpopular here.  The son was born,
grew, waxed strong, died.  Elisha restored him to life in Shunem.

We found here a grove of lemon trees--cool, shady, hung with fruit.  One
is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare, but to me this grove
seemed very beautiful.  It was beautiful.  I do not overestimate it.  I
must always remember Shunem gratefully, as a place which gave to us this
leafy shelter after our long, hot ride.  We lunched, rested, chatted,
smoked our pipes an hour, and then mounted and moved on.

As we trotted across the Plain of Jezreel, we met half a dozen Digger
Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears in their hands, cavorting around
on old crowbait horses, and spearing imaginary enemies; whooping, and
fluttering their rags in the wind, and carrying on in every respect like
a pack of hopeless lunatics.  At last, here were the "wild, free sons of
the desert, speeding over the plain like the wind, on their beautiful
Arabian mares" we had read so much about and longed so much to see!  Here
were the "picturesque costumes!"  This was the "gallant spectacle!"
Tatterdemalion vagrants--cheap braggadocio--"Arabian mares" spined and
necked like the ichthyosaurus in the museum, and humped and cornered like
a dromedary!  To glance at the genuine son of the desert is to take the
romance out of him forever--to behold his steed is to long in charity to
strip his harness off and let him fall to pieces.

Presently we came to a ruinous old town on a hill, the same being the
ancient Jezreel.

Ahab, King of Samaria, (this was a very vast kingdom, for those days, and
was very nearly half as large as Rhode Island) dwelt in the city of
Jezreel, which was his capital.  Near him lived a man by the name of
Naboth, who had a vineyard.  The King asked him for it, and when he would
not give it, offered to buy it.  But Naboth refused to sell it.  In those
days it was considered a sort of crime to part with one's inheritance at
any price--and even if a man did part with it, it reverted to himself or
his heirs again at the next jubilee year.  So this spoiled child of a
King went and lay down on the bed with his face to the wall, and grieved
sorely.  The Queen, a notorious character in those days, and whose name
is a by-word and a reproach even in these, came in and asked him
wherefore he sorrowed, and he told her.  Jezebel said she could secure
the vineyard; and she went forth and forged letters to the nobles and
wise men, in the King's name, and ordered them to proclaim a fast and set
Naboth on high before the people, and suborn two witnesses to swear that
he had blasphemed.  They did it, and the people stoned the accused by the
city wall, and he died.  Then Jezebel came and told the King, and said,
Behold, Naboth is no more--rise up and seize the vineyard.  So Ahab
seized the vineyard, and went into it to possess it.  But the Prophet
Elijah came to him there and read his fate to him, and the fate of
Jezebel; and said that in the place where dogs licked the blood of
Naboth, dogs should also lick his blood--and he said, likewise, the dogs
should eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.  In the course of time, the
King was killed in battle, and when his chariot wheels were washed in the
pool of Samaria, the dogs licked the blood.  In after years, Jehu, who
was King of Israel, marched down against Jezreel, by order of one of the
Prophets, and administered one of those convincing rebukes so common
among the people of those days: he killed many kings and their subjects,
and as he came along he saw Jezebel, painted and finely dressed, looking
out of a window, and ordered that she be thrown down to him.  A servant
did it, and Jehu's horse trampled her under foot.  Then Jehu went in and
sat down to dinner; and presently he said, Go and bury this cursed woman,
for she is a King's daughter.  The spirit of charity came upon him too
late, however, for the prophecy had already been fulfilled--the dogs had
eaten her, and they "found no more of her than the skull, and the feet,
and the palms of her hands."

Ahab, the late King, had left a helpless family behind him, and Jehu
killed seventy of the orphan sons.  Then he killed all the relatives, and
teachers, and servants and friends of the family, and rested from his
labors, until he was come near to Samaria, where he met forty-two persons
and asked them who they were; they said they were brothers of the King of
Judah.  He killed them.  When he got to Samaria, he said he would show
his zeal for the Lord; so he gathered all the priests and people together
that worshiped Baal, pretending that he was going to adopt that worship
and offer up a great sacrifice; and when they were all shut up where they
could not defend themselves, he caused every person of them to be killed.
Then Jehu, the good missionary, rested from his labors once more.

We went back to the valley, and rode to the Fountain of Ain Jelud.  They
call it the Fountain of Jezreel, usually.  It is a pond about one hundred
feet square and four feet deep, with a stream of water trickling into it
from under an overhanging ledge of rocks.  It is in the midst of a great
solitude.  Here Gideon pitched his camp in the old times; behind Shunem
lay the "Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Children of the East," who
were "as grasshoppers for multitude; both they and their camels were
without number, as the sand by the sea-side for multitude."  Which means
that there were one hundred and thirty-five thousand men, and that they
had transportation service accordingly.

Gideon, with only three hundred men, surprised them in the night, and
stood by and looked on while they butchered each other until a hundred
and twenty thousand lay dead on the field.

We camped at Jenin before night, and got up and started again at one
o'clock in the morning.  Somewhere towards daylight we passed the
locality where the best authenticated tradition locates the pit into
which Joseph's brethren threw him, and about noon, after passing over a
succession of mountain tops, clad with groves of fig and olive trees,
with the Mediterranean in sight some forty miles away, and going by many
ancient Biblical cities whose inhabitants glowered savagely upon our
Christian procession, and were seemingly inclined to practice on it with
stones, we came to the singularly terraced and unlovely hills that
betrayed that we were out of Galilee and into Samaria at last.

We climbed a high hill to visit the city of Samaria, where the woman may
have hailed from who conversed with Christ at Jacob's Well, and from
whence, no doubt, came also the celebrated Good Samaritan.  Herod the
Great is said to have made a magnificent city of this place, and a great
number of coarse limestone columns, twenty feet high and two feet
through, that are almost guiltless of architectural grace of shape and
ornament, are pointed out by many authors as evidence of the fact.  They
would not have been considered handsome in ancient Greece, however.

The inhabitants of this camp are particularly vicious, and stoned two
parties of our pilgrims a day or two ago who brought about the difficulty
by showing their revolvers when they did not intend to use them--a thing
which is deemed bad judgment in the Far West, and ought certainly to be
so considered any where.  In the new Territories, when a man puts his
hand on a weapon, he knows that he must use it; he must use it instantly
or expect to be shot down where he stands.  Those pilgrims had been
reading Grimes.

There was nothing for us to do in Samaria but buy handfuls of old Roman
coins at a franc a dozen, and look at a dilapidated church of the
Crusaders and a vault in it which once contained the body of John the
Baptist.  This relic was long ago carried away to Genoa.

Samaria stood a disastrous siege, once, in the days of Elisha, at the
hands of the King of Syria.  Provisions reached such a figure that "an
ass' head was sold for eighty pieces of silver and the fourth part of a
cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver."

An incident recorded of that heavy time will give one a very good idea of
the distress that prevailed within these crumbling walls.  As the King
was walking upon the battlements one day, "a woman cried out, saying,
Help, my lord, O King!  And the King said, What aileth thee?  and she
answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him
to-day, and we will eat my son to-morrow.  So we boiled my son, and did
eat him; and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son that we may
eat him; and she hath hid her son."

The prophet Elisha declared that within four and twenty hours the prices
of food should go down to nothing, almost, and it was so.  The Syrian
army broke camp and fled, for some cause or other, the famine was
relieved from without, and many a shoddy speculator in dove's dung and
ass's meat was ruined.

We were glad to leave this hot and dusty old village and hurry on.  At
two o'clock we stopped to lunch and rest at ancient Shechem, between the
historic Mounts of Gerizim and Ebal, where in the old times the books of
the law, the curses and the blessings, were read from the heights to the
Jewish multitudes below.



CHAPTER LII.

The narrow canon in which Nablous, or Shechem, is situated, is under high
cultivation, and the soil is exceedingly black and fertile.  It is well
watered, and its affluent vegetation gains effect by contrast with the
barren hills that tower on either side.  One of these hills is the
ancient Mount of Blessings and the other the Mount of Curses and wise men
who seek for fulfillments of prophecy think they find here a wonder of
this kind--to wit, that the Mount of Blessings is strangely fertile and
its mate as strangely unproductive.  We could not see that there was
really much difference between them in this respect, however.

Shechem is distinguished as one of the residences of the patriarch Jacob,
and as the seat of those tribes that cut themselves loose from their
brethren of Israel and propagated doctrines not in conformity with those
of the original Jewish creed.  For thousands of years this clan have
dwelt in Shechem under strict tabu, and having little commerce or
fellowship with their fellow men of any religion or nationality.  For
generations they have not numbered more than one or two hundred, but they
still adhere to their ancient faith and maintain their ancient rites and
ceremonies.  Talk of family and old descent!  Princes and nobles pride
themselves upon lineages they can trace back some hundreds of years.
What is this trifle to this handful of old first families of Shechem who
can name their fathers straight back without a flaw for thousands
--straight back to a period so remote that men reared in a country where
the days of two hundred years ago are called "ancient" times grow dazed
and bewildered when they try to comprehend it!  Here is respectability
for you--here is "family"--here is high descent worth talking about.
This sad, proud remnant of a once mighty community still hold themselves
aloof from all the world; they still live as their fathers lived, labor
as their fathers labored, think as they did, feel as they did, worship in
the same place, in sight of the same landmarks, and in the same quaint,
patriarchal way their ancestors did more than thirty centuries ago.  I
found myself gazing at any straggling scion of this strange race with a
riveted fascination, just as one would stare at a living mastodon, or a
megatherium that had moved in the grey dawn of creation and seen the
wonders of that mysterious world that was before the flood.

Carefully preserved among the sacred archives of this curious community
is a MSS.  copy of the ancient Jewish law, which is said to be the oldest
document on earth.  It is written on vellum, and is some four or five
thousand years old.  Nothing but bucksheesh can purchase a sight.  Its
fame is somewhat dimmed in these latter days, because of the doubts so
many authors of Palestine travels have felt themselves privileged to cast
upon it.  Speaking of this MSS. reminds me that I procured from the
high-priest of this ancient Samaritan community, at great expense, a
secret document of still higher antiquity and far more extraordinary
interest, which I propose to publish as soon as I have finished
translating it.

Joshua gave his dying injunction to the children of Israel at Shechem,
and buried a valuable treasure secretly under an oak tree there about the
same time.  The superstitious Samaritans have always been afraid to hunt
for it.  They believe it is guarded by fierce spirits invisible to men.

About a mile and a half from Shechem we halted at the base of Mount Ebal
before a little square area, inclosed by a high stone wall, neatly
whitewashed.  Across one end of this inclosure is a tomb built after the
manner of the Moslems.  It is the tomb of Joseph.  No truth is better
authenticated than this.

When Joseph was dying he prophesied that exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt which occurred four hundred years afterwards.  At the same time he
exacted of his people an oath that when they journeyed to the land of
Canaan they would bear his bones with them and bury them in the ancient
inheritance of his fathers.  The oath was kept. "And the bones of Joseph,
which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in
Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor
the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of silver."

Few tombs on earth command the veneration of so many races and men of
divers creeds as this of Joseph.  "Samaritan and Jew, Moslem and
Christian alike, revere it, and honor it with their visits.  The tomb of
Joseph, the dutiful son, the affectionate, forgiving brother, the
virtuous man, the wise Prince and ruler.  Egypt felt his influence--the
world knows his history."

In this same "parcel of ground" which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor
for a hundred pieces of silver, is Jacob's celebrated well.  It is cut in
the solid rock, and is nine feet square and ninety feet deep.  The name
of this unpretending hole in the ground, which one might pass by and take
no notice of, is as familiar as household words to even the children and
the peasants of many a far-off country.  It is more famous than the
Parthenon; it is older than the Pyramids.

It was by this well that Jesus sat and talked with a woman of that
strange, antiquated Samaritan community I have been speaking of, and told
her of the mysterious water of life.  As descendants of old English
nobles still cherish in the traditions of their houses how that this king
or that king tarried a day with some favored ancestor three hundred years
ago, no doubt the descendants of the woman of Samaria, living there in
Shechem, still refer with pardonable vanity to this conversation of their
ancestor, held some little time gone by, with the Messiah of the
Christians.  It is not likely that they undervalue a distinction such as
this.  Samaritan nature is human nature, and human nature remembers
contact with the illustrious, always.

For an offense done to the family honor, the sons of Jacob exterminated
all Shechem once.

We left Jacob's Well and traveled till eight in the evening, but rather
slowly, for we had been in the saddle nineteen hours, and the horses were
cruelly tired.  We got so far ahead of the tents that we had to camp in
an Arab village, and sleep on the ground.  We could have slept in the
largest of the houses; but there were some little drawbacks: it was
populous with vermin, it had a dirt floor, it was in no respect cleanly,
and there was a family of goats in the only bedroom, and two donkeys in
the parlor.  Outside there were no inconveniences, except that the dusky,
ragged, earnest-eyed villagers of both sexes and all ages grouped
themselves on their haunches all around us, and discussed us and
criticised us with noisy tongues till midnight.  We did not mind the
noise, being tired, but, doubtless, the reader is aware that it is almost
an impossible thing to go to sleep when you know that people are looking
at you.  We went to bed at ten, and got up again at two and started once
more.  Thus are people persecuted by dragomen, whose sole ambition in
life is to get ahead of each other.

About daylight we passed Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant rested
three hundred years, and at whose gates good old Eli fell down and "brake
his neck" when the messenger, riding hard from the battle, told him of
the defeat of his people, the death of his sons, and, more than all, the
capture of Israel's pride, her hope, her refuge, the ancient Ark her
forefathers brought with them out of Egypt.  It is little wonder that
under circumstances like these he fell down and brake his neck.  But
Shiloh had no charms for us.  We were so cold that there was no comfort
but in motion, and so drowsy we could hardly sit upon the horses.

After a while we came to a shapeless mass of ruins, which still bears the
name of Bethel.  It was here that Jacob lay down and had that superb
vision of angels flitting up and down a ladder that reached from the
clouds to earth, and caught glimpses of their blessed home through the
open gates of Heaven.

The pilgrims took what was left of the hallowed ruin, and we pressed on
toward the goal of our crusade, renowned Jerusalem.

The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the more rocky and bare,
repulsive and dreary the landscape became.  There could not have been
more fragments of stone strewn broadcast over this part of the world, if
every ten square feet of the land had been occupied by a separate and
distinct stonecutter's establishment for an age.  There was hardly a tree
or a shrub any where.  Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends
of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.  No landscape
exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the
approaches to Jerusalem.  The only difference between the roads and the
surrounding country, perhaps, is that there are rather more rocks in the
roads than in the surrounding country.

We passed Ramah, and Beroth, and on the right saw the tomb of the prophet
Samuel, perched high upon a commanding eminence.  Still no Jerusalem came
in sight.  We hurried on impatiently.  We halted a moment at the ancient
Fountain of Beira, but its stones, worn deeply by the chins of thirsty
animals that are dead and gone centuries ago, had no interest for us--we
longed to see Jerusalem.  We spurred up hill after hill, and usually
began to stretch our necks minutes before we got to the top--but
disappointment always followed:--more stupid hills beyond--more unsightly
landscape--no Holy City.

At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bite of wall and
crumbling arches began to line the way--we toiled up one more hill, and
every pilgrim and every sinner swung his hat on high!  Jerusalem!

Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together
and hooped with high gray walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun.
So small!  Why, it was no larger than an American village of four
thousand inhabitants, and no larger than an ordinary Syrian city of
thirty thousand.  Jerusalem numbers only fourteen thousand people.

We dismounted and looked, without speaking a dozen sentences, across the
wide intervening valley for an hour or more; and noted those prominent
features of the city that pictures make familiar to all men from their
school days till their death.  We could recognize the Tower of Hippicus,
the Mosque of Omar, the Damascus Gate, the Mount of Olives, the Valley of
Jehoshaphat, the Tower of David, and the Garden of Gethsemane--and dating
from these landmarks could tell very nearly the localities of many others
we were not able to distinguish.

I record it here as a notable but not discreditable fact that not even
our pilgrims wept.  I think there was no individual in the party whose
brain was not teeming with thoughts and images and memories invoked by
the grand history of the venerable city that lay before us, but still
among them all was no "voice of them that wept."

There was no call for tears.  Tears would have been out of place.  The
thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of poetry, sublimity, and more than
all, dignity.  Such thoughts do not find their appropriate expression in
the emotions of the nursery.

Just after noon we entered these narrow, crooked streets, by the ancient
and the famed Damascus Gate, and now for several hours I have been trying
to comprehend that I am actually in the illustrious old city where
Solomon dwelt, where Abraham held converse with the Deity, and where
walls still stand that witnessed the spectacle of the Crucifixion.



CHAPTER LIII.

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely
around the city in an hour.  I do not know how else to make one
understand how small it is.  The appearance of the city is peculiar.  It
is as knobby with countless little domes as a prison door is with
bolt-heads.  Every house has from one to half a dozen of these white
plastered domes of stone, broad and low, sitting in the centre of, or in
a cluster upon, the flat roof.  Wherefore, when one looks down from an
eminence, upon the compact mass of houses (so closely crowded together,
in fact, that there is no appearance of streets at all, and so the city
looks solid,) he sees the knobbiest town in the world, except
Constantinople. It looks as if it might be roofed, from centre to
circumference, with inverted saucers.  The monotony of the view is
interrupted only by the great Mosque of Omar, the Tower of Hippicus, and
one or two other buildings that rise into commanding prominence.

The houses are generally two stories high, built strongly of masonry,
whitewashed or plastered outside, and have a cage of wooden lattice-work
projecting in front of every window.  To reproduce a Jerusalem street, it
would only be necessary to up-end a chicken-coop and hang it before each
window in an alley of American houses.

The streets are roughly and badly paved with stone, and are tolerably
crooked--enough so to make each street appear to close together
constantly and come to an end about a hundred yards ahead of a pilgrim as
long as he chooses to walk in it.  Projecting from the top of the lower
story of many of the houses is a very narrow porch-roof or shed, without
supports from below; and I have several times seen cats jump across the
street from one shed to the other when they were out calling.  The cats
could have jumped double the distance without extraordinary exertion.  I
mention these things to give an idea of how narrow the streets are.
Since a cat can jump across them without the least inconvenience, it is
hardly necessary to state that such streets are too narrow for carriages.
These vehicles cannot navigate the Holy City.

The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins,
Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of
Protestants.  One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in
this birthplace of Christianity.  The nice shades of nationality
comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are
altogether too numerous to mention.  It seems to me that all the races
and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the
fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem.  Rags, wretchedness,
poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of
Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.  Lepers,
cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they
know but one word of but one language apparently--the eternal
"bucksheesh."  To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased
humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might
suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the
Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of
Bethesda.  Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless.  I would not
desire to live here.

One naturally goes first to the Holy Sepulchre.  It is right in the city,
near the western gate; it and the place of the Crucifixion, and, in fact,
every other place intimately connected with that tremendous event, are
ingeniously massed together and covered by one roof--the dome of the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Entering the building, through the midst of the usual assemblage of
beggars, one sees on his left a few Turkish guards--for Christians of
different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred
place, if allowed to do it.  Before you is a marble slab, which covers
the Stone of Unction, whereon the Saviour's body was laid to prepare it
for burial.  It was found necessary to conceal the real stone in this way
in order to save it from destruction.  Pilgrims were too much given to
chipping off pieces of it to carry home.  Near by is a circular railing
which marks the spot where the Virgin stood when the Lord's body was
anointed.

Entering the great Rotunda, we stand before the most sacred locality in
Christendom--the grave of Jesus.  It is in the centre of the church, and
immediately under the great dome.  It is inclosed in a sort of little
temple of yellow and white stone, of fanciful design.  Within the little
temple is a portion of the very stone which was rolled away from the door
of the Sepulchre, and on which the angel was sitting when Mary came
thither "at early dawn."  Stooping low, we enter the vault--the Sepulchre
itself.  It is only about six feet by seven, and the stone couch on which
the dead Saviour lay extends from end to end of the apartment and
occupies half its width.  It is covered with a marble slab which has been
much worn by the lips of pilgrims.  This slab serves as an altar, now.
Over it hang some fifty gold and silver lamps, which are kept always
burning, and the place is otherwise scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and
tawdry ornamentation.

All sects of Christians (except Protestants,) have chapels under the roof
of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not
venture upon another's ground.  It has been proven conclusively that they
can not worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the World in
peace.  The chapel of the Syrians is not handsome; that of the Copts is
the humblest of them all.  It is nothing but a dismal cavern, roughly
hewn in the living rock of the Hill of Calvary.  In one side of it two
ancient tombs are hewn, which are claimed to be those in which Nicodemus
and Joseph of Aramathea were buried.

As we moved among the great piers and pillars of another part of the
church, we came upon a party of black-robed, animal-looking Italian
monks, with candles in their hands, who were chanting something in Latin,
and going through some kind of religious performance around a disk of
white marble let into the floor.  It was there that the risen Saviour
appeared to Mary Magdalen in the likeness of a gardener.  Near by was a
similar stone, shaped like a star--here the Magdalen herself stood, at
the same time.  Monks were performing in this place also.  They perform
everywhere--all over the vast building, and at all hours.  Their candles
are always flitting about in the gloom, and making the dim old church
more dismal than there is any necessity that it should be, even though it
is a tomb.

We were shown the place where our Lord appeared to His mother after the
Resurrection.  Here, also, a marble slab marks the place where St.
Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found the crosses about
three hundred years after the Crucifixion.  According to the legend, this
great discovery elicited extravagant demonstrations of joy.  But they
were of short duration.  The question intruded itself: "Which bore the
blessed Saviour, and which the thieves?"  To be in doubt, in so mighty a
matter as this--to be uncertain which one to adore--was a grievous
misfortune.  It turned the public joy to sorrow.  But when lived there a
holy priest who could not set so simple a trouble as this at rest?  One
of these soon hit upon a plan that would be a certain test.  A noble lady
lay very ill in Jerusalem.  The wise priests ordered that the three
crosses be taken to her bedside one at a time.  It was done.  When her
eyes fell upon the first one, she uttered a scream that was heard beyond
the Damascus Gate, and even upon the Mount of Olives, it was said, and
then fell back in a deadly swoon.  They recovered her and brought the
second cross.  Instantly she went into fearful convulsions, and it was
with the greatest difficulty that six strong men could hold her.  They
were afraid, now, to bring in the third cross.  They began to fear that
possibly they had fallen upon the wrong crosses, and that the true cross
was not with this number at all.  However, as the woman seemed likely to
die with the convulsions that were tearing her, they concluded that the
third could do no more than put her out of her misery with a happy
dispatch.  So they brought it, and behold, a miracle!  The woman sprang
from her bed, smiling and joyful, and perfectly restored to health.  When
we listen to evidence like this, we cannot but believe.  We would be
ashamed to doubt, and properly, too.  Even the very part of Jerusalem
where this all occurred is there yet.  So there is really no room for
doubt.

The priests tried to show us, through a small screen, a fragment of the
genuine Pillar of Flagellation, to which Christ was bound when they
scourged him.  But we could not see it, because it was dark inside the
screen.  However, a baton is kept here, which the pilgrim thrusts through
a hole in the screen, and then he no longer doubts that the true Pillar
of Flagellation is in there.  He can not have any excuse to doubt it, for
he can feel it with the stick.  He can feel it as distinctly as he could
feel any thing.

Not far from here was a niche where they used to preserve a piece of the
True Cross, but it is gone, now.  This piece of the cross was discovered
in the sixteenth century.  The Latin priests say it was stolen away, long
ago, by priests of another sect.  That seems like a hard statement to
make, but we know very well that it was stolen, because we have seen it
ourselves in several of the cathedrals of Italy and France.

But the relic that touched us most was the plain old sword of that stout
Crusader, Godfrey of Bulloigne--King Godfrey of Jerusalem.  No blade in
Christendom wields such enchantment as this--no blade of all that rust in
the ancestral halls of Europe is able to invoke such visions of romance
in the brain of him who looks upon it--none that can prate of such
chivalric deeds or tell such brave tales of the warrior days of old.  It
stirs within a man every memory of the Holy Wars that has been sleeping
in his brain for years, and peoples his thoughts with mail-clad images,
with marching armies, with battles and with sieges.  It speaks to him of
Baldwin, and Tancred, the princely Saladin, and great Richard of the Lion
Heart.  It was with just such blades as these that these splendid heroes
of romance used to segregate a man, so to speak, and leave the half of
him to fall one way and the other half the other.  This very sword has
cloven hundreds of Saracen Knights from crown to chin in those old times
when Godfrey wielded it.  It was enchanted, then, by a genius that was
under the command of King Solomon.  When danger approached its master's
tent it always struck the shield and clanged out a fierce alarm upon the
startled ear of night.  In times of doubt, or in fog or darkness, if it
were drawn from its sheath it would point instantly toward the foe, and
thus reveal the way--and it would also attempt to start after them of its
own accord.  A Christian could not be so disguised that it would not know
him and refuse to hurt him--nor a Moslem so disguised that it would not
leap from its scabbard and take his life.  These statements are all well
authenticated in many legends that are among the most trustworthy legends
the good old Catholic monks preserve.  I can never forget old Godfrey's
sword, now.  I tried it on a Moslem, and clove him in twain like a
doughnut.  The spirit of Grimes was upon me, and if I had had a graveyard
I would have destroyed all the infidels in Jerusalem.  I wiped the blood
off the old sword and handed it back to the priest--I did not want the
fresh gore to obliterate those sacred spots that crimsoned its brightness
one day six hundred years ago and thus gave Godfrey warning that before
the sun went down his journey of life would end.

Still moving through the gloom of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre we
came to a small chapel, hewn out of the rock--a place which has been
known as "The Prison of Our Lord" for many centuries.  Tradition says
that here the Saviour was confined just previously to the crucifixion.
Under an altar by the door was a pair of stone stocks for human legs.
These things are called the "Bonds of Christ," and the use they were once
put to has given them the name they now bear.

The Greek Chapel is the most roomy, the richest and the showiest chapel
in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Its altar, like that of all the
Greek churches, is a lofty screen that extends clear across the chapel,
and is gorgeous with gilding and pictures.  The numerous lamps that hang
before it are of gold and silver, and cost great sums.

But the feature of the place is a short column that rises from the middle
of the marble pavement of the chapel, and marks the exact centre of the
earth.  The most reliable traditions tell us that this was known to be
the earth's centre, ages ago, and that when Christ was upon earth he set
all doubts upon the subject at rest forever, by stating with his own lips
that the tradition was correct.  Remember, He said that that particular
column stood upon the centre of the world.  If the centre of the world
changes, the column changes its position accordingly.  This column has
moved three different times of its own accord.  This is because, in great
convulsions of nature, at three different times, masses of the earth
--whole ranges of mountains, probably--have flown off into space, thus
lessening the diameter of the earth, and changing the exact locality of
its centre by a point or two.  This is a very curious and interesting
circumstance, and is a withering rebuke to those philosophers who would
make us believe that it is not possible for any portion of the earth to
fly off into space.

To satisfy himself that this spot was really the centre of the earth, a
sceptic once paid well for the privilege of ascending to the dome of the
church to see if the sun gave him a shadow at noon.  He came down
perfectly convinced.  The day was very cloudy and the sun threw no
shadows at all; but the man was satisfied that if the sun had come out
and made shadows it could not have made any for him.  Proofs like these
are not to be set aside by the idle tongues of cavilers.  To such as are
not bigoted, and are willing to be convinced, they carry a conviction
that nothing can ever shake.

If even greater proofs than those I have mentioned are wanted, to satisfy
the headstrong and the foolish that this is the genuine centre of the
earth, they are here.  The greatest of them lies in the fact that from
under this very column was taken the dust from which Adam was made.  This
can surely be regarded in the light of a settler.  It is not likely that
the original first man would have been made from an inferior quality of
earth when it was entirely convenient to get first quality from the
world's centre.  This will strike any reflecting mind forcibly.  That
Adam was formed of dirt procured in this very spot is amply proven by the
fact that in six thousand years no man has ever been able to prove that
the dirt was not procured here whereof he was made.

It is a singular circumstance that right under the roof of this same
great church, and not far away from that illustrious column, Adam
himself, the father of the human race, lies buried.  There is no question
that he is actually buried in the grave which is pointed out as his
--there can be none--because it has never yet been proven that that grave
is not the grave in which he is buried.

The tomb of Adam!  How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far
away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover
the grave of a blood relation.  True, a distant one, but still a
relation.  The unerring instinct of nature thrilled its recognition.  The
fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths,
and I gave way to tumultuous emotion.  I leaned upon a pillar and burst
into tears.  I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor
dead relative.  Let him who would sneer at my emotion close this volume
here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings through Holy
Land.  Noble old man--he did not live to see me--he did not live to see
his child.  And I--I--alas, I did not live to see him.  Weighed down by
sorrow and disappointment, he died before I was born--six thousand brief
summers before I was born.  But let us try to bear it with fortitude.
Let us trust that he is better off where he is.  Let us take comfort in
the thought that his loss is our eternal gain.

The next place the guide took us to in the holy church was an altar
dedicated to the Roman soldier who was of the military guard that
attended at the Crucifixion to keep order, and who--when the vail of the
Temple was rent in the awful darkness that followed; when the rock of
Golgotha was split asunder by an earthquake; when the artillery of heaven
thundered, and in the baleful glare of the lightnings the shrouded dead
flitted about the streets of Jerusalem--shook with fear and said, "Surely
this was the Son of God!"  Where this altar stands now, that Roman
soldier stood then, in full view of the crucified Saviour--in full sight
and hearing of all the marvels that were transpiring far and wide about
the circumference of the Hill of Calvary.  And in this self-same spot the
priests of the Temple beheaded him for those blasphemous words he had
spoken.

In this altar they used to keep one of the most curious relics that human
eyes ever looked upon--a thing that had power to fascinate the beholder
in some mysterious way and keep him gazing for hours together.  It was
nothing less than the copper plate Pilate put upon the Saviour's cross,
and upon which he wrote, "THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS."  I think St.
Helena, the mother of Constantine, found this wonderful memento when she
was here in the third century.  She traveled all over Palestine, and was
always fortunate.  Whenever the good old enthusiast found a thing
mentioned in her Bible, Old or New, she would go and search for that
thing, and never stop until she found it.  If it was Adam, she would find
Adam; if it was the Ark, she would find the Ark; if it was Goliath, or
Joshua, she would find them.  She found the inscription here that I was
speaking of, I think.  She found it in this very spot, close to where the
martyred Roman soldier stood.  That copper plate is in one of the
churches in Rome, now.  Any one can see it there.  The inscription is
very distinct.

We passed along a few steps and saw the altar built over the very spot
where the good Catholic priests say the soldiers divided the raiment of
the Saviour.

Then we went down into a cavern which cavilers say was once a cistern.
It is a chapel, now, however--the Chapel of St. Helena.  It is fifty-one
feet long by forty-three wide.  In it is a marble chair which Helena used
to sit in while she superintended her workmen when they were digging and
delving for the True Cross.  In this place is an altar dedicated to St.
Dimas, the penitent thief.  A new bronze statue is here--a statue of St.
Helena.  It reminded us of poor Maximilian, so lately shot.  He presented
it to this chapel when he was about to leave for his throne in Mexico.

From the cistern we descended twelve steps into a large roughly-shaped
grotto, carved wholly out of the living rock.  Helena blasted it out when
she was searching for the true Cross.  She had a laborious piece of work,
here, but it was richly rewarded.  Out of this place she got the crown of
thorns, the nails of the cross, the true Cross itself, and the cross of
the penitent thief.  When she thought she had found every thing and was
about to stop, she was told in a dream to continue a day longer.  It was
very fortunate.  She did so, and found the cross of the other thief.

The walls and roof of this grotto still weep bitter tears in memory of
the event that transpired on Calvary, and devout pilgrims groan and sob
when these sad tears fall upon them from the dripping rock.  The monks
call this apartment the "Chapel of the Invention of the Cross"--a name
which is unfortunate, because it leads the ignorant to imagine that a
tacit acknowledgment is thus made that the tradition that Helena found
the true Cross here is a fiction--an invention.  It is a happiness to
know, however, that intelligent people do not doubt the story in any of
its particulars.

Priests of any of the chapels and denominations in the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre can visit this sacred grotto to weep and pray and worship the
gentle Redeemer.  Two different congregations are not allowed to enter at
the same time, however, because they always fight.

Still marching through the venerable Church of the Holy Sepulchre, among
chanting priests in coarse long robes and sandals; pilgrims of all colors
and many nationalities, in all sorts of strange costumes; under dusky
arches and by dingy piers and columns; through a sombre cathedral gloom
freighted with smoke and incense, and faintly starred with scores of
candles that appeared suddenly and as suddenly disappeared, or drifted
mysteriously hither and thither about the distant aisles like ghostly
jack-o'-lanterns--we came at last to a small chapel which is called the
"Chapel of the Mocking."  Under the altar was a fragment of a marble
column; this was the seat Christ sat on when he was reviled, and
mockingly made King, crowned with a crown of thorns and sceptred with a
reed.  It was here that they blindfolded him and struck him, and said in
derision, "Prophesy who it is that smote thee."  The tradition that this
is the identical spot of the mocking is a very ancient one.  The guide
said that Saewulf was the first to mention it.  I do not know Saewulf,
but still, I cannot well refuse to receive his evidence--none of us can.

They showed us where the great Godfrey and his brother Baldwin, the first
Christian Kings of Jerusalem, once lay buried by that sacred sepulchre
they had fought so long and so valiantly to wrest from the hands of the
infidel.  But the niches that had contained the ashes of these renowned
crusaders were empty.  Even the coverings of their tombs were gone
--destroyed by devout members of the Greek Church, because Godfrey and
Baldwin were Latin princes, and had been reared in a Christian faith
whose creed differed in some unimportant respects from theirs.

We passed on, and halted before the tomb of Melchisedek!  You will
remember Melchisedek, no doubt; he was the King who came out and levied a
tribute on Abraham the time that he pursued Lot's captors to Dan, and
took all their property from them.  That was about four thousand years
ago, and Melchisedek died shortly afterward.  However, his tomb is in a
good state of preservation.

When one enters the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Sepulchre itself is
the first thing he desires to see, and really is almost the first thing
he does see.  The next thing he has a strong yearning to see is the spot
where the Saviour was crucified.  But this they exhibit last.  It is the
crowning glory of the place.  One is grave and thoughtful when he stands
in the little Tomb of the Saviour--he could not well be otherwise in such
a place--but he has not the slightest possible belief that ever the Lord
lay there, and so the interest he feels in the spot is very, very greatly
marred by that reflection.  He looks at the place where Mary stood, in
another part of the church, and where John stood, and Mary Magdalen;
where the mob derided the Lord; where the angel sat; where the crown of
thorns was found, and the true Cross; where the risen Saviour appeared
--he looks at all these places with interest, but with the same conviction
he felt in the case of the Sepulchre, that there is nothing genuine about
them, and that they are imaginary holy places created by the monks.  But
the place of the Crucifixion affects him differently.  He fully believes
that he is looking upon the very spot where the Savior gave up his
life.  He remembers that Christ was very celebrated, long before he came
to Jerusalem; he knows that his fame was so great that crowds followed
him all the time; he is aware that his entry into the city produced a
stirring sensation, and that his reception was a kind of ovation; he can
not overlook the fact that when he was crucified there were very many in
Jerusalem who believed that he was the true Son of God.  To publicly
execute such a personage was sufficient in itself to make the locality of
the execution a memorable place for ages; added to this, the storm, the
darkness, the earthquake, the rending of the vail of the Temple, and the
untimely waking of the dead, were events calculated to fix the execution
and the scene of it in the memory of even the most thoughtless witness.
Fathers would tell their sons about the strange affair, and point out the
spot; the sons would transmit the story to their children, and thus a
period of three hundred years would easily be spanned--[The thought is
Mr. Prime's, not mine, and is full of good sense.  I borrowed it from his
"Tent Life."--M.  T.]--at which time Helena came and built a church upon
Calvary to commemorate the death and burial of the Lord and preserve the
sacred place in the memories of men; since that time there has always
been a church there.  It is not possible that there can be any mistake
about the locality of the Crucifixion.  Not half a dozen persons knew
where they buried the Saviour, perhaps, and a burial is not a startling
event, any how; therefore, we can be pardoned for unbelief in the
Sepulchre, but not in the place of the Crucifixion.  Five hundred years
hence there will be no vestige of Bunker Hill Monument left, but America
will still know where the battle was fought and where Warren fell.  The
crucifixion of Christ was too notable an event in Jerusalem, and the Hill
of Calvary made too celebrated by it, to be forgotten in the short space
of three hundred years.  I climbed the stairway in the church which
brings one to the top of the small inclosed pinnacle of rock, and looked
upon the place where the true cross once stood, with a far more absorbing
interest than I had ever felt in any thing earthly before.  I could not
believe that the three holes in the top of the rock were the actual ones
the crosses stood in, but I felt satisfied that those crosses had stood
so near the place now occupied by them, that the few feet of possible
difference were a matter of no consequence.

When one stands where the Saviour was crucified, he finds it all he can
do to keep it strictly before his mind that Christ was not crucified in a
Catholic Church.  He must remind himself every now and then that the
great event transpired in the open air, and not in a gloomy,
candle-lighted cell in a little corner of a vast church, up-stairs
--a small cell all bejeweled and bespangled with flashy ornamentation,
in execrable taste.

Under a marble altar like a table, is a circular hole in the marble
floor, corresponding with the one just under it in which the true Cross
stood.  The first thing every one does is to kneel down and take a candle
and examine this hole.  He does this strange prospecting with an amount
of gravity that can never be estimated or appreciated by a man who has
not seen the operation.  Then he holds his candle before a richly
engraved picture of the Saviour, done on a messy slab of gold, and
wonderfully rayed and starred with diamonds, which hangs above the hole
within the altar, and his solemnity changes to lively admiration.  He
rises and faces the finely wrought figures of the Saviour and the
malefactors uplifted upon their crosses behind the altar, and bright with
a metallic lustre of many colors.  He turns next to the figures close to
them of the Virgin and Mary Magdalen; next to the rift in the living rock
made by the earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion, and an extension
of which he had seen before in the wall of one of the grottoes below; he
looks next at the show-case with a figure of the Virgin in it, and is
amazed at the princely fortune in precious gems and jewelry that hangs so
thickly about the form as to hide it like a garment almost.  All about
the apartment the gaudy trappings of the Greek Church offend the eye and
keep the mind on the rack to remember that this is the Place of the
Crucifixion--Golgotha--the Mount of Calvary.  And the last thing he looks
at is that which was also the first--the place where the true Cross
stood.  That will chain him to the spot and compel him to look once more,
and once again, after he has satisfied all curiosity and lost all
interest concerning the other matters pertaining to the locality.

And so I close my chapter on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre--the most
sacred locality on earth to millions and millions of men, and women, and
children, the noble and the humble, bond and free.  In its history from
the first, and in its tremendous associations, it is the most illustrious
edifice in Christendom.  With all its clap-trap side-shows and unseemly
impostures of every kind, it is still grand, reverend, venerable--for a
god died there; for fifteen hundred years its shrines have been wet with
the tears of pilgrims from the earth's remotest confines; for more than
two hundred, the most gallant knights that ever wielded sword wasted
their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from
infidel pollution.  Even in our own day a war, that cost millions of
treasure and rivers of blood, was fought because two rival nations
claimed the sole right to put a new dome upon it.  History is full of
this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre--full of blood that was shed
because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last
resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of
Peace!



CHAPTER LIV.

We were standing in a narrow street, by the Tower of Antonio.  "On these
stones that are crumbling away," the guide said, "the Saviour sat and
rested before taking up the cross.  This is the beginning of the
Sorrowful Way, or the Way of Grief."  The party took note of the sacred
spot, and moved on.  We passed under the "Ecce Homo Arch," and saw the
very window from which Pilate's wife warned her husband to have nothing
to do with the persecution of the Just Man.  This window is in an
excellent state of preservation, considering its great age.  They showed
us where Jesus rested the second time, and where the mob refused to give
him up, and said, "Let his blood be upon our heads, and upon our
children's children forever."  The French Catholics are building a church
on this spot, and with their usual veneration for historical relics, are
incorporating into the new such scraps of ancient walls as they have
found there.  Further on, we saw the spot where the fainting Saviour fell
under the weight of his cross.  A great granite column of some ancient
temple lay there at the time, and the heavy cross struck it such a blow
that it broke in two in the middle.  Such was the guide's story when he
halted us before the broken column.

We crossed a street, and came presently to the former residence of St.
Veronica.  When the Saviour passed there, she came out, full of womanly
compassion, and spoke pitying words to him, undaunted by the hootings and
the threatenings of the mob, and wiped the perspiration from his face
with her handkerchief.  We had heard so much of St. Veronica, and seen
her picture by so many masters, that it was like meeting an old friend
unexpectedly to come upon her ancient home in Jerusalem.  The strangest
thing about the incident that has made her name so famous, is, that when
she wiped the perspiration away, the print of the Saviour's face remained
upon the handkerchief, a perfect portrait, and so remains unto this day.
We knew this, because we saw this handkerchief in a cathedral in Paris,
in another in Spain, and in two others in Italy.  In the Milan cathedral
it costs five francs to see it, and at St. Peter's, at Rome, it is almost
impossible to see it at any price.  No tradition is so amply verified as
this of St. Veronica and her handkerchief.

At the next corner we saw a deep indention in the hard stone masonry of
the corner of a house, but might have gone heedlessly by it but that the
guide said it was made by the elbow of the Saviour, who stumbled here and
fell.  Presently we came to just such another indention in a stone wall.
The guide said the Saviour fell here, also, and made this depression with
his elbow.

There were other places where the Lord fell, and others where he rested;
but one of the most curious landmarks of ancient history we found on this
morning walk through the crooked lanes that lead toward Calvary, was a
certain stone built into a house--a stone that was so seamed and scarred
that it bore a sort of grotesque resemblance to the human face.  The
projections that answered for cheeks were worn smooth by the passionate
kisses of generations of pilgrims from distant lands.  We asked "Why?"
The guide said it was because this was one of "the very stones of
Jerusalem" that Christ mentioned when he was reproved for permitting the
people to cry "Hosannah!"  when he made his memorable entry into the
city upon an ass.  One of the pilgrims said, "But there is no evidence
that the stones did cry out--Christ said that if the people stopped from
shouting Hosannah, the very stones would do it."  The guide was perfectly
serene.  He said, calmly, "This is one of the stones that would have
cried out.  "It was of little use to try to shake this fellow's simple
faith--it was easy to see that.

And so we came at last to another wonder, of deep and abiding interest
--the veritable house where the unhappy wretch once lived who has been
celebrated in song and story for more than eighteen hundred years as the
Wandering Jew.  On the memorable day of the Crucifixion he stood in this
old doorway with his arms akimbo, looking out upon the struggling mob
that was approaching, and when the weary Saviour would have sat down and
rested him a moment, pushed him rudely away and said, "Move on!"  The
Lord said, "Move on, thou, likewise," and the command has never been
revoked from that day to this.  All men know how that the miscreant upon
whose head that just curse fell has roamed up and down the wide world,
for ages and ages, seeking rest and never finding it--courting death but
always in vain--longing to stop, in city, in wilderness, in desert
solitudes, yet hearing always that relentless warning to march--march on!
They say--do these hoary traditions--that when Titus sacked Jerusalem and
slaughtered eleven hundred thousand Jews in her streets and by-ways, the
Wandering Jew was seen always in the thickest of the fight, and that when
battle-axes gleamed in the air, he bowed his head beneath them; when
swords flashed their deadly lightnings, he sprang in their way; he bared
his breast to whizzing javelins, to hissing arrows, to any and to every
weapon that promised death and forgetfulness, and rest.  But it was
useless--he walked forth out of the carnage without a wound.  And it is
said that five hundred years afterward he followed Mahomet when he
carried destruction to the cities of Arabia, and then turned against him,
hoping in this way to win the death of a traitor.  His calculations were
wrong again.  No quarter was given to any living creature but one, and
that was the only one of all the host that did not want it.  He sought
death five hundred years later, in the wars of the Crusades, and offered
himself to famine and pestilence at Ascalon.  He escaped again--he could
not die.  These repeated annoyances could have at last but one effect
--they shook his confidence.  Since then the Wandering Jew has carried on a
kind of desultory toying with the most promising of the aids and
implements of destruction, but with small hope, as a general thing.  He
has speculated some in cholera and railroads, and has taken almost a
lively interest in infernal machines and patent medicines.  He is old,
now, and grave, as becomes an age like his; he indulges in no light
amusements save that he goes sometimes to executions, and is fond of
funerals.

There is one thing he can not avoid; go where he will about the world, he
must never fail to report in Jerusalem every fiftieth year.  Only a year
or two ago he was here for the thirty-seventh time since Jesus was
crucified on Calvary.  They say that many old people, who are here now,
saw him then, and had seen him before.  He looks always the same--old,
and withered, and hollow-eyed, and listless, save that there is about him
something which seems to suggest that he is looking for some one,
expecting some one--the friends of his youth, perhaps.  But the most of
them are dead, now.  He always pokes about the old streets looking
lonesome, making his mark on a wall here and there, and eyeing the oldest
buildings with a sort of friendly half interest; and he sheds a few tears
at the threshold of his ancient dwelling, and bitter, bitter tears they
are.  Then he collects his rent and leaves again.  He has been seen
standing near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on many a starlight night,
for he has cherished an idea for many centuries that if he could only
enter there, he could rest.  But when he approaches, the doors slam to
with a crash, the earth trembles, and all the lights in Jerusalem burn a
ghastly blue!  He does this every fifty years, just the same.  It is
hopeless, but then it is hard to break habits one has been eighteen
hundred years accustomed to.  The old tourist is far away on his
wanderings, now.  How he must smile to see a pack of blockheads like us,
galloping about the world, and looking wise, and imagining we are finding
out a good deal about it!  He must have a consuming contempt for the
ignorant, complacent asses that go skurrying about the world in these
railroading days and call it traveling.

When the guide pointed out where the Wandering Jew had left his familiar
mark upon a wall, I was filled with astonishment.  It read:

                         "S. T.--1860--X."

All I have revealed about the Wandering Jew can be amply proven by
reference to our guide.

The mighty Mosque of Omar, and the paved court around it, occupy a fourth
part of Jerusalem.  They are upon Mount Moriah, where King Solomon's
Temple stood.  This Mosque is the holiest place the Mohammedan knows,
outside of Mecca.  Up to within a year or two past, no Christian could
gain admission to it or its court for love or money.  But the prohibition
has been removed, and we entered freely for bucksheesh.

I need not speak of the wonderful beauty and the exquisite grace and
symmetry that have made this Mosque so celebrated--because I did not see
them.  One can not see such things at an instant glance--one frequently
only finds out how really beautiful a really beautiful woman is after
considerable acquaintance with her; and the rule applies to Niagara
Falls, to majestic mountains and to mosques--especially to mosques.

The great feature of the Mosque of Omar is the prodigious rock in the
centre of its rotunda.  It was upon this rock that Abraham came so near
offering up his son Isaac--this, at least, is authentic--it is very much
more to be relied on than most of the traditions, at any rate.  On this
rock, also, the angel stood and threatened Jerusalem, and David persuaded
him to spare the city.  Mahomet was well acquainted with this stone.
From it he ascended to heaven.  The stone tried to follow him, and if the
angel Gabriel had not happened by the merest good luck to be there to
seize it, it would have done it.  Very few people have a grip like
Gabriel--the prints of his monstrous fingers, two inches deep, are to be
seen in that rock to-day.

This rock, large as it is, is suspended in the air.  It does not touch
any thing at all.  The guide said so.  This is very wonderful.  In the
place on it where Mahomet stood, he left his foot-prints in the solid
stone.  I should judge that he wore about eighteens.  But what I was
going to say, when I spoke of the rock being suspended, was, that in the
floor of the cavern under it they showed us a slab which they said
covered a hole which was a thing of extraordinary interest to all
Mohammedans, because that hole leads down to perdition, and every soul
that is transferred from thence to Heaven must pass up through this
orifice.  Mahomet stands there and lifts them out by the hair.  All
Mohammedans shave their heads, but they are careful to leave a lock of
hair for the Prophet to take hold of.  Our guide observed that a good
Mohammedan would consider himself doomed to stay with the damned forever
if he were to lose his scalp-lock and die before it grew again.  The most
of them that I have seen ought to stay with the damned, any how, without
reference to how they were barbered.

For several ages no woman has been allowed to enter the cavern where that
important hole is.  The reason is that one of the sex was once caught
there blabbing every thing she knew about what was going on above ground,
to the rapscallions in the infernal regions down below.  She carried her
gossiping to such an extreme that nothing could be kept private--nothing
could be done or said on earth but every body in perdition knew all about
it before the sun went down.  It was about time to suppress this woman's
telegraph, and it was promptly done.  Her breath subsided about the same
time.

The inside of the great mosque is very showy with variegated marble walls
and with windows and inscriptions of elaborate mosaic.  The Turks have
their sacred relics, like the Catholics.  The guide showed us the
veritable armor worn by the great son-in-law and successor of Mahomet,
and also the buckler of Mahomet's uncle.  The great iron railing which
surrounds the rock was ornamented in one place with a thousand rags tied
to its open work.  These are to remind Mahomet not to forget the
worshipers who placed them there.  It is considered the next best thing
to tying threads around his finger by way of reminders.

Just outside the mosque is a miniature temple, which marks the spot where
David and Goliah used to sit and judge the people.--[A pilgrim informs
me that it was not David and Goliah, but David and Saul.  I stick to my
own statement--the guide told me, and he ought to know.]

Every where about the Mosque of Omar are portions of pillars, curiously
wrought altars, and fragments of elegantly carved marble--precious
remains of Solomon's Temple.  These have been dug from all depths in the
soil and rubbish of Mount Moriah, and the Moslems have always shown a
disposition to preserve them with the utmost care.  At that portion of
the ancient wall of Solomon's Temple which is called the Jew's Place of
Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble every Friday to kiss the
venerated stones and weep over the fallen greatness of Zion, any one can
see a part of the unquestioned and undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same
consisting of three or four stones lying one upon the other, each of
which is about twice as long as a seven-octave piano, and about as thick
as such a piano is high.  But, as I have remarked before, it is only a
year or two ago that the ancient edict prohibiting Christian rubbish like
ourselves to enter the Mosque of Omar and see the costly marbles that
once adorned the inner Temple was annulled.  The designs wrought upon
these fragments are all quaint and peculiar, and so the charm of novelty
is added to the deep interest they naturally inspire.  One meets with
these venerable scraps at every turn, especially in the neighboring
Mosque el Aksa, into whose inner walls a very large number of them are
carefully built for preservation.  These pieces of stone, stained and
dusty with age, dimly hint at a grandeur we have all been taught to
regard as the princeliest ever seen on earth; and they call up pictures
of a pageant that is familiar to all imaginations--camels laden with
spices and treasure--beautiful slaves, presents for Solomon's harem--a
long cavalcade of richly caparisoned beasts and warriors--and Sheba's
Queen in the van of this vision of "Oriental magnificence."  These
elegant fragments bear a richer interest than the solemn vastness of the
stones the Jews kiss in the Place of Wailing can ever have for the
heedless sinner.

Down in the hollow ground, underneath the olives and the orange-trees
that flourish in the court of the great Mosque, is a wilderness of
pillars--remains of the ancient Temple; they supported it.  There are
ponderous archways down there, also, over which the destroying "plough"
of prophecy passed harmless.  It is pleasant to know we are disappointed,
in that we never dreamed we might see portions of the actual Temple of
Solomon, and yet experience no shadow of suspicion that they were a
monkish humbug and a fraud.

We are surfeited with sights.  Nothing has any fascination for us, now,
but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  We have been there every day, and
have not grown tired of it; but we are weary of every thing else.  The
sights are too many.  They swarm about you at every step; no single foot
of ground in all Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without
a stirring and important history of its own.  It is a very relief to
steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to talk unceasingly
about every stone you step upon and drag you back ages and ages to the
day when it achieved celebrity.

It seems hardly real when I find myself leaning for a moment on a ruined
wall and looking listlessly down into the historic pool of Bethesda.  I
did not think such things could be so crowded together as to diminish
their interest.  But in serious truth, we have been drifting about, for
several days, using our eyes and our ears more from a sense of duty than
any higher and worthier reason.  And too often we have been glad when it
was time to go home and be distressed no more about illustrious
localities.

Our pilgrims compress too much into one day.  One can gorge sights to
repletion as well as sweetmeats.  Since we breakfasted, this morning, we
have seen enough to have furnished us food for a year's reflection if we
could have seen the various objects in comfort and looked upon them
deliberately.  We visited the pool of Hezekiah, where David saw Uriah's
wife coming from the bath and fell in love with her.

We went out of the city by the Jaffa gate, and of course were told many
things about its Tower of Hippicus.

We rode across the Valley of Hinnom, between two of the Pools of Gihon,
and by an aqueduct built by Solomon, which still conveys water to the
city.  We ascended the Hill of Evil Counsel, where Judas received his
thirty pieces of silver, and we also lingered a moment under the tree a
venerable tradition says he hanged himself on.

We descended to the canon again, and then the guide began to give name
and history to every bank and boulder we came to: "This was the Field of
Blood; these cuttings in the rocks were shrines and temples of Moloch;
here they sacrificed children; yonder is the Zion Gate; the Tyropean
Valley, the Hill of Ophel; here is the junction of the Valley of
Jehoshaphat--on your right is the Well of Job."  We turned up
Jehoshaphat.  The recital went on.  "This is the Mount of Olives; this is
the Hill of Offense; the nest of huts is the Village of Siloam; here,
yonder, every where, is the King's Garden; under this great tree
Zacharias, the high priest, was murdered; yonder is Mount Moriah and the
Temple wall; the tomb of Absalom; the tomb of St. James; the tomb of
Zacharias; beyond, are the Garden of Gethsemane and the tomb of the
Virgin Mary; here is the Pool of Siloam, and----"

We said we would dismount, and quench our thirst, and rest.  We were
burning up with the heat.  We were failing under the accumulated fatigue
of days and days of ceaseless marching.  All were willing.

The Pool is a deep, walled ditch, through which a clear stream of water
runs, that comes from under Jerusalem somewhere, and passing through the
Fountain of the Virgin, or being supplied from it, reaches this place by
way of a tunnel of heavy masonry.  The famous pool looked exactly as it
looked in Solomon's time, no doubt, and the same dusky, Oriental women,
came down in their old Oriental way, and carried off jars of the water on
their heads, just as they did three thousand years ago, and just as they
will do fifty thousand years hence if any of them are still left on
earth.

We went away from there and stopped at the Fountain of the Virgin.  But
the water was not good, and there was no comfort or peace any where, on
account of the regiment of boys and girls and beggars that persecuted us
all the time for bucksheesh.  The guide wanted us to give them some
money, and we did it; but when he went on to say that they were starving
to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in throwing
obstacles in the way of such a desirable consummation, and so we tried to
collect it back, but it could not be done.

We entered the Garden of Gethsemane, and we visited the Tomb of the
Virgin, both of which we had seen before.  It is not meet that I should
speak of them now.  A more fitting time will come.

I can not speak now of the Mount of Olives or its view of Jerusalem, the
Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab; nor of the Damascus Gate or the tree
that was planted by King Godfrey of Jerusalem.  One ought to feel
pleasantly when he talks of these things.  I can not say any thing about
the stone column that projects over Jehoshaphat from the Temple wall like
a cannon, except that the Moslems believe Mahomet will sit astride of it
when he comes to judge the world.  It is a pity he could not judge it
from some roost of his own in Mecca, without trespassing on our holy
ground.  Close by is the Golden Gate, in the Temple wall--a gate that was
an elegant piece of sculpture in the time of the Temple, and is even so
yet.  From it, in ancient times, the Jewish High Priest turned loose the
scapegoat and let him flee to the wilderness and bear away his
twelve-month load of the sins of the people.  If they were to turn one
loose now, he would not get as far as the Garden of Gethsemane, till
these miserable vagabonds here would gobble him up,--[Favorite pilgrim
expression.]--sins and all.  They wouldn't care.  Mutton-chops and sin
is good enough living for them.  The Moslems watch the Golden Gate with
a jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they have an honored tradition
that when it falls, Islamism will fall and with it the Ottoman Empire.
It did not grieve me any to notice that the old gate was getting a
little shaky.

We are at home again.  We are exhausted.  The sun has roasted us, almost.
We have full comfort in one reflection, however.  Our experiences in
Europe have taught us that in time this fatigue will be forgotten; the
heat will be forgotten; the thirst, the tiresome volubility of the guide,
the persecutions of the beggars--and then, all that will be left will be
pleasant memories of Jerusalem, memories we shall call up with always
increasing interest as the years go by, memories which some day will
become all beautiful when the last annoyance that incumbers them shall
have faded out of our minds never again to return.  School-boy days are
no happier than the days of after life, but we look back upon them
regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school, and how
we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed--because we
have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of that canonized epoch and
remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden sword pageants and its
fishing holydays.  We are satisfied.  We can wait.  Our reward will come.
To us, Jerusalem and to-day's experiences will be an enchanted memory a
year hence--memory which money could not buy from us.



CHAPTER LV.

We cast up the account.  It footed up pretty fairly.  There was nothing
more at Jerusalem to be seen, except the traditional houses of Dives and
Lazarus of the parable, the Tombs of the Kings, and those of the Judges;
the spot where they stoned one of the disciples to death, and beheaded
another; the room and the table made celebrated by the Last Supper; the
fig-tree that Jesus withered; a number of historical places about
Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, and fifteen or twenty others in
different portions of the city itself.

We were approaching the end.  Human nature asserted itself, now.
Overwork and consequent exhaustion began to have their natural effect.
They began to master the energies and dull the ardor of the party.
Perfectly secure now, against failing to accomplish any detail of the
pilgrimage, they felt like drawing in advance upon the holiday soon to be
placed to their credit.  They grew a little lazy.  They were late to
breakfast and sat long at dinner.  Thirty or forty pilgrims had arrived
from the ship, by the short routes, and much swapping of gossip had to be
indulged in.  And in hot afternoons, they showed a strong disposition to
lie on the cool divans in the hotel and smoke and talk about pleasant
experiences of a month or so gone by--for even thus early do episodes of
travel which were sometimes annoying, sometimes exasperating and full as
often of no consequence at all when they transpired, begin to rise above
the dead level of monotonous reminiscences and become shapely landmarks
in one's memory.  The fog-whistle, smothered among a million of trifling
sounds, is not noticed a block away, in the city, but the sailor hears it
far at sea, whither none of those thousands of trifling sounds can reach.
When one is in Rome, all the domes are alike; but when he has gone away
twelve miles, the city fades utterly from sight and leaves St. Peter's
swelling above the level plain like an anchored balloon.  When one is
traveling in Europe, the daily incidents seem all alike; but when he has
placed them all two months and two thousand miles behind him, those that
were worthy of being remembered are prominent, and those that were really
insignificant have vanished.  This disposition to smoke, and idle and
talk, was not well.  It was plain that it must not be allowed to gain
ground.  A diversion must be tried, or demoralization would ensue.  The
Jordan, Jericho and the Dead Sea were suggested.  The remainder of
Jerusalem must be left unvisited, for a little while.  The journey was
approved at once.  New life stirred in every pulse.  In the saddle
--abroad on the plains--sleeping in beds bounded only by the horizon: fancy
was at work with these things in a moment.--It was painful to note how
readily these town-bred men had taken to the free life of the camp and
the desert The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with
Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries
of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us
yet.  It has a charm which, once tasted, a man will yearn to taste again.
The nomadic instinct can not be educated out of an Indian at all.

The Jordan journey being approved, our dragoman was notified.

At nine in the morning the caravan was before the hotel door and we were
at breakfast.  There was a commotion about the place.  Rumors of war and
bloodshed were flying every where.  The lawless Bedouins in the Valley of
the Jordan and the deserts down by the Dead Sea were up in arms, and were
going to destroy all comers.  They had had a battle with a troop of
Turkish cavalry and defeated them; several men killed.  They had shut up
the inhabitants of a village and a Turkish garrison in an old fort near
Jericho, and were besieging them.  They had marched upon a camp of our
excursionists by the Jordan, and the pilgrims only saved their lives by
stealing away and flying to Jerusalem under whip and spur in the darkness
of the night.  Another of our parties had been fired on from an ambush
and then attacked in the open day.  Shots were fired on both sides.
Fortunately there was no bloodshed.  We spoke with the very pilgrim who
had fired one of the shots, and learned from his own lips how, in this
imminent deadly peril, only the cool courage of the pilgrims, their
strength of numbers and imposing display of war material, had saved them
from utter destruction.  It was reported that the Consul had requested
that no more of our pilgrims should go to the Jordan while this state of
things lasted; and further, that he was unwilling that any more should
go, at least without an unusually strong military guard.  Here was
trouble.  But with the horses at the door and every body aware of what
they were there for, what would you have done?  Acknowledged that you
were afraid, and backed shamefully out?  Hardly.  It would not be human
nature, where there were so many women.  You would have done as we did:
said you were not afraid of a million Bedouins--and made your will and
proposed quietly to yourself to take up an unostentatious position in the
rear of the procession.

I think we must all have determined upon the same line of tactics, for it
did seem as if we never would get to Jericho.  I had a notoriously slow
horse, but somehow I could not keep him in the rear, to save my neck.
He was forever turning up in the lead.  In such cases I trembled a
little, and got down to fix my saddle.  But it was not of any use.  The
others all got down to fix their saddles, too.  I never saw such a time
with saddles.  It was the first time any of them had got out of order in
three weeks, and now they had all broken down at once.  I tried walking,
for exercise--I had not had enough in Jerusalem searching for holy
places.  But it was a failure.  The whole mob were suffering for
exercise, and it was not fifteen minutes till they were all on foot and I
had the lead again.  It was very discouraging.

This was all after we got beyond Bethany.  We stopped at the village of
Bethany, an hour out from Jerusalem.  They showed us the tomb of Lazarus.
I had rather live in it than in any house in the town.  And they showed
us also a large "Fountain of Lazarus," and in the centre of the village
the ancient dwelling of Lazarus.  Lazarus appears to have been a man of
property.  The legends of the Sunday Schools do him great injustice; they
give one the impression that he was poor.  It is because they get him
confused with that Lazarus who had no merit but his virtue, and virtue
never has been as respectable as money.  The house of Lazarus is a
three-story edifice, of stone masonry, but the accumulated rubbish of
ages has buried all of it but the upper story.  We took candles and
descended to the dismal cell-like chambers where Jesus sat at meat with
Martha and Mary, and conversed with them about their brother.  We could
not but look upon these old dingy apartments with a more than common
interest.

We had had a glimpse, from a mountain top, of the Dead Sea, lying like a
blue shield in the plain of the Jordan, and now we were marching down a
close, flaming, rugged, desolate defile, where no living creature could
enjoy life, except, perhaps, a salamander.  It was such a dreary,
repulsive, horrible solitude!  It was the "wilderness" where John
preached, with camel's hair about his loins--raiment enough--but he never
could have got his locusts and wild honey here.  We were moping along
down through this dreadful place, every man in the rear.  Our guards--two
gorgeous young Arab sheiks, with cargoes of swords, guns, pistols and
daggers on board--were loafing ahead.

"Bedouins!"

Every man shrunk up and disappeared in his clothes like a mud-turtle.
My first impulse was to dash forward and destroy the Bedouins.  My second
was to dash to the rear to see if there were any coming in that
direction.  I acted on the latter impulse.  So did all the others.  If
any Bedouins had approached us, then, from that point of the compass,
they would have paid dearly for their rashness.  We all remarked that,
afterwards.  There would have been scenes of riot and bloodshed there
that no pen could describe.  I know that, because each man told what he
would have done, individually; and such a medley of strange and
unheard-of inventions of cruelty you could not conceive of.  One man
said he had calmly made up his mind to perish where he stood, if need
be, but never yield an inch; he was going to wait, with deadly patience,
till he could count the stripes upon the first Bedouin's jacket, and
then count them and let him have it.  Another was going to sit still
till the first lance reached within an inch of his breast, and then
dodge it and seize it.  I forbear to tell what he was going to do to
that Bedouin that owned it. It makes my blood run cold to think of it.
Another was going to scalp such Bedouins as fell to his share, and take
his bald-headed sons of the desert home with him alive for trophies.
But the wild-eyed pilgrim rhapsodist was silent.  His orbs gleamed with
a deadly light, but his lips moved not.  Anxiety grew, and he was
questioned.  If he had got a Bedouin, what would he have done with him
--shot him?  He smiled a smile of grim contempt and shook his head.
Would he have stabbed him?  Another shake.  Would he have quartered him
--flayed him?  More shakes.  Oh! horror what would he have done?

"Eat him!"

Such was the awful sentence that thundered from his lips.  What was
grammar to a desperado like that?  I was glad in my heart that I had been
spared these scenes of malignant carnage.  No Bedouins attacked our
terrible rear.  And none attacked the front.  The new-comers were only a
reinforcement of cadaverous Arabs, in shirts and bare legs, sent far
ahead of us to brandish rusty guns, and shout and brag, and carry on like
lunatics, and thus scare away all bands of marauding Bedouins that might
lurk about our path.  What a shame it is that armed white Christians must
travel under guard of vermin like this as a protection against the
prowling vagabonds of the desert--those sanguinary outlaws who are always
going to do something desperate, but never do it.  I may as well mention
here that on our whole trip we saw no Bedouins, and had no more use for
an Arab guard than we could have had for patent leather boots and white
kid gloves.  The Bedouins that attacked the other parties of pilgrims so
fiercely were provided for the occasion by the Arab guards of those
parties, and shipped from Jerusalem for temporary service as Bedouins.
They met together in full view of the pilgrims, after the battle, and
took lunch, divided the bucksheesh extorted in the season of danger, and
then accompanied the cavalcade home to the city!  The nuisance of an Arab
guard is one which is created by the Sheiks and the Bedouins together,
for mutual profit, it is said, and no doubt there is a good deal of truth
in it.

We visited the fountain the prophet Elisha sweetened (it is sweet yet,)
where he remained some time and was fed by the ravens.

Ancient Jericho is not very picturesque as a ruin.  When Joshua marched
around it seven times, some three thousand years ago, and blew it down
with his trumpet, he did the work so well and so completely that he
hardly left enough of the city to cast a shadow.  The curse pronounced
against the rebuilding of it, has never been removed.  One King, holding
the curse in light estimation, made the attempt, but was stricken sorely
for his presumption.  Its site will always remain unoccupied; and yet it
is one of the very best locations for a town we have seen in all
Palestine.

At two in the morning they routed us out of bed--another piece of
unwarranted cruelty--another stupid effort of our dragoman to get ahead
of a rival.  It was not two hours to the Jordan.  However, we were
dressed and under way before any one thought of looking to see what time
it was, and so we drowsed on through the chill night air and dreamed of
camp fires, warm beds, and other comfortable things.

There was no conversation.  People do not talk when they are cold, and
wretched, and sleepy.  We nodded in the saddle, at times, and woke up
with a start to find that the procession had disappeared in the gloom.
Then there was energy and attention to business until its dusky outlines
came in sight again.  Occasionally the order was passed in a low voice
down the line: "Close up--close up!  Bedouins lurk here, every where!"
What an exquisite shudder it sent shivering along one's spine!

We reached the famous river before four o'clock, and the night was so
black that we could have ridden into it without seeing it.  Some of us
were in an unhappy frame of mind.  We waited and waited for daylight, but
it did not come.  Finally we went away in the dark and slept an hour on
the ground, in the bushes, and caught cold.  It was a costly nap, on that
account, but otherwise it was a paying investment because it brought
unconsciousness of the dreary minutes and put us in a somewhat fitter
mood for a first glimpse of the sacred river.

With the first suspicion of dawn, every pilgrim took off his clothes and
waded into the dark torrent, singing:

               "On Jordan's stormy banks I stand,
               And cast a wistful eye
               To Canaan's fair and happy land,
               Where my possessions lie."

But they did not sing long.  The water was so fearfully cold that they
were obliged to stop singing and scamper out again.  Then they stood on
the bank shivering, and so chagrined and so grieved, that they merited
holiest compassion.  Because another dream, another cherished hope, had
failed.  They had promised themselves all along that they would cross the
Jordan where the Israelites crossed it when they entered Canaan from
their long pilgrimage in the desert.  They would cross where the twelve
stones were placed in memory of that great event.  While they did it they
would picture to themselves that vast army of pilgrims marching through
the cloven waters, bearing the hallowed ark of the covenant and shouting
hosannahs, and singing songs of thanksgiving and praise.  Each had
promised himself that he would be the first to cross.  They were at the
goal of their hopes at last, but the current was too swift, the water was
too cold!

It was then that Jack did them a service.  With that engaging
recklessness of consequences which is natural to youth, and so proper and
so seemly, as well, he went and led the way across the Jordan, and all
was happiness again.  Every individual waded over, then, and stood upon
the further bank.  The water was not quite breast deep, any where.  If it
had been more, we could hardly have accomplished the feat, for the strong
current would have swept us down the stream, and we would have been
exhausted and drowned before reaching a place where we could make a
landing.  The main object compassed, the drooping, miserable party sat
down to wait for the sun again, for all wanted to see the water as well
as feel it.  But it was too cold a pastime.  Some cans were filled from
the holy river, some canes cut from its banks, and then we mounted and
rode reluctantly away to keep from freezing to death.  So we saw the
Jordan very dimly.  The thickets of bushes that bordered its banks threw
their shadows across its shallow, turbulent waters ("stormy," the hymn
makes them, which is rather a complimentary stretch of fancy,) and we
could not judge of the width of the stream by the eye.  We knew by our
wading experience, however, that many streets in America are double as
wide as the Jordan.

Daylight came, soon after we got under way, and in the course of an hour
or two we reached the Dead Sea.  Nothing grows in the flat, burning
desert around it but weeds and the Dead Sea apple the poets say is
beautiful to the eye, but crumbles to ashes and dust when you break it.
Such as we found were not handsome, but they were bitter to the taste.
They yielded no dust.  It was because they were not ripe, perhaps.

The desert and the barren hills gleam painfully in the sun, around the
Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing or living creature upon it or
about its borders to cheer the eye.  It is a scorching, arid, repulsive
solitude.  A silence broods over the scene that is depressing to the
spirits.  It makes one think of funerals and death.

The Dead Sea is small.  Its waters are very clear, and it has a pebbly
bottom and is shallow for some distance out from the shores.  It yields
quantities of asphaltum; fragments of it lie all about its banks; this
stuff gives the place something of an unpleasant smell.

All our reading had taught us to expect that the first plunge into the
Dead Sea would be attended with distressing results--our bodies would
feel as if they were suddenly pierced by millions of red-hot needles; the
dreadful smarting would continue for hours; we might even look to be
blistered from head to foot, and suffer miserably for many days.  We were
disappointed.  Our eight sprang in at the same time that another party of
pilgrims did, and nobody screamed once.  None of them ever did complain
of any thing more than a slight pricking sensation in places where their
skin was abraded, and then only for a short time.  My face smarted for a
couple of hours, but it was partly because I got it badly sun-burned
while I was bathing, and staid in so long that it became plastered over
with salt.

No, the water did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze
and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance; it was not very slimy; and I
could not discover that we smelt really any worse than we have always
smelt since we have been in Palestine.  It was only a different kind of
smell, but not conspicuous on that account, because we have a great deal
of variety in that respect.  We didn't smell, there on the Jordan, the
same as we do in Jerusalem; and we don't smell in Jerusalem just as we
did in Nazareth, or Tiberias, or Cesarea Philippi, or any of those other
ruinous ancient towns in Galilee.  No, we change all the time, and
generally for the worse.  We do our own washing.

It was a funny bath.  We could not sink.  One could stretch himself at
full length on his back, with his arms on his breast, and all of his body
above a line drawn from the corner of his jaw past the middle of his
side, the middle of his leg and through his ancle bone, would remain out
of water.  He could lift his head clear out, if he chose.  No position
can be retained long; you lose your balance and whirl over, first on your
back and then on your face, and so on.  You can lie comfortably, on your
back, with your head out, and your legs out from your knees down, by
steadying yourself with your hands.  You can sit, with your knees drawn
up to your chin and your arms clasped around them, but you are bound to
turn over presently, because you are top-heavy in that position.  You can
stand up straight in water that is over your head, and from the middle of
your breast upward you will not be wet.  But you can not remain so.  The
water will soon float your feet to the surface.  You can not swim on your
back and make any progress of any consequence, because your feet stick
away above the surface, and there is nothing to propel yourself with but
your heels.  If you swim on your face, you kick up the water like a
stern-wheel boat.  You make no headway.  A horse is so top-heavy that he
can neither swim nor stand up in the Dead Sea.  He turns over on his side
at once.  Some of us bathed for more than an hour, and then came out
coated with salt till we shone like icicles.  We scrubbed it off with a
coarse towel and rode off with a splendid brand-new smell, though it was
one which was not any more disagreeable than those we have been for
several weeks enjoying.  It was the variegated villainy and novelty of it
that charmed us.  Salt crystals glitter in the sun about the shores of
the lake.  In places they coat the ground like a brilliant crust of ice.

When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was
four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide.  It is only ninety
miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know which side of it he
is on half the time.  In going ninety miles it does not get over more
than fifty miles of ground.  It is not any wider than Broadway in New
York.

There is the Sea of Galilee and this Dead Sea--neither of them twenty
miles long or thirteen wide.  And yet when I was in Sunday School I
thought they were sixty thousand miles in diameter.

Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most
cherished traditions of our boyhood.  Well, let them go.  I have already
seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of the State of
Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the
river.

We looked every where, as we passed along, but never saw grain or crystal
of Lot's wife.  It was a great disappointment.  For many and many a year
we had known her sad story, and taken that interest in her which
misfortune always inspires.  But she was gone.  Her picturesque form no
longer looms above the desert of the Dead Sea to remind the tourist of
the doom that fell upon the lost cities.

I can not describe the hideous afternoon's ride from the Dead Sea to Mars
Saba.  It oppresses me yet, to think of it.  The sun so pelted us that
the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice.  The ghastly, treeless,
grassless, breathless canons smothered us as if we had been in an oven.
The sun had positive weight to it, I think.  Not a man could sit erect
under it.  All drooped low in the saddles.  John preached in this
"Wilderness!"  It must have been exhausting work.  What a very heaven the
messy towers and ramparts of vast Mars Saba looked to us when we caught a
first glimpse of them!

We staid at this great convent all night, guests of the hospitable
priests.  Mars Saba, perched upon a crag, a human nest stock high up
against a perpendicular mountain wall, is a world of grand masonry that
rises, terrace upon terrace away above your head, like the terraced and
retreating colonnades one sees in fanciful pictures of Belshazzar's Feast
and the palaces of the ancient Pharaohs.  No other human dwelling is
near.  It was founded many ages ago by a holy recluse who lived at first
in a cave in the rock--a cave which is inclosed in the convent walls,
now, and was reverently shown to us by the priests.  This recluse, by his
rigorous torturing of his flesh, his diet of bread and water, his utter
withdrawal from all society and from the vanities of the world, and his
constant prayer and saintly contemplation of a skull, inspired an
emulation that brought about him many disciples.  The precipice on the
opposite side of the canyon is well perforated with the small holes they
dug in the rock to live in.  The present occupants of Mars Saba, about
seventy in number, are all hermits.  They wear a coarse robe, an ugly,
brimless stove-pipe of a hat, and go without shoes.  They eat nothing
whatever but bread and salt; they drink nothing but water.  As long as
they live they can never go outside the walls, or look upon a woman--for
no woman is permitted to enter Mars Saba, upon any pretext whatsoever.

Some of those men have been shut up there for thirty years.  In all that
dreary time they have not heard the laughter of a child or the blessed
voice of a woman; they have seen no human tears, no human smiles; they
have known no human joys, no wholesome human sorrows.  In their hearts
are no memories of the past, in their brains no dreams of the future.
All that is lovable, beautiful, worthy, they have put far away from them;
against all things that are pleasant to look upon, and all sounds that
are music to the ear, they have barred their massive doors and reared
their relentless walls of stone forever.  They have banished the tender
grace of life and left only the sapped and skinny mockery.  Their lips
are lips that never kiss and never sing; their hearts are hearts that
never hate and never love; their breasts are breasts that never swell
with the sentiment, "I have a country and a flag."  They are dead men who
walk.

I set down these first thoughts because they are natural--not because
they are just or because it is right to set them down.  It is easy for
book-makers to say "I thought so and so as I looked upon such and such a
scene"--when the truth is, they thought all those fine things afterwards.
One's first thought is not likely to be strictly accurate, yet it is no
crime to think it and none to write it down, subject to modification by
later experience.  These hermits are dead men, in several respects, but
not in all; and it is not proper, that, thinking ill of them at first, I
should go on doing so, or, speaking ill of them I should reiterate the
words and stick to them.  No, they treated us too kindly for that.  There
is something human about them somewhere.  They knew we were foreigners
and Protestants, and not likely to feel admiration or much friendliness
toward them.  But their large charity was above considering such things.
They simply saw in us men who were hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and
that was sufficient.  They opened their doors and gave us welcome.  They
asked no questions, and they made no self-righteous display of their
hospitality.  They fished for no compliments.  They moved quietly about,
setting the table for us, making the beds, and bringing water to wash in,
and paid no heed when we said it was wrong for them to do that when we
had men whose business it was to perform such offices.  We fared most
comfortably, and sat late at dinner.  We walked all over the building
with the hermits afterward, and then sat on the lofty battlements and
smoked while we enjoyed the cool air, the wild scenery and the sunset.
One or two chose cosy bed-rooms to sleep in, but the nomadic instinct
prompted the rest to sleep on the broad divan that extended around the
great hall, because it seemed like sleeping out of doors, and so was more
cheery and inviting.  It was a royal rest we had.

When we got up to breakfast in the morning, we were new men.  For all
this hospitality no strict charge was made.  We could give something if
we chose; we need give nothing, if we were poor or if we were stingy.
The pauper and the miser are as free as any in the Catholic Convents of
Palestine.  I have been educated to enmity toward every thing that is
Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to
discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits.  But there is one thing I
feel no disposition to overlook, and no disposition to forget: and that
is, the honest gratitude I and all pilgrims owe, to the Convent Fathers
in Palestine.  Their doors are always open, and there is always a welcome
for any worthy man who comes, whether he comes in rags or clad in purple.
The Catholic Convents are a priceless blessing to the poor.  A pilgrim
without money, whether he be a Protestant or a Catholic, can travel the
length and breadth of Palestine, and in the midst of her desert wastes
find wholesome food and a clean bed every night, in these buildings.
Pilgrims in better circumstances are often stricken down by the sun and
the fevers of the country, and then their saving refuge is the Convent.
Without these hospitable retreats, travel in Palestine would be a
pleasure which none but the strongest men could dare to undertake.  Our
party, pilgrims and all, will always be ready and always willing, to
touch glasses and drink health, prosperity and long life to the Convent
Fathers of Palestine.

So, rested and refreshed, we fell into line and filed away over the
barren mountains of Judea, and along rocky ridges and through sterile
gorges, where eternal silence and solitude reigned.  Even the scattering
groups of armed shepherds we met the afternoon before, tending their
flocks of long-haired goats, were wanting here.  We saw but two living
creatures.  They were gazelles, of "soft-eyed" notoriety.  They looked
like very young kids, but they annihilated distance like an express
train.  I have not seen animals that moved faster, unless I might say it
of the antelopes of our own great plains.

At nine or ten in the morning we reached the Plain of the Shepherds, and
stood in a walled garden of olives where the shepherds were watching
their flocks by night, eighteen centuries ago, when the multitude of
angels brought them the tidings that the Saviour was born.  A quarter of
a mile away was Bethlehem of Judea, and the pilgrims took some of the
stone wall and hurried on.

The Plain of the Shepherds is a desert, paved with loose stones, void of
vegetation, glaring in the fierce sun.  Only the music of the angels it
knew once could charm its shrubs and flowers to life again and restore
its vanished beauty.  No less potent enchantment could avail to work this
miracle.

In the huge Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, built fifteen hundred
years ago by the inveterate St. Helena, they took us below ground, and
into a grotto cut in the living rock.  This was the "manger" where Christ
was born.  A silver star set in the floor bears a Latin inscription to
that effect.  It is polished with the kisses of many generations of
worshiping pilgrims.  The grotto was tricked out in the usual tasteless
style observable in all the holy places of Palestine.  As in the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre, envy and uncharitableness were apparent here.  The
priests and the members of the Greek and Latin churches can not come by
the same corridor to kneel in the sacred birthplace of the Redeemer, but
are compelled to approach and retire by different avenues, lest they
quarrel and fight on this holiest ground on earth.

I have no "meditations," suggested by this spot where the very first
"Merry Christmas!" was uttered in all the world, and from whence the
friend of my childhood, Santa Claus, departed on his first journey, to
gladden and continue to gladden roaring firesides on wintry mornings in
many a distant land forever and forever.  I touch, with reverent finger,
the actual spot where the infant Jesus lay, but I think--nothing.

You can not think in this place any more than you can in any other in
Palestine that would be likely to inspire reflection.  Beggars, cripples
and monks compass you about, and make you think only of bucksheesh when
you would rather think of something more in keeping with the character of
the spot.

I was glad to get away, and glad when we had walked through the grottoes
where Eusebius wrote, and Jerome fasted, and Joseph prepared for the
flight into Egypt, and the dozen other distinguished grottoes, and knew
we were done.  The Church of the Nativity is almost as well packed with
exceeding holy places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself.  They
even have in it a grotto wherein twenty thousand children were
slaughtered by Herod when he was seeking the life of the infant Saviour.

We went to the Milk Grotto, of course--a cavern where Mary hid herself
for a while before the flight into Egypt.  Its walls were black before
she entered, but in suckling the Child, a drop of her milk fell upon the
floor and instantly changed the darkness of the walls to its own snowy
hue.  We took many little fragments of stone from here, because it is
well known in all the East that a barren woman hath need only to touch
her lips to one of these and her failing will depart from her.  We took
many specimens, to the end that we might confer happiness upon certain
households that we wot of.

We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers
in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel's tomb,
hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible.  I never was so glad to get
home again before.  I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during
these last few hours.  The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and
Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one.  Such roasting heat,
such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist
elsewhere on earth.  And such fatigue!

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary
pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted
place in Palestine.  Every body tells that, but with as little
ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it.  I could
take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty
pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as
sincerely devout as any that come here.  They will say it when they get
home, fast enough, but why should they not?  They do not wish to array
themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world.  It does
not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very
life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and
peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek
and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and
malformations they exhibit.  One is glad to get away.  I have heard
shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies' Festivals
where they were importuned to buy by bevies of lovely young ladies.
Transform those houris into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace
their rounded forms with shrunken and knotted distortions, their soft
hands with scarred and hideous deformities, and the persuasive music of
their voices with the discordant din of a hated language, and then see
how much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered.  No, it is the
neat thing to say you were reluctant, and then append the profound
thoughts that "struggled for utterance," in your brain; but it is the
true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found it impossible to
think at all--though in good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and
not poetical, either.

We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when
the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we
revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom
pageants of an age that has passed away.



CHAPTER LVI.

We visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which we had left
unvisited when we journeyed to the Jordan and then, about three o'clock
one afternoon, we fell into procession and marched out at the stately
Damascus gate, and the walls of Jerusalem shut us out forever.  We paused
on the summit of a distant hill and took a final look and made a final
farewell to the venerable city which had been such a good home to us.

For about four hours we traveled down hill constantly.  We followed a
narrow bridle-path which traversed the beds of the mountain gorges, and
when we could we got out of the way of the long trains of laden camels
and asses, and when we could not we suffered the misery of being mashed
up against perpendicular walls of rock and having our legs bruised by the
passing freight.  Jack was caught two or three times, and Dan and Moult
as often.  One horse had a heavy fall on the slippery rocks, and the
others had narrow escapes.  However, this was as good a road as we had
found in Palestine, and possibly even the best, and so there was not much
grumbling.

Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards of figs,
apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener the scenery was
rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbidding.  Here and there, towers
were perched high up on acclivities which seemed almost inaccessible.
This fashion is as old as Palestine itself and was adopted in ancient
times for security against enemies.

We crossed the brook which furnished David the stone that killed Goliah,
and no doubt we looked upon the very ground whereon that noted battle was
fought.  We passed by a picturesque old gothic ruin whose stone pavements
had rung to the armed heels of many a valorous Crusader, and we rode
through a piece of country which we were told once knew Samson as a
citizen.

We staid all night with the good monks at the convent of Ramleh, and in
the morning got up and galloped the horses a good part of the distance
from there to Jaffa, or Joppa, for the plain was as level as a floor and
free from stones, and besides this was our last march in Holy Land.
These two or three hours finished, we and the tired horses could have
rest and sleep as long as we wanted it.  This was the plain of which
Joshua spoke when he said, "Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou
moon in the valley of Ajalon."  As we drew near to Jaffa, the boys
spurred up the horses and indulged in the excitement of an actual race
--an experience we had hardly had since we raced on donkeys in the Azores
islands.

We came finally to the noble grove of orange-trees in which the Oriental
city of Jaffa lies buried; we passed through the walls, and rode again
down narrow streets and among swarms of animated rags, and saw other
sights and had other experiences we had long been familiar with.  We
dismounted, for the last time, and out in the offing, riding at anchor,
we saw the ship!  I put an exclamation point there because we felt one
when we saw the vessel.  The long pilgrimage was ended, and somehow we
seemed to feel glad of it.

[For description of Jaffa, see Universal Gazetteer.] Simon the Tanner
formerly lived here.  We went to his house.  All the pilgrims visit Simon
the Tanner's house.  Peter saw the vision of the beasts let down in a
sheet when he lay upon the roof of Simon the Tanner's house.  It was from
Jaffa that Jonah sailed when he was told to go and prophesy against
Nineveh, and no doubt it was not far from the town that the whale threw
him up when he discovered that he had no ticket.  Jonah was disobedient,
and of a fault-finding, complaining disposition, and deserves to be
lightly spoken of, almost.  The timbers used in the construction of
Solomon's Temple were floated to Jaffa in rafts, and the narrow opening
in the reef through which they passed to the shore is not an inch wider
or a shade less dangerous to navigate than it was then.  Such is the
sleepy nature of the population Palestine's only good seaport has now and
always had.  Jaffa has a history and a stirring one.  It will not be
discovered any where in this book.  If the reader will call at the
circulating library and mention my name, he will be furnished with books
which will afford him the fullest information concerning Jaffa.

So ends the pilgrimage.  We ought to be glad that we did not make it for
the purpose of feasting our eyes upon fascinating aspects of nature, for
we should have been disappointed--at least at this season of the year.  A
writer in "Life in the Holy Land" observes:

     "Monotonous and uninviting as much of the Holy Land will appear to
     persons accustomed to the almost constant verdure of flowers, ample
     streams and varied surface of our own country, we must remember that
     its aspect to the Israelites after the weary march of forty years
     through the desert must have been very different."

Which all of us will freely grant.  But it truly is "monotonous and
uninviting," and there is no sufficient reason for describing it as being
otherwise.

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be
the prince.  The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are
unpicturesque in shape.  The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a
feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and
despondent.  The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a
vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant
tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or
mottled with the shadows of the clouds.  Every outline is harsh, every
feature is distinct, there is no perspective--distance works no
enchantment here.  It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.

Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the full flush
of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by contrast with the
far-reaching desolation that surrounds them on every side.  I would like
much to see the fringes of the Jordan in spring-time, and Shechem,
Esdraelon, Ajalon and the borders of Galilee--but even then these spots
would seem mere toy gardens set at wide intervals in the waste of a
limitless desolation.

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.  Over it broods the spell of a
curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.  Where
Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now
floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists--over
whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead
--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of
cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching
lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.  Nazareth is forlorn; about that
ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with
songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins
of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even
as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem
and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about
them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the
Saviour's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their
flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, good will to
men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
that is pleasant to the eye.  Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest
name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a
pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the
admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was
the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is
lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of
the world, they reared the Holy Cross.  The noted Sea of Galilee, where
Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed
in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and
commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a
shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and
Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round
about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice
and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.

Palestine is desolate and unlovely.  And why should it be otherwise?  Can
the curse of the Deity beautify a land?

Palestine is no more of this work-day world.  It is sacred to poetry and
tradition--it is dream-land.



CHAPTER LVII.

It was worth a kingdom to be at sea again.  It was a relief to drop all
anxiety whatsoever--all questions as to where we should go; how long we
should stay; whether it were worth while to go or not; all anxieties
about the condition of the horses; all such questions as "Shall we ever
get to water?"  "Shall we ever lunch?"  "Ferguson, how many more million
miles have we got to creep under this awful sun before we camp?"  It was
a relief to cast all these torturing little anxieties far away--ropes of
steel they were, and every one with a separate and distinct strain on it
--and feel the temporary contentment that is born of the banishment of
all care and responsibility.  We did not look at the compass: we did not
care, now, where the ship went to, so that she went out of sight of land
as quickly as possible.  When I travel again, I wish to go in a pleasure
ship.  No amount of money could have purchased for us, in a strange
vessel and among unfamiliar faces, the perfect satisfaction and the sense
of being at home again which we experienced when we stepped on board the
"Quaker City,"--our own ship--after this wearisome pilgrimage.  It is a
something we have felt always when we returned to her, and a something we
had no desire to sell.

We took off our blue woollen shirts, our spurs, and heavy boots, our
sanguinary revolvers and our buckskin-seated pantaloons, and got shaved
and came out in Christian costume once more.  All but Jack, who changed
all other articles of his dress, but clung to his traveling pantaloons.
They still preserved their ample buckskin seat intact; and so his short
pea jacket and his long, thin legs assisted to make him a picturesque
object whenever he stood on the forecastle looking abroad upon the ocean
over the bows.  At such times his father's last injunction suggested
itself to me.  He said:

"Jack, my boy, you are about to go among a brilliant company of gentlemen
and ladies, who are refined and cultivated, and thoroughly accomplished
in the manners and customs of good society.  Listen to their
conversation, study their habits of life, and learn.  Be polite and
obliging to all, and considerate towards every one's opinions, failings
and prejudices.  Command the just respect of all your fellow-voyagers,
even though you fail to win their friendly regard.  And Jack--don't you
ever dare, while you live, appear in public on those decks in fair
weather, in a costume unbecoming your mother's drawing-room!"

It would have been worth any price if the father of this hopeful youth
could have stepped on board some time, and seen him standing high on the
fore-castle, pea jacket, tasseled red fez, buckskin patch and all,
placidly contemplating the ocean--a rare spectacle for any body's
drawing-room.

After a pleasant voyage and a good rest, we drew near to Egypt and out of
the mellowest of sunsets we saw the domes and minarets of Alexandria rise
into view.  As soon as the anchor was down, Jack and I got a boat and
went ashore.  It was night by this time, and the other passengers were
content to remain at home and visit ancient Egypt after breakfast.  It
was the way they did at Constantinople.  They took a lively interest in
new countries, but their school-boy impatience had worn off, and they had
learned that it was wisdom to take things easy and go along comfortably
--these old countries do not go away in the night; they stay till after
breakfast.

When we reached the pier we found an army of Egyptian boys with donkeys
no larger than themselves, waiting for passengers--for donkeys are the
omnibuses of Egypt.  We preferred to walk, but we could not have our own
way.  The boys crowded about us, clamored around us, and slewed their
donkeys exactly across our path, no matter which way we turned.  They
were good-natured rascals, and so were the donkeys.  We mounted, and the
boys ran behind us and kept the donkeys in a furious gallop, as is the
fashion at Damascus.  I believe I would rather ride a donkey than any
beast in the world.  He goes briskly, he puts on no airs, he is docile,
though opinionated.  Satan himself could not scare him, and he is
convenient--very convenient.  When you are tired riding you can rest your
feet on the ground and let him gallop from under you.

We found the hotel and secured rooms, and were happy to know that the
Prince of Wales had stopped there once.  They had it every where on
signs.  No other princes had stopped there since, till Jack and I came.
We went abroad through the town, then, and found it a city of huge
commercial buildings, and broad, handsome streets brilliant with
gas-light.  By night it was a sort of reminiscence of Paris.  But finally
Jack found an ice-cream saloon, and that closed investigations for that
evening.  The weather was very hot, it had been many a day since Jack had
seen ice-cream, and so it was useless to talk of leaving the saloon till
it shut up.

In the morning the lost tribes of America came ashore and infested the
hotels and took possession of all the donkeys and other open barouches
that offered.  They went in picturesque procession to the American
Consul's; to the great gardens; to Cleopatra's Needles; to Pompey's
Pillar; to the palace of the Viceroy of Egypt; to the Nile; to the superb
groves of date-palms.  One of our most inveterate relic-hunters had his
hammer with him, and tried to break a fragment off the upright Needle and
could not do it; he tried the prostrate one and failed; he borrowed a
heavy sledge hammer from a mason and tried again.  He tried Pompey's
Pillar, and this baffled him.  Scattered all about the mighty monolith
were sphinxes of noble countenance, carved out of Egyptian granite as
hard as blue steel, and whose shapely features the wear of five thousand
years had failed to mark or mar.  The relic-hunter battered at these
persistently, and sweated profusely over his work.  He might as well have
attempted to deface the moon.  They regarded him serenely with the
stately smile they had worn so long, and which seemed to say, "Peck away,
poor insect; we were not made to fear such as you; in ten-score dragging
ages we have seen more of your kind than there are sands at your feet:
have they left a blemish upon us?"

But I am forgetting the Jaffa Colonists.  At Jaffa we had taken on board
some forty members of a very celebrated community.  They were male and
female; babies, young boys and young girls; young married people, and
some who had passed a shade beyond the prime of life.  I refer to the
"Adams Jaffa Colony."  Others had deserted before.  We left in Jaffa Mr.
Adams, his wife, and fifteen unfortunates who not only had no money but
did not know where to turn or whither to go.  Such was the statement made
to us.  Our forty were miserable enough in the first place, and they lay
about the decks seasick all the voyage, which about completed their
misery, I take it.  However, one or two young men remained upright, and
by constant persecution we wormed out of them some little information.
They gave it reluctantly and in a very fragmentary condition, for, having
been shamefully humbugged by their prophet, they felt humiliated and
unhappy.  In such circumstances people do not like to talk.

The colony was a complete fiasco.  I have already said that such as could
get away did so, from time to time.  The prophet Adams--once an actor,
then several other things, afterward a Mormon and a missionary, always an
adventurer--remains at Jaffa with his handful of sorrowful subjects.  The
forty we brought away with us were chiefly destitute, though not all of
them.  They wished to get to Egypt.  What might become of them then they
did not know and probably did not care--any thing to get away from hated
Jaffa.  They had little to hope for.  Because after many appeals to the
sympathies of New England, made by strangers of Boston, through the
newspapers, and after the establishment of an office there for the
reception of moneyed contributions for the Jaffa colonists, One Dollar
was subscribed.  The consul-general for Egypt showed me the newspaper
paragraph which mentioned the circumstance and mentioned also the
discontinuance of the effort and the closing of the office.  It was
evident that practical New England was not sorry to be rid of such
visionaries and was not in the least inclined to hire any body to bring
them back to her.  Still, to get to Egypt, was something, in the eyes of
the unfortunate colonists, hopeless as the prospect seemed of ever
getting further.

Thus circumstanced, they landed at Alexandria from our ship.  One of our
passengers, Mr. Moses S. Beach, of the New York Sun, inquired of the
consul-general what it would cost to send these people to their home in
Maine by the way of Liverpool, and he said fifteen hundred dollars in
gold would do it.  Mr. Beach gave his check for the money and so the
troubles of the Jaffa colonists were at an end.--[It was an unselfish
act of benevolence; it was done without any ostentation, and has never
been mentioned in any newspaper, I think.  Therefore it is refreshing to
learn now, several months after the above narrative was written, that
another man received all the credit of this rescue of the colonists.
Such is life.]

Alexandria was too much like a European city to be novel, and we soon
tired of it.  We took the cars and came up here to ancient Cairo, which
is an Oriental city and of the completest pattern.  There is little about
it to disabuse one's mind of the error if he should take it into his head
that he was in the heart of Arabia.  Stately camels and dromedaries,
swarthy Egyptians, and likewise Turks and black Ethiopians, turbaned,
sashed, and blazing in a rich variety of Oriental costumes of all shades
of flashy colors, are what one sees on every hand crowding the narrow
streets and the honeycombed bazaars.  We are stopping at Shepherd's
Hotel, which is the worst on earth except the one I stopped at once in a
small town in the United States.  It is pleasant to read this sketch in
my note-book, now, and know that I can stand Shepherd's Hotel, sure,
because I have been in one just like it in America and survived:

     I stopped at the Benton House.  It used to be a good hotel, but that
     proves nothing--I used to be a good boy, for that matter.  Both of
     us have lost character of late years.  The Benton is not a good
     hotel.  The Benton lacks a very great deal of being a good hotel.
     Perdition is full of better hotels than the Benton.

     It was late at night when I got there, and I told the clerk I would
     like plenty of lights, because I wanted to read an hour or two.
     When I reached No. 15 with the porter (we came along a dim hall that
     was clad in ancient carpeting, faded, worn out in many places, and
     patched with old scraps of oil cloth--a hall that sank under one's
     feet, and creaked dismally to every footstep,) he struck a light
--     two inches of sallow, sorrowful, consumptive tallow candle, that
     burned blue, and sputtered, and got discouraged and went out.  The
     porter lit it again, and I asked if that was all the light the clerk
     sent.  He said, "Oh no, I've got another one here," and he produced
     another couple of inches of tallow candle.  I said, "Light them both
     --I'll have to have one to see the other by."  He did it, but the
     result was drearier than darkness itself.  He was a cheery,
     accommodating rascal.  He said he would go "somewheres" and steal a
     lamp.  I abetted and encouraged him in his criminal design.  I heard
     the landlord get after him in the hall ten minutes afterward.

     "Where are you going with that lamp?"

     "Fifteen wants it, sir."

     "Fifteen! why he's got a double lot of candles--does the man want
     to illuminate the house?--does he want to get up a torch-light
     procession?--what is he up to, any how?"

     "He don't like them candles--says he wants a lamp."

     "Why what in the nation does----why I never heard of such a thing?
     What on earth can he want with that lamp?"

     "Well, he only wants to read--that's what he says."

     "Wants to read, does he?--ain't satisfied with a thousand candles,
     but has to have a lamp!--I do wonder what the devil that fellow
     wants that lamp for?  Take him another candle, and then if----"

     "But he wants the lamp--says he'll burn the d--d old house down if
     he don't get a lamp!" (a remark which I never made.)

     "I'd like to see him at it once.  Well, you take it along--but I
     swear it beats my time, though--and see if you can't find out what
     in the very nation he wants with that lamp."

     And he went off growling to himself and still wondering and
     wondering over the unaccountable conduct of No. 15.  The lamp was a
     good one, but it revealed some disagreeable things--a bed in the
     suburbs of a desert of room--a bed that had hills and valleys in it,
     and you'd have to accommodate your body to the impression left in it
     by the man that slept there last, before you could lie comfortably;
     a carpet that had seen better days; a melancholy washstand in a
     remote corner, and a dejected pitcher on it sorrowing over a broken
     nose; a looking-glass split across the centre, which chopped your
     head off at the chin and made you look like some dreadful unfinished
     monster or other; the paper peeling in shreds from the walls.

     I sighed and said: "This is charming; and now don't you think you
     could get me something to read?"

     The porter said, "Oh, certainly; the old man's got dead loads of
     books;" and he was gone before I could tell him what sort of
     literature I would rather have.  And yet his countenance expressed
     the utmost confidence in his ability to execute the commission with
     credit to himself.  The old man made a descent on him.

     "What are you going to do with that pile of books?"

     "Fifteen wants 'em, sir."

     "Fifteen, is it?  He'll want a warming-pan, next--he'll want a
     nurse!  Take him every thing there is in the house--take him the
     bar-keeper--take him the baggage-wagon--take him a chamber-maid!
     Confound me, I never saw any thing like it.  What did he say he
     wants with those books?"

     "Wants to read 'em, like enough; it ain't likely he wants to eat
     'em, I don't reckon."

     "Wants to read 'em--wants to read 'em this time of night, the
     infernal lunatic!  Well, he can't have them."

     "But he says he's mor'ly bound to have 'em; he says he'll just go
     a-rairin' and a-chargin' through this house and raise more--well,
     there's no tellin' what he won't do if he don't get 'em; because
     he's drunk and crazy and desperate, and nothing'll soothe him down
     but them cussed books."  [I had not made any threats, and was not in
     the condition ascribed to me by the porter.]

     "Well, go on; but I will be around when he goes to rairing and
     charging, and the first rair he makes I'll make him rair out of the
     window."  And then the old gentleman went off, growling as before.

     The genius of that porter was something wonderful.  He put an armful
     of books on the bed and said "Good night" as confidently as if he
     knew perfectly well that those books were exactly my style of
     reading matter.  And well he might.  His selection covered the whole
     range of legitimate literature.  It comprised "The Great
     Consummation," by Rev. Dr. Cummings--theology; "Revised Statutes of
     the State of Missouri"--law; "The Complete Horse-Doctor"--medicine;
     "The Toilers of the Sea," by Victor Hugo--romance; "The works of
     William Shakspeare"--poetry.  I shall never cease to admire the tact
     and the intelligence of that gifted porter.

But all the donkeys in Christendom, and most of the Egyptian boys, I
think, are at the door, and there is some noise going on, not to put it
in stronger language.--We are about starting to the illustrious Pyramids
of Egypt, and the donkeys for the voyage are under inspection.  I will go
and select one before the choice animals are all taken.



CHAPTER LVIII.

The donkeys were all good, all handsome, all strong and in good
condition, all fast and all willing to prove it.  They were the best we
had found any where, and the most 'recherche'.  I do not know what
'recherche' is, but that is what these donkeys were, anyhow.  Some
were of a soft mouse-color, and the others were white, black, and
vari-colored.  Some were close-shaven, all over, except that a tuft like
a paint-brush was left on the end of the tail.  Others were so shaven in
fanciful landscape garden patterns, as to mark their bodies with curving
lines, which were bounded on one side by hair and on the other by the
close plush left by the shears.  They had all been newly barbered, and
were exceedingly stylish.  Several of the white ones were barred like
zebras with rainbow stripes of blue and red and yellow paint.  These
were indescribably gorgeous.  Dan and Jack selected from this lot
because they brought back Italian reminiscences of the "old masters."
The saddles were the high, stuffy, frog-shaped things we had known in
Ephesus and Smyrna.  The donkey-boys were lively young Egyptian rascals
who could follow a donkey and keep him in a canter half a day without
tiring.  We had plenty of spectators when we mounted, for the hotel was
full of English people bound overland to India and officers getting
ready for the African campaign against the Abyssinian King Theodorus.
We were not a very large party, but as we charged through the streets of
the great metropolis, we made noise for five hundred, and displayed
activity and created excitement in proportion.  Nobody can steer a
donkey, and some collided with camels, dervishes, effendis, asses,
beggars and every thing else that offered to the donkeys a reasonable
chance for a collision. When we turned into the broad avenue that leads
out of the city toward Old Cairo, there was plenty of room.  The walls
of stately date-palms that fenced the gardens and bordered the way,
threw their shadows down and made the air cool and bracing.  We rose to
the spirit of the time and the race became a wild rout, a stampede, a
terrific panic.  I wish to live to enjoy it again.

Somewhere along this route we had a few startling exhibitions of Oriental
simplicity.  A girl apparently thirteen years of age came along the great
thoroughfare dressed like Eve before the fall.  We would have called her
thirteen at home; but here girls who look thirteen are often not more
than nine, in reality.  Occasionally we saw stark-naked men of superb
build, bathing, and making no attempt at concealment.  However, an hour's
acquaintance with this cheerful custom reconciled the pilgrims to it, and
then it ceased to occasion remark.  Thus easily do even the most
startling novelties grow tame and spiritless to these sight-surfeited
wanderers.

Arrived at Old Cairo, the camp-followers took up the donkeys and tumbled
them bodily aboard a small boat with a lateen sail, and we followed and
got under way.  The deck was closely packed with donkeys and men; the two
sailors had to climb over and under and through the wedged mass to work
the sails, and the steersman had to crowd four or five donkeys out of the
way when he wished to swing his tiller and put his helm hard-down.  But
what were their troubles to us?  We had nothing to do; nothing to do but
enjoy the trip; nothing to do but shove the donkeys off our corns and
look at the charming scenery of the Nile.

On the island at our right was the machine they call the Nilometer, a
stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of the river and
prophecy whether it will reach only thirty-two feet and produce a famine,
or whether it will properly flood the land at forty and produce plenty,
or whether it will rise to forty-three and bring death and destruction to
flocks and crops--but how it does all this they could not explain to us
so that we could understand.  On the same island is still shown the spot
where Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes.  Near the spot we
sailed from, the Holy Family dwelt when they sojourned in Egypt till
Herod should complete his slaughter of the innocents.  The same tree they
rested under when they first arrived, was there a short time ago, but the
Viceroy of Egypt sent it to the Empress Eugenie lately.  He was just in
time, otherwise our pilgrims would have had it.

The Nile at this point is muddy, swift and turbid, and does not lack a
great deal of being as wide as the Mississippi.

We scrambled up the steep bank at the shabby town of Ghizeh, mounted the
donkeys again, and scampered away.  For four or five miles the route lay
along a high embankment which they say is to be the bed of a railway the
Sultan means to build for no other reason than that when the Empress of
the French comes to visit him she can go to the Pyramids in comfort.
This is true Oriental hospitality.  I am very glad it is our privilege to
have donkeys instead of cars.

At the distance of a few miles the Pyramids rising above the palms,
looked very clean-cut, very grand and imposing, and very soft and filmy,
as well.  They swam in a rich haze that took from them all suggestions of
unfeeling stone, and made them seem only the airy nothings of a dream
--structures which might blossom into tiers of vague arches, or ornate
colonnades, may be, and change and change again, into all graceful forms
of architecture, while we looked, and then melt deliciously away and
blend with the tremulous atmosphere.

At the end of the levee we left the mules and went in a sailboat across
an arm of the Nile or an overflow, and landed where the sands of the
Great Sahara left their embankment, as straight as a wall, along the
verge of the alluvial plain of the river.  A laborious walk in the
flaming sun brought us to the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops.  It
was a fairy vision no longer.  It was a corrugated, unsightly mountain of
stone.  Each of its monstrous sides was a wide stairway which rose
upward, step above step, narrowing as it went, till it tapered to a point
far aloft in the air.  Insect men and women--pilgrims from the Quaker
City--were creeping about its dizzy perches, and one little black swarm
were waving postage stamps from the airy summit--handkerchiefs will be
understood.

Of course we were besieged by a rabble of muscular Egyptians and Arabs
who wanted the contract of dragging us to the top--all tourists are.  Of
course you could not hear your own voice for the din that was around you.
Of course the Sheiks said they were the only responsible parties; that
all contracts must be made with them, all moneys paid over to them, and
none exacted from us by any but themselves alone.  Of course they
contracted that the varlets who dragged us up should not mention
bucksheesh once.  For such is the usual routine.  Of course we contracted
with them, paid them, were delivered into the hands of the draggers,
dragged up the Pyramids, and harried and be-deviled for bucksheesh from
the foundation clear to the summit.  We paid it, too, for we were
purposely spread very far apart over the vast side of the Pyramid.  There
was no help near if we called, and the Herculeses who dragged us had a
way of asking sweetly and flatteringly for bucksheesh, which was
seductive, and of looking fierce and threatening to throw us down the
precipice, which was persuasive and convincing.

Each step being full as high as a dinner-table; there being very, very
many of the steps; an Arab having hold of each of our arms and springing
upward from step to step and snatching us with them, forcing us to lift
our feet as high as our breasts every time, and do it rapidly and keep it
up till we were ready to faint, who shall say it is not lively,
exhilarating, lacerating, muscle-straining, bone-wrenching and perfectly
excruciating and exhausting pastime, climbing the Pyramids?  I beseeched
the varlets not to twist all my joints asunder; I iterated, reiterated,
even swore to them that I did not wish to beat any body to the top; did
all I could to convince them that if I got there the last of all I would
feel blessed above men and grateful to them forever; I begged them,
prayed them, pleaded with them to let me stop and rest a moment--only one
little moment: and they only answered with some more frightful springs,
and an unenlisted volunteer behind opened a bombardment of determined
boosts with his head which threatened to batter my whole political
economy to wreck and ruin.

Twice, for one minute, they let me rest while they extorted bucksheesh,
and then continued their maniac flight up the Pyramid.  They wished to
beat the other parties.  It was nothing to them that I, a stranger, must
be sacrificed upon the altar of their unholy ambition.  But in the midst
of sorrow, joy blooms.  Even in this dark hour I had a sweet consolation.
For I knew that except these Mohammedans repented they would go straight
to perdition some day.  And they never repent--they never forsake their
paganism.  This thought calmed me, cheered me, and I sank down, limp and
exhausted, upon the summit, but happy, so happy and serene within.

On the one hand, a mighty sea of yellow sand stretched away toward the
ends of the earth, solemn, silent, shorn of vegetation, its solitude
uncheered by any forms of creature life; on the other, the Eden of Egypt
was spread below us--a broad green floor, cloven by the sinuous river,
dotted with villages, its vast distances measured and marked by the
diminishing stature of receding clusters of palms.  It lay asleep in an
enchanted atmosphere.  There was no sound, no motion.  Above the
date-plumes in the middle distance, swelled a domed and pinnacled mass,
glimmering through a tinted, exquisite mist; away toward the horizon a
dozen shapely pyramids watched over ruined Memphis: and at our feet the
bland impassible Sphynx looked out upon the picture from her throne in
the sands as placidly and pensively as she had looked upon its like full
fifty lagging centuries ago.

We suffered torture no pen can describe from the hungry appeals for
bucksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes and poured incessantly from Arab
lips.  Why try to call up the traditions of vanished Egyptian grandeur;
why try to fancy Egypt following dead Rameses to his tomb in the Pyramid,
or the long multitude of Israel departing over the desert yonder?  Why
try to think at all?  The thing was impossible.  One must bring his
meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them afterward.

The traditional Arab proposed, in the traditional way, to run down
Cheops, cross the eighth of a mile of sand intervening between it and the
tall pyramid of Cephron, ascend to Cephron's summit and return to us on
the top of Cheops--all in nine minutes by the watch, and the whole
service to be rendered for a single dollar.  In the first flush of
irritation, I said let the Arab and his exploits go to the mischief.
But stay.  The upper third of Cephron was coated with dressed marble,
smooth as glass.  A blessed thought entered my brain.  He must infallibly
break his neck.  Close the contract with dispatch, I said, and let him
go.  He started.  We watched.  He went bounding down the vast broadside,
spring after spring, like an ibex.  He grew small and smaller till he
became a bobbing pigmy, away down toward the bottom--then disappeared.
We turned and peered over the other side--forty seconds--eighty seconds
--a hundred--happiness, he is dead already!--two minutes--and a quarter
--"There he goes!"  Too true--it was too true.  He was very small, now.
Gradually, but surely, he overcame the level ground.  He began to spring
and climb again.  Up, up, up--at last he reached the smooth coating--now
for it.  But he clung to it with toes and fingers, like a fly.  He
crawled this way and that--away to the right, slanting upward--away to
the left, still slanting upward--and stood at last, a black peg on the
summit, and waved his pigmy scarf!  Then he crept downward to the raw
steps again, then picked up his agile heels and flew.  We lost him
presently.  But presently again we saw him under us, mounting with
undiminished energy.  Shortly he bounded into our midst with a gallant
war-whoop.  Time, eight minutes, forty-one seconds.  He had won.  His
bones were intact.  It was a failure.  I reflected.  I said to myself, he
is tired, and must grow dizzy.  I will risk another dollar on him.

He started again.  Made the trip again.  Slipped on the smooth coating
--I almost had him.  But an infamous crevice saved him.  He was with us
once more--perfectly sound.  Time, eight minutes, forty-six seconds.

I said to Dan, "Lend me a dollar--I can beat this game, yet."

Worse and worse.  He won again.  Time, eight minutes, forty-eight
seconds.  I was out of all patience, now.  I was desperate.--Money was
no longer of any consequence.  I said, "Sirrah, I will give you a hundred
dollars to jump off this pyramid head first.  If you do not like the
terms, name your bet.  I scorn to stand on expenses now.  I will stay
right here and risk money on you as long as Dan has got a cent."

I was in a fair way to win, now, for it was a dazzling opportunity for an
Arab.  He pondered a moment, and would have done it, I think, but his
mother arrived, then, and interfered.  Her tears moved me--I never can
look upon the tears of woman with indifference--and I said I would give
her a hundred to jump off, too.

But it was a failure.  The Arabs are too high-priced in Egypt.  They put
on airs unbecoming to such savages.

We descended, hot and out of humor.  The dragoman lit candles, and we all
entered a hole near the base of the pyramid, attended by a crazy rabble
of Arabs who thrust their services upon us uninvited.  They dragged us up
a long inclined chute, and dripped candle-grease all over us.  This chute
was not more than twice as wide and high as a Saratoga trunk, and was
walled, roofed and floored with solid blocks of Egyptian granite as wide
as a wardrobe, twice as thick and three times as long.  We kept on
climbing, through the oppressive gloom, till I thought we ought to be
nearing the top of the pyramid again, and then came to the "Queen's
Chamber," and shortly to the Chamber of the King.  These large apartments
were tombs.  The walls were built of monstrous masses of smoothed
granite, neatly joined together.  Some of them were nearly as large
square as an ordinary parlor.  A great stone sarcophagus like a bath-tub
stood in the centre of the King's Chamber.  Around it were gathered a
picturesque group of Arab savages and soiled and tattered pilgrims, who
held their candles aloft in the gloom while they chattered, and the
winking blurs of light shed a dim glory down upon one of the
irrepressible memento-seekers who was pecking at the venerable
sarcophagus with his sacrilegious hammer.

We struggled out to the open air and the bright sunshine, and for the
space of thirty minutes received ragged Arabs by couples, dozens and
platoons, and paid them bucksheesh for services they swore and proved by
each other that they had rendered, but which we had not been aware of
before--and as each party was paid, they dropped into the rear of the
procession and in due time arrived again with a newly-invented delinquent
list for liquidation.

We lunched in the shade of the pyramid, and in the midst of this
encroaching and unwelcome company, and then Dan and Jack and I started
away for a walk.  A howling swarm of beggars followed us--surrounded us
--almost headed us off.  A sheik, in flowing white bournous and gaudy
head-gear, was with them.  He wanted more bucksheesh.  But we had
adopted a new code--it was millions for defense, but not a cent for
bucksheesh.  I asked him if he could persuade the others to depart if we
paid him.  He said yes--for ten francs.  We accepted the contract, and
said--

"Now persuade your vassals to fall back."

He swung his long staff round his head and three Arabs bit the dust.  He
capered among the mob like a very maniac.  His blows fell like hail, and
wherever one fell a subject went down.  We had to hurry to the rescue and
tell him it was only necessary to damage them a little, he need not kill
them.--In two minutes we were alone with the sheik, and remained so.
The persuasive powers of this illiterate savage were remarkable.

Each side of the Pyramid of Cheops is about as long as the Capitol at
Washington, or the Sultan's new palace on the Bosporus, and is longer
than the greatest depth of St. Peter's at Rome--which is to say that each
side of Cheops extends seven hundred and some odd feet.  It is about
seventy-five feet higher than the cross on St. Peter's.  The first time I
ever went down the Mississippi, I thought the highest bluff on the river
between St. Louis and New Orleans--it was near Selma, Missouri--was
probably the highest mountain in the world.  It is four hundred and
thirteen feet high.  It still looms in my memory with undiminished
grandeur.  I can still see the trees and bushes growing smaller and
smaller as I followed them up its huge slant with my eye, till they
became a feathery fringe on the distant summit.  This symmetrical Pyramid
of Cheops--this solid mountain of stone reared by the patient hands of
men--this mighty tomb of a forgotten monarch--dwarfs my cherished
mountain.  For it is four hundred and eighty feet high.  In still earlier
years than those I have been recalling, Holliday's Hill, in our town, was
to me the noblest work of God.  It appeared to pierce the skies.  It was
nearly three hundred feet high.  In those days I pondered the subject
much, but I never could understand why it did not swathe its summit with
never-failing clouds, and crown its majestic brow with everlasting snows.
I had heard that such was the custom of great mountains in other parts of
the world.  I remembered how I worked with another boy, at odd afternoons
stolen from study and paid for with stripes, to undermine and start from
its bed an immense boulder that rested upon the edge of that hilltop; I
remembered how, one Saturday afternoon, we gave three hours of honest
effort to the task, and saw at last that our reward was at hand; I
remembered how we sat down, then, and wiped the perspiration away, and
waited to let a picnic party get out of the way in the road below--and
then we started the boulder.  It was splendid.  It went crashing down the
hillside, tearing up saplings, mowing bushes down like grass, ripping and
crushing and smashing every thing in its path--eternally splintered and
scattered a wood pile at the foot of the hill, and then sprang from the
high bank clear over a dray in the road--the negro glanced up once and
dodged--and the next second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame
cooper-shop, and the coopers swarmed out like bees.  Then we said it was
perfectly magnificent, and left.  Because the coopers were starting up
the hill to inquire.

Still, that mountain, prodigious as it was, was nothing to the Pyramid of
Cheops.  I could conjure up no comparison that would convey to my mind a
satisfactory comprehension of the magnitude of a pile of monstrous stones
that covered thirteen acres of ground and stretched upward four hundred
and eighty tiresome feet, and so I gave it up and walked down to the
Sphynx.

After years of waiting, it was before me at last.  The great face was so
sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient.  There was a dignity not of
earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any
thing human wore.  It was stone, but it seemed sentient.  If ever image
of stone thought, it was thinking.  It was looking toward the verge of
the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing but distance and vacancy.
It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into
the past.  It was gazing out over the ocean of Time--over lines of
century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and
nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward
the horizon of remote antiquity.  It was thinking of the wars of departed
ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations
whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose
annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the
grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years.  It was the
type of an attribute of man--of a faculty of his heart and brain.  It was
MEMORY--RETROSPECTION--wrought into visible, tangible form.  All who know
what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces
that have vanished--albeit only a trifling score of years gone by--will
have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that
look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before History was
born--before Tradition had being--things that were, and forms that moved,
in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know of--and passed
one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a
strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes.

The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude;
it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story.  And there is
that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with
its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one
something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful
presence of God.

There are some things which, for the credit of America, should be left
unsaid, perhaps; but these very things happen sometimes to be the very
things which, for the real benefit of Americans, ought to have prominent
notice.  While we stood looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind,
appeared on the jaw of the Sphynx.  We heard the familiar clink of a
hammer, and understood the case at once.  One of our well meaning
reptiles--I mean relic-hunters--had crawled up there and was trying to
break a "specimen" from the face of this the most majestic creation the
hand of man has wrought.  But the great image contemplated the dead ages
as calmly as ever, unconscious of the small insect that was fretting at
its jaw.  Egyptian granite that has defied the storms and earthquakes of
all time has nothing to fear from the tack-hammers of ignorant
excursionists--highwaymen like this specimen.  He failed in his
enterprise.  We sent a sheik to arrest him if he had the authority, or to
warn him, if he had not, that by the laws of Egypt the crime he was
attempting to commit was punishable with imprisonment or the bastinado.
Then he desisted and went away.

The Sphynx: a hundred and twenty-five feet long, sixty feet high, and a
hundred and two feet around the head, if I remember rightly--carved out
of one solid block of stone harder than any iron.  The block must have
been as large as the Fifth Avenue Hotel before the usual waste (by the
necessities of sculpture) of a fourth or a half of the original mass was
begun.  I only set down these figures and these remarks to suggest the
prodigious labor the carving of it so elegantly, so symmetrically, so
faultlessly, must have cost.  This species of stone is so hard that
figures cut in it remain sharp and unmarred after exposure to the weather
for two or three thousand years.  Now did it take a hundred years of
patient toil to carve the Sphynx?  It seems probable.

Something interfered, and we did not visit the Red Sea and walk upon the
sands of Arabia.  I shall not describe the great mosque of Mehemet Ali,
whose entire inner walls are built of polished and glistening alabaster;
I shall not tell how the little birds have built their nests in the
globes of the great chandeliers that hang in the mosque, and how they
fill the whole place with their music and are not afraid of any body
because their audacity is pardoned, their rights are respected, and
nobody is allowed to interfere with them, even though the mosque be thus
doomed to go unlighted; I certainly shall not tell the hackneyed story of
the massacre of the Mamelukes, because I am glad the lawless rascals were
massacred, and I do not wish to get up any sympathy in their behalf; I
shall not tell how that one solitary Mameluke jumped his horse a hundred
feet down from the battlements of the citadel and escaped, because I do
not think much of that--I could have done it myself; I shall not tell of
Joseph's well which he dug in the solid rock of the citadel hill and
which is still as good as new, nor how the same mules he bought to draw
up the water (with an endless chain) are still at it yet and are getting
tired of it, too; I shall not tell about Joseph's granaries which he
built to store the grain in, what time the Egyptian brokers were "selling
short," unwitting that there would be no corn in all the land when it
should be time for them to deliver; I shall not tell any thing about the
strange, strange city of Cairo, because it is only a repetition, a good
deal intensified and exaggerated, of the Oriental cities I have already
spoken of; I shall not tell of the Great Caravan which leaves for Mecca
every year, for I did not see it; nor of the fashion the people have of
prostrating themselves and so forming a long human pavement to be ridden
over by the chief of the expedition on its return, to the end that their
salvation may be thus secured, for I did not see that either; I shall not
speak of the railway, for it is like any other railway--I shall only say
that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three
thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that
purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out
pettishly, "D--n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent--pass out
a King;"--[Stated to me for a fact.  I only tell it as I got it.  I am
willing to believe it.  I can believe any thing.]--I shall not tell of
the groups of mud cones stuck like wasps' nests upon a thousand mounds
above high water-mark the length and breadth of Egypt--villages of the
lower classes; I shall not speak of the boundless sweep of level plain,
green with luxuriant grain, that gladdens the eye as far as it can pierce
through the soft, rich atmosphere of Egypt; I shall not speak of the
vision of the Pyramids seen at a distance of five and twenty miles, for
the picture is too ethereal to be limned by an uninspired pen; I shall
not tell of the crowds of dusky women who flocked to the cars when they
stopped a moment at a station, to sell us a drink of water or a ruddy,
juicy pomegranate; I shall not tell of the motley multitudes and wild
costumes that graced a fair we found in full blast at another barbarous
station; I shall not tell how we feasted on fresh dates and enjoyed the
pleasant landscape all through the flying journey; nor how we thundered
into Alexandria, at last, swarmed out of the cars, rowed aboard the ship,
left a comrade behind, (who was to return to Europe, thence home,) raised
the anchor, and turned our bows homeward finally and forever from the
long voyage; nor how, as the mellow sun went down upon the oldest land on
earth, Jack and Moult assembled in solemn state in the smoking-room and
mourned over the lost comrade the whole night long, and would not be
comforted.  I shall not speak a word of any of these things, or write a
line.  They shall be as a sealed book.  I do not know what a sealed book
is, because I never saw one, but a sealed book is the expression to use
in this connection, because it is popular.

We were glad to have seen the land which was the mother of civilization
--which taught Greece her letters, and through Greece Rome, and through
Rome the world; the land which could have humanized and civilized the
hapless children of Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders
little better than savages.  We were glad to have seen that land which
had an enlightened religion with future eternal rewards and punishment in
it, while even Israel's religion contained no promise of a hereafter.
We were glad to have seen that land which had glass three thousand years
before England had it, and could paint upon it as none of us can paint
now; that land which knew, three thousand years ago, well nigh all of
medicine and surgery which science has discovered lately; which had all
those curious surgical instruments which science has invented recently;
which had in high excellence a thousand luxuries and necessities of an
advanced civilization which we have gradually contrived and accumulated
in modern times and claimed as things that were new under the sun; that
had paper untold centuries before we dreampt of it--and waterfalls before
our women thought of them; that had a perfect system of common schools so
long before we boasted of our achievements in that direction that it
seems forever and forever ago; that so embalmed the dead that flesh was
made almost immortal--which we can not do; that built temples which mock
at destroying time and smile grimly upon our lauded little prodigies of
architecture; that old land that knew all which we know now, perchance,
and more; that walked in the broad highway of civilization in the gray
dawn of creation, ages and ages before we were born; that left the
impress of exalted, cultivated Mind upon the eternal front of the Sphynx
to confound all scoffers who, when all her other proofs had passed away,
might seek to persuade the world that imperial Egypt, in the days of her
high renown, had groped in darkness.



CHAPTER LIX.

We were at sea now, for a very long voyage--we were to pass through the
entire length of the Levant; through the entire length of the
Mediterranean proper, also, and then cross the full width of the
Atlantic--a voyage of several weeks.  We naturally settled down into a
very slow, stay-at-home manner of life, and resolved to be quiet,
exemplary people, and roam no more for twenty or thirty days.  No more,
at least, than from stem to stern of the ship.  It was a very comfortable
prospect, though, for we were tired and needed a long rest.

We were all lazy and satisfied, now, as the meager entries in my
note-book (that sure index, to me, of my condition), prove.  What a
stupid thing a note-book gets to be at sea, any way.  Please observe the
style:

     "Sunday--Services, as usual, at four bells.  Services at night,
     also.  No cards.

     "Monday--Beautiful day, but rained hard.  The cattle purchased at
     Alexandria for beef ought to be shingled.  Or else fattened.  The
     water stands in deep puddles in the depressions forward of their
     after shoulders.  Also here and there all over their backs.  It is
     well they are not cows--it would soak in and ruin the milk.  The
     poor devil eagle--[Afterwards presented to the Central Park.]--from
     Syria looks miserable and droopy in the rain, perched on the forward
     capstan.  He appears to have his own opinion of a sea voyage, and if
     it were put into language and the language solidified, it would
     probably essentially dam the widest river in the world.

     "Tuesday--Somewhere in the neighborhood of the island of Malta.  Can
     not stop there.  Cholera.  Weather very stormy.  Many passengers
     seasick and invisible.

     "Wednesday--Weather still very savage.  Storm blew two land birds to
     sea, and they came on board.  A hawk was blown off, also.  He
     circled round and round the ship, wanting to light, but afraid of
     the people.  He was so tired, though, that he had to light, at last,
     or perish.  He stopped in the foretop, repeatedly, and was as often
     blown away by the wind.  At last Harry caught him.  Sea full of
     flying-fish.  They rise in flocks of three hundred and flash along
     above the tops of the waves a distance of two or three hundred feet,
     then fall and disappear.

     "Thursday--Anchored off Algiers, Africa.  Beautiful city, beautiful
     green hilly landscape behind it.  Staid half a day and left.  Not
     permitted to land, though we showed a clean bill of health.  They
     were afraid of Egyptian plague and cholera.

     "Friday--Morning, dominoes.  Afternoon, dominoes.  Evening,
     promenading the deck.  Afterwards, charades.

     "Saturday--Morning, dominoes.  Afternoon, dominoes.  Evening,
     promenading the decks.  Afterwards, dominoes.

     "Sunday--Morning service, four bells.  Evening service, eight bells.
     Monotony till midnight.--Whereupon, dominoes.

     "Monday--Morning, dominoes.  Afternoon, dominoes.  Evening,
     promenading the decks.  Afterward, charades and a lecture from Dr.
     C. Dominoes.

     "No date--Anchored off the picturesque city of Cagliari, Sardinia.
     Staid till midnight, but not permitted to land by these infamous
     foreigners.  They smell inodorously--they do not wash--they dare not
     risk cholera.

     "Thursday--Anchored off the beautiful cathedral city of Malaga,
     Spain.--Went ashore in the captain's boat--not ashore, either, for
     they would not let us land.  Quarantine.  Shipped my newspaper
     correspondence, which they took with tongs, dipped it in sea water,
     clipped it full of holes, and then fumigated it with villainous
     vapors till it smelt like a Spaniard.  Inquired about chances to run
     to blockade and visit the Alhambra at Granada.  Too risky--they
     might hang a body.  Set sail--middle of afternoon.

     "And so on, and so on, and so forth, for several days.  Finally,
     anchored off Gibraltar, which looks familiar and home-like."

It reminds me of the journal I opened with the New Year, once, when I was
a boy and a confiding and a willing prey to those impossible schemes of
reform which well-meaning old maids and grandmothers set for the feet of
unwary youths at that season of the year--setting oversized tasks for
them, which, necessarily failing, as infallibly weaken the boy's strength
of will, diminish his confidence in himself and injure his chances of
success in life.  Please accept of an extract:

     "Monday--Got up, washed, went to bed.
     "Tuesday--Got up, washed, went to bed.
     "Wednesday--Got up, washed, went to bed.
     "Thursday--Got up, washed, went to bed.
     "Friday--Got up, washed, went to bed.
     "Next Friday--Got up, washed, went to bed.
     "Friday fortnight--Got up, washed, went to bed.
     "Following month--Got up, washed, went to bed."

I stopped, then, discouraged.  Startling events appeared to be too rare,
in my career, to render a diary necessary.  I still reflect with pride,
however, that even at that early age I washed when I got up.  That
journal finished me.  I never have had the nerve to keep one since.  My
loss of confidence in myself in that line was permanent.

The ship had to stay a week or more at Gibraltar to take in coal for the
home voyage.

It would be very tiresome staying here, and so four of us ran the
quarantine blockade and spent seven delightful days in Seville, Cordova,
Cadiz, and wandering through the pleasant rural scenery of Andalusia, the
garden of Old Spain.  The experiences of that cheery week were too varied
and numerous for a short chapter and I have not room for a long one.
Therefore I shall leave them all out.



CHAPTER LX.

Ten or eleven o'clock found us coming down to breakfast one morning in
Cadiz.  They told us the ship had been lying at anchor in the harbor two
or three hours.  It was time for us to bestir ourselves.  The ship could
wait only a little while because of the quarantine.  We were soon on
board, and within the hour the white city and the pleasant shores of
Spain sank down behind the waves and passed out of sight.  We had seen no
land fade from view so regretfully.

It had long ago been decided in a noisy public meeting in the main cabin
that we could not go to Lisbon, because we must surely be quarantined
there.  We did every thing by mass-meeting, in the good old national way,
from swapping off one empire for another on the programme of the voyage
down to complaining of the cookery and the scarcity of napkins.  I am
reminded, now, of one of these complaints of the cookery made by a
passenger.  The coffee had been steadily growing more and more execrable
for the space of three weeks, till at last it had ceased to be coffee
altogether and had assumed the nature of mere discolored water--so this
person said.  He said it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in
depth around the edge of the cup.  As he approached the table one morning
he saw the transparent edge--by means of his extraordinary vision long
before he got to his seat.  He went back and complained in a high-handed
way to Capt.  Duncan.  He said the coffee was disgraceful.  The Captain
showed his.  It seemed tolerably good.  The incipient mutineer was more
outraged than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown
the captain's table over the other tables in the ship.  He flourished
back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, and said:

"Just try that mixture once, Captain Duncan."

He smelt it--tasted it--smiled benignantly--then said:

"It is inferior--for coffee--but it is pretty fair tea."

The humbled mutineer smelt it, tasted it, and returned to his seat.  He
had made an egregious ass of himself before the whole ship.  He did it no
more.  After that he took things as they came.  That was me.

The old-fashioned ship-life had returned, now that we were no longer in
sight of land.  For days and days it continued just the same, one day
being exactly like another, and, to me, every one of them pleasant.  At
last we anchored in the open roadstead of Funchal, in the beautiful
islands we call the Madeiras.

The mountains looked surpassingly lovely, clad as they were in living,
green; ribbed with lava ridges; flecked with white cottages; riven by
deep chasms purple with shade; the great slopes dashed with sunshine and
mottled with shadows flung from the drifting squadrons of the sky, and
the superb picture fitly crowned by towering peaks whose fronts were
swept by the trailing fringes of the clouds.

But we could not land.  We staid all day and looked, we abused the man
who invented quarantine, we held half a dozen mass-meetings and crammed
them full of interrupted speeches, motions that fell still-born,
amendments that came to nought and resolutions that died from sheer
exhaustion in trying to get before the house.  At night we set sail.

We averaged four mass-meetings a week for the voyage--we seemed always in
labor in this way, and yet so often fallaciously that whenever at long
intervals we were safely delivered of a resolution, it was cause for
public rejoicing, and we hoisted the flag and fired a salute.

Days passed--and nights; and then the beautiful Bermudas rose out of the
sea, we entered the tortuous channel, steamed hither and thither among
the bright summer islands, and rested at last under the flag of England
and were welcome.  We were not a nightmare here, where were civilization
and intelligence in place of Spanish and Italian superstition, dirt and
dread of cholera.  A few days among the breezy groves, the flower
gardens, the coral caves, and the lovely vistas of blue water that went
curving in and out, disappearing and anon again appearing through jungle
walls of brilliant foliage, restored the energies dulled by long drowsing
on the ocean, and fitted us for our final cruise--our little run of a
thousand miles to New York--America--HOME.

We bade good-bye to "our friends the Bermudians," as our programme hath
it--the majority of those we were most intimate with were negroes--and
courted the great deep again.  I said the majority.  We knew more negroes
than white people, because we had a deal of washing to be done, but we
made some most excellent friends among the whites, whom it will be a
pleasant duty to hold long in grateful remembrance.

We sailed, and from that hour all idling ceased.  Such another system of
overhauling, general littering of cabins and packing of trunks we had not
seen since we let go the anchor in the harbor of Beirout.  Every body was
busy.  Lists of all purchases had to be made out, and values attached, to
facilitate matters at the custom-house.  Purchases bought by bulk in
partnership had to be equitably divided, outstanding debts canceled,
accounts compared, and trunks, boxes and packages labeled.  All day long
the bustle and confusion continued.

And now came our first accident.  A passenger was running through a
gangway, between decks, one stormy night, when he caught his foot in the
iron staple of a door that had been heedlessly left off a hatchway, and
the bones of his leg broke at the ancle.  It was our first serious
misfortune.  We had traveled much more than twenty thousand miles, by
land and sea, in many trying climates, without a single hurt, without a
serious case of sickness and without a death among five and sixty
passengers.  Our good fortune had been wonderful.  A sailor had jumped
overboard at Constantinople one night, and was seen no more, but it was
suspected that his object was to desert, and there was a slim chance, at
least, that he reached the shore.  But the passenger list was complete.
There was no name missing from the register.

At last, one pleasant morning, we steamed up the harbor of New York, all
on deck, all dressed in Christian garb--by special order, for there was a
latent disposition in some quarters to come out as Turks--and amid a
waving of handkerchiefs from welcoming friends, the glad pilgrims noted
the shiver of the decks that told that ship and pier had joined hands
again and the long, strange cruise was over.  Amen.



CHAPTER LXI.

In this place I will print an article which I wrote for the New York
Herald the night we arrived.  I do it partly because my contract with my
publishers makes it compulsory; partly because it is a proper, tolerably
accurate, and exhaustive summing up of the cruise of the ship and the
performances of the pilgrims in foreign lands; and partly because some of
the passengers have abused me for writing it, and I wish the public to
see how thankless a task it is to put one's self to trouble to glorify
unappreciative people.  I was charged with "rushing into print" with
these compliments.  I did not rush.  I had written news letters to the
Herald sometimes, but yet when I visited the office that day I did not
say any thing about writing a valedictory.  I did go to the Tribune
office to see if such an article was wanted, because I belonged on the
regular staff of that paper and it was simply a duty to do it.  The
managing editor was absent, and so I thought no more about it.  At night
when the Herald's request came for an article, I did not "rush."  In
fact, I demurred for a while, because I did not feel like writing
compliments then, and therefore was afraid to speak of the cruise lest I
might be betrayed into using other than complimentary language.  However,
I reflected that it would be a just and righteous thing to go down and
write a kind word for the Hadjis--Hadjis are people who have made the
pilgrimage--because parties not interested could not do it so feelingly
as I, a fellow-Hadji, and so I penned the valedictory.  I have read it,
and read it again; and if there is a sentence in it that is not fulsomely
complimentary to captain, ship and passengers, I can not find it.  If it
is not a chapter that any company might be proud to have a body write
about them, my judgment is fit for nothing.  With these remarks I
confidently submit it to the unprejudiced judgment of the reader:

     RETURN OF THE HOLY LAND EXCURSIONISTS--THE STORY OF THE CRUISE.

     TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD:

     The steamer Quaker City has accomplished at last her extraordinary
     voyage and returned to her old pier at the foot of Wall street.
     The expedition was a success in some respects, in some it was not.
     Originally it was advertised as a "pleasure excursion."  Well,
     perhaps, it was a pleasure excursion, but certainly it did not look
     like one; certainly it did not act like one.  Any body's and every
     body's notion of a pleasure excursion is that the parties to it will
     of a necessity be young and giddy and somewhat boisterous.  They
     will dance a good deal, sing a good deal, make love, but sermonize
     very little.  Any body's and every body's notion of a well conducted
     funeral is that there must be a hearse and a corpse, and chief
     mourners and mourners by courtesy, many old people, much solemnity,
     no levity, and a prayer and a sermon withal.  Three-fourths of the
     Quaker City's passengers were between forty and seventy years of
     age!  There was a picnic crowd for you!  It may be supposed that the
     other fourth was composed of young girls.  But it was not.  It was
     chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors and a child of six years.
     Let us average the ages of the Quaker City's pilgrims and set the
     figure down as fifty years.  Is any man insane enough to imagine
     that this picnic of patriarchs sang, made love, danced, laughed,
     told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity?  In my experience they
     sinned little in these matters.  No doubt it was presumed here at
     home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all
     day, and day after day, and kept up a noisy excitement from one end
     of the ship to the other; and that they played blind-man's buff or
     danced quadrilles and waltzes on moonlight evenings on the
     quarter-deck; and that at odd moments of unoccupied time they jotted
     a laconic item or two in the journals they opened on such an
     elaborate plan when they left home, and then skurried off to their
     whist and euchre labors under the cabin lamps.  If these things were
     presumed, the presumption was at fault.  The venerable excursionists
     were not gay and frisky.  They played no blind-man's buff; they
     dealt not in whist; they shirked not the irksome journal, for alas!
     most of them were even writing books.  They never romped, they
     talked but little, they never sang, save in the nightly
     prayer-meeting.  The pleasure ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure
     trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse.  (There is nothing
     exhilarating about a funeral excursion without a corpse.) A free,
     hearty laugh was a sound that was not heard oftener than once in
     seven days about those decks or in those cabins, and when it was
     heard it met with precious little sympathy.  The excursionists
     danced, on three separate evenings, long, long ago, (it seems an
     age.) quadrilles, of a single set, made up of three ladies and five
     gentlemen, (the latter with handkerchiefs around their arms to
     signify their sex.) who timed their feet to the solemn wheezing of a
     melodeon; but even this melancholy orgie was voted to be sinful, and
     dancing was discontinued.

     The pilgrims played dominoes when too much Josephus or Robinson's
     Holy Land Researches, or book-writing, made recreation necessary
--     for dominoes is about as mild and sinless a game as any in the
     world, perhaps, excepting always the ineffably insipid diversion
     they call croquet, which is a game where you don't pocket any balls
     and don't carom on any thing of any consequence, and when you are
     done nobody has to pay, and there are no refreshments to saw off,
     and, consequently, there isn't any satisfaction whatever about it
--     they played dominoes till they were rested, and then they
     blackguarded each other privately till prayer-time.  When they were
     not seasick they were uncommonly prompt when the dinner-gong
     sounded.  Such was our daily life on board the ship--solemnity,
     decorum, dinner, dominoes, devotions, slander.  It was not lively
     enough for a pleasure trip; but if we had only had a corpse it would
     have made a noble funeral excursion.  It is all over now; but when I
     look back, the idea of these venerable fossils skipping forth on a
     six months' picnic, seems exquisitely refreshing.  The advertised
     title of the expedition--"The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion"
--     was a misnomer.  "The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession" would have
     been better--much better.

     Wherever we went, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation,
     and, I suppose I may add, created a famine.  None of us had ever
     been any where before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a
     wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance with
     the natural instincts that were in us, and trammeled ourselves with
     no ceremonies, no conventionalities.  We always took care to make it
     understood that we were Americans--Americans!  When we found that a
     good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a
     good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off
     somewhere, that had lately been at war with somebody, we pitied the
     ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot of our importance.
     Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere will
     remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of
     our Lord 1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to
     imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud
     of it.  We generally created a famine, partly because the coffee on
     the Quaker City was unendurable, and sometimes the more substantial
     fare was not strictly first class; and partly because one naturally
     tires of sitting long at the same board and eating from the same
     dishes.

     The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant.  They
     looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of
     America.  They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes.
     They noticed that we looked out for expenses, and got what we
     conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the
     mischief we came from.  In Paris they just simply opened their eyes
     and stared when we spoke to them in French!  We never did succeed in
     making those idiots understand their own language.  One of our
     passengers said to a shopkeeper, in reference to a proposed return
     to buy a pair of gloves, "Allong restay trankeel--may be ve coom
     Moonday;" and would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born
     Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said.  Sometimes it
     seems to me, somehow, that there must be a difference between
     Parisian French and Quaker City French.

     The people stared at us every where, and we stared at them.  We
     generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with
     them, because we bore down on them with America's greatness until we
     crushed them.  And yet we took kindly to the manners and customs,
     and especially to the fashions of the various people we visited.
     When we left the Azores, we wore awful capotes and used fine tooth
     combs--successfully.  When we came back from Tangier, in Africa, we
     were topped with fezzes of the bloodiest hue, hung with tassels like
     an Indian's scalp-lock.  In France and Spain we attracted some
     attention in these costumes.  In Italy they naturally took us for
     distempered Garibaldians, and set a gunboat to look for any thing
     significant in our changes of uniform.  We made Rome howl.  We could
     have made any place howl when we had all our clothes on.  We got no
     fresh raiment in Greece--they had but little there of any kind.  But
     at Constantinople, how we turned out!  Turbans, scimetars, fezzes,
     horse-pistols, tunics, sashes, baggy trowsers, yellow slippers--Oh,
     we were gorgeous!  The illustrious dogs of Constantinople barked
     their under jaws off, and even then failed to do us justice.  They
     are all dead by this time.  They could not go through such a run of
     business as we gave them and survive.

     And then we went to see the Emperor of Russia.  We just called on
     him as comfortably as if we had known him a century or so, and when
     we had finished our visit we variegated ourselves with selections
     from Russian costumes and sailed away again more picturesque than
     ever.  In Smyrna we picked up camel's hair shawls and other dressy
     things from Persia; but in Palestine--ah, in Palestine--our splendid
     career ended.  They didn't wear any clothes there to speak of.  We
     were satisfied, and stopped.  We made no experiments.  We did not
     try their costume.  But we astonished the natives of that country.
     We astonished them with such eccentricities of dress as we could
     muster.  We prowled through the Holy Land, from Cesarea Philippi to
     Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a weird procession of pilgrims, gotten
     up regardless of expense, solemn, gorgeous, green-spectacled,
     drowsing under blue umbrellas, and astride of a sorrier lot of
     horses, camels and asses than those that came out of Noah's ark,
     after eleven months of seasickness and short rations.  If ever those
     children of Israel in Palestine forget when Gideon's Band went
     through there from America, they ought to be cursed once more and
     finished.  It was the rarest spectacle that ever astounded mortal
     eyes, perhaps.

     Well, we were at home in Palestine.  It was easy to see that that
     was the grand feature of the expedition.  We had cared nothing much
     about Europe.  We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the
     Ufizzi, the Vatican--all the galleries--and through the pictured and
     frescoed churches of Venice, Naples, and the cathedrals of Spain;
     some of us said that certain of the great works of the old masters
     were glorious creations of genius, (we found it out in the
     guide-book, though we got hold of the wrong picture sometimes,) and
     the others said they were disgraceful old daubs.  We examined modern
     and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome, or any
     where we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn't we
     said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of
     America.  But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm.  We fell
     into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor
     and at Nazareth; we exploded into poetry over the questionable
     loveliness of Esdraelon; we meditated at Jezreel and Samaria over
     the missionary zeal of Jehu; we rioted--fairly rioted among the holy
     places of Jerusalem; we bathed in Jordan and the Dead Sea, reckless
     whether our accident-insurance policies were extra-hazardous or not,
     and brought away so many jugs of precious water from both places
     that all the country from Jericho to the mountains of Moab will
     suffer from drouth this year, I think.  Yet, the pilgrimage part of
     the excursion was its pet feature--there is no question about that.
     After dismal, smileless Palestine, beautiful Egypt had few charms
     for us.  We merely glanced at it and were ready for home.

     They wouldn't let us land at Malta--quarantine; they would not let
     us land in Sardinia; nor at Algiers, Africa; nor at Malaga, Spain,
     nor Cadiz, nor at the Madeira islands.  So we got offended at all
     foreigners and turned our backs upon them and came home.  I suppose
     we only stopped at the Bermudas because they were in the programme.
     We did not care any thing about any place at all.  We wanted to go
     home.  Homesickness was abroad in the ship--it was epidemic.  If the
     authorities of New York had known how badly we had it, they would
     have quarantined us here.

     The grand pilgrimage is over.  Good-bye to it, and a pleasant memory
     to it, I am able to say in all kindness.  I bear no malice, no
     ill-will toward any individual that was connected with it, either as
     passenger or officer.  Things I did not like at all yesterday I like
     very well to-day, now that I am at home, and always hereafter I
     shall be able to poke fun at the whole gang if the spirit so moves
     me to do, without ever saying a malicious word.  The expedition
     accomplished all that its programme promised that it should
     accomplish, and we ought all to be satisfied with the management of
     the matter, certainly.  Bye-bye!

                                             MARK TWAIN.


I call that complimentary.  It is complimentary; and yet I never have
received a word of thanks for it from the Hadjis; on the contrary I speak
nothing but the serious truth when I say that many of them even took
exceptions to the article.  In endeavoring to please them I slaved over
that sketch for two hours, and had my labor for my pains.  I never will
do a generous deed again.



CONCLUSION.

Nearly one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage was ended; and as
I sit here at home in San Francisco thinking, I am moved to confess that
day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and
more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered
them flitted one by one out of my mind--and now, if the Quaker City were
weighing her anchor to sail away on the very same cruise again, nothing
could gratify me more than to be a passenger.  With the same captain and
even the same pilgrims, the same sinners.  I was on excellent terms with
eight or nine of the excursionists (they are my staunch friends yet,) and
was even on speaking terms with the rest of the sixty-five.  I have been
at sea quite enough to know that that was a very good average.  Because a
long sea-voyage not only brings out all the mean traits one has, and
exaggerates them, but raises up others which he never suspected he
possessed, and even creates new ones.  A twelve months' voyage at sea
would make of an ordinary man a very miracle of meanness.  On the other
hand, if a man has good qualities, the spirit seldom moves him to exhibit
them on shipboard, at least with any sort of emphasis.  Now I am
satisfied that our pilgrims are pleasant old people on shore; I am also
satisfied that at sea on a second voyage they would be pleasanter,
somewhat, than they were on our grand excursion, and so I say without
hesitation that I would be glad enough to sail with them again.  I could
at least enjoy life with my handful of old friends.  They could enjoy
life with their cliques as well--passengers invariably divide up into
cliques, on all ships.

And I will say, here, that I would rather travel with an excursion party
of Methuselahs than have to be changing ships and comrades constantly, as
people do who travel in the ordinary way.  Those latter are always
grieving over some other ship they have known and lost, and over other
comrades whom diverging routes have separated from them.  They learn to
love a ship just in time to change it for another, and they become
attached to a pleasant traveling companion only to lose him.  They have
that most dismal experience of being in a strange vessel, among strange
people who care nothing about them, and of undergoing the customary
bullying by strange officers and the insolence of strange servants,
repeated over and over again within the compass of every month.  They
have also that other misery of packing and unpacking trunks--of running
the distressing gauntlet of custom-houses--of the anxieties attendant
upon getting a mass of baggage from point to point on land in safety.
I had rasher sail with a whole brigade of patriarchs than suffer so.
We never packed our trunks but twice--when we sailed from New York, and
when we returned to it.  Whenever we made a land journey, we estimated
how many days we should be gone and what amount of clothing we should
need, figured it down to a mathematical nicety, packed a valise or two
accordingly, and left the trunks on board.  We chose our comrades from
among our old, tried friends, and started.  We were never dependent upon
strangers for companionship.  We often had occasion to pity Americans
whom we found traveling drearily among strangers with no friends to
exchange pains and pleasures with.  Whenever we were coming back from a
land journey, our eyes sought one thing in the distance first--the ship
--and when we saw it riding at anchor with the flag apeak, we felt as a
returning wanderer feels when he sees his home.  When we stepped on
board, our cares vanished, our troubles were at an end--for the ship was
home to us.  We always had the same familiar old state-room to go to, and
feel safe and at peace and comfortable again.

I have no fault to find with the manner in which our excursion was
conducted.  Its programme was faithfully carried out--a thing which
surprised me, for great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they
perform.  It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every
year and the system regularly inaugurated.  Travel is fatal to prejudice,
bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on
these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can
not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's
lifetime.

The Excursion is ended, and has passed to its place among the things that
were.  But its varied scenes and its manifold incidents will linger
pleasantly in our memories for many a year to come.  Always on the wing,
as we were, and merely pausing a moment to catch fitful glimpses of the
wonders of half a world, we could not hope to receive or retain vivid
impressions of all it was our fortune to see.  Yet our holyday flight has
not been in vain--for above the confusion of vague recollections, certain
of its best prized pictures lift themselves and will still continue
perfect in tint and outline after their surroundings shall have faded
away.

We shall remember something of pleasant France; and something also of
Paris, though it flashed upon us a splendid meteor, and was gone again,
we hardly knew how or where.  We shall remember, always, how we saw
majestic Gibraltar glorified with the rich coloring of a Spanish sunset
and swimming in a sea of rainbows.  In fancy we shall see Milan again,
and her stately Cathedral with its marble wilderness of graceful spires.
And Padua--Verona--Como, jeweled with stars; and patrician Venice, afloat
on her stagnant flood--silent, desolate, haughty--scornful of her humbled
state--wrapping herself in memories of her lost fleets, of battle and
triumph, and all the pageantry of a glory that is departed.

We can not forget Florence--Naples--nor the foretaste of heaven that is
in the delicious atmosphere of Greece--and surely not Athens and the
broken temples of the Acropolis.  Surely not venerable Rome--nor the
green plain that compasses her round about, contrasting its brightness
with her gray decay--nor the ruined arches that stand apart in the plain
and clothe their looped and windowed raggedness with vines.  We shall
remember St. Peter's: not as one sees it when he walks the streets of
Rome and fancies all her domes are just alike, but as he sees it leagues
away, when every meaner edifice has faded out of sight and that one dome
looms superbly up in the flush of sunset, full of dignity and grace,
strongly outlined as a mountain.

We shall remember Constantinople and the Bosporus--the colossal
magnificence of Baalbec--the Pyramids of Egypt--the prodigious form, the
benignant countenance of the Sphynx--Oriental Smyrna--sacred Jerusalem
--Damascus, the "Pearl of the East," the pride of Syria, the fabled Garden
of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest
metropolis on earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name
and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires
of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of
pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten!


-----------------------------------------------------------------------



A BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by Mark Twain



Contents:
    Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Auto-Biography
    First Romance.



1871



BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would
write an autobiography they would read it, when they got leisure, I yield
at last to this frenzied public demand, and herewith tender my history:

Ours is a noble old house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity.
The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the
family by the name of Higgins.  This was in the eleventh century, when
our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England.  Why it is
that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except when
one of them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert
foolishness), instead of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has ever
felt much desire to stir.  It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we
leave it alone.  All the old families do that way.

Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note a solicitor on the highway
in William Rufus' time.  At about the age of thirty he went to one of
those fine old English places of resort called Newgate, to see about
something, and never returned again.  While there he died suddenly.

Augustus Twain, seems to have made something of a stir about the year
1160.  He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old
sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night,
and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump.  He was a
born humorist.  But he got to going too far with it; and the first time
he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one
end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it
could contemplate the people and have a good time.  He never liked any
situation so much or stuck to it so long.

Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows a succession of
soldiers--noble, high-spirited fellows, who always went into battle
singing; right behind the army, and always went out a-whooping, right
ahead of it.

This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism that our
family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that one stuck out at
right angles, and bore fruit winter, and summer.

                         ||=======|====
                         ||       |
                         ||       |
                         ||       O
                         ||     / || \
                         ||       ||
                         ||       ||
                         ||
                         ||
                         ||
                         OUR FAMILY TREE

Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called "the Scholar."
He wrote a beautiful, beautiful hand.  And he could imitate anybody's
hand so closely that it was enough to make a person laugh his head off to
see it.  He had infinite sport with his talent.  But by and by he took a
contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness of the work spoiled
his hand.  Still, he enjoyed life all the time he was in the stone
business, which, with inconsiderable intervals, was some forty-two years.
In fact, he died in harness.  During all those long years he gave such
satisfaction that he never was through with one contract a week till
government gave him another.  He was a perfect pet.  And he was always a
favorite with his fellow-artists, and was a conspicuous member of their
benevolent secret society, called the Chain Gang.  He always wore his
hair short, had a preference for striped clothes, and died lamented by
the government.  He was a sore loss to his country.  For he was so
regular.

Some years later we have the illustrious John Morgan Twain.  He came over
to this country with Columbus in 1492, as a passenger.  He appears to
have been of a crusty, uncomfortable disposition.  He complained of the
food all the way over, and was always threatening to go ashore unless
there was a change.  He wanted fresh shad.  Hardly a day passed over his
head that he did not go idling about the ship with his nose in the air,
sneering about the commander, and saying he did not believe Columbus knew
where he was going to or had ever been there before.  The memorable cry
of "Land ho!" thrilled every heart in the ship but his.  He gazed a while
through a piece of smoked glass at the penciled line lying on the distant
water, and then said: "Land be hanged,--it's a raft!"

When this questionable passenger came on board the ship, he brought
nothing with him but an old newspaper containing a handkerchief marked
"B. G.," one cotton sock marked "L. W. C." one woollen one marked "D. F."
and a night-shirt marked "O. M. R."  And yet during the voyage he worried
more about his "trunk," and gave himself more airs about it, than all
the rest of the passengers put together.

If the ship was "down by the head," and would got steer, he would go and
move his "trunk" farther aft, and then watch the effect.  If the
ship was "by the stern," he would suggest to Columbus to detail some men
to "shift that baggage."  In storms he had to be gagged, because his
wailings about his "trunk" made it impossible for the men to hear the
orders.  The man does not appear to have been openly charged with any
gravely unbecoming thing, but it is noted in the ship's log as a "curious
circumstance" that albeit he brought his baggage on board the ship in a
newspaper, he took it ashore in four trunks, a queensware crate, and a
couple of champagne baskets.  But when he came back insinuating in an
insolent, swaggering way, that some of his things were missing, and was
going to search the other passengers' baggage, it was too much, and they
threw him overboard.  They watched long and wonderingly for him to come
up, but not even a bubble rose on the quietly ebbing tide.  But while
every one was most absorbed in gazing over the side, and the interest was
momentarily increasing, it was observed with consternation that the
vessel was adrift and the anchor cable hanging limp from the bow.  Then
in the ship's dimmed and ancient log we find this quaint note:

          "In time it was discouvered yt ye troblesome passenger hadde
          gonne downe and got ye anchor, and toke ye same and solde it to
          ye dam sauvages from ye interior, saying yt he hadde founde it,
          ye sonne of a ghun!"

Yet this ancestor had good and noble instincts, and it is with pride that
we call to mind the fact that he was the first white person who ever
interested himself in the work of elevating and civilizing our Indians.
He built a commodious jail and put up a gallows, and to his dying day he
claimed with satisfaction that he had had a more restraining and
elevating influence on the Indians than any other reformer that ever,
labored among them.  At this point the chronicle becomes less frank and
chatty, and closes abruptly by saying that the old voyager went to see
his gallows perform on the first white man ever hanged in America, and
while there received injuries which terminated in his death.

The great grandson of the "Reformer" flourished in sixteen hundred and
something, and was known in our annals as, "the old Admiral," though in
history he had other titles.  He was long in command of fleets of swift
vessels, well armed and, manned, and did great service in hurrying up
merchantmen.  Vessels which he followed and kept his eagle eye on, always
made good fair time across the ocean.  But if a ship still loitered in
spite of all he could do, his indignation would grow till he could
contain himself no longer--and then he would take that ship home where he
lived and, keep it there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it,
but they never did.  And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out
of the sailors of that ship by compelling, them to take invigorating
exercise and a bath.  He called it "walking a plank."  All the pupils
liked it.  At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying
it.  When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral always
burned them, so that the insurance money should not be lost.  At last
this fine old tar was cut down in the fulness of his years and honors.
And to her dying day, his poor heart-broken widow believed that if he had
been cut down fifteen minutes sooner he might have been resuscitated.

Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter part of the seventeenth
century, and was a zealous and distinguished missionary.  He converted
sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught them that a dog-tooth
necklace and a pair of spectacles was not enough clothing to come to
divine service in.  His poor flock loved him very, very dearly; and when
his funeral was over, they got up in a body (and came out of the
restaurant) with tears in their eyes, and saying, one to another, that he
was a good tender missionary, and they wished they had some more of him.

PAH-GO-TO-WAH-WAH-PUKKETEKEEWIS (Mighty-Hunter-with-a-Hog-Eye) TWAIN
adorned the middle of the eighteenth century, and aided Gen. Braddock
with all his heart to resist the oppressor Washington.  It was this
ancestor who fired seventeen times at our Washington from behind a tree.
So far the beautiful romantic narrative in the moral story-books is
correct; but when that narrative goes on to say that at the seventeenth
round the awe-stricken savage said solemnly that that man was being
reserved by the Great Spirit for some mighty mission, and he dared not
lift his sacrilegious rifle against him again, the narrative seriously
impairs the integrity of history.  What he did say was:

"It ain't no (hic !) no use.  'At man's so drunk he can't stan' still
long enough for a man to hit him.  I (hic !) I can't 'ford to fool away
any more am'nition on him!"

That was why he stopped at the seventeenth round, and it was, a good
plain matter-of-fact reason, too, and one that easily commends itself to
us by the eloquent, persuasive flavor of probability there is about it.

I always enjoyed the story-book narrative, but I felt a marring misgiving
that every Indian at Braddock's Defeat who fired at a soldier a couple of
times (two easily grows to seventeen in a century), and missed him,
jumped to the conclusion that the Great Spirit was reserving that soldier
for some grand mission; and so I somehow feared that the only reason why
Washington's case is remembered and the others forgotten is, that in his
the prophecy' came true, and in that of the others it didn't.  There are
not books enough on earth to contain the record of the prophecies Indians
and other unauthorized parties have made; but one may carry in his
overcoat pockets the record of all the prophecies that have been
fulfilled.

I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are so
thoroughly well known in history by their aliases, that I have not felt
it to be worth while to dwell upon them, or even mention them in the
order of their birth.  Among these may be mentioned RICHARD BRINSLEY
TWAIN, alias Guy Fawkes; JOHN WENTWORTH TWAIN, alias Sixteen-String Jack;
WILLIAM HOGARTH TWAIN, alias Jack Sheppard; ANANIAS TWAIN, alias Baron
Munchausen; JOHN GEORGE TWAIN, alias Capt. Kydd; and them there are
George Francis Train, Tom Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar and Baalam's Ass--they
all belong to our family, but to a branch of it somewhat distantly
removed from the honorable direct line--in fact, a collateral branch,
whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order to
acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for, they have
got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.

It is not well; when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry
down too close to your own time--it is safest to speak only vaguely of
your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now
do.

I was born without teeth--and there Richard III had the advantage of me;
but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the
advantage of him.  My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously
honest.

But now a thought occurs to me.  My own history would really seem so tame
contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave
it unwritten until I am hanged.  If some other biographies I have read
had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have
been a felicitous thing, for the reading public.  How does it strike you?



                            AWFUL, TERRIBLE
                            MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

CHAPTER I

THE SECRET REVEALED.

It was night.  Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of
Klugenstein.  The year 1222 was drawing to a close.  Far away up in the
tallest of the castle's towers a single light glimmered.  A secret
council was being held there.  The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in
a chair of state meditating.  Presently he, said, with a tender
accent:

"My daughter!"

A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,
answered:

"Speak, father!"

"My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that hath
puzzled all your young life.  Know, then, that it had its birth in the
matters which I shall now unfold.  My brother Ulrich is the great Duke of
Brandenburgh.  Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if no son were
born to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house, provided a son
were born to me.  And further, in case no son, were born to either, but
only daughters, then the succession should pass to Ulrich's daughter,
if she proved stainless; if she did not, my daughter should succeed,
if she retained a blameless name.  And so I, and my old wife here, prayed
fervently for the good boon of a son, but the prayer was vain.  You were
born to us.  I was in despair.  I saw the mighty prize slipping from my
grasp, the splendid dream vanishing away.  And I had been so hopeful!
Five years had Ulrich lived in wedlock, and yet his wife had borne no
heir of either sex.

"'But hold,' I said, 'all is not lost.'  A saving scheme had shot athwart
my brain.  You were born at midnight.  Only the leech, the nurse, and six
waiting-women knew your sex.  I hanged them every one before an hour had
sped.  Next morning all the barony went mad with rejoicing over the
proclamation that a son was born to Klugenstein, an heir to mighty
Brandenburgh!  And well the secret has been kept.  Your mother's own
sister nursed your infancy, and from that time forward we feared nothing.

"When you were ten years old, a daughter was born to Ulrich.  We grieved,
but hoped for good results from measles, or physicians, or other natural
enemies of infancy, but were always disappointed.  She lived, she throve
--Heaven's malison upon her!  But it is nothing.  We are safe.  For,
Ha-ha! have we not a son?  And is not our son the future Duke?  Our
well-beloved Conrad, is it not so?--for, woman of eight-and-twenty years
--as you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!

"Now it hath come to pass that age hath laid its hand upon my brother,
and he waxes feeble.  The cares of state do tax him sore.  Therefore he
wills that you shall come to him and be already Duke--in act, though not
yet in name.  Your servitors are ready--you journey forth to-night.

"Now listen well.  Remember every word I say.  There is a law as old as
Germany that if any woman sit for a single instant in the great ducal
chair before she hath been absolutely crowned in presence of the people,
SHE SHALL DIE! So heed my words.  Pretend humility.  Pronounce your
judgments from the Premier's chair, which stands at the foot of the
throne.  Do this until you are crowned and safe.  It is not likely that
your sex will ever be discovered; but still it is the part of wisdom to
make all things as safe as may be in this treacherous earthly life."

"Oh; my father, is it for this my life hath been a lie!  Was it that I
might cheat my unoffending cousin of her rights?  Spare me, father,
spare your child!"

"What, huzzy!  Is this my reward for the august fortune my brain has
wrought for thee?  By the bones of my father, this puling sentiment of
thine but ill accords with my humor.

"Betake thee to the Duke, instantly!  And beware how thou meddlest with my
purpose!"

Let this suffice, of the conversation.  It is enough for us to know that
the prayers, the entreaties and the tears of the gentle-natured girl
availed nothing.  They nor anything could move the stout old lord of
Klugenstein.  And so, at last, with a heavy heart, the daughter saw the
castle gates close behind her, and found herself riding away in the
darkness surrounded by a knightly array of armed, vassals and a brave
following of servants.

The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter's departure,
and then he turned to his sad wife and said:

"Dame, our matters seem speeding fairly.  It is full three months since I
sent the shrewd and handsome Count Detzin on his devilish mission to my
brother's daughter Constance.  If he fail, we are not wholly safe; but if
he do succeed, no power can bar our girl from being Duchess e'en though
ill-fortune should decree she never should be Duke!"

"My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well."

"Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak.  To bed with ye, and dream of
Brandenburgh and grandeur!"



CHAPTER II.

FESTIVITY AND TEARS

Six days after the occurrences related in the above chapter, the
brilliant capital of the Duchy of Brandenburgh was resplendent with
military pageantry, and noisy with the rejoicings of loyal multitudes;
for Conrad, the young heir to the crown, was come.  The old Duke's, heart
was full of happiness, for Conrad's handsome person and graceful bearing
had won his love at once.  The great halls of the palace were thronged
with nobles, who welcomed Conrad bravely; and so bright and happy did all
things seem, that he felt his fears and sorrows passing away and giving
place to a comforting contentment.

But in a remote apartment of the palace a scene of a different nature
was, transpiring.  By a window stood the Duke's only child, the Lady
Constance.  Her eyes were red and swollen, and full of tears.  She was
alone.  Presently she fell to weeping anew, and said aloud:

"The villain Detzin is gone--has fled the dukedom!  I could not believe
it at first, but alas! it is too true.  And I loved him so.  I dared to
love him though I knew the Duke my father would never let me wed him.
I loved him--but now I hate him!  With all, my soul I hate him!  Oh, what
is to become of me!  I am lost, lost, lost!  I shall go mad!"



CHAPTER III.

THE PLOT THICKENS.

Few months drifted by.  All men published the praises of the young
Conrad's government and extolled the wisdom of his judgments, the
mercifulness of his sentences, and the modesty with which he bore himself
in his great office.  The old Duke soon gave everything into his hands,
and sat apart and listened with proud satisfaction while his heir
delivered the decrees of the crown from the seat of the premier.
It seemed plain that one so loved and praised and honored of all men
as Conrad was, could not be otherwise than happy.  But strange enough,
he was not.  For he saw with dismay that the Princess Constance had begun
to love him!  The love of, the rest of the world was happy fortune for
him, but this was freighted with danger!  And he saw, moreover, that the
delighted Duke had discovered his daughter's passion likewise, and was
already dreaming of a marriage.  Every day somewhat of the deep sadness
that had been in the princess' face faded away; every day hope and
animation beamed brighter from her eye; and by and by even vagrant smiles
visited the face that had been so troubled.

Conrad was appalled.  He bitterly cursed himself for having yielded to
the instinct that had made him seek the companionship of one of his own
sex when he was new and a stranger in the palace--when he was sorrowful
and yearned for a sympathy such as only women can give or feel.  He now
began to avoid, his cousin.  But this only made matters worse, for,
naturally enough, the more he avoided her, the more she cast herself in
his way.  He marveled at this at first; and next it startled him.  The
girl haunted him; she hunted him; she happened upon him at all times and
in all places, in the night as well as in the day.  She seemed singularly
anxious.  There was surely a mystery somewhere.

This could not go on forever.  All the world was talking about it.  The
Duke was beginning to look perplexed.  Poor Conrad was becoming a very
ghost through dread and dire distress.  One day as he was emerging from a
private ante-room attached to the picture gallery, Constance confronted
him, and seizing both his hands, in hers, exclaimed:

"Oh, why, do you avoid me?  What have I done--what have I said, to lose
your kind opinion of me--for, surely I had it once?  Conrad, do not
despise me, but pity a tortured heart?  I cannot--cannot hold the words
unspoken longer, lest they kill me--I LOVE you, CONRAD!  There, despise
me if you must, but they would be uttered!"

Conrad was speechless.  Constance hesitated a moment, and then,
misinterpreting his silence, a wild gladness flamed in her eyes, and she
flung her arms about his neck and said:

"You relent! you relent! You can love me--you will love me! Oh, say you
will, my own, my worshipped Conrad!'"

Conrad groaned aloud.  A sickly pallor overspread his countenance, and
he trembled like an aspen.  Presently, in desperation, he thrust the poor
girl from him, and cried:

"You know not what you ask!  It is forever and ever impossible!"  And then
he fled like a criminal and left the princess stupefied with amazement.
A minute afterward she was crying and sobbing there, and Conrad was
crying and sobbing in his chamber.  Both were in despair.  Both save ruin
staring them in the face.

By and by Constance rose slowly to her feet and moved away, saying:

"To think that he was despising my love at the very moment that I thought
it was melting his cruel heart!  I hate him!  He spurned me--did this
man--he spurned me from him like a dog!"



CHAPTER IV

THE AWFUL REVELATION.

Time passed on.  A settled sadness rested once more upon the countenance
of the good Duke's daughter.  She and Conrad were seen together no more
now.  The Duke grieved at this.  But as the weeks wore away, Conrad's
color came back to his cheeks and his old-time vivacity to his eye, and
he administered the government with a clear and steadily ripening wisdom.

Presently a strange whisper began to be heard about the palace.  It grew
louder; it spread farther.  The gossips of the city got hold-of it.  It
swept the dukedom.  And this is what the whisper said:

"The Lady Constance hath given birth to a child!"

When the lord of Klugenstein heard it, he swung his plumed helmet thrice
around his head and shouted:

"Long live.  Duke Conrad!--for lo, his crown is sure, from this day
forward!  Detzin has done his errand well, and the good scoundrel shall
be rewarded!"

And he spread, the tidings far and wide, and for eight-and-forty hours no
soul in all the barony but did dance and sing, carouse and illuminate, to
celebrate the great event, and all at proud and happy old Klugenstein's
expense.



CHAPTER V.

THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE.

The trial was at hand.  All the great lords and barons of Brandenburgh
were assembled in the Hall of Justice in the ducal palace.  No space was
left unoccupied where there was room for a spectator to stand or sit.
Conrad, clad in purple and ermine, sat in the premier's chair, and on
either side sat the great judges of the realm.  The old Duke had sternly
commanded that the trial of his daughter should proceed, without favor,
and then had taken to his bed broken-hearted.  His days were numbered.
Poor Conrad had begged, as for his very life, that he might be spared the
misery of sitting in judgment upon his cousin's crime, but it did not
avail.

The saddest heart in all that great assemblage was in Conrad's breast.

The gladdest was in his father's.  For, unknown to his daughter "Conrad,"
the old Baron Klugenstein was come, and was among the crowd of nobles,
triumphant in the swelling fortunes of his house.

After the heralds had made due proclamation and the other preliminaries
had followed, the venerable Lord Chief justice said:

"Prisoner, stand forth!"

The unhappy princess rose and stood unveiled before the vast multitude.
The Lord Chief Justice continued:

"Most noble lady, before the great judges of this realm it hath been
charged and proven that out of holy wedlock your Grace hath given birth
unto a child; and by our ancient law the penalty is death, excepting in
one sole contingency, whereof his Grace the acting Duke, our good Lord
Conrad, will advertise you in his solemn sentence now; wherefore, give
heed."

Conrad stretched forth the reluctant sceptre, and in the self-same moment
the womanly heart beneath his robe yearned pityingly toward the doomed
prisoner, and the tears came into his eyes.  He opened his lips to speak,
but the Lord Chief Justice said quickly:

"Not there, your Grace, not there!  It is not lawful to pronounce
judgment upon any of the ducal line SAVE FROM THE DUCAL THRONE!"

A shudder went to the heart of poor Conrad, and a tremor shook the iron
frame of his old father likewise.  CONRAD HAD NOT BEEN CROWNED--dared he
profane the throne? He hesitated and turned pale with fear.  But it must
be done.  Wondering eyes were already upon him.  They would be suspicious
eyes if he hesitated longer.  He ascended the throne.  Presently he
stretched forth the sceptre again, and said:

"Prisoner, in the name of our sovereign lord, Ulrich, Duke of
Brandenburgh, I proceed to the solemn duty that hath devolved upon me.
Give heed to my words.  By the ancient law of the land, except you
produce the partner of your guilt and deliver him up to the executioner,
you must surely die.  Embrace this opportunity--save yourself while yet
you may.  Name the father of your child!"

A solemn hush fell upon the great court--a silence so profound that men
could hear their own hearts beat.  Then the princess slowly turned, with
eyes gleaming with hate, and pointing her finger straight at Conrad,
said:

"Thou art the man!"

An appalling conviction of his helpless, hopeless peril struck a chill to
Conrad's heart like the chill of death itself.  What power on earth could
save him!  To disprove the charge, he must reveal that he was a woman;
and for an uncrowned woman to sit in the ducal chair was death!  At one
and the same moment, he and his grim old father swooned and fell to, the
ground.

[The remainder of this thrilling and eventful story will NOT be found in
this or any other publication, either now or at any future time.]

The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly
close place, that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her)
out of it again--and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole
business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers--or
else stay there.  I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten
out that little difficulty, but it looks different now.

[If Harper's Weekly or the New York Tribune desire to copy these initial
chapters into the, reading columns of their valuable journals, just as
they do the opening chapters of Ledger and New York Weekly novels, they
are at liberty to do so at the usual rates, provided they "trust."]

                                                       MARK TWAIN


-----------------------------------------------------------------------



                              ROUGHING IT

                             by Mark Twain

                                  1880



                                   TO
                           CALVIN H. HIGBIE,
                             Of California,
        an Honest Man, a Genial Comrade, and a Steadfast Friend.
                         THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
                             By the Author,
                     In Memory of the Curious Time
                              When We Two
                    WERE MILLIONAIRES FOR TEN DAYS.



                              ROUGHING IT

                                   BY
                              MARK TWAIN.
                          (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.)



                               PREFATORY.

This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history
or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of
variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting
reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad
him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information
concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about
which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in
person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude
to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada
-a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind,
that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely
to occur in it.

Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the
book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped:
information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar
of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would
give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk
up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore,
I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not
justification.

THE AUTHOR.



CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
My Brother appointed Secretary of Nevada--I Envy His Prospective
Adventures--Am Appointed Private Secretary Under Him--My Contentment
Complete--Packed in One Hour--Dreams and Visions--On the Missouri River
--A Bully Boat

CHAPTER II.
Arrive at St. Joseph--Only Twenty-five Pounds Baggage Allowed--Farewell
to Kid Gloves and Dress Coats--Armed to the Teeth--The "Allen"--A
Cheerful Weapon--Persuaded to Buy a Mule--Schedule of Luxuries--We Leave
the "States"--"Our Coach"--Mails for the Indians--Between a Wink and an
Earthquake--A Modern Sphynx and How She Entertained Us--A Sociable Heifer

CHAPTER III.
"The Thoroughbrace is Broke"--Mails Delivered Properly--Sleeping Under
Difficulties--A Jackass Rabbit Meditating, and on Business--A Modern
Gulliver--Sage-brush--Overcoats as an Article of Diet--Sad Fate of a
Camel--Warning to Experimenters

CHAPTER IV.
Making Our Bed--Assaults by the Unabridged--At a Station--Our Driver a
Great and Shining Dignitary--Strange Place for a Frontyard
--Accommodations--Double Portraits--An Heirloom--Our Worthy Landlord
--"Fixings and Things"--An Exile--Slumgullion--A Well Furnished Table--The
Landlord Astonished--Table Etiquette--Wild Mexican Mules--Stage-coaching
and Railroading

CHAPTER V.
New Acquaintances--The Cayote--A Dog's Experiences--A Disgusted Dog--The
Relatives of the Cayote--Meals Taken Away from Home

CHAPTER VI.
The Division Superintendent--The Conductor--The Driver--One Hundred and
Fifty Miles' Drive Without Sleep--Teaching a Subordinate--Our Old Friend
Jack and a Pilgrim--Ben Holliday Compared to Moses

CHAPTER VII.
Overland City--Crossing the Platte--Bemis's Buffalo Hunt--Assault by a
Buffalo--Bemis's Horse Goes Crazy--An Impromptu Circus--A New Departure
--Bemis Finds Refuge in a Tree--Escapes Finally by a Wonderful Method

CHAPTER VIII.
The Pony Express--Fifty Miles Without Stopping--"Here he Comes"--Alkali
Water--Riding an Avalanche--Indian Massacre

CHAPTER IX.
Among the Indians--An Unfair Advantage--Laying on our Arms--A Midnight
Murder--Wrath of Outlaws--A Dangerous, yet Valuable Citizen

CHAPTER X.
History of Slade--A Proposed Fist-fight--Encounter with Jules--Paradise
of Outlaws--Slade as Superintendent--As Executioner--A Doomed Whisky
Seller--A Prisoner--A Wife's Bravery--An Ancient Enemy Captured--Enjoying
a Luxury--Hob-nobbing with Slade--Too Polite--A Happy Escape

CHAPTER XI.
Slade in Montana--"On a Spree"--In Court--Attack on a Judge--Arrest by
the Vigilantes--Turn out of the Miners--Execution of Slade--Lamentations
of His Wife--Was Slade a Coward?

CHAPTER XII.
A Mormon Emigrant Train--The Heart of the Rocky Mountains--Pure
Saleratus--A Natural Ice-House--An Entire Inhabitant--In Sight of
"Eternal Snow"--The South Pass--The Parting Streams--An Unreliable Letter
Carrier--Meeting of Old Friends--A Spoiled Watermelon--Down the
Mountain--A Scene of Desolation--Lost in the Dark--Unnecessary Advice
--U.S. Troops and Indians--Sublime Spectacle--Another Delusion Dispelled
--Among the Angels

CHAPTER XIII.
Mormons and Gentiles--Exhilarating Drink, and its Effect on Bemis--Salt
Lake City--A Great Contrast--A Mormon Vagrant--Talk with a Saint--A Visit
to the "King"--A Happy Simile

CHAPTER XIV.
Mormon Contractors--How Mr. Street Astonished Them--The Case Before
Brigham Young, and How he Disposed of it--Polygamy Viewed from a New
Position

CHAPTER XV.
A Gentile Den--Polygamy Discussed--Favorite Wife and D. 4--Hennery for
Retired Wives--Children Need Marking--Cost of a Gift to No. 6
--A Penny-whistle Gift and its Effects--Fathering the Foundlings
--It Resembled Him--The Family Bedstead

CHAPTER XVI
The Mormon Bible--Proofs of its Divinity--Plagiarism of its Authors
--Story of Nephi--Wonderful Battle--Kilkenny Cats Outdone

CHAPTER XVII.
Three Sides to all Questions--Everything "A Quarter"--Shriveled Up
--Emigrants and White Shirts at a Discount--"Forty-Niners"--Above Par--Real
Happiness

CHAPTER XVIII.
Alkali Desert--Romance of Crossing Dispelled--Alkali Dust--Effect on the
Mules--Universal Thanksgiving

CHAPTER XIX.
The Digger Indians Compared with the Bushmen of Africa--Food, Life and
Characteristics--Cowardly Attack on a Stage Coach--A Brave Driver--The
Noble Red Man

CHAPTER XX.
The Great American Desert--Forty Miles on Bones--Lakes Without Outlets
--Greely's Remarkable Ride--Hank Monk, the Renowned Driver--Fatal Effects
of "Corking" a Story--Bald-Headed Anecdote

CHAPTER XXI.
Alkali Dust--Desolation and Contemplation--Carson City--Our Journey
Ended--We are Introduced to Several Citizens--A Strange Rebuke--A Washoe
Zephyr at Play--Its Office Hours--Governor's Palace--Government Offices
--Our French Landlady Bridget O'Flannigan--Shadow Secrets--Cause for a
Disturbance at Once--The Irish Brigade--Mrs. O'Flannigan's Boarders--The
Surveying Expedition--Escape of the Tarantulas

CHAPTER XXII.
The Son of a Nabob--Start for Lake Tahoe--Splendor of the Views--Trip on
the Lake--Camping Out--Reinvigorating Climate--Clearing a Tract of Land
--Securing a Title--Outhouse and Fences

CHAPTER XXIII.
A Happy Life--Lake Tahoe and its Moods--Transparency of the Waters--A
Catastrophe--Fire! Fire!--A Magnificent Spectacle--Homeless Again--We
take to the Lake--A Storm--Return to Carson

CHAPTER XXIV.
Resolve to Buy a Horse--Horsemanship in Carson--A Temptation--Advice
Given Me Freely--I Buy the Mexican Plug--My First Ride--A Good Bucker--I
Loan the Plug--Experience of Borrowers--Attempts to Sell--Expense of the
Experiment--A Stranger Taken In

CHAPTER XXV.
The Mormons in Nevada--How to Persuade a Loan from Them--Early History of
the Territory--Silver Mines Discovered--The New Territorial Government--A
Foreign One and a Poor One--Its Funny Struggles for Existence--No Credit,
no Cash--Old Abe Currey Sustains it and its Officers--Instructions and
Vouchers--An Indian's Endorsement--Toll-Gates

CHAPTER XXVI.
The Silver Fever--State of the Market--Silver Bricks--Tales Told--Off for
the Humboldt Mines

CHAPTER XXVII.
Our manner of going--Incidents of the Trip--A Warm but Too Familiar a
Bedfellow--Mr. Ballou Objects--Sunshine amid Clouds--Safely Arrived

CHAPTER XXVIII.
Arrive at the Mountains--Building Our Cabin--My First Prospecting Tour
--My First Gold Mine--Pockets Filled With Treasures--Filtering the News to
My Companions--The Bubble Pricked--All Not Gold That Glitters

CHAPTER XXIX.
Out Prospecting--A Silver Mine At Last--Making a Fortune With Sledge and
Drill--A Hard Road to Travel--We Own in Claims--A Rocky Country

CHAPTER XXX.
Disinterested Friends--How "Feet" Were Sold--We Quit Tunnelling--A Trip
to Esmeralda--My Companions--An Indian Prophesy--A Flood--Our Quarters
During It

CHAPTER XXXI.
The Guests at "Honey Lake Smith's"--"Bully Old Arkansas"--"Our Landlord"
--Determined to Fight--The Landlord's Wife--The Bully Conquered by Her
--Another Start--Crossing the Carson--A Narrow Escape--Following Our Own
Track--A New Guide--Lost in the Snow

CHAPTER XXXII.
Desperate Situation--Attempts to Make a Fire--Our Horses leave us--We
Find Matches--One, Two, Three and the Last--No Fire--Death Seems
Inevitable--We Mourn Over Our Evil Lives--Discarded Vices--We Forgive
Each Other--An Affectionate Farewell--The Sleep of Oblivion

CHAPTER XXXIII.
Return of Consciousness--Ridiculous Developments--A Station House--Bitter
Feelings--Fruits of Repentance--Resurrected Vices

CHAPTER XXXIV.
About Carson--General Buncombe--Hyde vs. Morgan--How Hyde Lost His Ranch
--The Great Landslide Case--The Trial--General Buncombe in Court--A
Wonderful Decision--A Serious Afterthought

CHAPTER XXXV.
A New Travelling Companion--All Full and No Accommodations--How Captain
Nye found Room--and Caused Our Leaving to be Lamented--The Uses of
Tunnelling--A Notable Example--We Go into the "Claim" Business and Fail
--At the Bottom

CHAPTER XXXVI.
A Quartz Mill--Amalgamation--"Screening Tailings"--First Quartz Mill in
Nevada--Fire Assay--A Smart Assayer--I stake for an advance

CHAPTER XXXVII.
The Whiteman Cement Mine--Story of its Discovery--A Secret Expedition--A
Nocturnal Adventure--A Distressing Position--A Failure and a Week's
Holiday

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Mono Lake--Shampooing Made Easy--Thoughtless Act of Our Dog and the
Results--Lye Water--Curiosities of the Lake--Free Hotel--Some Funny
Incidents a Little Overdrawn

CHAPTER XXXIX.
Visit to the Islands in Lake Mono--Ashes and Desolation--Life Amid Death
Our Boat Adrift--A Jump For Life--A Storm On the Lake--A Mass of Soap
Suds--Geological Curiosities--A Week On the Sierras--A Narrow Escape From
a Funny Explosion--"Stove Heap Gone"

CHAPTER XL.
The "Wide West" Mine--It is "Interviewed" by Higbie--A Blind Lead--Worth
a Million--We are Rich At Last--Plans for the Future

CHAPTER XLI.
A Rheumatic Patient--Day Dreams--An Unfortunate Stumble--I Leave
Suddenly--Another Patient--Higbie in the Cabin--Our Balloon Bursted
--Worth Nothing--Regrets and Explanations--Our Third Partner

CHAPTER XLII.
What to do Next?--Obstacles I Had Met With--"Jack of All Trades"--Mining
Again--Target Shooting--I Turn City Editor--I Succeed Finely

CHAPTER XLIII.
My Friend Boggs--The School Report--Boggs Pays Me An Old Debt--Virginia
City

CHAPTER XLIV.
Flush Times--Plenty of Stock--Editorial Puffing--Stocks Given Me--Salting
Mines--A Tragedian In a New Role

CHAPTER XLV.
Flush Times Continue--Sanitary Commission Fund--Wild Enthusiasm of the
People--Would not wait to Contribute--The Sanitary Flour Sack--It is
Carried to Gold Hill and Dayton--Final Reception in Virginia--Results of
the Sale--A Grand Total

CHAPTER XLVI.
The Nabobs of Those Days--John Smith as a Traveler--Sudden Wealth--A
Sixty-Thousand-Dollar Horse--A Smart Telegraph Operator--A Nabob in New
York City--Charters an Omnibus--"Walk in, It's All Free"--"You Can't Pay
a Cent"--"Hold On, Driver, I Weaken"--Sociability of New Yorkers

CHAPTER XLVII.
Buck Fanshaw's Death--The Cause Thereof--Preparations for His Burial
--Scotty Briggs the Committee Man--He Visits the Minister--Scotty Can't
Play His Hand--The Minister Gets Mixed--Both Begin to See--"All Down
Again But Nine"--Buck Fanshaw as a Citizen--How To "Shook Your Mother"
--The Funeral--Scotty Briggs as a Sunday School Teacher

CHAPTER XLVIII.
The First Twenty-Six Graves in Nevada--The Prominent Men of the County
--The Man Who Had Killed His Dozen--Trial by Jury--Specimen Jurors--A
Private Grave Yard--The Desperadoes--Who They Killed--Waking up the Weary
Passenger--Satisfaction Without Fighting

CHAPTER XLIX.
Fatal Shooting Affray--Robbery and Desperate Affray--A Specimen City
Official--A Marked Man--A Street Fight--Punishment of Crime

CHAPTER L.
Captain Ned Blakely--Bill Nookes Receives Desired Information--Killing of
Blakely's Mate--A Walking Battery--Blakely Secures Nookes--Hang First and
Be Tried Afterwards--Captain Blakely as a Chaplain--The First Chapter of
Genesis Read at a Hanging--Nookes Hung--Blakely's Regrets

CHAPTER LI.
The Weekly Occidental--A Ready Editor--A Novel--A Concentration of
Talent--The Heroes and the Heroines--The Dissolute Author Engaged
--Extraordinary Havoc With the Novel--A Highly Romantic Chapter--The Lovers
Separated--Jonah Out-done--A Lost Poem--The Aged Pilot Man--Storm On the
Erie Canal--Dollinger the Pilot Man--Terrific Gale--Danger Increases--A
Crisis Arrived--Saved as if by a Miracle

CHAPTER LII.
Freights to California--Silver Bricks--Under Ground Mines--Timber
Supports--A Visit to the Mines--The Caved Mines--Total of Shipments in
1863

CHAPTER LIII.
Jim Blaine and his Grandfather's Ram--Filkin's Mistake--Old Miss Wagner
and her Glass Eye--Jacobs, the Coffin Dealer--Waiting for a Customer--His
Bargain With Old Robbins--Robbins Sues for Damage and Collects--A New Use
for Missionaries--The Effect--His Uncle Lem. and the Use Providence Made
of Him--Sad Fate of Wheeler--Devotion of His Wife--A Model Monument--What
About the Ram?

CHAPTER LIV.
Chinese in Virginia City--Washing Bills--Habit of Imitation--Chinese
Immigration--A Visit to Chinatown--Messrs. Ah Sing, Hong Wo, See Yup, &c.

CHAPTER LV.
Tired of Virginia City--An Old Schoolmate--A Two Years' Loan--Acting as
an Editor--Almost Receive an Offer--An Accident--Three Drunken Anecdotes
--Last Look at Mt. Davidson--A Beautiful Incident

CHAPTER LVI.
Off for San Francisco--Western and Eastern Landscapes--The Hottest place
on Earth--Summer and Winter

CHAPTER LVII.
California--Novelty of Seeing a Woman--"Well if it ain't a Child!"--One
Hundred and Fifty Dollars for a Kiss--Waiting for a turn

CHAPTER LVIII.
Life in San Francisco--Worthless Stocks--My First Earthquake--Reportorial
Instincts--Effects of the Shocks--Incidents and Curiosities--Sabbath
Breakers--The Lodger and the Chambermaid--A Sensible Fashion to Follow
--Effects of the Earthquake on the Ministers

CHAPTER LIX.
Poor Again--Slinking as a Business--A Model Collector--Misery loves
Company--Comparing Notes for Comfort--A Streak of Luck--Finding a Dime
--Wealthy by Comparison--Two Sumptuous Dinners

CHAPTER LX.
An Old Friend--An Educated Miner--Pocket Mining--Freaks of Fortune

CHAPTER LXI.
Dick Baker and his Cat--Tom Quartz's Peculiarities--On an Excursion
--Appearance On His Return--A Prejudiced Cat--Empty Pockets and a Roving
Life

CHAPTER LXII.
Bound for the Sandwich Islands--The Three Captains--The Old Admiral--His
Daily Habits--His Well Fought Fields--An Unexpected Opponent--The Admiral
Overpowered--The Victor Declared a Hero

CHAPTER LXIII.
Arrival at the Islands--Honolulu--What I Saw There--Dress and Habits of
the Inhabitants--The Animal Kingdom--Fruits and Delightful Effects

CHAPTER LXIV.
An Excursion--Captain Phillips and his Turn-Out--A Horseback Ride--A
Vicious Animal--Nature and Art--Interesting Ruins--All Praise to the
Missionaries

CHAPTER LXV.
Interesting Mementoes and Relics--An Old Legend of a Frightful Leap--An
Appreciative Horse--Horse Jockeys and Their Brothers--A New Trick--A Hay
Merchant--Good Country for Horse Lovers

CHAPTER LXVI.
A Saturday Afternoon--Sandwich Island Girls on a Frolic--The Poi
Merchant--Grand Gala Day--A Native Dance--Church Membership--Cats and
Officials--An Overwhelming Discovery

CHAPTER LXVII.
The Legislature of the Island--What Its President Has Seen--Praying for
an Enemy--Women's Rights--Romantic Fashions--Worship of the Shark--Desire
for Dress--Full Dress--Not Paris Style--Playing Empire--Officials and
Foreign Ambassadors--Overwhelming Magnificence

CHAPTER LXVIII.
A Royal Funeral--Order of Procession--Pomp and Ceremony--A Striking
Contrast--A Sick Monarch--Human Sacrifices at His Death--Burial Orgies

CHAPTER LXIX.
"Once more upon the Waters."--A Noisy Passenger--Several Silent Ones--A
Moonlight Scene--Fruits and Plantations

CHAPTER LXX.
A Droll Character--Mrs. Beazely and Her Son--Meditations on Turnips--A
Letter from Horace Greeley--An Indignant Rejoinder--The Letter Translated
but too Late

CHAPTER LXXI.
Kealakekua Bay--Death of Captain Cook--His Monument--Its Construction--On
Board the Schooner

CHAPTER LXXII.
Young Kanakas in New England--A Temple Built by Ghosts--Female Bathers--I
Stood Guard--Women and Whiskey--A Fight for Religion--Arrival of
Missionaries

CHAPTER LXXIII.
Native Canoes--Surf Bathing--A Sanctuary--How Built--The Queen's Rock
--Curiosities--Petrified Lava

CHAPTER LXXIV.
Visit to the Volcano--The Crater--Pillar of Fire--Magnificent Spectacle
--A Lake of Fire

CHAPTER LXXV.
The North Lake--Fountains of Fire--Streams of Burning Lava--Tidal Waves

CHAPTER LXXVI.
A Reminiscence--Another Horse Story--My Ride with the Retired Milk Horse
--A Picnicing Excursion--Dead Volcano of Holeakala--Comparison with
Vesuvius--An Inside View

CHAPTER LXXVII.
A Curious Character--A Series of Stories--Sad Fate of a Liar--Evidence of
Insanity

CHAPTER LXXVIII.
Return to San Francisco--Ship Amusements--Preparing for Lecturing
--Valuable Assistance Secured--My First Attempt--The Audience Carried
--"All's Well that Ends Well."

CHAPTER LXXIX.
Highwaymen--A Predicament--A Huge Joke--Farewell to California--At Home
Again--Great Changes.  Moral.



APPENDIX.
A.--Brief Sketch of Mormon History
B.--The Mountain Meadows Massacre
C.--Concerning a Frightful Assassination that was never Consummated



CHAPTER I.

My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory--an
office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and
dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting
Governor in the Governor's absence.  A salary of eighteen hundred dollars
a year and the title of "Mr. Secretary," gave to the great position an
air of wild and imposing grandeur.  I was young and ignorant, and I
envied my brother.  I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor,
but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to
make, and the curious new world he was going to explore.  He was going to
travel!  I never had been away from home, and that word "travel" had a
seductive charm for me.  Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of
miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of
the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and
antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or
scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all
about it, and be a hero.  And he would see the gold mines and the silver
mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and
pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and
silver on the hillside.  And by and by he would become very rich, and
return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and
the ocean, and "the isthmus" as if it was nothing of any consequence to
have seen those marvels face to face.  What I suffered in contemplating
his happiness, pen cannot describe.  And so, when he offered me, in cold
blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared
to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was
rolled together as a scroll!  I had nothing more to desire.  My
contentment was complete.

At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey.  Not much
packing up was necessary, because we were going in the overland stage
from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a
small quantity of baggage apiece.  There was no Pacific railroad in those
fine times of ten or twelve years ago--not a single rail of it.
I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months--I had no thought of
staying longer than that.  I meant to see all I could that was new and
strange, and then hurry home to business.  I little thought that I would
not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven
uncommonly long years!

I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due
time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a
steamboat bound up the Missouri River.

We were six days going from St. Louis to "St. Jo."--a trip that was so
dull, and sleepy, and eventless that it has left no more impression on my
memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many
days.  No record is left in my mind, now, concerning it, but a confused
jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with
one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then
retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars
which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our
crutches and sparred over.

In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo. by land, for
she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and
clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long.  The
captain said she was a "bully" boat, and all she wanted was more "shear"
and a bigger wheel.  I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the
deep sagacity not to say so.



CHAPTER II.

The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph
was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars
apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada.

The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and
hurried to the starting-place.  Then an inconvenience presented itself
which we had not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot
make a heavy traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage
--because it weighs a good deal more.  But that was all we could take
--twenty-five pounds each.  So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a
selection in a good deal of a hurry.  We put our lawful twenty-five
pounds apiece all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis
again.  It was a sad parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and
white kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and
no stove-pipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary
to make life calm and peaceful.  We were reduced to a war-footing.  Each
of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and
"stogy" boots included; and into the valise we crowded a few white
shirts, some under-clothing and such things.  My brother, the Secretary,
took along about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds of
Unabridged Dictionary; for we did not know--poor innocents--that such
things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson
City the next.  I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith &
Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill,
and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult.  But I thought
it was grand.  It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon.  It only had
one fault--you could not hit anything with it.  One of our "conductors"
practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and
behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about,
and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief.  The Secretary
had a small-sized Colt's revolver strapped around him for protection
against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it
uncapped.  Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable.  George Bemis was
our fellow-traveler.

We had never seen him before.  He wore in his belt an old original
"Allen" revolver, such as irreverent people called a "pepper-box." Simply
drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol.  As the trigger
came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over,
and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball.
To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat
which was probably never done with an "Allen" in the world.  But George's
was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers
afterward said, "If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch
something else." And so she did.  She went after a deuce of spades nailed
against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to
the left of it.  Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with
a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow.  It was a
cheerful weapon--the "Allen." Sometimes all its six barrels would go off
at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about,
but behind it.

We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in
the mountains.  In the matter of luxuries we were modest--we took none
along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco.  We had two
large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we
also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in
the way of breakfasts and dinners.

By eight o'clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of
the river.  We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we
bowled away and left "the States" behind us.  It was a superb summer
morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.  There was a
freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation
from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel
that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving,
had been wasted and thrown away.  We were spinning along through Kansas,
and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the
great Plains.  Just here the land was rolling--a grand sweep of regular
elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach--like the
stately heave and swell of the ocean's bosom after a storm.  And
everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this
limitless expanse of grassy land.  But presently this sea upon dry ground
was to lose its "rolling" character and stretch away for seven hundred
miles as level as a floor!

Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous
description--an imposing cradle on wheels.  It was drawn by six handsome
horses, and by the side of the driver sat the "conductor," the legitimate
captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of
the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers.  We three were the
only passengers, this trip.  We sat on the back seat, inside.  About all
the rest of the coach was full of mail bags--for we had three days'
delayed mails with us.  Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall
of mail matter rose up to the roof.  There was a great pile of it
strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full.
We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said--"a
little for Brigham, and Carson, and 'Frisco, but the heft of it for the
Injuns, which is powerful troublesome 'thout they get plenty of truck to
read." But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance
which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we
guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we
would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and
leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it.

We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the
hard, level road.  We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the
coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued.

After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and
we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and
conductor.  Apparently she was not a talkative woman.  She would sit
there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a
mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand
till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that
would have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the
corpse with tranquil satisfaction--for she never missed her mosquito; she
was a dead shot at short range.  She never removed a carcase, but left
them there for bait.  I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill
thirty or forty mosquitoes--watched her, and waited for her to say
something, but she never did.  So I finally opened the conversation
myself.  I said:

"The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam."

"You bet!"

"What did I understand you to say, madam?"

"You BET!"

Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:

"Danged if I didn't begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb.  I did,
b'gosh.  Here I've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust'n muskeeters and
wonderin' what was ailin' ye.  Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I
thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by I begin to
reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to
say.  Wher'd ye come from?"

The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more!  The fountains of her great deep were
broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty
nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge
of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder
projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed
pronunciation!

How we suffered, suffered, suffered!  She went on, hour after hour, till
I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start.
She never did stop again until she got to her journey's end toward
daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we
were nodding, by that time), and said:

"Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o'
days, and I'll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good
by edgin' in a word now and then, I'm right thar.  Folks'll tell you't
I've always ben kind o' offish and partic'lar for a gal that's raised in
the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be,
if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my
equals, I reckon I'm a pretty sociable heifer after all."

We resolved not to "lay by at Cottonwood."



CHAPTER III.

About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly
over the road--so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle,
lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our
consciousness--when something gave away under us!  We were dimly aware of
it, but indifferent to it.  The coach stopped.  We heard the driver and
conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and
swearing because they could not find it--but we had no interest in
whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those
people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with
the curtains drawn.  But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an
examination going on, and then the driver's voice said:

"By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!"

This startled me broad awake--as an undefined sense of calamity is always
apt to do.  I said to myself: "Now, a thoroughbrace is probably part of a
horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver's
voice.  Leg, maybe--and yet how could he break his leg waltzing along
such a road as this?  No, it can't be his leg.  That is impossible,
unless he was reaching for the driver.  Now, what can be the
thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder?  Well, whatever comes, I shall not
air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway."

Just then the conductor's face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his
lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter.  He said:
"Gents, you'll have to turn out a spell.  Thoroughbrace is broke."

We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and
dreary.  When I found that the thing they called a "thoroughbrace" was
the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself
in, I said to the driver:

"I never saw a thoroughbrace used up like that, before, that I can
remember.  How did it happen?"

"Why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days' mail
--that's how it happened," said he.  "And right here is the very direction
which is wrote on all the newspaper-bags which was to be put out for the
Injuns for to keep 'em quiet.  It's most uncommon lucky, becuz it's so
nation dark I should 'a' gone by unbeknowns if that air thoroughbrace
hadn't broke."

I knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though I
could not see his face, because he was bent down at work; and wishing him
a safe delivery, I turned to and helped the rest get out the mail-sacks.
It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out.  When they
had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again, but put no
mail on top, and only half as much inside as there was before.  The
conductor bent all the seat-backs down, and then filled the coach just
half full of mail-bags from end to end.  We objected loudly to this, for
it left us no seats.  But the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed
was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his
thoroughbraces.  We never wanted any seats after that.  The lazy bed was
infinitely preferable.  I had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying
on it reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the
characters would turn out.

The conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to
take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we drove on.

It was now just dawn; and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on
the mail sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes
of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant
look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a
tranquil and contented ecstasy.  The stage whirled along at a spanking
gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in a most
exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering
of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi!
g'lang!" were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared
to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after
us with interest, or envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome
city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one
complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it.

After breakfast, at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three
climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor have our
bed for a nap.  And by and by, when the sun made me drowsy, I lay down on
my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing, and slept
for an hour or more.  That will give one an appreciable idea of those
matchless roads.  Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of
the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no
grip is necessary.  Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their
places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while
spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour.  I saw them do
it, often.  There was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize the
irons in time when the coach jolts.  These men were hard worked, and it
was not possible for them to stay awake all the time.

By and by we passed through Marysville, and over the Big Blue and Little
Sandy; thence about a mile, and entered Nebraska.  About a mile further
on, we came to the Big Sandy--one hundred and eighty miles from St.
Joseph.

As the sun was going down, we saw the first specimen of an animal known
familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert--from Kansas
clear to the Pacific Ocean--as the "jackass rabbit." He is well named.
He is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one third to
twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the
most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a
jackass.

When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded or
unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him
conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death,
and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home.  All you can
see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out
straight and "streaking it" through the low sage-brush, head erect, eyes
right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing you where
the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib.  Now and
then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the
stunted sage-brush, and scores a leap that would make a horse envious.
Presently he comes down to a long, graceful "lope," and shortly he
mysteriously disappears.  He has crouched behind a sage-bush, and will
sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of him,
when he will get under way again.  But one must shoot at this creature
once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the
best he knows how.  He is frightened clear through, now, and he lays his
long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yard-stick
every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy
indifference that is enchanting.

Our party made this specimen "hump himself," as the conductor said.  The
secretary started him with a shot from the Colt; I commenced spitting at
him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the old "Allen's" whole
broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not putting it too
strong to say that the rabbit was frantic!  He dropped his ears, set up
his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be
described as a flash and a vanish!  Long after he was out of sight we
could hear him whiz.

I do not remember where we first came across "sage-brush," but as I have
been speaking of it I may as well describe it.

This is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and
venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its
rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture
the "sage-brush" exactly.  Often, on lazy afternoons in the mountains, I
have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and entertained
myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were liliputian
birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its base were
liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from Brobdignag
waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.

It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the
"sage-brush."  Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to
desert and mountain.  It smells like our domestic sage, and "sage-tea"
made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well
acquainted with.  The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows
right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing
else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except "bunch-grass."
--["Bunch-grass" grows on the bleak mountain-sides of Nevada and
neighboring territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the
dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it;
notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more
nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass
that is known--so stock-men say.]--The sage-bushes grow from three to
six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far
West, clear to the borders of California.  There is not a tree of any
kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles--there is no vegetation at all
in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the
"greasewood," which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference
amounts to little.  Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be
impossible but for the friendly sage-brush.  Its trunk is as large as a
boy's wrist (and from that up to a man's arm), and its crooked branches
are half as large as its trunk--all good, sound, hard wood, very like
oak.

When a party camps, the first thing to be done is to cut sage-brush; and
in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use.  A hole a
foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug, and sage-brush
chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing
coals.  Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently
no swearing.  Such a fire will keep all night, with very little
replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around
which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and
profoundly entertaining.

Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished
failure.  Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his
illegitimate child the mule.  But their testimony to its nutritiousness
is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or
brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes
handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for
dinner.  Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will
relieve temporarily, but nothing satisfy.

In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of
my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a
critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of
getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as
an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet.
He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth,
and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while
opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had
never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life.  Then
he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve.
Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment
that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing
about an overcoat.  The tails went next, along with some percussion caps
and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople.  And then my
newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that
--manuscript letters written for the home papers.  But he was treading on
dangerous ground, now.  He began to come across solid wisdom in those
documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he
would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it
was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good
courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements
that not even a camel could swallow with impunity.  He began to gag and
gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about
a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench,
and died a death of indescribable agony.  I went and pulled the
manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had
choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact
that I ever laid before a trusting public.

I was about to say, when diverted from my subject, that occasionally one
finds sage-bushes five or six feet high, and with a spread of branch and
foliage in proportion, but two or two and a half feet is the usual
height.



CHAPTER IV.

As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation
for bed.  We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty
canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting
ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books).  We stirred them up and
redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible.
And we did improve it, too, though after all our work it had an upheaved
and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea.  Next we
hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where they had
settled, and put them on.  Then we got down our coats, vests, pantaloons
and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had been swinging
all day, and clothed ourselves in them--for, there being no ladies either
at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being hot, we had looked
to our comfort by stripping to our underclothing, at nine o'clock in the
morning.  All things being now ready, we stowed the uneasy Dictionary
where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteens
and pistols where we could find them in the dark.  Then we smoked a final
pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we put the pipes, tobacco
and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-bags, and then
fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made the place as "dark
as the inside of a cow," as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque
way.  It was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even
dimly visible in it.  And finally, we rolled ourselves up like
silk-worms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep.

Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to
recollect where we were--and succeed--and in a minute or two the stage
would be off again, and we likewise.  We began to get into country, now,
threaded here and there with little streams.  These had high, steep banks
on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the
other, our party inside got mixed somewhat.  First we would all be down
in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture,
and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads.
And we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and corners of
mail-bags that came lumbering over us and about us; and as the dust rose
from the tumult, we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us
would grumble, and probably say some hasty thing, like: "Take your elbow
out of my ribs!--can't you quit crowding?"

Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the
Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged
somebody.  One trip it "barked" the Secretary's elbow; the next trip it
hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis's nose up till he
could look down his nostrils--he said.  The pistols and coin soon settled
to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco and canteens clattered
and floundered after the Dictionary every time it made an assault on us,
and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes, and water
down our backs.

Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night.  It wore
gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through
the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with
satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was
necessary.  By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled
off our clothes and got ready for breakfast.  We were just pleasantly in
time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his
bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low
hut or two in the distance.  Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter
of our six horses' hoofs, and the driver's crisp commands, awoke to a
louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the station at
our smartest speed.  It was fascinating--that old overland stagecoaching.

We jumped out in undress uniform.  The driver tossed his gathered reins
out on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy
buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity--taking
not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquires after his health,
and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious tenders of
service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized station-keepers and
hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh
team out of the stables--for in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day,
station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of good enough low creatures,
useful in their place, and helping to make up a world, but not the kind
of beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself
with; while, on the contrary, in the eyes of the station-keeper and the
hostler, the stage-driver was a hero--a great and shining dignitary, the
world's favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the
nations.  When they spoke to him they received his insolent silence
meekly, and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man;
when he opened his lips they all hung on his words with admiration (he
never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed it
with a broad generality to the horses, the stables, the surrounding
country and the human underlings); when he discharged a facetious
insulting personality at a hostler, that hostler was happy for the day;
when he uttered his one jest--old as the hills, coarse, profane, witless,
and inflicted on the same audience, in the same language, every time his
coach drove up there--the varlets roared, and slapped their thighs, and
swore it was the best thing they'd ever heard in all their lives.  And
how they would fly around when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the
same, or a light for his pipe!--but they would instantly insult a
passenger if he so far forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands.
They could do that sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it
from--for, let it be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little
less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers.

The hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful conductor of
the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but
the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped.  How
admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved
himself with lingering deliberation, while some happy hostler held the
bunch of reins aloft, and waited patiently for him to take it!  And how
they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his
long whip and went careering away.

The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sundried, mud-colored
bricks, laid up without mortar (adobes, the Spaniards call these bricks,
and Americans shorten it to 'dobies).  The roofs, which had no slant to
them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a
thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds
and grass.  It was the first time we had ever seen a man's front yard on
top of his house.  The building consisted of barns, stable-room for
twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room for passengers.
This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two.
You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to
get in at the door.  In place of a window there was a square hole about
large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it.
There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard.  There was no
stove, but the fire-place served all needful purposes.  There were no
shelves, no cupboards, no closets.  In a corner stood an open sack of
flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable
tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon.


By the door of the station-keeper's den, outside, was a tin wash-basin,
on the ground.  Near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar
soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt, significantly
--but this latter was the station-keeper's private towel, and only two
persons in all the party might venture to use it--the stage-driver and
the conductor.  The latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former
would not, because did not choose to encourage the advances of a
station-keeper.  We had towels--in the valise; they might as well have
been in Sodom and Gomorrah.  We (and the conductor) used our
handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves.  By the door,
inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two
little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it.
This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when
you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches
above the other half.  From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a
string--but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would
order some sample coffins.

It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair
ever since--along with certain impurities.  In one corner of the room
stood three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches
of ammunition.  The station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven
stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample
additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode
horseback--so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow, and
unspeakably picturesque.  The pants were stuffed into the tops of high
boots, the heels whereof were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose
little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step.  The man wore a
huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no
suspenders, no vest, no coat--in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great
long "navy" revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and
projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife.  The furniture of
the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way.  The rocking-chairs and
sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by
two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty
candle-boxes.  The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the
table-cloth and napkins had not come--and they were not looking for them,
either.  A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin pint cup,
were at each man's place, and the driver had a queens-ware saucer that
had seen better days.  Of course this duke sat at the head of the table.
There was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it a
touching air of grandeur in misfortune.  This was the caster.  It was
German silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out
of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among
barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even
in its degradation.

There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked,
broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen
preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested
there.

The station-keeper upended a disk of last week's bread, of the shape and
size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as
good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer.

He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old
hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the
United States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage
company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and
employees.  We may have found this condemned army bacon further out on
the plains than the section I am locating it in, but we found it--there
is no gainsaying that.

Then he poured for us a beverage which he called "Slum gullion," and it
is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it.  It really
pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old
bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.

He had no sugar and no milk--not even a spoon to stir the ingredients
with.

We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the "slumgullion." And
when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote
(a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to
a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard.  He
asked the landlord if this was all.  The landlord said:

"All!  Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel
enough there for six."

"But I don't like mackerel."

"Oh--then help yourself to the mustard."

In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but
there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor
out of it.

Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.

I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed.  The
station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless.  At last,
when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with
himself upon a matter too vast to grasp:

"Coffee!  Well, if that don't go clean ahead of me, I'm d---d!"

We could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and
herdsmen--we all sat at the same board.  At least there was no
conversation further than a single hurried request, now and then, from
one employee to another.  It was always in the same form, and always
gruffly friendly.  Its western freshness and novelty startled me, at
first, and interested me; but it presently grew monotonous, and lost its
charm.  It was:

"Pass the bread, you son of a skunk!"  No, I forget--skunk was not the
word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that; I know it was, in
fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently.  However, it is no
matter--probably it was too strong for print, anyway.  It is the landmark
in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new
vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.

We gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece and went back to our
mail-bag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes.  Right here we
suffered the first diminution of our princely state.  We left our six
fine horses and took six mules in their place.  But they were wild
Mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and
hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready.  And when at
last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away
from the mules' heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had
issued from a cannon.  How the frantic animals did scamper!  It was a
fierce and furious gallop--and the gait never altered for a moment till
we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of
little station-huts and stables.

So we flew along all day.  At 2 P.M.  the belt of timber that fringes the
North Platte and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the
Plains came in sight.  At 4 P.M.  we crossed a branch of the river, and
at 5 P.M.  we crossed the Platte itself, and landed at Fort Kearney,
fifty-six hours out from St. Joe--THREE HUNDRED MILES!

Now that was stage-coaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years
ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in America, all told, expected to
live to see a railroad follow that route to the Pacific.  But the
railroad is there, now, and it pictures a thousand odd comparisons and
contrasts in my mind to read the following sketch, in the New York Times,
of a recent trip over almost the very ground I have been describing.  I
can scarcely comprehend the new state of things:

     "ACROSS THE CONTINENT.

     "At 4.20 P.M., Sunday, we rolled out of the station at Omaha, and
     started westward on our long jaunt.  A couple of hours out, dinner
     was announced--an "event" to those of us who had yet to experience
     what it is to eat in one of Pullman's hotels on wheels; so, stepping
     into the car next forward of our sleeping palace, we found ourselves
     in the dining-car.  It was a revelation to us, that first dinner on
     Sunday.  And though we continued to dine for four days, and had as
     many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire
     the perfection of the arrangements, and the marvelous results
     achieved.  Upon tables covered with snowy linen, and garnished with
     services of solid silver, Ethiop waiters, flitting about in spotless
     white, placed as by magic a repast at which Delmonico himself could
     have had no occasion to blush; and, indeed, in some respects it
     would be hard for that distinguished chef to match our menu; for, in
     addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we
     not our antelope steak (the gormand who has not experienced this
     --bah! what does he know of the feast of fat things?) our delicious
     mountain-brook trout, and choice fruits and berries, and (sauce
     piquant and unpurchasable!) our sweet-scented, appetite-compelling
     air of the prairies?

     "You may depend upon it, we all did justice to the good things, and
     as we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling Krug, whilst we
     sped along at the rate of thirty miles an hour, agreed it was the
     fastest living we had ever experienced.  (We beat that, however, two
     days afterward when we made twenty-seven miles in twenty-seven
     minutes, while our Champagne glasses filled to the brim spilled not
     a drop!) After dinner we repaired to our drawing-room car, and, as
     it was Sabbath eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns--"Praise God
     from whom," etc.; "Shining Shore," "Coronation," etc.--the voices of
     the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in the
     evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring Polyphemus
     eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and
     the Wild.  Then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the
     sleep of the just and only awoke the next morning (Monday) at eight
     o'clock, to find ourselves at the crossing of the North Platte,
     three hundred miles from Omaha--fifteen hours and forty minutes
     out."



CHAPTER V.

Another night of alternate tranquillity and turmoil.  But morning came,
by and by.  It was another glad awakening to fresh breezes, vast expanses
of level greensward, bright sunlight, an impressive solitude utterly
without visible human beings or human habitations, and an atmosphere of
such amazing magnifying properties that trees that seemed close at hand
were more than three mile away.  We resumed undress uniform, climbed
a-top of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted
occasionally at our frantic mules, merely to see them lay their ears back
and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away,
and leveled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new
and strange to gaze at.  Even at this day it thrills me through and
through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom
that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland
mornings!

Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog
villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf.  If I remember rightly,
this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther
deserts.  And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable
either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak
with confidence.  The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking
skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail
that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and
misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly
lifted lip and exposed teeth.  He has a general slinking expression all
over.  The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.  He is always
hungry.

He is always poor, out of luck and friendless.  The meanest creatures
despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.  He is
so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are
pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.  And he
is so homely!--so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.
When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and
then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head
a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush,
glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about
out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey
of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again--another fifty and stop
again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of
the sage-brush, and he disappears.  All this is when you make no
demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest
in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal
of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have
raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and by the time
you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you
have "drawn a bead" on him you see well enough that nothing but an
unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is
now.  But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it
ever so much--especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of
himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.

The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and
every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that
will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition,
and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck
further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out
straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy,
and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert
sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain!
And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote,
and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot
get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him
madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never
pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more
incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire
stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot
is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote
actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from
him--and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain
and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the
cayote with concentrated and desperate energy.  This "spurt" finds him
six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends.  And
then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the
cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something
about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from
you, bub--business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling
along this way all day"--and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the
sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that
dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

It makes his head swim.  He stops, and looks all around; climbs the
nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head
reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to
his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and
feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at
half-mast for a week.  And for as much as a year after that, whenever
there is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance
in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself,
"I believe I do not wish any of the pie."

The cayote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert,
along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit and the raven, and gets an
uncertain and precarious living, and earns it.  He seems to subsist
almost wholly on the carcases of oxen, mules and horses that have dropped
out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion, and
occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have been
opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned army
bacon.

He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the
desert-frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything
they can bite.  It is a curious fact that these latter are the only
creatures known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for more
if they survive.

The cayote of the deserts beyond the Rocky Mountains has a peculiarly
hard time of it, owing to the fact that his relations, the Indians, are
just as apt to be the first to detect a seductive scent on the desert
breeze, and follow the fragrance to the late ox it emanated from, as he
is himself; and when this occurs he has to content himself with sitting
off at a little distance watching those people strip off and dig out
everything edible, and walk off with it.  Then he and the waiting ravens
explore the skeleton and polish the bones.  It is considered that the
cayote, and the obscene bird, and the Indian of the desert, testify their
blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the waste
places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship, while
hating all other creature and yearning to assist at their funerals.  He
does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty
to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals,
and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying
around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents.

We soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the cayote as it
came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the
mail-sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune, made
shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and a
limitless larder the morrow.



CHAPTER VI.

Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours.
Such a thing was very frequent.  From St. Joseph, Missouri, to
Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred
miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in
four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and
required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember
rightly.  This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows,
and other unavoidable causes of detention.  The stage company had
everything under strict discipline and good system.  Over each two
hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent,
and invested him with great authority.  His beat or jurisdiction of two
hundred and fifty miles was called a "division." He purchased horses,
mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things
among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of
what each station needed.  He erected station buildings and dug wells.
He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and
blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose.  He was a very, very
great man in his "division"--a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the
Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner,
and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver
dwindled to a penny dip.  There were about eight of these kings, all
told, on the overland route.

Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the "conductor."
His beat was the same length as the agent's--two hundred and fifty miles.
He sat with the driver, and (when necessary) rode that fearful distance,
night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he could get perched
thus on top of the flying vehicle.  Think of it!  He had absolute charge
of the mails, express matter, passengers and stage, coach, until he
delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for them.

Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and
considerable executive ability.  He was usually a quiet, pleasant man,
who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman.
It was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent should be a
gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't.  But he was always a general in
administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and determination
--otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland
service would never in any instance have been to him anything but an
equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a
coffin at the end of it.  There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors
on the overland, for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on
every stage.

Next in real and official rank and importance, after the conductor, came
my delight, the driver--next in real but not in apparent importance--for
we have seen that in the eyes of the common herd the driver was to the
conductor as an admiral is to the captain of the flag-ship.  The driver's
beat was pretty long, and his sleeping-time at the stations pretty short,
sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of his position his would have
been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a wearing one.  We took a new
driver every day or every night (for they drove backward and forward over
the same piece of road all the time), and therefore we never got as well
acquainted with them as we did with the conductors; and besides, they
would have been above being familiar with such rubbish as passengers,
anyhow, as a general thing.  Still, we were always eager to get a sight
of each and every new driver as soon as the watch changed, for each and
every day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one, or
loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and had come to be
sociable and friendly with.  And so the first question we asked the
conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers, was
always, "Which is him?"  The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not
know, then, that it would go into a book some day.  As long as everything
went smoothly, the overland driver was well enough situated, but if a
fellow driver got sick suddenly it made trouble, for the coach must go
on, and so the potentate who was about to climb down and take a luxurious
rest after his long night's siege in the midst of wind and rain and
darkness, had to stay where he was and do the sick man's work.  Once, in
the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver sound asleep on the box, and
the mules going at the usual break-neck pace, the conductor said never
mind him, there was no danger, and he was doing double duty--had driven
seventy-five miles on one coach, and was now going back over it on this
without rest or sleep.  A hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six
vindictive mules and keeping them from climbing the trees!  It sounds
incredible, but I remember the statement well enough.

The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as
already described; and from western Nebraska to Nevada a considerable
sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws--fugitives from
justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which was
without law and without even the pretence of it.  When the
"division-agent" issued an order to one of these parties he did it with
the full understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy
six-shooter, and so he always went "fixed" to make things go along
smoothly.

Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler
through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have
taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been
different.  But they were snappy, able men, those division-agents, and
when they tried to teach a subordinate anything, that subordinate
generally "got it through his head."

A great portion of this vast machinery--these hundreds of men and
coaches, and thousands of mules and horses--was in the hands of Mr. Ben
Holliday.  All the western half of the business was in his hands.  This
reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is pertinent here, so
I will transfer it just in the language in which I find it set down in my
Holy Land note-book:

      No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday--a man of prodigious
      energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying across the
      continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind--two
      thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the watch!  But
      this fragment of history is not about Ben Holliday, but about a
      young New York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small
      party of pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to
      California in Mr. Holliday's overland coaches three years before,
      and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of
      Mr. H.) Aged nineteen.  Jack was a good boy--a good-hearted and
      always well-meaning boy, who had been reared in the city of New
      York, and although he was bright and knew a great many useful
      things, his Scriptural education had been a good deal neglected--to
      such a degree, indeed, that all Holy Land history was fresh and new
      to him, and all Bible names mysteries that had never disturbed his
      virgin ear.

      Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of
      Jack, in that he was learned in the Scriptures and an enthusiast
      concerning them.  He was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired
      of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them.  He never
      passed a celebrated locality, from Bashan to Bethlehem, without
      illuminating it with an oration.  One day, when camped near the
      ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with something like this:

      "Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that bounds
      the Jordan valley?  The mountains of Moab, Jack!  Think of it, my
      boy--the actual mountains of Moab--renowned in Scripture history!
      We are actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags
      and peaks--and for all we know" [dropping his voice impressively],
      "our eyes may be resting at this very moment upon the spot WHERE
      LIES THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES!  Think of it, Jack!"

      "Moses who?"  (falling inflection).

      "Moses who!  Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself--you ought to
      be ashamed of such criminal ignorance.  Why, Moses, the great guide,
      soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel!  Jack, from this spot
      where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred
      miles in extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought
      the children of Israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for
      forty years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing
      rocks and hills, and landed them at last, safe and sound, within
      sight of this very spot; and where we now stand they entered the
      Promised Land with anthems of rejoicing!  It was a wonderful,
      wonderful thing to do, Jack!  Think of it!"

      "Forty years?  Only three hundred miles?  Humph!  Ben Holliday would
      have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!"

The boy meant no harm.  He did not know that he had said anything that
was wrong or irreverent.  And so no one scolded him or felt offended with
him--and nobody could but some ungenerous spirit incapable of excusing
the heedless blunders of a boy.

At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the "Crossing of the South
Platte," alias "Julesburg," alias "Overland City," four hundred and
seventy miles from St. Joseph--the strangest, quaintest, funniest
frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been
astonished with.



CHAPTER VII.

It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us
such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless
solitude!  We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric
people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up
suddenly in this.  For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City
as if we had never seen a town before.  The reason we had an hour to
spare was because we had to change our stage (for a less sumptuous
affair, called a "mud-wagon") and transfer our freight of mails.

Presently we got under way again.  We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy
South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and
pigmy islands--a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the
enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with
the naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either
bank.  The Platte was "up," they said--which made me wish I could see it
when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier.  They said it
was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its quicksands were liable
to swallow up horses, coach and passengers if an attempt was made to ford
it.  But the mails had to go, and we made the attempt.  Once or twice in
midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sands so threateningly that
we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to be
shipwrecked in a "mud-wagon" in the middle of a desert at last.  But we
dragged through and sped away toward the setting sun.

Next morning, just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles
from St. Joseph, our mud-wagon broke down.  We were to be delayed five or
six hours, and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a
party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt.  It was noble sport
galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our
part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo
bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two miles, and then he forsook his
horse and took to a lone tree.  He was very sullen about the matter for
some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little,
and finally he said:

"Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making
themselves so facetious over it.  I tell you I was angry in earnest for
awhile.  I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if
I could have done it without crippling six or seven other people--but of
course I couldn't, the old 'Allen's' so confounded comprehensive.  I wish
those loafers had been up in the tree; they wouldn't have wanted to laugh
so.  If I had had a horse worth a cent--but no, the minute he saw that
buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the
air and stood on his heels.  The saddle began to slip, and I took him
round the neck and laid close to him, and began to pray.  Then he came
down and stood up on the other end awhile, and the bull actually stopped
pawing sand and bellowing to contemplate the inhuman spectacle.

"Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded
perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to literally
prostrate my horse's reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him,
and I wish I may die if he didn't stand on his head for a quarter of a
minute and shed tears.  He was absolutely out of his mind--he was, as
sure as truth itself, and he really didn't know what he was doing.  Then
the bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and
took a fresh start--and then for the next ten minutes he would actually
throw one hand-spring after another so fast that the bull began to get
unsettled, too, and didn't know where to start in--and so he stood there
sneezing, and shovelling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and
then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for
breakfast, certain.  Well, I was first out on his neck--the horse's, not
the bull's--and then underneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head
up, and sometimes heels--but I tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be
ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you
might say.  Pretty soon the bull made a snatch for us and brought away
some of my horse's tail (I suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy at
the time), but something made him hungry for solitude and suggested to
him to get up and hunt for it.

"And then you ought to have seen that spider legged old skeleton go! and
you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him, too--head down, tongue
out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mowing down the
weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a
whirlwind!  By George, it was a hot race!  I and the saddle were back on
the rump, and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel
with both hands.  First we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass
rabbit; then we overtook a cayote, and were gaining on an antelope when
the rotten girth let go and threw me about thirty yards off to the left,
and as the saddle went down over the horse's rump he gave it a lift with
his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in the air, I wish
I may die in a minute if he didn't.  I fell at the foot of the only
solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could
see with the naked eye), and the next second I had hold of the bark with
four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that I was
astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming my luck in a way that made my
breath smell of brimstone.  I had the bull, now, if he did not think of
one thing.  But that one thing I dreaded.  I dreaded it very seriously.
There was a possibility that the bull might not think of it, but there
were greater chances that he would.  I made up my mind what I would do in
case he did.  It was a little over forty feet to the ground from where I
sat.  I cautiously unwound the lariat from the pommel of my saddle----"

"Your saddle?  Did you take your saddle up in the tree with you?"

"Take it up in the tree with me?  Why, how you talk.  Of course I didn't.
No man could do that.  It fell in the tree when it came down."

"Oh--exactly."

"Certainly.  I unwound the lariat, and fastened one end of it to the
limb.  It was the very best green raw-hide, and capable of sustaining
tons.  I made a slip-noose in the other end, and then hung it down to see
the length.  It reached down twenty-two feet--half way to the ground.
I then loaded every barrel of the Allen with a double charge.  I felt
satisfied.  I said to myself, if he never thinks of that one thing that I
dread, all right--but if he does, all right anyhow--I am fixed for him.
But don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that
always happens?  Indeed it is so.  I watched the bull, now, with anxiety
--anxiety which no one can conceive of who has not been in such a
situation and felt that at any moment death might come.  Presently a
thought came into the bull's eye.  I knew it! said I--if my nerve fails
now, I am lost.  Sure enough, it was just as I had dreaded, he started in
to climb the tree----"

"What, the bull?"

"Of course--who else?"

"But a bull can't climb a tree."

"He can't, can't he?  Since you know so much about it, did you ever see a
bull try?"

"No!  I never dreamt of such a thing."

"Well, then, what is the use of your talking that way, then?  Because you
never saw a thing done, is that any reason why it can't be done?"

"Well, all right--go on.  What did you do?"

"The bull started up, and got along well for about ten feet, then slipped
and slid back.  I breathed easier.  He tried it again--got up a little
higher--slipped again.  But he came at it once more, and this time he was
careful.  He got gradually higher and higher, and my spirits went down
more and more.  Up he came--an inch at a time--with his eyes hot, and his
tongue hanging out.  Higher and higher--hitched his foot over the stump
of a limb, and looked up, as much as to say, 'You are my meat, friend.'
Up again--higher and higher, and getting more excited the closer he got.
He was within ten feet of me!  I took a long breath,--and then said I,
'It is now or never.'  I had the coil of the lariat all ready; I paid it
out slowly, till it hung right over his head; all of a sudden I let go of
the slack, and the slipnoose fell fairly round his neck!  Quicker than
lightning I out with the Allen and let him have it in the face.  It was
an awful roar, and must have scared the bull out of his senses.  When the
smoke cleared away, there he was, dangling in the air, twenty foot from
the ground, and going out of one convulsion into another faster than you
could count!  I didn't stop to count, anyhow--I shinned down the tree and
shot for home."

"Bemis, is all that true, just as you have stated it?"

"I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn't."

"Well, we can't refuse to believe it, and we don't.  But if there were
some proofs----"

"Proofs!  Did I bring back my lariat?"

"No."

"Did I bring back my horse?"

"No."

"Did you ever see the bull again?"

"No."

"Well, then, what more do you want?  I never saw anybody as particular as
you are about a little thing like that."

I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by
the skin of his teeth.  This episode reminds me of an incident of my
brief sojourn in Siam, years afterward.  The European citizens of a town
in the neighborhood of Bangkok had a prodigy among them by the name of
Eckert, an Englishman--a person famous for the number, ingenuity and
imposing magnitude of his lies.  They were always repeating his most
celebrated falsehoods, and always trying to "draw him out" before
strangers; but they seldom succeeded.  Twice he was invited to the house
where I was visiting, but nothing could seduce him into a specimen lie.
One day a planter named Bascom, an influential man, and a proud and
sometimes irascible one, invited me to ride over with him and call on
Eckert.  As we jogged along, said he:

"Now, do you know where the fault lies?  It lies in putting Eckert on his
guard.  The minute the boys go to pumping at Eckert he knows perfectly
well what they are after, and of course he shuts up his shell.  Anybody
might know he would.  But when we get there, we must play him finer than
that.  Let him shape the conversation to suit himself--let him drop it or
change it whenever he wants to.  Let him see that nobody is trying to
draw him out.  Just let him have his own way.  He will soon forget
himself and begin to grind out lies like a mill.  Don't get impatient
--just keep quiet, and let me play him.  I will make him lie.  It does seem
to me that the boys must be blind to overlook such an obvious and simple
trick as that."

Eckert received us heartily--a pleasant-spoken, gentle-mannered creature.
We sat in the veranda an hour, sipping English ale, and talking about the
king, and the sacred white elephant, the Sleeping Idol, and all manner of
things; and I noticed that my comrade never led the conversation himself
or shaped it, but simply followed Eckert's lead, and betrayed no
solicitude and no anxiety about anything.  The effect was shortly
perceptible.  Eckert began to grow communicative; he grew more and more
at his ease, and more and more talkative and sociable.  Another hour
passed in the same way, and then all of a sudden Eckert said:

"Oh, by the way!  I came near forgetting.  I have got a thing here to
astonish you.  Such a thing as neither you nor any other man ever heard
of--I've got a cat that will eat cocoanut!  Common green cocoanut--and
not only eat the meat, but drink the milk.  It is so--I'll swear to it."

A quick glance from Bascom--a glance that I understood--then:

"Why, bless my soul, I never heard of such a thing.  Man, it is
impossible."

"I knew you would say it.  I'll fetch the cat."

He went in the house.  Bascom said:

"There--what did I tell you?  Now, that is the way to handle Eckert.  You
see, I have petted him along patiently, and put his suspicions to sleep.
I am glad we came.  You tell the boys about it when you go back.  Cat eat
a cocoanut--oh, my!  Now, that is just his way, exactly--he will tell the
absurdest lie, and trust to luck to get out of it again.

"Cat eat a cocoanut--the innocent fool!"

Eckert approached with his cat, sure enough.

Bascom smiled.  Said he:

"I'll hold the cat--you bring a cocoanut."

Eckert split one open, and chopped up some pieces.  Bascom smuggled a
wink to me, and proffered a slice of the fruit to puss.  She snatched it,
swallowed it ravenously, and asked for more!

We rode our two miles in silence, and wide apart.  At least I was silent,
though Bascom cuffed his horse and cursed him a good deal,
notwithstanding the horse was behaving well enough.  When I branched off
homeward, Bascom said:

"Keep the horse till morning.  And--you need not speak of this
--foolishness to the boys."



CHAPTER VIII.

In a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks and
watching for the "pony-rider"--the fleet messenger who sped across the
continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred
miles in eight days!  Think of that for perishable horse and human flesh
and blood to do!  The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man,
brimful of spirit and endurance.  No matter what time of the day or night
his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer,
raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level
straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or
whether it led through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with
hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be
off like the wind!  There was no idling-time for a pony-rider on duty.
He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight,
or through the blackness of darkness--just as it happened.  He rode a
splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a
gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he
came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh,
impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mail-bag was made in the
twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight
before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look.  Both rider
and horse went "flying light." The rider's dress was thin, and fitted
close; he wore a "round-about," and a skull-cap, and tucked his
pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider.  He carried no arms--he
carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage
on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter.

He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry--his bag had business
letters in it, mostly.  His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight,
too.  He wore a little wafer of a racing-saddle, and no visible blanket.
He wore light shoes, or none at all.  The little flat mail-pockets
strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a
child's primer.  They held many and many an important business chapter
and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as
gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized.  The
stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles
a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty.
There were about eighty pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and
day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to
California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among
them making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and
see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.

We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider,
but somehow or other all that passed us and all that met us managed to
streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the
swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of
the windows.  But now we were expecting one along every moment, and would
see him in broad daylight.  Presently the driver exclaims:

"HERE HE COMES!"

Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider.  Away
across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears
against the sky, and it is plain that it moves.  Well, I should think so!

In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling,
rising and falling--sweeping toward us nearer and nearer--growing more
and more distinct, more and more sharply defined--nearer and still
nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another
instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's
hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and
go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!

So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for
the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after
the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether
we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe.

We rattled through Scott's Bluffs Pass, by and by.  It was along here
somewhere that we first came across genuine and unmistakable alkali water
in the road, and we cordially hailed it as a first-class curiosity, and a
thing to be mentioned with eclat in letters to the ignorant at home.
This water gave the road a soapy appearance, and in many places the
ground looked as if it had been whitewashed.  I think the strange alkali
water excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet, and I know
we felt very complacent and conceited, and better satisfied with life
after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some
other people had not.  In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons
as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mont Blanc and the
Matterhorn, and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it
isn't a common experience.  But once in a while one of those parties
trips and comes darting down the long mountain-crags in a sitting
posture, making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to
bench, and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he strikes,
and still glancing and flitting on again, sticking an iceberg into
himself every now and then, and tearing his clothes, snatching at things
to save himself, taking hold of trees and fetching them along with him,
roots and all, starting little rocks now and then, then big boulders,
then acres of ice and snow and patches of forest, gathering and still
gathering as he goes, adding and still adding to his massed and sweeping
grandeur as he nears a three thousand-foot precipice, till at last he
waves his hat magnificently and rides into eternity on the back of a
raging and tossing avalanche!

This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by excitement, but
ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments next
day, with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of him?

We crossed the sand hills near the scene of the Indian mail robbery and
massacre of 1856, wherein the driver and conductor perished, and also all
the passengers but one, it was supposed; but this must have been a
mistake, for at different times afterward on the Pacific coast I was
personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who
were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives.
There was no doubt of the truth of it--I had it from their own lips.  One
of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads in his
system for nearly seven years after the massacre; and another of them
told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows that after the
Indians were gone and he could raise up and examine himself, he could not
restrain his tears, for his clothes were completely ruined.

The most trustworthy tradition avers, however, that only one man, a
person named Babbitt, survived the massacre, and he was desperately
wounded.  He dragged himself on his hands and knee (for one leg was
broken) to a station several miles away.  He did it during portions of
two nights, lying concealed one day and part of another, and for more
than forty hours suffering unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst and
bodily pain.  The Indians robbed the coach of everything it contained,
including quite an amount of treasure.



CHAPTER IX.

We passed Fort Laramie in the night, and on the seventh morning out we
found ourselves in the Black Hills, with Laramie Peak at our elbow
(apparently) looming vast and solitary--a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in
hue, so portentously did the old colossus frown under his beetling brows
of storm-cloud.  He was thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he
only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right.  We
breakfasted at Horse-Shoe Station, six hundred and seventy-six miles out
from St. Joseph.  We had now reached a hostile Indian country, and during
the afternoon we passed Laparelle Station, and enjoyed great discomfort
all the time we were in the neighborhood, being aware that many of the
trees we dashed by at arm's length concealed a lurking Indian or two.
During the preceding night an ambushed savage had sent a bullet through
the pony-rider's jacket, but he had ridden on, just the same, because
pony-riders were not allowed to stop and inquire into such things except
when killed.  As long as they had life enough left in them they had to
stick to the horse and ride, even if the Indians had been waiting for
them a week, and were entirely out of patience.  About two hours and a
half before we arrived at Laparelle Station, the keeper in charge of it
had fired four times at an Indian, but he said with an injured air that
the Indian had "skipped around so's to spile everything--and ammunition's
blamed skurse, too." The most natural inference conveyed by his manner of
speaking was, that in "skipping around," the Indian had taken an unfair
advantage.

The coach we were in had a neat hole through its front--a reminiscence of
its last trip through this region.  The bullet that made it wounded the
driver slightly, but he did not mind it much.  He said the place to keep
a man "huffy" was down on the Southern Overland, among the Apaches,
before the company moved the stage line up on the northern route.  He
said the Apaches used to annoy him all the time down there, and that he
came as near as anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance,
because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he "couldn't hold
his vittles."

This person's statement were not generally believed.

We shut the blinds down very tightly that first night in the hostile
Indian country, and lay on our arms.  We slept on them some, but most of
the time we only lay on them.  We did not talk much, but kept quiet and
listened.  It was an inky-black night, and occasionally rainy.  We were
among woods and rocks, hills and gorges--so shut in, in fact, that when
we peeped through a chink in a curtain, we could discern nothing.  The
driver and conductor on top were still, too, or only spoke at long
intervals, in low tones, as is the way of men in the midst of invisible
dangers.  We listened to rain-drops pattering on the roof; and the
grinding of the wheels through the muddy gravel; and the low wailing of
the wind; and all the time we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable
from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle, the sense of remaining
perfectly still in one place, notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of
the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels.
We listened a long time, with intent faculties and bated breath; every
time one of us would relax, and draw a long sigh of relief and start to
say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden "Hark!" and
instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again.  So the
tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our
tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one
might call such a condition by so strong a name--for it was a sleep set
with a hair-trigger.  It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird
and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams--a sleep that
was a chaos.  Presently, dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the
night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by such a long, wild,
agonizing shriek!  Then we heard--ten steps from the stage--

"Help!  help!  help!" [It was our driver's voice.]

"Kill him!  Kill him like a dog!"

"I'm being murdered!  Will no man lend me a pistol?"

"Look out! head him off! head him off!"

[Two pistol shots; a confusion of voices and the trampling of many feet,
as if a crowd were closing and surging together around some object;
several heavy, dull blows, as with a club; a voice that said appealingly,
"Don't, gentlemen, please don't--I'm a dead man!" Then a fainter groan,
and another blow, and away sped the stage into the darkness, and left the
grisly mystery behind us.]

What a startle it was!  Eight seconds would amply cover the time it
occupied--maybe even five would do it.  We only had time to plunge at a
curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering
flurry, when our whip cracked sharply overhead, and we went rumbling and
thundering away, down a mountain "grade."

We fed on that mystery the rest of the night--what was left of it, for it
was waning fast.  It had to remain a present mystery, for all we could
get from the conductor in answer to our hails was something that sounded,
through the clatter of the wheels, like "Tell you in the morning!"

So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney, and
lay there in the dark, listening to each other's story of how he first
felt and how many thousand Indians he first thought had hurled themselves
upon us, and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds was, and the
order of their occurrence.  And we theorized, too, but there was never a
theory that would account for our driver's voice being out there, nor yet
account for his Indian murderers talking such good English, if they were
Indians.

So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our
boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the real presence
of something to be anxious about.

We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence.  All that
we could make out of the odds and ends of the information we gathered in
the morning, was that the disturbance occurred at a station; that we
changed drivers there, and that the driver that got off there had been
talking roughly about some of the outlaws that infested the region ("for
there wasn't a man around there but had a price on his head and didn't
dare show himself in the settlements," the conductor said); he had talked
roughly about these characters, and ought to have "drove up there with
his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him, and begun
business himself, because any softy would know they would be laying for
him."

That was all we could gather, and we could see that neither the conductor
nor the new driver were much concerned about the matter.  They plainly
had little respect for a man who would deliver offensive opinions of
people and then be so simple as to come into their presence unprepared to
"back his judgment," as they pleasantly phrased the killing of any
fellow-being who did not like said opinions.  And likewise they plainly
had a contempt for the man's poor discretion in venturing to rouse the
wrath of such utterly reckless wild beasts as those outlaws--and the
conductor added:

"I tell you it's as much as Slade himself want to do!"

This remark created an entire revolution in my curiosity.  I cared
nothing now about the Indians, and even lost interest in the murdered
driver.  There was such magic in that name, SLADE!  Day or night, now, I
stood always ready to drop any subject in hand, to listen to something
new about Slade and his ghastly exploits.  Even before we got to Overland
City, we had begun to hear about Slade and his "division" (for he was a
"division-agent") on the Overland; and from the hour we had left Overland
City we had heard drivers and conductors talk about only three things
--"Californy," the Nevada silver mines, and this desperado Slade.  And a
deal the most of the talk was about Slade.  We had gradually come to have
a realizing sense of the fact that Slade was a man whose heart and hands
and soul were steeped in the blood of offenders against his dignity; a
man who awfully avenged all injuries, affront, insults or slights, of
whatever kind--on the spot if he could, years afterward if lack of
earlier opportunity compelled it; a man whose hate tortured him day and
night till vengeance appeased it--and not an ordinary vengeance either,
but his enemy's absolute death--nothing less; a man whose face would
light up with a terrible joy when he surprised a foe and had him at a
disadvantage.  A high and efficient servant of the Overland, an outlaw
among outlaws and yet their relentless scourge, Slade was at once the
most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that
inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains.



CHAPTER X.

Really and truly, two thirds of the talk of drivers and conductors had
been about this man Slade, ever since the day before we reached
Julesburg.  In order that the eastern reader may have a clear conception
of what a Rocky Mountain desperado is, in his highest state of
development, I will reduce all this mass of overland gossip to one
straightforward narrative, and present it in the following shape:

Slade was born in Illinois, of good parentage.  At about twenty-six years
of age he killed a man in a quarrel and fled the country.  At St. Joseph,
Missouri, he joined one of the early California-bound emigrant trains,
and was given the post of train-master.  One day on the plains he had an
angry dispute with one of his wagon-drivers, and both drew their
revolvers.  But the driver was the quicker artist, and had his weapon
cocked first.  So Slade said it was a pity to waste life on so small a
matter, and proposed that the pistols be thrown on the ground and the
quarrel settled by a fist-fight.  The unsuspecting driver agreed, and
threw down his pistol--whereupon Slade laughed at his simplicity, and
shot him dead!

He made his escape, and lived a wild life for awhile, dividing his time
between fighting Indians and avoiding an Illinois sheriff, who had been
sent to arrest him for his first murder.  It is said that in one Indian
battle he killed three savages with his own hand, and afterward cut their
ears off and sent them, with his compliments, to the chief of the tribe.

Slade soon gained a name for fearless resolution, and this was sufficient
merit to procure for him the important post of overland division-agent at
Julesburg, in place of Mr. Jules, removed.  For some time previously, the
company's horses had been frequently stolen, and the coaches delayed, by
gangs of outlaws, who were wont to laugh at the idea of any man's having
the temerity to resent such outrages.  Slade resented them promptly.

The outlaws soon found that the new agent was a man who did not fear
anything that breathed the breath of life.  He made short work of all
offenders.  The result was that delays ceased, the company's property was
let alone, and no matter what happened or who suffered, Slade's coaches
went through, every time!  True, in order to bring about this wholesome
change, Slade had to kill several men--some say three, others say four,
and others six--but the world was the richer for their loss.  The first
prominent difficulty he had was with the ex-agent Jules, who bore the
reputation of being a reckless and desperate man himself.  Jules hated
Slade for supplanting him, and a good fair occasion for a fight was all
he was waiting for.  By and by Slade dared to employ a man whom Jules had
once discharged.  Next, Slade seized a team of stage-horses which he
accused Jules of having driven off and hidden somewhere for his own use.
War was declared, and for a day or two the two men walked warily about
the streets, seeking each other, Jules armed with a double-barreled shot
gun, and Slade with his history-creating revolver.  Finally, as Slade
stepped into a store Jules poured the contents of his gun into him from
behind the door.  Slade was plucky, and Jules got several bad pistol
wounds in return.

Then both men fell, and were carried to their respective lodgings, both
swearing that better aim should do deadlier work next time.  Both were
bedridden a long time, but Jules got to his feet first, and gathering his
possessions together, packed them on a couple of mules, and fled to the
Rocky Mountains to gather strength in safety against the day of
reckoning.  For many months he was not seen or heard of, and was
gradually dropped out of the remembrance of all save Slade himself.  But
Slade was not the man to forget him.  On the contrary, common report said
that Slade kept a reward standing for his capture, dead or alive!

After awhile, seeing that Slade's energetic administration had restored
peace and order to one of the worst divisions of the road, the overland
stage company transferred him to the Rocky Ridge division in the Rocky
Mountains, to see if he could perform a like miracle there.  It was the
very paradise of outlaws and desperadoes.  There was absolutely no
semblance of law there.  Violence was the rule.  Force was the only
recognized authority.  The commonest misunderstandings were settled on
the spot with the revolver or the knife.  Murders were done in open day,
and with sparkling frequency, and nobody thought of inquiring into them.
It was considered that the parties who did the killing had their private
reasons for it; for other people to meddle would have been looked upon as
indelicate.  After a murder, all that Rocky Mountain etiquette required
of a spectator was, that he should help the gentleman bury his game
--otherwise his churlishness would surely be remembered against him the
first time he killed a man himself and needed a neighborly turn in
interring him.

Slade took up his residence sweetly and peacefully in the midst of this
hive of horse-thieves and assassins, and the very first time one of them
aired his insolent swaggerings in his presence he shot him dead!  He
began a raid on the outlaws, and in a singularly short space of time he
had completely stopped their depredations on the stage stock, recovered a
large number of stolen horses, killed several of the worst desperadoes of
the district, and gained such a dread ascendancy over the rest that they
respected him, admired him, feared him, obeyed him!  He wrought the same
marvelous change in the ways of the community that had marked his
administration at Overland City.  He captured two men who had stolen
overland stock, and with his own hands he hanged them.  He was supreme
judge in his district, and he was jury and executioner likewise--and not
only in the case of offences against his employers, but against passing
emigrants as well.  On one occasion some emigrants had their stock lost
or stolen, and told Slade, who chanced to visit their camp.  With a
single companion he rode to a ranch, the owners of which he suspected,
and opening the door, commenced firing, killing three, and wounding the
fourth.

From a bloodthirstily interesting little Montana book.--["The Vigilantes
of Montana," by Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale.]--I take this paragraph:

      "While on the road, Slade held absolute sway.  He would ride down to
      a station, get into a quarrel, turn the house out of windows, and
      maltreat the occupants most cruelly.  The unfortunates had no means
      of redress, and were compelled to recuperate as best they could."

On one of these occasions, it is said he killed the father of the fine
little half-breed boy Jemmy, whom he adopted, and who lived with his
widow after his execution.  Stories of Slade's hanging men, and of
innumerable assaults, shootings, stabbings and beatings, in which he was
a principal actor, form part of the legends of the stage line.  As for
minor quarrels and shootings, it is absolutely certain that a minute
history of Slade's life would be one long record of such practices.

Slade was a matchless marksman with a navy revolver.  The legends say
that one morning at Rocky Ridge, when he was feeling comfortable, he saw
a man approaching who had offended him some days before--observe the fine
memory he had for matters like that--and, "Gentlemen," said Slade,
drawing, "it is a good twenty-yard shot--I'll clip the third button on
his coat!"  Which he did.  The bystanders all admired it.  And they all
attended the funeral, too.

On one occasion a man who kept a little whisky-shelf at the station did
something which angered Slade--and went and made his will.  A day or two
afterward Slade came in and called for some brandy.  The man reached
under the counter (ostensibly to get a bottle--possibly to get something
else), but Slade smiled upon him that peculiarly bland and satisfied
smile of his which the neighbors had long ago learned to recognize as a
death-warrant in disguise, and told him to "none of that!--pass out the
high-priced article."  So the poor bar-keeper had to turn his back and
get the high-priced brandy from the shelf; and when he faced around again
he was looking into the muzzle of Slade's pistol.  "And the next
instant," added my informant, impressively, "he was one of the deadest
men that ever lived."

The stage-drivers and conductors told us that sometimes Slade would leave
a hated enemy wholly unmolested, unnoticed and unmentioned, for weeks
together--had done it once or twice at any rate.  And some said they
believed he did it in order to lull the victims into unwatchfulness, so
that he could get the advantage of them, and others said they believed he
saved up an enemy that way, just as a schoolboy saves up a cake, and made
the pleasure go as far as it would by gloating over the anticipation.
One of these cases was that of a Frenchman who had offended Slade.
To the surprise of everybody Slade did not kill him on the spot, but let
him alone for a considerable time.  Finally, however, he went to the
Frenchman's house very late one night, knocked, and when his enemy opened
the door, shot him dead--pushed the corpse inside the door with his foot,
set the house on fire and burned up the dead man, his widow and three
children!  I heard this story from several different people, and they
evidently believed what they were saying.  It may be true, and it may
not.  "Give a dog a bad name," etc.

Slade was captured, once, by a party of men who intended to lynch him.
They disarmed him, and shut him up in a strong log-house, and placed a
guard over him.  He prevailed on his captors to send for his wife, so
that he might have a last interview with her.  She was a brave, loving,
spirited woman.  She jumped on a horse and rode for life and death.
When she arrived they let her in without searching her, and before the
door could be closed she whipped out a couple of revolvers, and she and
her lord marched forth defying the party.  And then, under a brisk fire,
they mounted double and galloped away unharmed!

In the fulness of time Slade's myrmidons captured his ancient enemy
Jules, whom they found in a well-chosen hiding-place in the remote
fastnesses of the mountains, gaining a precarious livelihood with his
rifle.  They brought him to Rocky Ridge, bound hand and foot, and
deposited him in the middle of the cattle-yard with his back against a
post.  It is said that the pleasure that lit Slade's face when he heard
of it was something fearful to contemplate.  He examined his enemy to see
that he was securely tied, and then went to bed, content to wait till
morning before enjoying the luxury of killing him.  Jules spent the night
in the cattle-yard, and it is a region where warm nights are never known.
In the morning Slade practised on him with his revolver, nipping the
flesh here and there, and occasionally clipping off a finger, while Jules
begged him to kill him outright and put him out of his misery.  Finally
Slade reloaded, and walking up close to his victim, made some
characteristic remarks and then dispatched him.  The body lay there half
a day, nobody venturing to touch it without orders, and then Slade
detailed a party and assisted at the burial himself.  But he first cut
off the dead man's ears and put them in his vest pocket, where he carried
them for some time with great satisfaction.  That is the story as I have
frequently heard it told and seen it in print in California newspapers.
It is doubtless correct in all essential particulars.

In due time we rattled up to a stage-station, and sat down to
breakfast with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and
bearded mountaineers, ranchmen and station employees.  The most
gentlemanly-appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along
the road in the Overland Company's service was the person who sat at the
head of the table, at my elbow.  Never youth stared and shivered as I did
when I heard them call him SLADE!

Here was romance, and I sitting face to face with it!--looking upon it
--touching it--hobnobbing with it, as it were!  Here, right by my side, was
the actual ogre who, in fights and brawls and various ways, had taken the
lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him!  I suppose I
was the proudest stripling that ever traveled to see strange lands and
wonderful people.

He was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in
spite of his awful history.  It was hardly possible to realize that
this pleasant person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws, the
raw-head-and-bloody-bones the nursing mothers of the mountains terrified
their children with. And to this day I can remember nothing remarkable
about Slade except that his face was rather broad across the cheek bones,
and that the cheek bones were low and the lips peculiarly thin and
straight.  But that was enough to leave something of an effect upon me,
for since then I seldom see a face possessing those characteristics
without fancying that the owner of it is a dangerous man.

The coffee ran out.  At least it was reduced to one tin-cupful, and Slade
was about to take it when he saw that my cup was empty.

He politely offered to fill it, but although I wanted it, I politely
declined.  I was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning, and might
be needing diversion.  But still with firm politeness he insisted on
filling my cup, and said I had traveled all night and better deserved it
than he--and while he talked he placidly poured the fluid, to the last
drop.  I thanked him and drank it, but it gave me no comfort, for I could
not feel sure that he would not be sorry, presently, that he had given it
away, and proceed to kill me to distract his thoughts from the loss.
But nothing of the kind occurred.  We left him with only twenty-six dead
people to account for, and I felt a tranquil satisfaction in the thought
that in so judiciously taking care of No. 1 at that breakfast-table I had
pleasantly escaped being No. 27.  Slade came out to the coach and saw us
off, first ordering certain rearrangements of the mail-bags for our
comfort, and then we took leave of him, satisfied that we should hear of
him again, some day, and wondering in what connection.



CHAPTER XI.

And sure enough, two or three years afterward, we did hear him again.
News came to the Pacific coast that the Vigilance Committee in Montana
(whither Slade had removed from Rocky Ridge) had hanged him.  I find an
account of the affair in the thrilling little book I quoted a paragraph
from in the last chapter--"The Vigilantes of Montana; being a Reliable
Account of the Capture, Trial and Execution of Henry Plummer's Notorious
Road Agent Band: By Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale, Virginia City, M.T."
Mr. Dimsdale's chapter is well worth reading, as a specimen of how the
people of the frontier deal with criminals when the courts of law prove
inefficient.  Mr. Dimsdale makes two remarks about Slade, both of which
are accurately descriptive, and one of which is exceedingly picturesque:
"Those who saw him in his natural state only, would pronounce him to be a
kind husband, a most hospitable host and a courteous gentleman; on the
contrary, those who met him when maddened with liquor and surrounded by a
gang of armed roughs, would pronounce him a fiend incarnate."  And this:
"From Fort Kearney, west, he was feared a great deal more than the
almighty."  For compactness, simplicity and vigor of expression, I will
"back" that sentence against anything in literature.  Mr. Dimsdale's
narrative is as follows.  In all places where italics occur, they are
mine:

      After the execution of the five men on the 14th of January, the
      Vigilantes considered that their work was nearly ended.  They had
      freed the country of highwaymen and murderers to a great extent, and
      they determined that in the absence of the regular civil authority
      they would establish a People's Court where all offenders should be
      tried by judge and jury.  This was the nearest approach to social
      order that the circumstances permitted, and, though strict legal
      authority was wanting, yet the people were firmly determined to
      maintain its efficiency, and to enforce its decrees.  It may here be
      mentioned that the overt act which was the last round on the fatal
      ladder leading to the scaffold on which Slade perished, was the
      tearing in pieces and stamping upon a writ of this court, followed
      by his arrest of the Judge Alex. Davis, by authority of a presented
      Derringer, and with his own hands.

      J. A. Slade was himself, we have been informed, a Vigilante; he
      openly boasted of it, and said he knew all that they knew.  He was
      never accused, or even suspected, of either murder or robbery,
      committed in this Territory (the latter crime was never laid to his
      charge, in any place); but that he had killed several men in other
      localities was notorious, and his bad reputation in this respect was
      a most powerful argument in determining his fate, when he was
      finally arrested for the offence above mentioned.  On returning from
      Milk River he became more and more addicted to drinking, until at
      last it was a common feat for him and his friends to "take the
      town."  He and a couple of his dependents might often be seen on one
      horse, galloping through the streets, shouting and yelling, firing
      revolvers, etc.  On many occasions he would ride his horse into
      stores, break up bars, toss the scales out of doors and use most
      insulting language to parties present.  Just previous to the day of
      his arrest, he had given a fearful beating to one of his followers;
      but such was his influence over them that the man wept bitterly at
      the gallows, and begged for his life with all his power.  It had
      become quite common, when Slade was on a spree, for the shop-keepers
      and citizens to close the stores and put out all the lights; being
      fearful of some outrage at his hands.  For his wanton destruction of
      goods and furniture, he was always ready to pay, when sober, if he
      had money; but there were not a few who regarded payment as small
      satisfaction for the outrage, and these men were his personal
      enemies.

      From time to time Slade received warnings from men that he well knew
      would not deceive him, of the certain end of his conduct.  There was
      not a moment, for weeks previous to his arrest, in which the public
      did not expect to hear of some bloody outrage.  The dread of his
      very name, and the presence of the armed band of hangers-on who
      followed him alone prevented a resistance which must certainly have
      ended in the instant murder or mutilation of the opposing party.

      Slade was frequently arrested by order of the court whose
      organization we have described, and had treated it with respect by
      paying one or two fines and promising to pay the rest when he had
      money; but in the transaction that occurred at this crisis, he
      forgot even this caution, and goaded by passion and the hatred of
      restraint, he sprang into the embrace of death.

      Slade had been drunk and "cutting up" all night.  He and his
      companions had made the town a perfect hell.  In the morning, J. M.
      Fox, the sheriff, met him, arrested him, took him into court and
      commenced reading a warrant that he had for his arrest, by way of
      arraignment.  He became uncontrollably furious, and seizing the
      writ, he tore it up, threw it on the ground and stamped upon it.

      The clicking of the locks of his companions' revolvers was instantly
      heard, and a crisis was expected.  The sheriff did not attempt his
      retention; but being at least as prudent as he was valiant, he
      succumbed, leaving Slade the master of the situation and the
      conqueror and ruler of the courts, law and law-makers.  This was a
      declaration of war, and was so accepted.  The Vigilance Committee
      now felt that the question of social order and the preponderance of
      the law-abiding citizens had then and there to be decided.  They
      knew the character of Slade, and they were well aware that they must
      submit to his rule without murmur, or else that he must be dealt
      with in such fashion as would prevent his being able to wreak his
      vengeance on the committee, who could never have hoped to live in
      the Territory secure from outrage or death, and who could never
      leave it without encountering his friend, whom his victory would
      have emboldened and stimulated to a pitch that would have rendered
      them reckless of consequences.  The day previous he had ridden into
      Dorris's store, and on being requested to leave, he drew his
      revolver and threatened to kill the gentleman who spoke to him.
      Another saloon he had led his horse into, and buying a bottle of
      wine, he tried to make the animal drink it.  This was not considered
      an uncommon performance, as he had often entered saloons and
      commenced firing at the lamps, causing a wild stampede.

      A leading member of the committee met Slade, and informed him in the
      quiet, earnest manner of one who feels the importance of what he is
      saying: "Slade, get your horse at once, and go home, or there will
      be ---- to pay."  Slade started and took a long look, with his dark
      and piercing eyes, at the gentleman.  "What do you mean?"  said he.
      "You have no right to ask me what I mean," was the quiet reply, "get
      your horse at once, and remember what I tell you."  After a short
      pause he promised to do so, and actually got into the saddle; but,
      being still intoxicated, he began calling aloud to one after another
      of his friends, and at last seemed to have forgotten the warning he
      had received and became again uproarious, shouting the name of a
      well-known courtezan in company with those of two men whom he
      considered heads of the committee, as a sort of challenge; perhaps,
      however, as a simple act of bravado.  It seems probable that the
      intimation of personal danger he had received had not been forgotten
      entirely; though fatally for him, he took a foolish way of showing
      his remembrance of it.  He sought out Alexander Davis, the Judge of
      the Court, and drawing a cocked Derringer, he presented it at his
      head, and told him that he should hold him as a hostage for his own
      safety.  As the judge stood perfectly quiet, and offered no
      resistance to his captor, no further outrage followed on this score.
      Previous to this, on account of the critical state of affairs, the
      committee had met, and at last resolved to arrest him.  His
      execution had not been agreed upon, and, at that time, would have
      been negatived, most assuredly.  A messenger rode down to Nevada to
      inform the leading men of what was on hand, as it was desirable to
      show that there was a feeling of unanimity on the subject, all along
      the gulch.

      The miners turned out almost en masse, leaving their work and
      forming in solid column about six hundred strong, armed to the
      teeth, they marched up to Virginia.  The leader of the body well
      knew the temper of his men on the subject.  He spurred on ahead of
      them, and hastily calling a meeting of the executive, he told them
      plainly that the miners meant "business," and that, if they came up,
      they would not stand in the street to be shot down by Slade's
      friends; but that they would take him and hang him.  The meeting was
      small, as the Virginia men were loath to act at all.  This momentous
      announcement of the feeling of the Lower Town was made to a cluster
      of men, who were deliberation behind a wagon, at the rear of a store
      on Main street.

      The committee were most unwilling to proceed to extremities.  All
      the duty they had ever performed seemed as nothing to the task
      before them; but they had to decide, and that quickly.  It was
      finally agreed that if the whole body of the miners were of the
      opinion that he should be hanged, that the committee left it in
      their hands to deal with him.  Off, at hot speed, rode the leader of
      the Nevada men to join his command.

      Slade had found out what was intended, and the news sobered him
      instantly.  He went into P. S. Pfouts' store, where Davis was, and
      apologized for his conduct, saying that he would take it all back.

      The head of the column now wheeled into Wallace street and marched
      up at quick time.  Halting in front of the store, the executive
      officer of the committee stepped forward and arrested Slade, who was
      at once informed of his doom, and inquiry was made as to whether he
      had any business to settle.  Several parties spoke to him on the
      subject; but to all such inquiries he turned a deaf ear, being
      entirely absorbed in the terrifying reflections on his own awful
      position.  He never ceased his entreaties for life, and to see his
      dear wife.  The unfortunate lady referred to, between whom and Slade
      there existed a warm affection, was at this time living at their
      ranch on the Madison.  She was possessed of considerable personal
      attractions; tall, well-formed, of graceful carriage, pleasing
      manners, and was, withal, an accomplished horsewoman.

      A messenger from Slade rode at full speed to inform her of her
      husband's arrest.  In an instant she was in the saddle, and with all
      the energy that love and despair could lend to an ardent temperament
      and a strong physique, she urged her fleet charger over the twelve
      miles of rough and rocky ground that intervened between her and the
      object of her passionate devotion.

      Meanwhile a party of volunteers had made the necessary preparations
      for the execution, in the valley traversed by the branch.  Beneath
      the site of Pfouts and Russell's stone building there was a corral,
      the gate-posts of which were strong and high.  Across the top was
      laid a beam, to which the rope was fastened, and a dry-goods box
      served for the platform.  To this place Slade was marched,
      surrounded by a guard, composing the best armed and most numerous
      force that has ever appeared in Montana Territory.

      The doomed man had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and
      lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the
      fatal beam.  He repeatedly exclaimed, "My God! my God! must I die?
      Oh, my dear wife!"

      On the return of the fatigue party, they encountered some friends of
      Slade, staunch and reliable citizens and members of the committee,
      but who were personally attached to the condemned.  On hearing of
      his sentence, one of them, a stout-hearted man, pulled out his
      handkerchief and walked away, weeping like a child.  Slade still
      begged to see his wife, most piteously, and it seemed hard to deny
      his request; but the bloody consequences that were sure to follow
      the inevitable attempt at a rescue, that her presence and entreaties
      would have certainly incited, forbade the granting of his request.
      Several gentlemen were sent for to see him, in his last moments, one
      of whom (Judge Davis) made a short address to the people; but in
      such low tones as to be inaudible, save to a few in his immediate
      vicinity.  One of his friends, after exhausting his powers of
      entreaty, threw off his coat and declared that the prisoner could
      not be hanged until he himself was killed.  A hundred guns were
      instantly leveled at him; whereupon he turned and fled; but, being
      brought back, he was compelled to resume his coat, and to give a
      promise of future peaceable demeanor.

      Scarcely a leading man in Virginia could be found, though numbers of
      the citizens joined the ranks of the guard when the arrest was made.
      All lamented the stern necessity which dictated the execution.

      Everything being ready, the command was given, "Men, do your duty,"
      and the box being instantly slipped from beneath his feet, he died
      almost instantaneously.

      The body was cut down and carried to the Virginia Hotel, where, in a
      darkened room, it was scarcely laid out, when the unfortunate and
      bereaved companion of the deceased arrived, at headlong speed, to
      find that all was over, and that she was a widow.  Her grief and
      heart-piercing cries were terrible evidences of the depth of her
      attachment for her lost husband, and a considerable period elapsed
      before she could regain the command of her excited feelings.

There is something about the desperado-nature that is wholly
unaccountable--at least it looks unaccountable.  It is this.  The true
desperado is gifted with splendid courage, and yet he will take the most
infamous advantage of his enemy; armed and free, he will stand up before
a host and fight until he is shot all to pieces, and yet when he is under
the gallows and helpless he will cry and plead like a child.  Words are
cheap, and it is easy to call Slade a coward (all executed men who do not
"die game" are promptly called cowards by unreflecting people), and when
we read of Slade that he "had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and
lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal
beam," the disgraceful word suggests itself in a moment--yet in
frequently defying and inviting the vengeance of banded Rocky Mountain
cut-throats by shooting down their comrades and leaders, and never
offering to hide or fly, Slade showed that he was a man of peerless
bravery.  No coward would dare that.  Many a notorious coward, many a
chicken-livered poltroon, coarse, brutal, degraded, has made his dying
speech without a quaver in his voice and been swung into eternity with
what looked liked the calmest fortitude, and so we are justified in
believing, from the low intellect of such a creature, that it was not
moral courage that enabled him to do it.  Then, if moral courage is not
the requisite quality, what could it have been that this stout-hearted
Slade lacked?--this bloody, desperate, kindly-mannered, urbane gentleman,
who never hesitated to warn his most ruffianly enemies that he would kill
them whenever or wherever he came across them next!  I think it is a
conundrum worth investigating.



CHAPTER XII.

Just beyond the breakfast-station we overtook a Mormon emigrant train of
thirty-three wagons; and tramping wearily along and driving their herd of
loose cows, were dozens of coarse-clad and sad-looking men, women and
children, who had walked as they were walking now, day after day for
eight lingering weeks, and in that time had compassed the distance our
stage had come in eight days and three hours--seven hundred and
ninety-eight miles!  They were dusty and uncombed, hatless, bonnetless
and ragged, and they did look so tired!

After breakfast, we bathed in Horse Creek, a (previously) limpid,
sparkling stream--an appreciated luxury, for it was very seldom that our
furious coach halted long enough for an indulgence of that kind.  We
changed horses ten or twelve times in every twenty-four hours--changed
mules, rather--six mules--and did it nearly every time in four minutes.
It was lively work.  As our coach rattled up to each station six
harnessed mules stepped gayly from the stable; and in the twinkling of an
eye, almost, the old team was out, and the new one in and we off and away
again.

During the afternoon we passed Sweetwater Creek, Independence Rock,
Devil's Gate and the Devil's Gap.  The latter were wild specimens of
rugged scenery, and full of interest--we were in the heart of the Rocky
Mountains, now.  And we also passed by "Alkali" or "Soda Lake," and we
woke up to the fact that our journey had stretched a long way across the
world when the driver said that the Mormons often came there from Great
Salt Lake City to haul away saleratus.  He said that a few days gone by
they had shoveled up enough pure saleratus from the ground (it was a dry
lake) to load two wagons, and that when they got these two wagons-loads
of a drug that cost them nothing, to Salt Lake, they could sell it for
twenty-five cents a pound.

In the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been
hearing a good deal about for a day or two, and were suffering to see.
This was what might be called a natural ice-house.  It was August, now,
and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men
could scape the soil on the hill-side under the lee of a range of
boulders, and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice--hard,
compactly frozen, and clear as crystal!

Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised
curtains enjoying our early-morning smoke and contemplating the first
splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain
peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as
if the invisible Creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with
a smile, we hove in sight of South Pass City.  The hotel-keeper, the
postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal
and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted
us cheerily, and we gave him good day.  He gave us a little Indian news,
and a little Rocky Mountain news, and we gave him some Plains information
in return.  He then retired to his lonely grandeur and we climbed on up
among the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds.  South Pass City
consisted of four log cabins, one if which was unfinished, and the
gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten
citizens of the place.  Think of hotel-keeper, postmaster, blacksmith,
mayor, constable, city marshal and principal citizen all condensed into
one person and crammed into one skin.  Bemis said he was "a perfect
Allen's revolver of dignities."  And he said that if he were to die as
postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the
people might stand it; but if he were to die all over, it would be a
frightful loss to the community.

Two miles beyond South Pass City we saw for the first time that
mysterious marvel which all Western untraveled boys have heard of and
fully believe in, but are sure to be astounded at when they see it with
their own eyes, nevertheless--banks of snow in dead summer time.  We were
now far up toward the sky, and knew all the time that we must presently
encounter lofty summits clad in the "eternal snow" which was so common
place a matter of mention in books, and yet when I did see it glittering
in the sun on stately domes in the distance and knew the month was August
and that my coat was hanging up because it was too warm to wear it, I was
full as much amazed as if I never had heard of snow in August before.
Truly, "seeing is believing"--and many a man lives a long life through,
thinking he believes certain universally received and well established
things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things
once, he would discover that he did not really believe them before, but
only thought he believed them.

In a little while quite a number of peaks swung into view with long claws
of glittering snow clasping them; and with here and there, in the shade,
down the mountain side, a little solitary patch of snow looking no larger
than a lady's pocket-handkerchief but being in reality as large as a
"public square."

And now, at last, we were fairly in the renowned SOUTH PASS, and whirling
gayly along high above the common world.  We were perched upon the
extreme summit of the great range of the Rocky Mountains, toward which we
had been climbing, patiently climbing, ceaselessly climbing, for days and
nights together--and about us was gathered a convention of Nature's kings
that stood ten, twelve, and even thirteen thousand feet high--grand old
fellows who would have to stoop to see Mount Washington, in the twilight.
We were in such an airy elevation above the creeping populations of the
earth, that now and then when the obstructing crags stood out of the way
it seemed that we could look around and abroad and contemplate the whole
great globe, with its dissolving views of mountains, seas and continents
stretching away through the mystery of the summer haze.

As a general thing the Pass was more suggestive of a valley than a
suspension bridge in the clouds--but it strongly suggested the latter at
one spot.  At that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple
domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a
hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their
bases which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look
over.  These Sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes
of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed
and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them; and catching
presently on an intercepting peak, wrapped it about and brooded there
--then shredded away again and left the purple peak, as they had left the
purple domes, downy and white with new-laid snow.  In passing, these
monstrous rags of cloud hung low and swept along right over the
spectator's head, swinging their tatters so nearly in his face that his
impulse was to shrink when they came closet.  In the one place I speak
of, one could look below him upon a world of diminishing crags and
canyons leading down, down, and away to a vague plain with a thread in it
which was a road, and bunches of feathers in it which were trees,--a
pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight--but with a darkness stealing
over it and glooming its features  deeper and deeper under the frown of a
coming storm; and then, while no film or shadow marred the noon
brightness of his high perch, he could watch the tempest break forth down
there and see the lightnings leap from crag to crag and the sheeted rain
drive along the canyon-sides, and hear the thunders peal and crash and
roar.  We had this spectacle; a familiar one to many, but to us a
novelty.

We bowled along cheerily, and presently, at the very summit (though it
had been all summit to us, and all equally level, for half an hour or
more), we came to a spring which spent its water through two outlets and
sent it in opposite directions.  The conductor said that one of those
streams which we were looking at, was just starting on a journey westward
to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean, through hundreds and
even thousands of miles of desert solitudes.  He said that the other was
just leaving its home among the snow-peaks on a similar journey eastward
--and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet
it would still be plodding its patient way down the mountain sides, and
canyon-beds, and between the banks of the Yellowstone; and by and by
would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts
and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among
snags and wrecks and sandbars; and enter the Mississippi, touch the
wharves of St. Louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky
channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with
unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody
islands, then the chained bends again, bordered with wide levels of
shining sugar-cane in place of the sombre forests; then by New Orleans
and still other chains of bends--and finally, after two long months of
daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful
peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass the Gulf and enter
into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its
snow-peaks again or regret them.

I freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and
dropped it in the stream.  But I put no stamp on it and it was held for
postage somewhere.

On the summit we overtook an emigrant train of many wagons, many tired
men and women, and many a disgusted sheep and cow.

In the wofully dusty horseman in charge of the expedition I recognized
John -----.  Of all persons in the world to meet on top of the Rocky
Mountains thousands of miles from home, he was the last one I should have
looked for.  We were school-boys together and warm friends for years.
But a boyish prank of mine had disruptured this friendship and it had
never been renewed.  The act of which I speak was this.  I had been
accustomed to visit occasionally an editor whose room was in the third
story of a building and overlooked the street.  One day this editor gave
me a watermelon which I made preparations to devour on the spot, but
chancing to look out of the window, I saw John standing directly under it
and an irresistible desire came upon me to drop the melon on his head,
which I immediately did.  I was the loser, for it spoiled the melon, and
John never forgave me and we dropped all intercourse and parted, but now
met again under these circumstances.

We recognized each other simultaneously, and hands were grasped as warmly
as if no coldness had ever existed between us, and no allusion was made
to any.  All animosities were buried and the simple fact of meeting a
familiar face in that isolated spot so far from home, was sufficient to
make us forget all things but pleasant ones, and we parted again with
sincere "good-bye" and "God bless you" from both.

We had been climbing up the long shoulders of the Rocky Mountains for
many tedious hours--we started down them, now.  And we went spinning away
at a round rate too.

We left the snowy Wind River Mountains and Uinta Mountains behind, and
sped away, always through splendid scenery but occasionally through long
ranks of white skeletons of mules and oxen--monuments of the huge
emigration of other days--and here and there were up-ended boards or
small piles of stones which the driver said marked the resting-place of
more precious remains.

It was the loneliest land for a grave!  A land given over to the cayote
and the raven--which is but another name for desolation and utter
solitude.  On damp, murky nights, these scattered skeletons gave forth a
soft, hideous glow, like very faint spots of moonlight starring the vague
desert.  It was because of the phosphorus in the bones.  But no
scientific explanation could keep a body from shivering when he drifted
by one of those ghostly lights and knew that a skull held it.

At midnight it began to rain, and I never saw anything like it--indeed, I
did not even see this, for it was too dark.  We fastened down the
curtains and even caulked them with clothing, but the rain streamed in in
twenty places, nothwithstanding.  There was no escape.  If one moved his
feet out of a stream, he brought his body under one; and if he moved his
body he caught one somewhere else.  If he struggled out of the drenched
blankets and sat up, he was bound to get one down the back of his neck.
Meantime the stage was wandering about a plain with gaping gullies in it,
for the driver could not see an inch before his face nor keep the road,
and the storm pelted so pitilessly that there was no keeping the horses
still.  With the first abatement the conductor turned out with lanterns
to look for the road, and the first dash he made was into a chasm about
fourteen feet deep, his lantern following like a meteor.  As soon as he
touched bottom he sang out frantically:

"Don't come here!"

To which the driver, who was looking over the precipice where he had
disappeared, replied, with an injured air: "Think I'm a dam fool?"

The conductor was more than an hour finding the road--a matter which
showed us how far we had wandered and what chances we had been taking.
He traced our wheel-tracks to the imminent verge of danger, in two
places.  I have always been glad that we were not killed that night.
I do not know any particular reason, but I have always been glad.
In the morning, the tenth day out, we crossed Green River, a fine, large,
limpid stream--stuck in it with the water just up to the top of our
mail-bed, and waited till extra teams were put on to haul us up the steep
bank.  But it was nice cool water, and besides it could not find any
fresh place on us to wet.

At the Green River station we had breakfast--hot biscuits, fresh antelope
steaks, and coffee--the only decent meal we tasted between the United
States and Great Salt Lake City, and the only one we were ever really
thankful for.

Think of the monotonous execrableness of the thirty that went before it,
to leave this one simple breakfast looming up in my memory like a
shot-tower after all these years have gone by!

At five P.M.  we reached Fort Bridger, one hundred and seventeen miles
from the South Pass, and one thousand and twenty-five miles from St.
Joseph.  Fifty-two miles further on, near the head of Echo Canyon, we met
sixty United States soldiers from Camp Floyd.  The day before, they had
fired upon three hundred or four hundred Indians, whom they supposed
gathered together for no good purpose.  In the fight that had ensued,
four Indians were captured, and the main body chased four miles, but
nobody killed.  This looked like business.  We had a notion to get out
and join the sixty soldiers, but upon reflecting that there were four
hundred of the Indians, we concluded to go on and join the Indians.

Echo Canyon is twenty miles long.  It was like a long, smooth, narrow
street, with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous
perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, four hundred feet high in
many places, and turreted like mediaeval castles.  This was the most
faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would
"let his team out."  He did, and if the Pacific express trains whiz
through there now any faster than we did then in the stage-coach, I envy
the passengers the exhilaration of it.  We fairly seemed to pick up our
wheels and fly--and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything
and held in solution!  I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a
thing I mean it.

However, time presses.  At four in the afternoon we arrived on the summit
of Big Mountain, fifteen miles from Salt Lake City, when all the world
was glorified with the setting sun, and the most stupendous panorama of
mountain peaks yet encountered burst on our sight.  We looked out upon
this sublime spectacle from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow!  Even
the overland stage-driver stopped his horses and gazed!

Half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses, and took supper with a
Mormon "Destroying Angel."

"Destroying Angels," as I understand it, are Latter-Day Saints who are
set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious
citizens.  I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels and
the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one's
house I had my shudder all ready.  But alas for all our romances, he was
nothing but a loud, profane, offensive, old blackguard!  He was murderous
enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any
kind of an Angel devoid of dignity?  Could you abide an Angel in an
unclean shirt and no suspenders?  Could you respect an Angel with a
horse-laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer?

There were other blackguards present--comrades of this one.  And there
was one person that looked like a gentleman--Heber C. Kimball's son, tall
and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps.  A lot of slatternly women
flitted hither and thither in a hurry, with coffee-pots, plates of bread,
and other appurtenances to supper, and these were said to be the wives of
the Angel--or some of them, at least.  And of course they were; for if
they had been hired "help" they would not have let an angel from above
storm and swear at them as he did, let alone one from the place this one
hailed from.

This was our first experience of the western "peculiar institution," and
it was not very prepossessing.  We did not tarry long to observe it, but
hurried on to the home of the Latter-Day Saints, the stronghold of the
prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in America--Great Salt
Lake City.  As the night closed in we took sanctuary in the Salt Lake
House and unpacked our baggage.



CHAPTER XIII.

We had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables--a
great variety and as great abundance.  We walked about the streets some,
afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination
in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon.
This was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes--a land of
enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery.  We felt a curiosity to ask
every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart; and
we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut
as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and
shoulders--for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon
family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary
concentric rings of its home circle.

By and by the Acting Governor of the Territory introduced us to other
"Gentiles," and we spent a sociable hour with them.  "Gentiles" are
people who are not Mormons.  Our fellow-passenger, Bemis, took care of
himself, during this part of the evening, and did not make an
overpowering success of it, either, for he came into our room in the
hotel about eleven o'clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely,
disjointedly and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a
ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it.
This, together with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a
chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants
on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then comtemplating the
general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it "too
many for him" and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that
something he had eaten had not agreed with him.

But we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking.  It was
the exclusively Mormon refresher, "valley tan."

Valley tan (or, at least, one form of valley tan) is a kind of whisky,
or first cousin to it; is of Mormon invention and manufactured only in
Utah.  Tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone.  If I
remember rightly no public drinking saloons were allowed in the kingdom
by Brigham Young, and no private drinking permitted among the faithful,
except they confined themselves to "valley tan."

Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level
streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen
thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible
drunkards or noisy people; a limpid stream rippling and dancing through
every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after block of trim
dwellings, built of "frame" and sunburned brick--a great thriving orchard
and garden behind every one of them, apparently--branches from the street
stream winding and sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees--and a
grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and
about and over the whole.  And everywhere were workshops, factories, and
all manner of industries; and intent faces and busy hands were to be seen
wherever one looked; and in one's ears was the ceaseless clink of
hammers, the buzz of trade and the contented hum of drums and fly-wheels.

The armorial crest of my own State consisted of two dissolute bears
holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the
pertinent remark, "UNITED, WE STAND--(hic!)--DIVIDED, WE FALL."  It was
always too figurative for the author of this book.  But the Mormon crest
was easy.  And it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove.
It was a representation of a GOLDEN BEEHIVE, with the bees all at work!

The city lies in the edge of a level plain as broad as the State of
Connecticut, and crouches close down to the ground under a curving wall
of mighty mountains whose heads are hidden in the clouds, and whose
shoulders bear relics of the snows of winter all the summer long.

Seen from one of these dizzy heights, twelve or fifteen miles off, Great
Salt Lake City is toned down and diminished till it is suggestive of a
child's toy-village reposing under the majestic protection of the Chinese
wall.

On some of those mountains, to the southwest, it had been raining every
day for two weeks, but not a drop had fallen in the city.  And on hot
days in late spring and early autumn the citizens could quit fanning and
growling and go out and cool off by looking at the luxury of a glorious
snow-storm going on in the mountains.  They could enjoy it at a distance,
at those seasons, every day, though no snow would fall in their streets,
or anywhere near them.

Salt Lake City was healthy--an extremely healthy city.

They declared there was only one physician in the place and he was
arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act
for having "no visible means of support."  They always give you a good
substantial article of truth in Salt Lake, and good measure and good
weight, too. [Very often, if you wished to weigh one of their airiest
little commonplace statements you would want the hay scales.]

We desired to visit the famous inland sea, the American "Dead Sea," the
great Salt Lake--seventeen miles, horseback, from the city--for we had
dreamed about it, and thought about it, and talked about it, and yearned
to see it, all the first part of our trip; but now when it was only arm's
length away it had suddenly lost nearly every bit of its interest.  And
so we put it off, in a sort of general way, till next day--and that was
the last we ever thought of it.  We dined with some hospitable Gentiles;
and visited the foundation of the prodigious temple; and talked long with
that shrewd Connecticut Yankee, Heber C. Kimball (since deceased), a
saint of high degree and a mighty man of commerce.

We saw the "Tithing-House," and the "Lion House," and I do not know or
remember how many more church and government buildings of various kinds
and curious names.  We flitted hither and thither and enjoyed every hour,
and picked up a great deal of useful information and entertaining
nonsense, and went to bed at night satisfied.

The second day, we made the acquaintance of Mr. Street (since deceased)
and put on white shirts and went and paid a state visit to the king.
He seemed a quiet, kindly, easy-mannered, dignified, self-possessed old
gentleman of fifty-five or sixty, and had a gentle craft in his eye that
probably belonged there.  He was very simply dressed and was just taking
off a straw hat as we entered.  He talked about Utah, and the Indians,
and Nevada, and general American matters and questions, with our
secretary and certain government officials who came with us.  But he
never paid any attention to me, notwithstanding I made several attempts
to "draw him out" on federal politics and his high handed attitude toward
Congress.  I thought some of the things I said were rather fine.  But he
merely looked around at me, at distant intervals, something as I have
seen a benignant old cat look around to see which kitten was meddling
with her tail.

By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the end,
hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant savage.
But he was calm.  His conversation with those gentlemen flowed on as
sweetly and peacefully and musically as any summer brook.  When the
audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he put his
hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my
brother:

"Ah--your child, I presume?  Boy, or girl?"



CHAPTER XIV.

Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters--and considering
that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited
mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with
his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as
possible.  He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the
road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those
exhausting deserts--and it was two days' journey from water to water, in
one or two of them.  Mr. Street's contract was a vast work, every way one
looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words "eight hundred
miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts" mean, one must go over the
ground in person--pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary
reality to the reader.  And after all, Mr. S.'s mightiest difficulty
turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all.
Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great
undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to
make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles
overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the
notion, and drove home and went about their customary business!  They
were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything
for that.  They said they would "admire" to see a "Gentile" force a
Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah!  And they made themselves
very merry over the matter.  Street said--for it was he that told us
these things:

"I was in dismay.  I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a
given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin.  It was an
astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I
was entirely nonplussed.  I am a business man--have always been a
business man--do not know anything but business--and so you can imagine
how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country
where written contracts were worthless!--that main security, that
sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business.  My confidence left
me. There was no use in making new contracts--that was plain.  I talked
with first one prominent citizen and then another.  They all sympathized
with me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me.  But at last a
Gentile said, 'Go to Brigham Young!--these small fry cannot do you any
good.'  I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help
me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with
either making the laws or executing them?  He might be a very good
patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something
sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred
refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors.  But what was a man to do? I
thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be
able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went
straight to him and laid the whole case before him.  He said very little,
but he showed strong interest all the way through.  He examined all the
papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either
in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread
and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result.
Then he made a list of the contractors' names.  Finally he said:

"'Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain.  These contracts are strictly
and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified.  These men
manifestly entered into them with their eyes open.  I see no fault or
flaw anywhere.'

"Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and
said: 'Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these
men here at such-and-such an hour.'

"They were there, to the minute.  So was I.  Mr. Young asked them a
number of questions, and their answers made my statement good.  Then he
said to them:

"'You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own
free will and accord?'

"'Yes.'

"'Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you!  Go!'

"And they did go, too!  They are strung across the deserts now, working
like bees.  And I never hear a word out of them.

"There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here,
shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican
form of government--but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute
monarchy and Brigham Young is king!"

Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story.  I knew him well
during several years afterward in San Francisco.

Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we
had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of
polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to
calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.

I had the will to do it.  With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I
was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here--until
I saw the Mormon women.  Then I was touched.  My heart was wiser than my
head.  It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely"
creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I
said, "No--the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian
charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their
harsh censure--and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of
open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered
in his presence and worship in silence."

      [For a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain Meadow
      massacre, see Appendices A and B. ]



CHAPTER XV.

It is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories about
assassinations of intractable Gentiles.  I cannot easily conceive of
anything more cosy than the night in Salt Lake which we spent in a
Gentile den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how Burton galloped
in among the pleading and defenceless "Morisites" and shot them down, men
and women, like so many dogs.  And how Bill Hickman, a Destroying Angel,
shot Drown and Arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a debt.
And how Porter Rockwell did this and that dreadful thing.  And how
heedless people often come to Utah and make remarks about Brigham, or
polygamy, or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning at
daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley,
contentedly waiting for the hearse.

And the next most interesting thing is to sit and listen to these
Gentiles talk about polygamy; and how some portly old frog of an elder,
or a bishop, marries a girl--likes her, marries her sister--likes her,
marries another sister--likes her, takes another--likes her, marries her
mother--likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather,
and then comes back hungry and asks for more.  And how the pert young
thing of eleven will chance to be the favorite wife and her own venerable
grandmother have to rank away down toward D 4 in their mutual husband's
esteem, and have to sleep in the kitchen, as like as not.  And how this
dreadful sort of thing, this hiving together in one foul nest of mother
and daughters, and the making a young daughter superior to her own mother
in rank and authority, are things which Mormon women submit to because
their religion teaches them that the more wives a man has on earth, and
the more children he rears, the higher the place they will all have in
the world to come--and the warmer, maybe, though they do not seem to say
anything about that.

According to these Gentile friends of ours, Brigham Young's harem
contains twenty or thirty wives.  They said that some of them had grown
old and gone out of active service, but were comfortably housed and cared
for in the henery--or the Lion House, as it is strangely named.  Along
with each wife were her children--fifty altogether.  The house was
perfectly quiet and orderly, when the children were still.  They all took
their meals in one room, and a happy and home-like sight it was
pronounced to be.  None of our party got an opportunity to take dinner
with Mr. Young, but a Gentile by the name of Johnson professed to have
enjoyed a sociable breakfast in the Lion House.  He gave a preposterous
account of the "calling of the roll," and other preliminaries, and the
carnage that ensued when the buckwheat cakes came in.  But he embellished
rather too much.  He said that Mr. Young told him several smart sayings
of certain of his "two-year-olds," observing with some pride that for
many years he had been the heaviest contributor in that line to one of
the Eastern magazines; and then he wanted to show Mr. Johnson one of the
pets that had said the last good thing, but he could not find the child.

He searched the faces of the children in detail, but could not decide
which one it was.  Finally he gave it up with a sigh and said:

"I thought I would know the little cub again but I don't."  Mr. Johnson
said further, that Mr. Young observed that life was a sad, sad thing
--"because the joy of every new marriage a man contracted was so apt to be
blighted by the inopportune funeral of a less recent bride."  And Mr.
Johnson said that while he and Mr. Young were pleasantly conversing in
private, one of the Mrs. Youngs came in and demanded a breast-pin,
remarking that she had found out that he had been giving a breast-pin to
No. 6, and she, for one, did not propose to let this partiality go on
without making a satisfactory amount of trouble about it.  Mr. Young
reminded her that there was a stranger present.  Mrs. Young said that if
the state of things inside the house was not agreeable to the stranger,
he could find room outside.  Mr. Young promised the breast-pin, and she
went away.  But in a minute or two another Mrs. Young came in and
demanded a breast-pin.  Mr. Young began a remonstrance, but Mrs. Young
cut him short.  She said No. 6 had got one, and No. 11 was promised one,
and it was "no use for him to try to impose on her--she hoped she knew
her rights."  He gave his promise, and she went.  And presently three
Mrs. Youngs entered in a body and opened on their husband a tempest of
tears, abuse, and entreaty.  They had heard all about No. 6, No. 11, and
No. 14.  Three more breast-pins were promised.  They were hardly gone
when nine more Mrs. Youngs filed into the presence, and a new tempest
burst forth and raged round about the prophet and his guest.  Nine
breast-pins were promised, and the weird sisters filed out again.  And in
came eleven more, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth.  Eleven
promised breast-pins purchased peace once more.

"That is a specimen," said Mr. Young.  "You see how it is.  You see what
a life I lead.  A man can't be wise all the time.  In a heedless moment I
gave my darling No. 6--excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has
escaped me for the moment--a breast-pin.  It was only worth twenty-five
dollars--that is, apparently that was its whole cost--but its ultimate
cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more.  You yourself have seen
it climb up to six hundred and fifty dollars--and alas, even that is not
the end!  For I have wives all over this Territory of Utah.  I have
dozens of wives whose numbers, even, I do not know without looking in the
family Bible.  They are scattered far and wide among the mountains and
valleys of my realm.  And mark you, every solitary one of them will hear
of this wretched breast pin, and every last one of them will have one or
die.  No. 6's breast pin will cost me twenty-five hundred dollars before
I see the end of it.  And these creatures will compare these pins
together, and if one is a shade finer than the rest, they will all be
thrown on my hands, and I will have to order a new lot to keep peace in
the family.  Sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were
present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant
servitors of mine.  If you had offered to give a child a dime, or a stick
of candy, or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out of
the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left your
hand.  Otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an
exactly similar gift to all my children--and knowing by experience the
importance of the thing, I would have stood by and seen to it myself that
you did it, and did it thoroughly.  Once a gentleman gave one of my
children a tin whistle--a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one
which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had eighty
or ninety children in your house.  But the deed was done--the man
escaped.  I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for
vengeance.  I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted
the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains.  But they never
caught him.  I am not cruel, sir--I am not vindictive except when sorely
outraged--but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would
have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death.
By the slaughtered body of St. Parley Pratt (whom God assail!) there
was never anything on this earth like it!  I knew who gave the whistle to
the child, but I could, not make those jealous mothers believe me.  They
believed I did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection
could have foreseen: I had to order a hundred and ten whistles--I think
we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them are
off at college now--I had to order a hundred and ten of those shrieking
things, and I wish I may never speak another word if we didn't have to
talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the children got
tired of the whistles.  And if ever another man gives a whistle to a
child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him higher than
Haman!  That is the word with the bark on it!  Shade of Nephi!  You don't
know anything about married life.  I am rich, and everybody knows it.  I
am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it.  I have a strong
fatherly instinct and all the foundlings are foisted on me.

"Every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain
to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands.  Why, sir, a
woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of
complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and
she my wife--that I had married her at such-and-such a time in
such-and-such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course I
could not remember her name.  Well, sir, she called my attention to the
fact that the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble
me--a common thing in the Territory--and, to cut the story short, I put
it in my nursery, and she left.  And by the ghost of Orson Hyde, when
they came to wash the paint off that child it was an Injun!  Bless my
soul, you don't know anything about married life.  It is a perfect dog's
life, sir--a perfect dog's life.  You can't economize.  It isn't
possible.  I have tried keeping one set of bridal attire for all
occasions.  But it is of no use.  First you'll marry a combination of
calico and consumption that's as thin as a rail, and next you'll get a
creature that's nothing more than the dropsy in disguise, and then you've
got to eke out that bridal dress with an old balloon.  That is the way it
goes.  And think of the wash-bill--(excuse these tears)--nine hundred and
eighty-four pieces a week!  No, sir, there is no such a thing as economy
in a family like mine.  Why, just the one item of cradles--think of it!
And vermifuge! Soothing syrup!  Teething rings!  And 'papa's watches' for
the babies to play with!  And things to scratch the furniture with!  And
lucifer matches for them to eat, and pieces of glass to cut themselves
with! The item of glass alone would support your family, I venture to
say, sir. Let me scrimp and squeeze all I can, I still can't get ahead as
fast as I feel I ought to, with my opportunities.  Bless you, sir, at a
time when I had seventy-two wives in this house, I groaned under the
pressure of keeping thousands of dollars tied up in seventy-two bedsteads
when the money ought to have been out at interest; and I just sold out
the whole stock, sir, at a sacrifice, and built a bedstead seven feet
long and ninety-six feet wide.  But it was a failure, sir.  I could not
sleep. It appeared to me that the whole seventy-two women snored at once.
The roar was deafening.  And then the danger of it!  That was what I was
looking at.  They would all draw in their breath at once, and you could
actually see the walls of the house suck in--and then they would all
exhale their breath at once, and you could see the walls swell out, and
strain, and hear the rafters crack, and the shingles grind together. My
friend, take an old man's advice, and don't encumber yourself with a
large family--mind, I tell you, don't do it.  In a small family, and in a
small family only, you will find that comfort and that peace of mind
which are the best at last of the blessings this world is able to afford
us, and for the lack of which no accumulation of wealth, and no
acquisition of fame, power, and greatness can ever compensate us. Take my
word for it, ten or eleven wives is all you need--never go over it."

Some instinct or other made me set this Johnson down as being unreliable.
And yet he was a very entertaining person, and I doubt if some of the
information he gave us could have been acquired from any other source.
He was a pleasant contrast to those reticent Mormons.



CHAPTER XVI.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have
seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it.  I brought away a
copy from Salt Lake.  The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a
pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of
inspiration.  It is chloroform in print.  If Joseph Smith composed this
book, the act was a miracle--keeping awake while he did it was, at any
rate.  If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain
ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he
found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of
translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.

The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the
Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New
Testament.  The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint,
old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the
Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel--half modern glibness, and half
ancient simplicity and gravity.  The latter is awkward and constrained;
the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast.  Whenever he found his
speech growing too modern--which was about every sentence or two--he
ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came
to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again.  "And it came to
pass" was his pet.  If he had left that out, his Bible would have been
only a pamphlet.

The title-page reads as follows:

      THE BOOK OF MORMON: AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY THE HAND OF MORMON, UPON
      PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI.

      Wherefore it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi,
      and also of the Lamanites; written to the Lamanites, who are a
      remnant of the House of Israel; and also to Jew and Gentile; written
      by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of
      revelation.  Written and sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord, that
      they might not be destroyed; to come forth by the gift and power of
      God unto the interpretation thereof; sealed by the hand of Moroni,
      and hid up unto the Lord, to come forth in due time by the way of
      Gentile; the interpretation thereof by the gift of God.  An
      abridgment taken from the Book of Ether also; which is a record of
      the people of Jared; who were scattered at the time the Lord
      confounded the language of the people when they were building a
      tower to get to Heaven.

"Hid up" is good.  And so is "wherefore"--though why "wherefore"?  Any
other word would have answered as well--though--in truth it would not
have sounded so Scriptural.

Next comes:

      THE TESTIMONY OF THREE WITNESSES.
      Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto
      whom this work shall come, that we, through the grace of God the
      Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which
      contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and
      also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of
      Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken; and we
      also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of
      God, for His voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a
      surety that the work is true.  And we also testify that we have seen
      the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown
      unto us by the power of God, and not of man.  And we declare with
      words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and
      he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the
      plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the
      grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld
      and bear record that these things are true; and it is marvellous in
      our eyes; nevertheless the voice of the Lord commanded us that we
      should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the
      commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things.  And we know
      that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the
      blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of
      Christ, and shall dwell with Him eternally in the heavens.  And the
      honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which
      is one God.  Amen.
                          OLIVER COWDERY,
                          DAVID WHITMER,
                          MARTIN HARRIS.

Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come
anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a
man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates,"
and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see
them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to
conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and
even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either.

Next is this:

      AND ALSO THE TESTIMONY OF EIGHT WITNESSES.
      Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto
      whom this work shall come, that Joseph Smith, Jr., the translator of
      this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken,
      which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the
      said Smith has translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also
      saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of
      ancient work, and of curious workmanship.  And this we bear record
      with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shown unto us, for
      we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith
      has got the plates of which we have spoken.  And we give our names
      unto the world, to witness unto the world that which we have seen;
      and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.
                          CHRISTIAN WHITMER,
                          JACOB WHITMER,
                          PETER WHITMER, JR.,
                          JOHN WHITMER,
                          HIRAM PAGE,
                          JOSEPH SMITH, SR.,
                          HYRUM SMITH,
                          SAMUEL H.  SMITH.

And when I am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they
grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen
the plates too; and not only seen those plates but "hefted" them, I am
convinced.  I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire
Whitmer family had testified.

The Mormon Bible consists of fifteen "books"--being the books of Jacob,
Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mosiah, Zeniff, Alma, Helaman, Ether, Moroni, two
"books" of Mormon, and three of Nephi.

In the first book of Nephi is a plagiarism of the Old Testament, which
gives an account of the exodus from Jerusalem of the "children of Lehi";
and it goes on to tell of their wanderings in the wilderness, during
eight years, and their supernatural protection by one of their number, a
party by the name of Nephi.  They finally reached the land of
"Bountiful," and camped by the sea.  After they had remained there "for
the space of many days"--which is more Scriptural than definite--Nephi
was commanded from on high to build a ship wherein to "carry the people
across the waters."  He travestied Noah's ark--but he obeyed orders in
the matter of the plan.  He finished the ship in a single day, while his
brethren stood by and made fun of it--and of him, too--"saying, our
brother is a fool, for he thinketh that he can build a ship."  They did
not wait for the timbers to dry, but the whole tribe or nation sailed the
next day.  Then a bit of genuine nature cropped out, and is revealed by
outspoken Nephi with Scriptural frankness--they all got on a spree!
They, "and also their wives, began to make themselves merry, insomuch
that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness;
yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness."

Nephi tried to stop these scandalous proceedings; but they tied him neck
and heels, and went on with their lark.  But observe how Nephi the
prophet circumvented them by the aid of the invisible powers:

      And it came to pass that after they had bound me, insomuch that I
      could not move, the compass, which had been prepared of the Lord,
      did cease to work; wherefore, they knew not whither they should
      steer the ship, insomuch that there arose a great storm, yea, a
      great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back upon the waters
      for the space of three days; and they began to be frightened
      exceedingly, lest they should be drowned in the sea; nevertheless
      they did not loose me.  And on the fourth day, which we had been
      driven back, the tempest began to be exceeding sore.  And it came to
      pass that we were about to be swallowed up in the depths of the sea.

Then they untied him.

      And it came to pass after they had loosed me, behold, I took the
      compass, and it did work whither I desired it.  And it came to pass
      that I prayed unto the Lord; and after I had prayed, the winds did
      cease, and the storm did cease, and there was a great calm.

Equipped with their compass, these ancients appear to have had the
advantage of Noah.

Their voyage was toward a "promised land"--the only name they give it.
They reached it in safety.

Polygamy is a recent feature in the Mormon religion, and was added by
Brigham Young after Joseph Smith's death.  Before that, it was regarded
as an "abomination."  This verse from the Mormon Bible occurs in Chapter
II. of the book of Jacob:

      For behold, thus saith the Lord, this people begin to wax in
      iniquity; they understand not the Scriptures; for they seek to
      excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things
      which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son.  Behold,
      David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing
      was abominable before me, saith the Lord; wherefore, thus saith the
      Lord, I have led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem, by
      the power of mine arm, that I might raise up unto me a righteous
      branch from the fruit of the loins of Joseph.  Wherefore, I the Lord
      God, will no suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old.

However, the project failed--or at least the modern Mormon end of it--for
Brigham "suffers" it.  This verse is from the same chapter:

      Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, because of their
      filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are
      more righteous than you; for they have not forgotten the commandment
      of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should
      have, save it were one wife; and concubines they should have none.

The following verse (from Chapter IX. of the Book of Nephi) appears to
contain information not familiar to everybody:

      And now it came to pass that when Jesus had ascended into heaven,
      the multitude did disperse, and every man did take his wife and his
      children, and did return to his own home.

      And it came to pass that on the morrow, when the multitude was
      gathered together, behold, Nephi and his brother whom he had raised
      from the dead, whose name was Timothy, and also his son, whose name
      was Jonas, and also Mathoni, and Mathonihah, his brother, and Kumen,
      and Kumenenhi, and Jeremiah, and Shemnon, and Jonas, and Zedekiah,
      and Isaiah; now these were the names of the disciples whom Jesus had
      chosen.

In order that the reader may observe how much more grandeur and
picturesqueness (as seen by these Mormon twelve) accompanied on of the
tenderest episodes in the life of our Saviour than other eyes seem to
have been aware of, I quote the following from the same "book"--Nephi:

      And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise.
      And they arose from the earth, and He said unto them, Blessed are ye
      because of your faith.  And now behold, My joy is full.  And when He
      had said these words, He wept, and the multitude bear record of it,
      and He took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and
      prayed unto the Father for them.  And when He had done this He wept
      again, and He spake unto the multitude, and saith unto them, Behold
      your little ones.  And as they looked to behold, they cast their
      eyes toward heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw
      angels descending out of heaven as it were, in the midst of fire;
      and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they
      were encircled about with fire; and the angels did minister unto
      them, and the multitude did see and hear and bear record; and they
      know that their record is true, for they all of them did see and
      hear, every man for himself; and they were in number about two
      thousand and five hundred souls; and they did consist of men, women,
      and children.

And what else would they be likely to consist of?

The Book of Ether is an incomprehensible medley of if "history," much of
it relating to battles and sieges among peoples whom the reader has
possibly never heard of; and who inhabited a country which is not set
down in the geography.  These was a King with the remarkable name of
Coriantumr,^^ and he warred with Shared, and Lib, and Shiz, and others,
in the "plains of Heshlon"; and the "valley of Gilgal"; and the
"wilderness of Akish"; and the "land of Moran"; and the "plains of
Agosh"; and "Ogath," and "Ramah," and the "land of Corihor," and the
"hill Comnor," by "the waters of Ripliancum," etc., etc., etc.  "And it
came to pass," after a deal of fighting, that Coriantumr, upon making
calculation of his losses, found that "there had been slain two millions
of mighty men, and also their wives and their children"--say 5,000,000 or
6,000,000 in all--"and he began to sorrow in his heart."  Unquestionably
it was time.  So he wrote to Shiz, asking a cessation of hostilities, and
offering to give up his kingdom to save his people.  Shiz declined,
except upon condition that Coriantumr would come and let him cut his head
off first--a thing which Coriantumr would not do.  Then there was more
fighting for a season; then four years were devoted to gathering the
forces for a final struggle--after which ensued a battle, which, I take
it, is the most remarkable set forth in history,--except, perhaps, that
of the Kilkenny cats, which it resembles in some respects.  This is the
account of the gathering and the battle:

      7.  And it came to pass that they did gather together all the
      people, upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save
      it was Ether.  And it came to pass that Ether did behold all the
      doings of the people; and he beheld that the people who were for
      Coriantumr, were gathered together to the army of Coriantumr; and
      the people who were for Shiz, were gathered together to the army of
      Shiz; wherefore they were for the space of four years gathering
      together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face
      of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it
      was possible that they could receive.  And it came to pass that when
      they were all gathered together, every one to the army which he
      would, with their wives and their children; both men, women, and
      children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and
      breast-plates, and head-plates, and being clothed after the manner
      of war, they did march forth one against another, to battle; and
      they fought all that day, and conquered not.  And it came to pass
      that when it was night they were weary, and retired to their camps;
      and after they had retired to their camps, they took up a howling
      and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so
      great were their cries, their howlings and lamentations, that it did
      rend the air exceedingly.  And it came to pass that on the morrow
      they did go again to battle, and great and terrible was that day;
      nevertheless they conquered not, and when the night came again, they
      did rend the air with their cries, and their howlings, and their
      mournings, for the loss of the slain of their people.

      8.  And it came to pass that Coriantumr wrote again an epistle unto
      Shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he
      would take the kingdom, and spare the lives of the people.  But
      behold, the Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and
      Satan had full power over the hearts of the people, for they were
      given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of
      their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again
      to battle.  And it came to pass that they fought all that day, and
      when the night came they slept upon their swords; and on the morrow
      they fought even until the night came; and when the night came they
      were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and
      they slept again upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought
      again; and when the night came they had all fallen by the sword save
      it were fifty and two of the people of Coriantumr, and sixty and
      nine of the people of Shiz.  And it came to pass that they slept
      upon their swords that night, and on the morrow they fought again,
      and they contended in their mights with their swords, and with their
      shields, all that day; and when the night came there were thirty and
      two of the people of Shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of
      Coriantumr.

      9.  And it came to pass that they ate and slept, and prepared for
      death on the morrow.  And they were large and mighty men, as to the
      strength of men.  And it came to pass that they fought for the space
      of three hours, and they fainted with the loss of blood.  And it
      came to pass that when the men of Coriantumr had received sufficient
      strength, that they could walk, they were about to flee for their
      lives, but behold, Shiz arose, and also his men, and he swore in his
      wrath that he would slay Coriantumr, or he would perish by the
      sword: wherefore he did pursue them, and on the morrow he did
      overtake them; and they fought again with the sword.  And it came to
      pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were
      Coriantumr and Shiz, behold Shiz had fainted with loss of blood.
      And it came to pass that when Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword,
      that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz.  And it came
      to pass that after he had smote off the head of Shiz, that Shiz
      raised upon his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for
      breath, he died.  And it came to pass that Coriantumr fell to the
      earth, and became as if he had no life.  And the Lord spake unto
      Ether, and said unto him, go forth.  And he went forth, and beheld
      that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished
      his record; and the hundredth part I have not written.

It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former
chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming
interesting.

The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is
nothing vicious in its teachings.  Its code of morals is unobjectionable
--it is "smouched" [Milton] from the New Testament and no credit given.



CHAPTER XVII.

At the end of our two days' sojourn, we left Great Salt Lake City hearty
and well fed and happy--physically superb but not so very much wiser, as
regards the "Mormon question," than we were when we arrived, perhaps.
We had a deal more "information" than we had before, of course, but we
did not know what portion of it was reliable and what was not--for it all
came from acquaintances of a day--strangers, strictly speaking.  We were
told, for instance, that the dreadful "Mountain Meadows Massacre" was the
work of the Indians entirely, and that the Gentiles had meanly tried to
fasten it upon the Mormons; we were told, likewise, that the Indians were
to blame, partly, and partly the Mormons; and we were told, likewise, and
just as positively, that the Mormons were almost if not wholly and
completely responsible for that most treacherous and pitiless butchery.
We got the story in all these different shapes, but it was not till
several years afterward that Mrs. Waite's book, "The Mormon Prophet,"
came out with Judge Cradlebaugh's trial of the accused parties in it and
revealed the truth that the latter version was the correct one and that
the Mormons were the assassins.  All our "information" had three sides to
it, and so I gave up the idea that I could settle the "Mormon question"
in two days.  Still I have seen newspaper correspondents do it in one.

I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state of things
existed there--and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a
state of things existed there at all or not.  But presently I remembered
with a lightening sense of relief that we had learned two or three
trivial things there which we could be certain of; and so the two days
were not wholly lost.  For instance, we had learned that we were at last
in a pioneer land, in absolute and tangible reality.

The high prices charged for trifles were eloquent of high freights and
bewildering distances of freightage.  In the east, in those days, the
smallest moneyed denomination was a penny and it represented the smallest
purchasable quantity of any commodity.  West of Cincinnati the smallest
coin in use was the silver five-cent piece and no smaller quantity of an
article could be bought than "five cents' worth."  In Overland City the
lowest coin appeared to be the ten-cent piece; but in Salt Lake there did
not seem to be any money in circulation smaller than a quarter, or any
smaller quantity purchasable of any commodity than twenty-five cents'
worth.  We had always been used to half dimes and "five cents' worth" as
the minimum of financial negotiations; but in Salt Lake if one wanted a
cigar, it was a quarter; if he wanted a chalk pipe, it was a quarter; if
he wanted a peach, or a candle, or a newspaper, or a shave, or a little
Gentile whiskey to rub on his corns to arrest indigestion and keep him
from having the toothache, twenty-five cents was the price, every time.
When we looked at the shot-bag of silver, now and then, we seemed to be
wasting our substance in riotous living, but if we referred to the
expense account we could see that we had not been doing anything of the
kind.

But people easily get reconciled to big money and big prices, and fond
and vain of both--it is a descent to little coins and cheap prices that
is hardest to bear and slowest to take hold upon one's toleration.  After
a month's acquaintance with the twenty-five cent minimum, the average
human being is ready to blush every time he thinks of his despicable
five-cent days.  How sunburnt with blushes I used to get in gaudy Nevada,
every time I thought of my first financial experience in Salt Lake.
It was on this wise (which is a favorite expression of great authors, and
a very neat one, too, but I never hear anybody say on this wise when they
are talking).  A young half-breed with a complexion like a yellow-jacket
asked me if I would have my boots blacked.  It was at the Salt Lake House
the morning after we arrived.  I said yes, and he blacked them.  Then I
handed him a silver five-cent piece, with the benevolent air of a person
who is conferring wealth and blessedness upon poverty and suffering.  The
yellow-jacket took it with what I judged to be suppressed emotion, and
laid it reverently down in the middle of his broad hand.  Then he began
to contemplate it, much as a philosopher contemplates a gnat's ear in the
ample field of his microscope.  Several mountaineers, teamsters,
stage-drivers, etc., drew near and dropped into the tableau and fell to
surveying the money with that attractive indifference to formality which
is noticeable in the hardy pioneer.  Presently the yellow-jacket handed
the half dime back to me and told me I ought to keep my money in my
pocket-book instead of in my soul, and then I wouldn't get it cramped and
shriveled up so!

What a roar of vulgar laughter there was!  I destroyed the mongrel
reptile on the spot, but I smiled and smiled all the time I was detaching
his scalp, for the remark he made was good for an "Injun."

Yes, we had learned in Salt Lake to be charged great prices without
letting the inward shudder appear on the surface--for even already we had
overheard and noted the tenor of conversations among drivers, conductors,
and hostlers, and finally among citizens of Salt Lake, until we were well
aware that these superior beings despised "emigrants."  We permitted no
tell-tale shudders and winces in our countenances, for we wanted to seem
pioneers, or Mormons, half-breeds, teamsters, stage-drivers, Mountain
Meadow assassins--anything in the world that the plains and Utah
respected and admired--but we were wretchedly ashamed of being
"emigrants," and sorry enough that we had white shirts and could not
swear in the presence of ladies without looking the other way.

And many a time in Nevada, afterwards, we had occasion to remember with
humiliation that we were "emigrants," and consequently a low and inferior
sort of creatures.  Perhaps the reader has visited Utah, Nevada, or
California, even in these latter days, and while communing with himself
upon the sorrowful banishment of these countries from what he considers
"the world," has had his wings clipped by finding that he is the one to
be pitied, and that there are entire populations around him ready and
willing to do it for him--yea, who are complacently doing it for him
already, wherever he steps his foot.

Poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his New York
coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and his feeble
profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of ores, shafts,
tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt
enough interest in to read about.  And all the time that he is thinking
what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land,
the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting
compassion because he is an "emigrant" instead of that proudest and
blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a "FORTY-NINER."

The accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it almost
seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the mail sacks
at all.  We had made one alteration, however.  We had provided enough
bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to last double the six hundred
miles of staging we had still to do.

And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the
majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat
ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately
in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets.  Nothing helps scenery
like ham and eggs.  Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank,
delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down grade," a flying coach,
a fragrant pipe and a contented heart--these make happiness.  It is what
all the ages have struggled for.



CHAPTER XVIII.

At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been
the important military station of "Camp Floyd," some forty-five or fifty
miles from Salt Lake City.  At four P.M.  we had doubled our distance and
were ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake.  And now we entered upon
one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the
diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara--an "alkali" desert.  For
sixty-eight miles there was but one break in it.  I do not remember that
this was really a break; indeed it seems to me that it was nothing but a
watering depot in the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles.  If my
memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the
water was hauled there by mule and ox teams from the further side of the
desert.  There was a stage station there.  It was forty-five miles from
the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it.

We plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole live-long night,
and at the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the
forty-five-mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the
imported water was.  The sun was just rising.  It was easy enough to
cross a desert in the night while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to
reflect, in the morning, that we in actual person had encountered an
absolute desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence
of the ignorant thenceforward.  And it was pleasant also to reflect that
this was not an obscure, back country desert, but a very celebrated one,
the metropolis itself, as you may say.  All this was very well and very
comfortable and satisfactory--but now we were to cross a desert in
daylight.  This was fine--novel--romantic--dramatically adventurous
--this, indeed, was worth living for, worth traveling for!  We would
write home all about it.

This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry
August sun and did not last above one hour.  One poor little hour--and
then we were ashamed that we had "gushed" so.  The poetry was all in the
anticipation--there is none in the reality.  Imagine a vast, waveless
ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted
with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude
that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through
the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust
as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of
toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far
away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so
deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine
ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations
on boughs and bushes.  This is the reality of it.

The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the
perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a
sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets
there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a
merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a
living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank
level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a
sound--not a sigh--not a whisper--not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or
distant pipe of bird--not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless
people that dead air.  And so the occasional sneezing of the resting
mules, and the champing of the bits, grate harshly on the grim stillness,
not dissipating the spell but accenting it and making one feel more
lonesome and forsaken than before.

The mules, under violent swearing, coaxing and whip-cracking, would make
at stated intervals a "spurt," and drag the coach a hundred or may be two
hundred yards, stirring up a billowy cloud of dust that rolled back,
enveloping the vehicle to the wheel-tops or higher, and making it seem
afloat in a fog.  Then a rest followed, with the usual sneezing and
bit-champing.  Then another "spurt" of a hundred yards and another rest at
the end of it.  All day long we kept this up, without water for the mules
and without ever changing the team.  At least we kept it up ten hours,
which, I take it, is a day, and a pretty honest one, in an alkali desert.
It was from four in the morning till two in the afternoon.  And it was so
hot! and so close! and our water canteens went dry in the middle of the
day and we got so thirsty!  It was so stupid and tiresome and dull! and
the tedious hours did lag and drag and limp along with such a cruel
deliberation!  It was so trying to give one's watch a good long
undisturbed spell and then take it out and find that it had been fooling
away the time and not trying to get ahead any!  The alkali dust cut
through our lips, it persecuted our eyes, it ate through the delicate
membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding--and truly and
seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the
desert trip nothing but a harsh reality--a thirsty, sweltering, longing,
hateful reality!

Two miles and a quarter an hour for ten hours--that was what we
accomplished.  It was hard to bring the comprehension away down to such a
snail-pace as that, when we had been used to making eight and ten miles
an hour.  When we reached the station on the farther verge of the desert,
we were glad, for the first time, that the dictionary was along, because
we never could have found language to tell how glad we were, in any sort
of dictionary but an unabridged one with pictures in it.  But there could
not have been found in a whole library of dictionaries language
sufficient to tell how tired those mules were after their twenty-three
mile pull.  To try to give the reader an idea of how thirsty they were,
would be to "gild refined gold or paint the lily."

Somehow, now that it is there, the quotation does not seem to fit--but no
matter, let it stay, anyhow.  I think it is a graceful and attractive
thing, and therefore have tried time and time again to work it in where
it would fit, but could not succeed.  These efforts have kept my mind
distracted and ill at ease, and made my narrative seem broken and
disjointed, in places.  Under these circumstances it seems to me best to
leave it in, as above, since this will afford at least a temporary
respite from the wear and tear of trying to "lead up" to this really apt
and beautiful quotation.



CHAPTER XIX.

On the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at the
entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake.
It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation
of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the
wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing.  I
refer to the Goshoot Indians.  From what we could see and all we could
learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger
Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent;
inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and
actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa.  Indeed, I
have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood's "Uncivilized Races
of Men" clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to
take rank with the Goshoots.  I find but one people fairly open to that
shameful verdict.  It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa.  Such
of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations,
were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like
the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which
they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even
generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking,
treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all
the other "Noble Red Men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no
sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless,
like all other Indians; prideless beggars--for if the beggar instinct
were left out of an Indian he would not "go," any more than a clock
without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing
anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would
decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat
jack-ass rabbits,  crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from
the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common
Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something which almost amounts to
emotion, thinking whiskey is referred to; a thin, scattering race of
almost naked black children, these Goshoots are, who produce nothing at
all, and have no villages, and no gatherings together into strictly
defined tribal communities--a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on
a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the
most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can
exhibit.

The Bushmen and our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same
gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, which-ever animal--Adam the
Darwinians trace them to.

One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the Goshoots, and yet
they used to live off the offal and refuse of the stations a few months
and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected, and burn
down the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out.
And once, in the night, they attacked the stage-coach when a District
Judge, of Nevada Territory, was the only passenger, and with their first
volley of arrows (and a bullet or two) they riddled the stage curtains,
wounded a horse or two and mortally wounded the driver.  The latter was
full of pluck, and so was his passenger.  At the driver's call Judge Mott
swung himself out, clambered to the box and seized the reins of the team,
and away they plunged, through the racing mob of skeletons and under a
hurtling storm of missiles.  The stricken driver had sunk down on the
boot as soon as he was wounded, but had held on to the reins and said he
would manage to keep hold of them until relieved.

And after they were taken from his relaxing grasp, he lay with his head
between Judge Mott's feet, and tranquilly gave directions about the road;
he said he believed he could live till the miscreants were outrun and
left behind, and that if he managed that, the main difficulty would be at
an end, and then if the Judge drove so and so (giving directions about
bad places in the road, and general course) he would reach the next
station without trouble.  The Judge distanced the enemy and at last
rattled up to the station and knew that the night's perils were done; but
there was no comrade-in-arms for him to rejoice with, for the soldierly
driver was dead.

Let us forget that we have been saying harsh things about the Overland
drivers, now.  The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of
Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man--even of the scholarly savages in
the "Last of the Mohicans" who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen
who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically
grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part just such
an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk
might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett's works and
studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks--I say
that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me
to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating
the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance.
The revelations that came were disenchanting.  It was curious to see how
quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous,
filthy and repulsive--and how quickly the evidences accumulated that
wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or
less modified by circumstances and surroundings--but Goshoots, after all.
They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine--at this
distance.  Nearer by, they never get anybody's.

There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad
Company and many of its employees are Goshoots; but it is an error.
There is only a plausible resemblance, which, while it is apt enough to
mislead the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both
tribes.  But seriously, it was not only poor wit, but very wrong to start
the report referred to above; for however innocent the motive may have
been, the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who
have a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky
Mountains, Heaven knows!  If we cannot find it in our hearts to give
those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in
God's name let us at least not throw mud at them.



CHAPTER XX.

On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peaks we had yet
seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its
heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless.

On the eighteenth day we encountered the eastward-bound
telegraph-constructors at Reese River station and sent a message to his
Excellency Gov. Nye at Carson City (distant one hundred and fifty-six
miles).

On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American Desert--forty
memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from
six inches to a foot.  We worked our passage most of the way across.
That is to say, we got out and walked.  It was a dreary pull and a long
and thirsty one, for we had no water.  From one extremity of this desert
to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the
forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step!  The desert was one
prodigious graveyard.  And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting
wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones.  I think we saw
log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State
in the Union.  Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the
fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California
endured?

At the border of the Desert lies Carson Lake, or The "Sink" of the
Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water some eighty or a hundred
miles in circumference.  Carson River empties into it and is lost--sinks
mysteriously into the earth and never appears in the light of the sun
again--for the lake has no outlet whatever.

There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this mysterious
fate.  They end in various lakes or "sinks," and that is the last of
them.  Carson Lake, Humboldt Lake, Walker Lake, Mono Lake, are all great
sheets of water without any visible outlet.  Water is always flowing into
them; none is ever seen to flow out of them, and yet they remain always
level full, neither receding nor overflowing.  What they do with their
surplus is only known to the Creator.

On the western verge of the Desert we halted a moment at Ragtown.  It
consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map.

This reminds me of a circumstance.  Just after we left Julesburg, on the
Platte, I was sitting with the driver, and he said:

"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to
listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was
leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an
engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through
quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.
The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through
the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to
go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.
But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on
time'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"

A day or two after that we picked up a Denver man at the cross roads, and
he told us a good deal about the country and the Gregory Diggings.
He seemed a very entertaining person and a man well posted in the affairs
of Colorado.  By and by he remarked:

"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to
listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was
leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an
engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through
quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.  The
coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through
the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to
go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.
But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on
time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"

At Fort Bridger, some days after this, we took on board a cavalry
sergeant, a very proper and soldierly person indeed.  From no other man
during the whole journey, did we gather such a store of concise and
well-arranged military information.  It was surprising to find in the
desolate wilds of our country a man so thoroughly acquainted with
everything useful to know in his line of life, and yet of such inferior
rank and unpretentious bearing.  For as much as three hours we listened
to him with unabated interest.  Finally he got upon the subject of
trans-continental travel, and presently said:

"I can tell you a very laughable thing indeed, if you would like to
listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was
leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an
engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through
quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.  The
coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through
the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to
go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.
But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on
time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"

When we were eight hours out from Salt Lake City a Mormon preacher got in
with us at a way station--a gentle, soft-spoken, kindly man, and one whom
any stranger would warm to at first sight.  I can never forget the pathos
that was in his voice as he told, in simple language, the story of his
people's wanderings and unpitied sufferings.  No pulpit eloquence was
ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast's picture of the first
Mormon pilgrimage across the plains, struggling sorrowfully onward to the
land of its banishment and marking its desolate way with graves and
watering it with tears.  His words so wrought upon us that it was a
relief to us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful
channel and the natural features of the curious country we were in came
under treatment.  One matter after another was pleasantly discussed, and
at length the stranger said:

"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to
listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was
leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an
engagement to lecture in Placerville, and was very anxious to go through
quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.  The
coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the
buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through
the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to
go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.
But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on
time!'--and you bet you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"

Ten miles out of Ragtown we found a poor wanderer who had lain down to
die.  He had walked as long as he could, but his limbs had failed him at
last.  Hunger and fatigue had conquered him.  It would have been inhuman
to leave him there.  We paid his fare to Carson and lifted him into the
coach.  It was some little time before he showed any very decided signs
of life; but by dint of chafing him and pouring brandy between his lips
we finally brought him to a languid consciousness.  Then we fed him a
little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a
grateful light softened his eye.  We made his mail-sack bed as
comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our coats.
He seemed very thankful.  Then he looked up in our faces, and said in a
feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it:

"Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and
although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at
least make one hour of your long journey lighter.  I take it you are
strangers to this great thorough fare, but I am entirely familiar with
it.  In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if
you would like to listen to it.  Horace Greeley----"

I said, impressively:

"Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril.  You see in me the melancholy
wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood.  What has brought me to
this?  That thing which you are about to tell.  Gradually but surely,
that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my
constitution, withered my life.  Pity my helplessness.  Spare me only
just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little
hatchet for a change."

We were saved.  But not so the invalid.  In trying to retain the anecdote
in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.

I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen
of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after
seven years' residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or
driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was
by, and survived.  Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed
the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and
listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or
eighty-two times.  I have the list somewhere.  Drivers always told it,
conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the
very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it.  I have had the same
driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon.  It has
come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to
earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont,
tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to
it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the
sons of men.  I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt
that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that
one.  And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every
time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a
different smell.  Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote,
Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne,
and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon
the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and
I have heard that it is in the Talmud.  I have seen it in print in nine
different foreign languages; I have been told that it is employed in the
inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be
set to music.  I do not think that such things are right.

Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race
defunct.  I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their
successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter
still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did
many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific
coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his
adventure with Horace Greeley.  [And what makes that worn anecdote the
more aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred.
If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest
virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ought to be
done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this?  If I
were to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called
extravagant--but what does the sixteenth chapter of Daniel say?  Aha!]



CHAPTER XXI.

We were approaching the end of our long journey.  It was the morning of
the twentieth day.  At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of
Nevada Territory.  We were not glad, but sorry.  It had been a fine
pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well
accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a
stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not
agreeable, but on the contrary depressing.

Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad
mountains.  There was not a tree in sight.  There was no vegetation but
the endless sage-brush and greasewood.  All nature was gray with it.  We
were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in
thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning
house.

We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the
mail-bags, the driver--we and the sage-brush and the other scenery were
all one monotonous color.  Long trains of freight wagons in the distance
envelope in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on
fire.  These teams and their masters were the only life we saw.
Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence and desolation.
Every twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen,
with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs.
Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated
the passing coach with meditative serenity.

By and by Carson City was pointed out to us.  It nestled in the edge of a
great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an
assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of mountains
overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship
and consciousness of earthly things.

We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on.  It was a "wooden" town;
its population two thousand souls.  The main street consisted of four or
five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down
on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high
enough.  They were packed close together, side by side, as if room were
scarce in that mighty plain.

The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to
rattle when walked upon.  In the middle of the town, opposite the stores,
was the "plaza" which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains
--a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in it, and very
useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass meetings,
and likewise for teamsters to camp in.  Two other sides of the plaza were
faced by stores, offices and stables.

The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering.

We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the
way up to the Governor's from the hotel--among others, to a Mr. Harris,
who was on horseback; he began to say something, but interrupted himself
with the remark:

"I'll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the witness that
swore I helped to rob the California coach--a piece of impertinent
intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with the man."

Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter,
and the stranger began to explain with another.  When the pistols were
emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and Mr.
Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through
one of his lungs, and several in his hips; and from them issued little
rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal
look quite picturesque.  I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it
recalled to mind that first day in Carson.

This was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock, now, and according
to custom the daily "Washoe Zephyr" set in; a soaring dust-drift about
the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the
capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view.

Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting
to new comers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things
strange to the upper air--things living and dead, that flitted hither and
thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling
billows of dust--hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote
heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower;
door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the
next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted
lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only
thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating
roofs and vacant lots.

It was something to see that much.  I could have seen more, if I could
have kept the dust out of my eyes.

But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter.  It blows
flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones
like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the
passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people
there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are
looking skyward after their hats.  Carson streets seldom look inactive on
Summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around
their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a spider.

The "Washoe Zephyr" (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a peculiar
Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth "whence it cometh."  That is to
say, where it originates.  It comes right over the mountains from the
West, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the
other side!  It probably is manufactured on the mountain-top for the
occasion, and starts from there.  It is a pretty regular wind, in the
summer time.  Its office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the
next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours
needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to leeward
of the point he is aiming at.  And yet the first complaint a Washoe
visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds blow so, there!
There is a good deal of human nature in that.

We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist
of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms in it and a
stanchion supported shed in front--for grandeur--it compelled the respect
of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe.  The newly arrived
Chief and Associate Justices of the Territory, and other machinery of the
government, were domiciled with less splendor.  They were boarding around
privately, and had their offices in their bedrooms.

The Secretary and I took quarters in the "ranch" of a worthy French lady
by the name of Bridget O'Flannigan, a camp follower of his Excellency the
Governor.  She had known him in his prosperity as commander-in-chief of
the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would not desert him in his
adversity as Governor of Nevada.

Our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we had got
our bed, a small table, two chairs, the government fire-proof safe, and
the Unabridged Dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a
visitor--may be two, but not without straining the walls.  But the walls
could stand it--at least the partitions could, for they consisted simply
of one thickness of white "cotton domestic" stretched from corner to
corner of the room.  This was the rule in Carson--any other kind of
partition was the rare exception.  And if you stood in a dark room and
your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas told
queer secrets sometimes!  Very often these partitions were made of old
flour sacks basted together; and then the difference between the common
herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had unornamented
sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were overpowering with
rudimental fresco--i.e., red and blue mill brands on the flour sacks.

Occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their canvas by
pasting pictures from Harper's Weekly on them.  In many cases, too, the
wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a
sumptuous and luxurious taste.  [Washoe people take a joke so hard that I
must explain that the above description was only the rule; there were
many honorable exceptions in Carson--plastered ceilings and houses that
had considerable furniture in them.--M. T.]

We had a carpet and a genuine queen's-ware washbowl.  Consequently we
were hated without reserve by the other tenants of the O'Flannigan
"ranch."  When we added a painted oilcloth window curtain, we simply took
our lives into our own hands.  To prevent bloodshed I removed up stairs
and took up quarters with the untitled plebeians in one of the fourteen
white pine cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole
room of which the second story consisted.

It was a jolly company, the fourteen.  They were principally voluntary
camp-followers of the Governor, who had joined his retinue by their own
election at New York and San Francisco and came along, feeling that in
the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make
their condition more precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect
to make it better.  They were popularly known as the "Irish Brigade,"
though there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor's
retainers.

His good-natured Excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen
created--especially when there arose a rumor that they were paid
assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the democratic vote
when desirable!

Mrs. O'Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week
apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it.  They were
perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could
not be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson
boarding-house.  So she began to harry the Governor to find employment
for the "Brigade."  Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a
gentle desperation at last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the
presence. Then, said he:

"Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you
--a service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes,
and afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by
observation and study.  I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City
westward to a certain point!  When the legislature meets I will have the
necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged."

"What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?"

"Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!"

He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned
them loose in the desert.  It was "recreation" with a vengeance!
Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a
sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas.

"Romantic adventure" could go no further.  They surveyed very slowly,
very deliberately, very carefully.  They returned every night during the
first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly.  They
brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders--tarantulas--and
imprisoned them in covered tumblers up stairs in the "ranch."  After the
first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well
eastward.  They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that
indefinite "certain point," but got no information.  At last, to a
peculiarly urgent inquiry of "How far eastward?"  Governor Nye
telegraphed back:

"To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!--and then bridge it and go on!"

This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from
their labors.  The Governor was always comfortable about it; he said Mrs.
O'Flannigan would hold him for the Brigade's board anyhow, and he
intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said,
with his old-time pleasant twinkle, that he meant to survey them into
Utah and then telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass!

The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite
a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room.  Some of these
spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular
legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they
were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish.
If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up
and spoiling for a fight in a minute.  Starchy?--proud?  Indeed, they
would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress.
There was as usual a furious "zephyr" blowing the first night of the
brigade's return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew
off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch.
There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the
brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other
in the narrow aisle between the bedrows.  In the midst of the turmoil,
Bob H---- sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with
his head.  Instantly he shouted:

"Turn out, boys--the tarantulas is loose!"

No warning ever sounded so dreadful.  Nobody tried, any longer, to leave
the room, lest he might step on a tarantula.  Every man groped for a
trunk or a bed, and jumped on it.  Then followed the strangest silence--a
silence of grisly suspense it was, too--waiting, expectancy, fear.  It
was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those
fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a
thing could be seen.  Then came occasional little interruptions of the
silence, and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his
voice, or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or
changes of position.  The occasional voices were not given to much
speaking--you simply heard a gentle ejaculation of "Ow!" followed by a
solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or
something touch his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor.
Another silence.  Presently you would hear a gasping voice say:

"Su--su--something's crawling up the back of my neck!"

Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a
sorrowful "O Lord!" and then you knew that somebody was getting away from
something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any time about it,
either.  Directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and clear:

"I've got him!  I've got him!" [Pause, and probable change of
circumstances.]  "No, he's got me!  Oh, ain't they never going to fetch a
lantern!"

The lantern came at that moment, in the hands of Mrs. O'Flannigan, whose
anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting roof had not
prevented her waiting a judicious interval, after getting out of bed and
lighting up, to see if the wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a larger
contract.

The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was
picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us.
Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and so
strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too
genuinely miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the
semblance of a smile anywhere visible.  I know I am not capable of
suffering more than I did during those few minutes of suspense in the
dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas.  I had
skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every
time I touched anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs.  I had
rather go to war than live that episode over again.  Nobody was hurt.
The man who thought a tarantula had "got him" was mistaken--only a crack
in a box had caught his finger.  Not one of those escaped tarantulas was
ever seen again.  There were ten or twelve of them.  We took candles and
hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success.  Did we go
back to bed then?  We did nothing of the kind.  Money could not have
persuaded us to do it.  We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage
and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy.



CHAPTER XXII.

It was the end of August, and the skies were cloudless and the weather
superb.  In two or three weeks I had grown wonderfully fascinated with
the curious new country and concluded to put off my return to "the
States" awhile.  I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch
hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot-tops, and gloried in
the absence of coat, vest and braces.  I felt rowdyish and "bully," (as
the historian Josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the
destruction of the Temple).  It seemed to me that nothing could be so
fine and so romantic.  I had become an officer of the government, but
that was for mere sublimity.  The office was an unique sinecure.  I had
nothing to do and no salary.  I was private Secretary to his majesty the
Secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us.  So Johnny
K---- and I devoted our time to amusement.  He was the young son of an
Ohio nabob and was out there for recreation.  He got it.  We had heard a
world of talk about the marvellous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally
curiosity drove us thither to see it.  Three or four members of the
Brigade had been there and located some timber lands on its shores and
stored up a quantity of provisions in their camp.  We strapped a couple
of blankets on our shoulders and took an axe apiece and started--for we
intended to take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy.
We were on foot.  The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback.
We were told that the distance was eleven miles.  We tramped a long time
on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a
thousand miles high and looked over.  No lake there.  We descended on the
other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or
four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again.  No lake
yet.  We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to
curse those people who had beguiled us.  Thus refreshed, we presently
resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination.  We plodded on,
two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us--a noble
sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the
level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that
towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still!  It was a vast oval,
and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling
around it.  As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly
photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the
fairest picture the whole earth affords.

We found the small skiff belonging to the Brigade boys, and without loss
of time set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that
signified the locality of the camp.  I got Johnny to row--not because I
mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when
I am at work.  But I steered.  A three-mile pull brought us to the camp
just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly
hungry.  In a "cache" among the rocks we found the provisions and the
cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued as I was, I sat down on a
boulder and superintended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked supper.
Many a man who had gone through what I had, would have wanted to rest.

It was a delicious supper--hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee.
It was a delicious solitude we were in, too.  Three miles away was a
saw-mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings
throughout the wide circumference of the lake.  As the darkness closed
down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we
smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our
pains.  In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two
large boulders and soon feel asleep, careless of the procession of ants
that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our persons.
Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly
earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn
court for that night, any way.  The wind rose just as we were losing
consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf
upon the shore.

It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty
of blankets and were warm enough.  We never moved a muscle all night, but
waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once,
thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness.
There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience.  That
morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before
--sick ones at any rate.  But the world is slow, and people will go to
"water cures" and "movement cures" and to foreign lands for health.
Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy
to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator.  I do
not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and
delicious.  And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.
I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a
man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side.  Not under a
roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer
time.  I know a man who went there to die.  But he made a failure of it.
He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand.  He had no
appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.
Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he
could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three
thousand feet high for recreation.  And he was a skeleton no longer, but
weighed part of a ton.  This is no fancy sketch, but the truth.  His
disease was consumption.  I confidently commend his experience to other
skeletons.

I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in
the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and
disembarked.  We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed
some three hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree.  It was
yellow pine timber land--a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and
from one to five feet through at the butt.  It was necessary to fence our
property or we could not hold it.  That is to say, it was necessary to
cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to form
a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it).  We cut down three
trees apiece, and found it such heart-breaking work that we decided to
"rest our case" on those; if they held the property, well and good; if
they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go; it was
no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land.
Next day we came back to build a house--for a house was also necessary,
in order to hold the property.  We decided to build a substantial
log-house and excite the envy of the Brigade boys; but by the time we had
cut and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate,
and so we concluded to build it of saplings.  However, two saplings, duly
cut and trimmed, compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester
architecture would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a
"brush" house.  We devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much
"sitting around" and discussing, that by the middle of the afternoon we
had achieved only a half-way sort of affair which one of us had to watch
while the other cut brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be
able to find it again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the
surrounding vegetation.  But we were satisfied with it.

We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the
protection of the law.  Therefore we decided to take up our residence on
our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only such
an experience can bring.  Late the next afternoon, after a good long
rest, we sailed away from the Brigade camp with all the provisions and
cooking utensils we could carry off--borrow is the more accurate word
--and just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing.



CHAPTER XXIII.

If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber
ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of life which I
have not read of in books or experienced in person.  We did not see a
human being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those
that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and
now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche.  The forest about us
was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with
sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and
breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature's mood; and its
circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with
land-slides, cloven by canons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering
snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture.  The view was always
fascinating, bewitching, entrancing.  The eye was never tired of gazing,
night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was
that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep.

We slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two protecting
boulders, which took care of the stormy night-winds for us.  We never
took any paregoric to make us sleep.  At the first break of dawn we were
always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor
and exuberance of spirits.  That is, Johnny was--but I held his hat.
While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel
peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as
it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests
free.  We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water
till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in
and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete.  Then to
"business."

That is, drifting around in the boat.  We were on the north shore.
There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white.
This gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage
than it has elsewhere on the lake.  We usually pushed out a hundred yards
or so from shore, and then lay down on the thwarts, in the sun, and let
the boat drift by the hour whither it would.  We seldom talked.
It interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious
rest and indolence brought.  The shore all along was indented with deep,
curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the
sand ended, the steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space--rose
up like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly wooded
with tall pines.

So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or
thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat
seemed floating in the air!  Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep.
Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every
hand's-breadth of sand.  Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite
boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom
apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently
it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to
seize an oar and avert the danger.  But the boat would float on, and the
boulder descend again, and then we could see that when we had been
exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the
surface.  Down through the transparency of these great depths, the water
was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so.  All objects
seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but
of every minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply
through the same depth of atmosphere.  So empty and airy did all spaces
seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in
mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions "balloon-voyages."

We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week.  We could
see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness under us, or
sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite--they could see
the line too plainly, perhaps.  We frequently selected the trout we
wanted, and rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his
nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off with an
annoyed manner, and shift his position.

We bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all it
looked so sunny.  Sometimes we rowed out to the "blue water," a mile or
two from shore.  It was as dead blue as indigo there, because of the
immense depth.  By official measurement the lake in its centre is one
thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep!

Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp, and smoked
pipes and read some old well-worn novels.  At night, by the camp-fire, we
played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind--and played them with
cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance with
them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of
diamonds.

We never slept in our "house."  It never recurred to us, for one thing;
and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough.  We
did not wish to strain it.

By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old
camp and laid in a new supply.  We were gone all day, and reached home
again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry.  While Johnny was
carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future
use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot,
ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to
get the frying-pan.  While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny,
and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises!
Johnny was on the other side of it.  He had to run through the flames to
get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the
devastation.

The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire
touched them off as if they were gunpowder.  It was wonderful to see with
what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled!  My coffee-pot was
gone, and everything with it.  In a minute and a half the fire seized
upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chapparal six or eight feet high,
and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific.
We were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained,
spell-bound.

Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of
flame!  It went surging up adjacent ridges--surmounted them and
disappeared in the canons beyond--burst into view upon higher and farther
ridges, presently--shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again
--flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the
mountain-side--threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and
sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and
ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty
mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava
streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy
glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell!

Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the
lake!  Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the
lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held
it with the stronger fascination.

We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours.  We never thought
of supper, and never felt fatigue.  But at eleven o'clock the
conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness
stole down upon the landscape again.

Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat.  The provisions
were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see.  We were homeless
wanderers again, without any property.  Our fence was gone, our house
burned down; no insurance.  Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead
trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away.  Our
blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went
to sleep.  The next morning we started back to the old camp, but while
out a long way from shore, so great a storm came up that we dared not try
to land.  So I baled out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled heavily
through the billows till we had reached a point three or four miles
beyond the camp.  The storm was increasing, and it became evident that it
was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down in a
hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in, with tall white-caps following,
and I sat down in the stern-sheets and pointed her head-on to the shore.
The instant the bow struck, a wave came over the stern that washed crew
and cargo ashore, and saved a deal of trouble.  We shivered in the lee of
a boulder all the rest of the day, and froze all the night through.  In
the morning the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down to the camp
without any unnecessary delay.  We were so starved that we ate up the
rest of the Brigade's provisions, and then set out to Carson to tell them
about it and ask their forgiveness.  It was accorded, upon payment of
damages.

We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hair-breadth
escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any
history.



CHAPTER XXIV.

I resolved to have a horse to ride.  I had never seen such wild, free,
magnificent horsemanship outside of a circus as these picturesquely-clad
Mexicans, Californians and Mexicanized Americans displayed in Carson
streets every day.  How they rode!  Leaning just gently forward out of
the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant, with broad slouch-hat brim blown
square up in front, and long riata swinging above the head, they swept
through the town like the wind!  The next minute they were only a sailing
puff of dust on the far desert.  If they trotted, they sat up gallantly
and gracefully, and seemed part of the horse; did not go jiggering up and
down after the silly Miss-Nancy fashion of the riding-schools.  I had
quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full of anxiety to
learn more.  I was resolved to buy a horse.

While the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came skurrying
through the plaza on a black beast that had as many humps and corners on
him as a dromedary, and was necessarily uncomely; but he was "going,
going, at twenty-two!--horse, saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars,
gentlemen!" and I could hardly resist.

A man whom I did not know (he turned out to be the auctioneer's brother)
noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very
remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle
alone was worth the money.  It was a Spanish saddle, with ponderous
'tapidaros', and furnished with the ungainly sole-leather covering with
the unspellable name.  I said I had half a notion to bid.  Then this
keen-eyed person appeared to me to be "taking my measure"; but I
dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of
guileless candor and truthfulness.  Said he:

"I know that horse--know him well.  You are a stranger, I take it, and so
you might think he was an American horse, maybe, but I assure you he is
not.  He is nothing of the kind; but--excuse my speaking in a low voice,
other people being near--he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a Genuine
Mexican Plug!"

I did not know what a Genuine Mexican Plug was, but there was something
about this man's way of saying it, that made me swear inwardly that I
would own a Genuine Mexican Plug, or die.

"Has he any other--er--advantages?"  I inquired, suppressing what
eagerness I could.

He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one
side, and breathed in my ear impressively these words:

"He can out-buck anything in America!"

"Going, going, going--at twent--ty--four dollars and a half, gen--"

"Twenty-seven!" I shouted, in a frenzy.

"And sold!" said the auctioneer, and passed over the Genuine Mexican Plug
to me.

I could scarcely contain my exultation.  I paid the money, and put the
animal in a neighboring livery-stable to dine and rest himself.

In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain
citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while I mounted
him.  As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together,
lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me
straight into the air a matter of three or four feet!  I came as straight
down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost
on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse's neck--all
in the space of three or four seconds.  Then he rose and stood almost
straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately,
slid back into the saddle and held on.  He came down, and immediately
hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky, and
stood on his forefeet.  And then down he came once more, and began the
original exercise of shooting me straight up again.  The third time I
went up I heard a stranger say:

"Oh, don't he buck, though!"

While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a
leathern strap, and when I arrived again the Genuine Mexican Plug was not
there.  A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he
might have a ride.  I granted him that luxury.  He mounted the Genuine,
got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended,
and the horse darted away like a telegram.  He soared over three fences
like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washoe Valley.

I sat down on a stone, with a sigh, and by a natural impulse one of my
hands sought my forehead, and the other the base of my stomach.  I
believe I never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human
machinery--for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere.  Pen
cannot describe how I was jolted up.  Imagination cannot conceive how
disjointed I was--how internally, externally and universally I was
unsettled, mixed up and ruptured.  There was a sympathetic crowd around
me, though.

One elderly-looking comforter said:

"Stranger, you've been taken in.  Everybody in this camp knows that
horse.  Any child, any Injun, could have told you that he'd buck; he is
the very worst devil to buck on the continent of America.  You hear me.
I'm Curry.  Old Curry.  Old Abe Curry.  And moreover, he is a simon-pure,
out-and-out, genuine d--d Mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at that,
too.  Why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark, there's chances
to buy an American horse for mighty little more than you paid for that
bloody old foreign relic."

I gave no sign; but I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's
funeral took place while I was in the Territory I would postpone all
other recreations and attend it.

After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine
Mexican Plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the
spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a
wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch."

Such panting and blowing!  Such spreading and contracting of the red
equine nostrils, and glaring of the wild equine eye!  But was the
imperial beast subjugated?  Indeed he was not.

His lordship the Speaker of the House thought he was, and mounted him to
go down to the Capitol; but the first dash the creature made was over a
pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church; and his time to the
Capitol--one mile and three quarters--remains unbeaten to this day.  But
then he took an advantage--he left out the mile, and only did the three
quarters.  That is to say, he made a straight cut across lots, preferring
fences and ditches to a crooked road; and when the Speaker got to the
Capitol he said he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made
the trip on a comet.

In the evening the Speaker came home afoot for exercise, and got the
Genuine towed back behind a quartz wagon.  The next day I loaned the
animal to the Clerk of the House to go down to the Dana silver mine, six
miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed.
Everybody I loaned him to always walked back; they never could get enough
exercise any other way.

Still, I continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him,
my idea being to get him crippled, and throw him on the borrower's hands,
or killed, and make the borrower pay for him.  But somehow nothing ever
happened to him.  He took chances that no other horse ever took and
survived, but he always came out safe.  It was his daily habit to try
experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he
always got through.  Sometimes he miscalculated a little, and did not get
his rider through intact, but he always got through himself.  Of course I
had tried to sell him; but that was a stretch of simplicity which met
with little sympathy.  The auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on
him for four days, dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and
destroying children, and never got a bid--at least never any but the
eighteen-dollar one he hired a notoriously substanceless bummer to make.
The people only smiled pleasantly, and restrained their desire to buy, if
they had any.  Then the auctioneer brought in his bill, and I withdrew
the horse from the market.  We tried to trade him off at private vendue
next, offering him at a sacrifice for second-hand tombstones, old iron,
temperance tracts--any kind of property.  But holders were stiff, and we
retired from the market again.  I never tried to ride the horse any more.
Walking was good enough exercise for a man like me, that had nothing the
matter with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things.
Finally I tried to give him away.  But it was a failure.  Parties said
earthquakes were handy enough on the Pacific coast--they did not wish to
own one.  As a last resort I offered him to the Governor for the use of
the "Brigade."  His face lit up eagerly at first, but toned down again,
and he said the thing would be too palpable.

Just then the livery stable man brought in his bill for six weeks'
keeping--stall-room for the horse, fifteen dollars; hay for the horse,
two hundred and fifty!  The Genuine Mexican Plug had eaten a ton of the
article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let
him.

I will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay
during that year and a part of the next was really two hundred and fifty
dollars a ton.  During a part of the previous year it had sold at five
hundred a ton, in gold, and during the winter before that there was such
scarcity of the article that in several instances small quantities had
brought eight hundred dollars a ton in coin!  The consequence might be
guessed without my telling it: peopled turned their stock loose to
starve, and before the spring arrived Carson and Eagle valleys were
almost literally carpeted with their carcases!  Any old settler there
will verify these statements.

I managed to pay the livery bill, and that same day I gave the Genuine
Mexican Plug to a passing Arkansas emigrant whom fortune delivered into
my hand.  If this ever meets his eye, he will doubtless remember the
donation.

Now whoever has had the luck to ride a real Mexican plug will recognize
the animal depicted in this chapter, and hardly consider him exaggerated
--but the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as a
fancy sketch, perhaps.



CHAPTER XXV.

Originally, Nevada was a part of Utah and was called Carson county; and a
pretty large county it was, too.  Certain of its valleys produced no end
of hay, and this attracted small colonies of Mormon stock-raisers and
farmers to them.  A few orthodox Americans straggled in from California,
but no love was lost between the two classes of colonists.  There was
little or no friendly intercourse; each party staid to itself.  The
Mormons were largely in the majority, and had the additional advantage of
being peculiarly under the protection of the Mormon government of the
Territory.  Therefore they could afford to be distant, and even
peremptory toward their neighbors.  One of the traditions of Carson
Valley illustrates the condition of things that prevailed at the time I
speak of.  The hired girl of one of the American families was Irish, and
a Catholic; yet it was noted with surprise that she was the only person
outside of the Mormon ring who could get favors from the Mormons.  She
asked kindnesses of them often, and always got them.  It was a mystery to
everybody.  But one day as she was passing out at the door, a large bowie
knife dropped from under her apron, and when her mistress asked for an
explanation she observed that she was going out to "borry a wash-tub from
the Mormons!"

In 1858 silver lodes were discovered in "Carson County," and then the
aspect of things changed.  Californians began to flock in, and the
American element was soon in the majority.  Allegiance to Brigham Young
and Utah was renounced, and a temporary territorial government for
"Washoe" was instituted by the citizens.  Governor Roop was the first and
only chief magistrate of it.  In due course of time Congress passed a
bill to organize "Nevada Territory," and President Lincoln sent out
Governor Nye to supplant Roop.

At this time the population of the Territory was about twelve or fifteen
thousand, and rapidly increasing.  Silver mines were being vigorously
developed and silver mills erected.  Business of all kinds was active and
prosperous and growing more so day by day.

The people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government, but
did not particularly enjoy having strangers from distant States put in
authority over them--a sentiment that was natural enough.  They thought
the officials should have been chosen from among themselves from among
prominent citizens who had earned a right to such promotion, and who
would be in sympathy with the populace and likewise thoroughly acquainted
with the needs of the Territory.  They were right in viewing the matter
thus, without doubt.  The new officers were "emigrants," and that was no
title to anybody's affection or admiration either.

The new government was received with considerable coolness.  It was not
only a foreign intruder, but a poor one.  It was not even worth plucking
--except by the smallest of small fry office-seekers and such.  Everybody
knew that Congress had appropriated only twenty thousand dollars a year
in greenbacks for its support--about money enough to run a quartz mill a
month.  And everybody knew, also, that the first year's money was still
in Washington, and that the getting hold of it would be a tedious and
difficult process.  Carson City was too wary and too wise to open up a
credit account with the imported bantling with anything like indecent
haste.

There is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a new-born
Territorial government to get a start in this world.  Ours had a trying
time of it.  The Organic Act and the "instructions" from the State
Department commanded that a legislature should be elected at
such-and-such a time, and its sittings inaugurated at such-and-such a
date.  It was easy to get legislators, even at three dollars a day,
although board was four dollars and fifty cents, for distinction has its
charm in Nevada as well as elsewhere, and there were plenty of patriotic
souls out of employment; but to get a legislative hall for them to meet
in was another matter altogether.  Carson blandly declined to give a room
rent-free, or let one to the government on credit.

But when Curry heard of the difficulty, he came forward, solitary and
alone, and shouldered the Ship of State over the bar and got her afloat
again.  I refer to "Curry--Old Curry--Old Abe Curry."  But for him the
legislature would have been obliged to sit in the desert.  He offered his
large stone building just outside the capital limits, rent-free, and it
was gladly accepted.  Then he built a horse-railroad from town to the
capitol, and carried the legislators gratis.

He also furnished pine benches and chairs for the legislature, and
covered the floors with clean saw-dust by way of carpet and spittoon
combined.  But for Curry the government would have died in its tender
infancy.  A canvas partition to separate the Senate from the House of
Representatives was put up by the Secretary, at a cost of three dollars
and forty cents, but the United States declined to pay for it.  Upon
being reminded that the "instructions" permitted the payment of a liberal
rent for a legislative hall, and that that money was saved to the country
by Mr. Curry's generosity, the United States said that did not alter the
matter, and the three dollars and forty cents would be subtracted from
the Secretary's eighteen hundred dollar salary--and it was!

The matter of printing was from the beginning an interesting feature of
the new government's difficulties.  The Secretary was sworn to obey his
volume of written "instructions," and these commanded him to do two
certain things without fail, viz.:

1.  Get the House and Senate journals printed; and,
2.  For this work, pay one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand" for
composition, and one dollar and fifty cents per "token" for press-work,
in greenbacks.

It was easy to swear to do these two things, but it was entirely
impossible to do more than one of them.  When greenbacks had gone down to
forty cents on the dollar, the prices regularly charged everybody by
printing establishments were one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand"
and one dollar and fifty cents per "token," in gold.  The "instructions"
commanded that the Secretary regard a paper dollar issued by the
government as equal to any other dollar issued by the government.  Hence
the printing of the journals was discontinued.  Then the United States
sternly rebuked the Secretary for disregarding the "instructions," and
warned him to correct his ways.  Wherefore he got some printing done,
forwarded the bill to Washington with full exhibits of the high prices of
things in the Territory, and called attention to a printed market report
wherein it would be observed that even hay was two hundred and fifty
dollars a ton.  The United States responded by subtracting the
printing-bill from the Secretary's suffering salary--and moreover
remarked with dense gravity that he would find nothing in his
"instructions" requiring him to purchase hay!

Nothing in this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S.
Treasury Comptroller's understanding.  The very fires of the hereafter
could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it.  In the days I
speak of he never could be made to comprehend why it was that twenty
thousand dollars would not go as far in Nevada, where all commodities
ranged at an enormous figure, as it would in the other Territories, where
exceeding cheapness was the rule.  He was an officer who looked out for
the little expenses all the time.  The Secretary of the Territory kept
his office in his bedroom, as I before remarked; and he charged the
United States no rent, although his "instructions" provided for that item
and he could have justly taken advantage of it (a thing which I would
have done with more than lightning promptness if I had been Secretary
myself).  But the United States never applauded this devotion.  Indeed, I
think my country was ashamed to have so improvident a person in its
employ.

Those "instructions" (we used to read a chapter from them every morning,
as intellectual gymnastics, and a couple of chapters in Sunday school
every Sabbath, for they treated of all subjects under the sun and had
much valuable religious matter in them along with the other statistics)
those "instructions" commanded that pen-knives, envelopes, pens and
writing-paper be furnished the members of the legislature.  So the
Secretary made the purchase and the distribution.  The knives cost three
dollars apiece.  There was one too many, and the Secretary gave it to the
Clerk of the House of Representatives.  The United States said the Clerk
of the House was not a "member" of the legislature, and took that three
dollars out of the Secretary's salary, as usual.

White men charged three or four dollars a "load" for sawing up
stove-wood.  The Secretary was sagacious enough to know that the United
States would never pay any such price as that; so he got an Indian to saw
up a load of office wood at one dollar and a half.  He made out the usual
voucher, but signed no name to it--simply appended a note explaining that
an Indian had done the work, and had done it in a very capable and
satisfactory way, but could not sign the voucher owing to lack of ability
in the necessary direction.  The Secretary had to pay that dollar and a
half.  He thought the United States would admire both his economy and his
honesty in getting the work done at half price and not putting a
pretended Indian's signature to the voucher, but the United States did
not see it in that light.

The United States was too much accustomed to employing dollar-and-a-half
thieves in all manner of official capacities to regard his explanation of
the voucher as having any foundation in fact.

But the next time the Indian sawed wood for us I taught him to make a
cross at the bottom of the voucher--it looked like a cross that had been
drunk a year--and then I "witnessed" it and it went through all right.
The United States never said a word.  I was sorry I had not made the
voucher for a thousand loads of wood instead of one.

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic
villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable
pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.

That was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first Nevada legislature.
They levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars and
ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million.  Yet they had
their little periodical explosions of economy like all other bodies of
the kind.  A member proposed to save three dollars a day to the nation by
dispensing with the Chaplain.  And yet that short-sighted man needed the
Chaplain more than any other member, perhaps, for he generally sat with
his feet on his desk, eating raw turnips, during the morning prayer.

The legislature sat sixty days, and passed private tollroad franchises
all the time.  When they adjourned it was estimated that every citizen
owned about three franchises, and it was believed that unless Congress
gave the Territory another degree of longitude there would not be room
enough to accommodate the toll-roads.  The ends of them were hanging over
the boundary line everywhere like a fringe.

The fact is, the freighting business had grown to such important
proportions that there was nearly as much excitement over suddenly
acquired toll-road fortunes as over the wonderful silver mines.



CHAPTER XXVI.

By and by I was smitten with the silver fever.  "Prospecting parties"
were leaving for the mountains every day, and discovering and taking
possession of rich silver-bearing lodes and ledges of quartz.  Plainly
this was the road to fortune.  The great "Gould and Curry" mine was held
at three or four hundred dollars a foot when we arrived; but in two
months it had sprung up to eight hundred.  The "Ophir" had been worth
only a mere trifle, a year gone by, and now it was selling at nearly four
thousand dollars a foot!  Not a mine could be named that had not
experienced an astonishing advance in value within a short time.
Everybody was talking about these marvels.  Go where you would, you heard
nothing else, from morning till far into the night.  Tom So-and-So had
sold out of the "Amanda Smith" for $40,000--hadn't a cent when he "took
up" the ledge six months ago.  John Jones had sold half his interest in
the "Bald Eagle and Mary Ann" for $65,000, gold coin, and gone to the
States for his family.  The widow Brewster had "struck it rich" in the
"Golden Fleece" and sold ten feet for $18,000--hadn't money enough to buy
a crape bonnet when Sing-Sing Tommy killed her husband at Baldy Johnson's
wake last spring.  The "Last Chance" had found a "clay casing" and knew
they were "right on the ledge"--consequence, "feet" that went begging
yesterday were worth a brick house apiece to-day, and seedy owners who
could not get trusted for a drink at any bar in the country yesterday
were roaring drunk on champagne to-day and had hosts of warm personal
friends in a town where they had forgotten how to bow or shake hands from
long-continued want of practice.  Johnny Morgan, a common loafer, had
gone to sleep in the gutter and waked up worth a hundred thousand
dollars, in consequence of the decision in the "Lady Franklin and Rough
and Ready" lawsuit.  And so on--day in and day out the talk pelted our
ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us.

I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the
rest.  Cart-loads of solid silver bricks, as large as pigs of lead, were
arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that gave substance
to the wild talk about me.  I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the
craziest.

Every few days news would come of the discovery of a bran-new mining
region; immediately the papers would teem with accounts of its richness,
and away the surplus population would scamper to take possession.  By the
time I was fairly inoculated with the disease, "Esmeralda" had just had a
run and "Humboldt" was beginning to shriek for attention.  "Humboldt!
Humboldt!" was the new cry, and straightway Humboldt, the newest of the
new, the richest of the rich, the most marvellous of the marvellous
discoveries in silver-land was occupying two columns of the public prints
to "Esmeralda's" one.  I was just on the point of starting to Esmeralda,
but turned with the tide and got ready for Humboldt.  That the reader may
see what moved me, and what would as surely have moved him had he been
there, I insert here one of the newspaper letters of the day.  It and
several other letters from the same calm hand were the main means of
converting me.  I shall not garble the extract, but put it in just as it
appeared in the Daily Territorial Enterprise:

      But what about our mines?  I shall be candid with you.  I shall
      express an honest opinion, based upon a thorough examination.
      Humboldt county is the richest mineral region upon God's footstool.
      Each mountain range is gorged with the precious ores.  Humboldt is
      the true Golconda.

      The other day an assay of mere croppings yielded exceeding four
      thousand dollars to the ton.  A week or two ago an assay of just
      such surface developments made returns of seven thousand dollars to
      the ton.  Our mountains are full of rambling prospectors.  Each day
      and almost every hour reveals new and more startling evidences of
      the profuse and intensified wealth of our favored county.  The metal
      is not silver alone.  There are distinct ledges of auriferous ore.
      A late discovery plainly evinces cinnabar.  The coarser metals are
      in gross abundance.  Lately evidences of bituminous coal have been
      detected.  My theory has ever been that coal is a ligneous
      formation.  I told Col.  Whitman, in times past, that the
      neighborhood of Dayton (Nevada) betrayed no present or previous
      manifestations of a ligneous foundation, and that hence I had no
      confidence in his lauded coal mines.  I repeated the same doctrine
      to the exultant coal discoverers of Humboldt.  I talked with my
      friend Captain Burch on the subject.  My pyrhanism vanished upon his
      statement that in the very region referred to he had seen petrified
      trees of the length of two hundred feet.  Then is the fact
      established that huge forests once cast their grim shadows over this
      remote section.  I am firm in the coal faith.

      Have no fears of the mineral resources of Humboldt county.  They are
      immense--incalculable.

Let me state one or two things which will help the reader to better
comprehend certain items in the above.  At this time, our near neighbor,
Gold Hill, was the most successful silver mining locality in Nevada.  It
was from there that more than half the daily shipments of silver bricks
came.  "Very rich" (and scarce) Gold Hill ore yielded from $100 to $400
to the ton; but the usual yield was only $20 to $40 per ton--that is to
say, each hundred pounds of ore yielded from one dollar to two dollars.
But the reader will perceive by the above extract, that in Humboldt from
one fourth to nearly half the mass was silver!  That is to say, every one
hundred pounds of the ore had from two hundred dollars up to about three
hundred and fifty in it.  Some days later this same correspondent wrote:

      I have spoken of the vast and almost fabulous wealth of this
      region--it is incredible.  The intestines of our mountains are
      gorged with precious ore to plethora.  I have said that nature
      has so shaped our mountains as to furnish most excellent
      facilities for the working of our mines.  I have also told you
      that the country about here is pregnant with the finest mill
      sites in the world.  But what is the mining history of Humboldt?
      The Sheba mine is in the hands of energetic San Francisco
      capitalists.  It would seem that the ore is combined with metals
      that render it difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain
      machinery.  The proprietors have combined the capital and labor
      hinted at in my exordium.  They are toiling and probing.  Their
      tunnel has reached the length of one hundred feet.  From primal
      assays alone, coupled with the development of the mine and public
      confidence in the continuance of effort, the stock had reared
      itself to eight hundred dollars market value.  I do not know that
      one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal.  I do
      know that there are many lodes in this section that surpass the
      Sheba in primal assay value.  Listen a moment to the calculations
      of the Sheba operators.  They purpose transporting the ore
      concentrated to Europe.  The conveyance from Star City (its
      locality) to Virginia City will cost seventy dollars per ton;
      from Virginia to San Francisco, forty dollars per ton; from
      thence to Liverpool, its destination, ten dollars per ton.  Their
      idea is that its conglomerate metals will reimburse them their
      cost of original extraction, the price of transportation, and the
      expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net
      them twelve hundred dollars.  The estimate may be extravagant.
      Cut it in twain, and the product is enormous, far transcending
      any previous developments of our racy Territory.

      A very common calculation is that many of our mines will yield
      five hundred dollars to the ton.  Such fecundity throws the Gould
      & Curry, the Ophir and the Mexican, of your neighborhood, in the
      darkest shadow.  I have given you the estimate of the value of a
      single developed mine.  Its richness is indexed by its market
      valuation.  The people of Humboldt county are feet crazy.  As I
      write, our towns are near deserted.  They look as languid as a
      consumptive girl.  What has become of our sinewy and athletic
      fellow-citizens?  They are coursing through ravines and over
      mountain tops.  Their tracks are visible in every direction.
      Occasionally a horseman will dash among us.  His steed betrays
      hard usage.  He alights before his adobe dwelling, hastily
      exchanges courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay
      office and from thence to the District Recorder's.  In the
      morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he is off again
      on his wild and unbeaten route.  Why, the fellow numbers already
      his feet by the thousands.  He is the horse-leech.  He has the
      craving stomach of the shark or anaconda.  He would conquer
      metallic worlds.

This was enough.  The instant we had finished reading the above article,
four of us decided to go to Humboldt.  We commenced getting ready at
once.  And we also commenced upbraiding ourselves for not deciding
sooner--for we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and
secured before we got there, and we might have to put up with ledges that
would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton, maybe.  An
hour before, I would have felt opulent if I had owned ten feet in a Gold
Hill mine whose ore produced twenty-five dollars to the ton; now I was
already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with mines the
poorest of which would be a marvel in Gold Hill.



CHAPTER XXVII.

Hurry, was the word!  We wasted no time.  Our party consisted of four
persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself.
We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses.  We put eighteen hundred
pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of
Carson on a chilly December afternoon.  The horses were so weak and old
that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got out
and walked.  It was an improvement.  Next, we found that it would be
better if a third man got out.  That was an improvement also.  It was at
this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a
harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt
fairly excused from such a responsibility.  But in a little while it was
found that it would be a fine thing if the drive got out and walked also.
It was at this time that I resigned the position of driver, and never
resumed it again.  Within the hour, we found that it would not only be
better, but was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at
a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it
through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of
the way and hold up the tongue.  Perhaps it is well for one to know his
fate at first, and get reconciled to it.  We had learned ours in one
afternoon.  It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove
that wagon and those horses two hundred miles.  So we accepted the
situation, and from that time forth we never rode.  More than that, we
stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind.

We made seven miles, and camped in the desert.  Young Clagett (now member
of Congress from Montana) unharnessed and fed and watered the horses;
Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to cook
with; and old Mr. Ballou the blacksmith did the cooking.  This division
of labor, and this appointment, was adhered to throughout the journey.
We had no tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain.  We
were so tired that we slept soundly.

We were fifteen days making the trip--two hundred miles; thirteen,
rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place, to let the horses
rest.

We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed
the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it was
too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we
might have saved half the labor.  Parties who met us, occasionally,
advised us to put the horses in the wagon, but Mr. Ballou, through whose
iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not
do, because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses
being "bituminous from long deprivation."  The reader will excuse me from
translating.  What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used a long
word, was a secret between himself and his Maker.  He was one of the best
and kindest hearted men that ever graced a humble sphere of life.  He was
gentleness and simplicity itself--and unselfishness, too.  Although he
was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any
airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account.  He did a young man's
share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from
the general stand-point of any age--not from the arrogant, overawing
summit-height of sixty years.  His one striking peculiarity was his
Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes,
and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was
purposing to convey.  He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an
easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness.
In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always
catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something,
when they really meant nothing in the world.  If a word was long and
grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he
would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or
a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous
with meaning.

We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen
ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our foolish, long-legged
hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Oliphant got to admitting him
to the bed, between himself and Mr. Ballou, hugging the dog's warm back
to his breast and finding great comfort in it.  But in the night the pup
would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man's back and
shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and
snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in
excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the chase and
in his sleep tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his ear.  The old
gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when
he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not
a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so
meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions."  We turned
the dog out.

It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for
after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper
of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking,
song-singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still
solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that
seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury.

It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or
country-bred.  We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless
ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us
the nomadic instinct.  We all confess to a gratified thrill at the
thought of "camping out."

Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles
(through the Great American Desert), and ten miles beyond--fifty in all
--in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or rest.  To stretch
out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after pushing a
wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the
moment it almost seems cheap at the price.

We camped two days in the neighborhood of the "Sink of the Humboldt."
We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not
answer.  It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either.  It left a
taste in the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the
stomach that was very uncomfortable.  We put molasses in it, but that
helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the
prominent taste and so it was unfit for drinking.

The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet
invented.  It was really viler to the taste than the unameliorated water
itself.  Mr. Ballou, being the architect and builder of the beverage felt
constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little
sips, making shift to praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out
the remainder, and said frankly it was "too technical for him."

But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient, and then,
with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to interrupt it, we
entered into our rest.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt river a little
way.  People accustomed to the monster mile-wide Mississippi, grow
accustomed to associating the term "river" with a high degree of watery
grandeur.  Consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they
stand on the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that a "river"
in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the Erie
canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times
as deep.  One of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can
contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is
overheated, and then drink it dry.

On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and
entered Unionville, Humboldt county, in the midst of a driving
snow-storm.  Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole.
Six of the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the
other five faced them.  The rest of the landscape was made up of bleak
mountain walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the
canyon that the village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a
crevice. It was always daylight on the mountain tops a long time before
the darkness lifted and revealed Unionville.

We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it
with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which
the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture
and interrupt our sleep.  It was very cold weather and fuel was scarce.
Indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs; and when
we could catch a laden Indian it was well--and when we could not (which
was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it.

I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying
all about the ground.  I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the
mountain summits.  I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me
that I might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I
betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon myself.  Yet I was as
perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything, that I was
going to gather up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two, silver
enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy--and so my fancy was already
busy with plans for spending this money.  The first opportunity that
offered, I sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on
the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they seemed
to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, I fled
away as guiltily as a thief might have done and never halted till I was
far beyond sight and call.  Then I began my search with a feverish
excitement that was brimful of expectation--almost of certainty.
I crawled about the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone, blowing
the dust from them or rubbing them on my clothes, and then peering at
them with anxious hope.  Presently I found a bright fragment and my heart
bounded!  I hid behind a boulder and polished it and scrutinized it with
a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more pronounced than absolute
certainty itself could have afforded.  The more I examined the fragment
the more I was convinced that I had found the door to fortune.  I marked
the spot and carried away my specimen.  Up and down the rugged mountain
side I searched, with always increasing interest and always augmenting
gratitude that I had come to Humboldt and come in time.  Of all the
experiences of my life, this secret search among the hidden treasures of
silver-land was the nearest to unmarred ecstasy.  It was a delirious
revel.

By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining
yellow scales, and my breath almost forsook me!  A gold mine, and in my
simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver!  I was so excited that
I half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me.  Then a fear
came upon me that people might be observing me and would guess my secret.
Moved by this thought, I made a circuit of the place, and ascended a
knoll to reconnoiter.  Solitude.  No creature was near.  Then I returned
to my mine, fortifying myself against possible disappointment, but my
fears were groundless--the shining scales were still there.  I set about
scooping them out, and for an hour I toiled down the windings of the
stream and robbed its bed.  But at last the descending sun warned me to
give up the quest, and I turned homeward laden with wealth.  As I walked
along I could not help smiling at the thought of my being so excited over
my fragment of silver when a nobler metal was almost under my nose.  In
this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation that once or
twice I was on the point of throwing it away.

The boys were as hungry as usual, but I could eat nothing.  Neither could
I talk.  I was full of dreams and far away.  Their conversation
interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat, and annoyed me a little, too.
I despised the sordid and commonplace things they talked about.  But as
they proceeded, it began to amuse me.  It grew to be rare fun to hear
them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible
privations and distresses when a gold mine, all our own, lay within sight
of the cabin and I could point it out at any moment.  Smothered hilarity
began to oppress me, presently.  It was hard to resist the impulse to
burst out with exultation and reveal everything; but I did resist.  I
said within myself that I would filter the great news through my lips
calmly and be serene as a summer morning while I watched its effect in
their faces.  I said:

"Where have you all been?"

"Prospecting."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?  What do you think of the country?"

"Can't tell, yet," said Mr. Ballou, who was an old gold miner, and had
likewise had considerable experience among the silver mines.

"Well, haven't you formed any sort of opinion?"

"Yes, a sort of a one.  It's fair enough here, may be, but overrated.
Seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce, though.

"That Sheba may be rich enough, but we don't own it; and besides, the rock
is so full of base metals that all the science in the world can't work
it.  We'll not starve, here, but we'll not get rich, I'm afraid."

"So you think the prospect is pretty poor?"

"No name for it!"

"Well, we'd better go back, hadn't we?"

"Oh, not yet--of course not.  We'll try it a riffle, first."

"Suppose, now--this is merely a supposition, you know--suppose you could
find a ledge that would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a ton
--would that satisfy you?"

"Try us once!" from the whole party.

"Or suppose--merely a supposition, of course--suppose you were to find a
ledge that would yield two thousand dollars a ton--would that satisfy
you?"

"Here--what do you mean?  What are you coming at?  Is there some mystery
behind all this?"

"Never mind.  I am not saying anything.  You know perfectly well there
are no rich mines here--of course you do.  Because you have been around
and examined for yourselves.  Anybody would know that, that had been
around.  But just for the sake of argument, suppose--in a kind of general
way--suppose some person were to tell you that two-thousand-dollar ledges
were simply contemptible--contemptible, understand--and that right yonder
in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure
silver--oceans of it--enough to make you all rich in twenty-four hours!
Come!"

"I should say he was as crazy as a loon!" said old Ballou, but wild with
excitement, nevertheless.

"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything--I haven't been around, you
know, and of course don't know anything--but all I ask of you is to cast
your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I
tossed my treasure before them.

There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over
it under the candle-light.  Then old Ballou said:

"Think of it?  I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and
nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!"

So vanished my dream.  So melted my wealth away.  So toppled my airy
castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.

Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."

Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my
treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold.  So I learned
then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull,
unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration
of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter.  However, like the rest of
the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of
mica.  Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.



CHAPTER XXIX.

True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough.  We went
out "prospecting" with Mr. Ballou.  We climbed the mountain sides, and
clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop
with exhaustion, but found no silver--nor yet any gold.  Day after day we
did this.  Now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the
declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we found one or
two listless men still burrowing.  But there was no appearance of silver.
These holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive
them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day tap the hidden
ledge where the silver was.  Some day!  It seemed far enough away, and
very hopeless and dreary.  Day after day we toiled, and climbed and
searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the
promiseless toil.  At last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock
which projected from the earth high upon the mountain.  Mr. Ballou broke
off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long and attentively
with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this
rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver.
Contained it!  I had thought that at least it would be caked on the
outside of it like a kind of veneering.  He still broke off pieces and
critically examined them, now and then wetting the piece with his tongue
and applying the glass.  At last he exclaimed:

"We've got it!"

We were full of anxiety in a moment.  The rock was clean and white, where
it was broken, and across it ran a ragged thread of blue.  He said that
that little thread had silver in it, mixed with base metal, such as lead
and antimony, and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of
gold visible.  After a great deal of effort we managed to discern some
little fine yellow specks, and judged that a couple of tons of them
massed together might make a gold dollar, possibly.  We were not
jubilant, but Mr. Ballou said there were worse ledges in the world than
that.  He saved what he called the "richest" piece of the rock, in order
to determine its value by the process called the "fire-assay."  Then we
named the mine "Monarch of the Mountains" (modesty of nomenclature is not
a prominent feature in the mines), and Mr. Ballou wrote out and stuck up
the following "notice," preserving a copy to be entered upon the books in
the mining recorder's office in the town.

      "NOTICE."

      "We the undersigned claim three claims, of three hundred feet each
      (and one for discovery), on this silver-bearing quartz lead or lode,
      extending north and south from this notice, with all its dips,
      spurs, and angles, variations and sinuosities, together with fifty
      feet of ground on either side for working the same."

We put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made.
But when we talked the matter all over with Mr. Ballou, we felt depressed
and dubious.  He said that this surface quartz was not all there was of
our mine; but that the wall or ledge of rock called the "Monarch of the
Mountains," extended down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the earth
--he illustrated by saying it was like a curb-stone, and maintained a
nearly uniform thickness-say twenty feet--away down into the bowels of
the earth, and was perfectly distinct from the casing rock on each side
of it; and that it kept to itself, and maintained its distinctive
character always, no matter how deep it extended into the earth or how
far it stretched itself through and across the hills and valleys.  He
said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long, for all we knew; and
that wherever we bored into it above ground or below, we would find gold
and silver in it, but no gold or silver in the meaner rock it was cased
between.  And he said that down in the great depths of the ledge was its
richness, and the deeper it went the richer it grew.  Therefore, instead
of working here on the surface, we must either bore down into the rock
with a shaft till we came to where it was rich--say a hundred feet or so
--or else we must go down into the valley and bore a long tunnel into the
mountain side and tap the ledge far under the earth.  To do either was
plainly the labor of months; for we could blast and bore only a few feet
a day--some five or six.  But this was not all.  He said that after we
got the ore out it must be hauled in wagons to a distant silver-mill,
ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious and costly process.  Our
fortune seemed a century away!

But we went to work.  We decided to sink a shaft.  So, for a week we
climbed the mountain, laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels,
cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and main.
At first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks and
threw it out with shovels, and the hole progressed very well.  But the
rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into
play.  But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder.

That was the weariest work!  One of us held the iron drill in its place
and another would strike with an eight-pound sledge--it was like driving
nails on a large scale.  In the course of an hour or two the drill would
reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in
diameter.  We would put in a charge of powder, insert half a yard of
fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and
run.  When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air,
we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz
jolted out.  Nothing more.  One week of this satisfied me.  I resigned.
Clagget and Oliphant followed.  Our shaft was only twelve feet deep.  We
decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted.

So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which
time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and
judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge.
I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer.
We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted.  We wanted a ledge that
was already "developed."  There were none in the camp.

We dropped the "Monarch" for the time being.

Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly
growing excitement about our Humboldt mines.  We fell victims to the
epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more "feet."  We prospected
and took up new claims, put "notices" on them and gave them grandiloquent
names.  We traded some of our "feet" for "feet" in other people's claims.
In a little while we owned largely in the "Gray Eagle," the "Columbiana,"
the "Branch Mint," the "Maria Jane," the "Universe," the
"Root-Hog-or-Die," the "Samson and Delilah," the "Treasure Trove," the
"Golconda," the "Sultana," the "Boomerang," the "Great Republic," the
"Grand Mogul," and fifty other "mines" that had never been molested by a
shovel or scratched with a pick.  We had not less than thirty thousand
"feet" apiece in the "richest mines on earth" as the frenzied cant
phrased it--and were in debt to the butcher.  We were stark mad with
excitement--drunk with happiness--smothered under mountains of
prospective wealth--arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions
who knew not our marvellous canyon--but our credit was not good at the
grocer's.

It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine.  It was a beggars'
revel.  There was nothing doing in the district--no mining--no milling
--no productive effort--no income--and not enough money in the entire camp
to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger
would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires.
Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and
swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil--rocks.  Nothing but
rocks.  Every man's pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was
littered with them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves.



CHAPTER XXX.

I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand
"feet" in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they
believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars--and as
often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in
the world.  Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his
"specimens" ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly
back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part
with just a few feet in the "Golden Age," or the "Sarah Jane," or some
other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a "square meal"
with, as the phrase went.  And you were never to reveal that he had made
you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship
for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice.  Then he would fish a
piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as
if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in
his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an
eyeglass to it, and exclaim:

"Look at that!  Right there in that red dirt!  See it?  See the specks of
gold?  And the streak of silver?  That's from the Uncle Abe.  There's a
hundred thousand tons like that in sight!  Right in sight, mind you!
And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the
richest thing in the world!  Look at the assay!  I don't want you to
believe me--look at the assay!"

Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the
portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold
in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton.


I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of
rock and get it assayed!  Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert,
was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it--and
yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton
of rubbish it came from!

On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy.
On the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondents were
frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton!

And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a
quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the
way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents
received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and
other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses
incurred?  Everybody's head was full of such "calculations" as those
--such raving insanity, rather.  Few people took work into their
calculations--or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures
of other people.

We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again.  Why?  Because we judged
that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining--which
was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the
labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and
let them do the mining!

Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased "feet" from
various Esmeralda stragglers.  We had expected immediate returns of
bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant "assessments"
instead--demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines.  These
assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into
the matter personally.  Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to Carson and
thence to Esmeralda.  I bought a horse and started, in company with
Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff, a Prussian--not the party
who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched
foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which
never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation
among human beings.  We rode through a snow-storm for two or three days,
and arrived at "Honey Lake Smith's," a sort of isolated inn on the Carson
river.  It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the
midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds
its melancholy way.  Close to the house were the Overland stage stables,
built of sun-dried bricks.  There was not another building within several
leagues of the place.  Towards sunset about twenty hay-wagons arrived and
camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper--a very,
very rough set.  There were one or two Overland stage drivers there,
also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers; consequently the house
was well crowded.

We walked out, after supper, and visited a small Indian camp in the
vicinity.  The Indians were in a great hurry about something, and were
packing up and getting away as fast as they could.  In their broken
English they said, "By'm-by, heap water!" and by the help of signs made
us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming.  The weather was
perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season.  There was about a
foot of water in the insignificant river--or maybe two feet; the stream
was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely
higher than a man's head.

So, where was the flood to come from?  We canvassed the subject awhile
and then concluded it was a ruse, and that the Indians had some better
reason for leaving in a hurry than fears of a flood in such an
exceedingly dry time.

At seven in the evening we went to bed in the second story--with our
clothes on, as usual, and all three in the same bed, for every available
space on the floors, chairs, etc., was in request, and even then there
was barely room for the housing of the inn's guests.  An hour later we
were awakened by a great turmoil, and springing out of bed we picked our
way nimbly among the ranks of snoring teamsters on the floor and got to
the front windows of the long room.  A glance revealed a strange
spectacle, under the moonlight.  The crooked Carson was full to the brim,
and its waters were raging and foaming in the wildest way--sweeping
around the sharp bends at a furious speed, and bearing on their surface a
chaos of logs, brush and all sorts of rubbish.  A depression, where its
bed had once been, in other times, was already filling, and in one or two
places the water was beginning to wash over the main bank.  Men were
flying hither and thither, bringing cattle and wagons close up to the
house, for the spot of high ground on which it stood extended only some
thirty feet in front and about a hundred in the rear.  Close to the old
river bed just spoken of, stood a little log stable, and in this our
horses were lodged.

While we looked, the waters increased so fast in this place that in a few
minutes a torrent was roaring by the little stable and its margin
encroaching steadily on the logs.  We suddenly realized that this flood
was not a mere holiday spectacle, but meant damage--and not only to the
small log stable but to the Overland buildings close to the main river,
for the waves had now come ashore and were creeping about the foundations
and invading the great hay-corral adjoining.  We ran down and joined the
crowd of excited men and frightened animals.  We waded knee-deep into the
log stable, unfastened the horses and waded out almost waist-deep, so
fast the waters increased.  Then the crowd rushed in a body to the
hay-corral and began to tumble down the huge stacks of baled hay and roll
the bales up on the high ground by the house.  Meantime it was discovered
that Owens, an overland driver, was missing, and a man ran to the large
stable, and wading in, boot-top deep, discovered him asleep in his bed,
awoke him, and waded out again.  But Owens was drowsy and resumed his
nap; but only for a minute or two, for presently he turned in his bed,
his hand dropped over the side and came in contact with the cold water!
It was up level with the mattress!  He waded out, breast-deep, almost,
and the next moment the sun-burned bricks melted down like sugar and the
big building crumbled to a ruin and was washed away in a twinkling.

At eleven o'clock only the roof of the little log stable was out of
water, and our inn was on an island in mid-ocean.  As far as the eye
could reach, in the moonlight, there was no desert visible, but only a
level waste of shining water.  The Indians were true prophets, but how
did they get their information?  I am not able to answer the question.
We remained cooped up eight days and nights with that curious crew.
Swearing, drinking and card playing were the order of the day, and
occasionally a fight was thrown in for variety.  Dirt and vermin--but let
us forget those features; their profusion is simply inconceivable--it is
better that they remain so.

There were two men----however, this chapter is long enough.



CHAPTER XXXI.

There were two men in the company who caused me particular discomfort.
One was a little Swede, about twenty-five years old, who knew only one
song, and he was forever singing it.  By day we were all crowded into one
small, stifling bar-room, and so there was no escaping this person's
music.  Through all the profanity, whisky-guzzling, "old sledge" and
quarreling, his monotonous song meandered with never a variation in its
tiresome sameness, and it seemed to me, at last, that I would be content
to die, in order to be rid of the torture.  The other man was a stalwart
ruffian called "Arkansas," who carried two revolvers in his belt and a
bowie knife projecting from his boot, and who was always drunk and always
suffering for a fight.  But he was so feared, that nobody would
accommodate him.  He would try all manner of little wary ruses to entrap
somebody into an offensive remark, and his face would light up now and
then when he fancied he was fairly on the scent of a fight, but
invariably his victim would elude his toils and then he would show a
disappointment that was almost pathetic.  The landlord, Johnson, was a
meek, well-meaning fellow, and Arkansas fastened on him early, as a
promising subject, and gave him no rest day or night, for awhile.  On the
fourth morning, Arkansas got drunk and sat himself down to wait for an
opportunity.  Presently Johnson came in, just comfortably sociable with
whisky, and said:

"I reckon the Pennsylvania 'lection--"

Arkansas raised his finger impressively and Johnson stopped.  Arkansas
rose unsteadily and confronted him.  Said he:

"Wha-what do you know a--about Pennsylvania?  Answer me that.  Wha--what
do you know 'bout Pennsylvania?"

"I was only goin' to say--"

"You was only goin' to say.  You was!  You was only goin' to say--what
was you goin' to say?  That's it!  That's what I want to know.  I want to
know wha--what you ('ic) what you know about Pennsylvania, since you're
makin' yourself so d---d free.  Answer me that!"

"Mr. Arkansas, if you'd only let me--"

"Who's a henderin' you?  Don't you insinuate nothing agin me!--don't you
do it.  Don't you come in here bullyin' around, and cussin' and goin' on
like a lunatic--don't you do it.  'Coz I won't stand it.  If fight's what
you want, out with it!  I'm your man!  Out with it!"

Said Johnson, backing into a corner, Arkansas following, menacingly:

"Why, I never said nothing, Mr. Arkansas.  You don't give a man no
chance.  I was only goin' to say that Pennsylvania was goin' to have an
election next week--that was all--that was everything I was goin' to say
--I wish I may never stir if it wasn't."

"Well then why d'n't you say it?  What did you come swellin' around that
way for, and tryin' to raise trouble?"

"Why I didn't come swellin' around, Mr. Arkansas--I just--"

"I'm a liar am I!  Ger-reat Caesar's ghost--"

"Oh, please, Mr. Arkansas, I never meant such a thing as that, I wish I
may die if I did.  All the boys will tell you that I've always spoke well
of you, and respected you more'n any man in the house.  Ask Smith.  Ain't
it so, Smith?  Didn't I say, no longer ago than last night, that for a
man that was a gentleman all the time and every way you took him, give me
Arkansas?  I'll leave it to any gentleman here if them warn't the very
words I used.  Come, now, Mr. Arkansas, le's take a drink--le's shake
hands and take a drink.  Come up--everybody!  It's my treat.  Come up,
Bill, Tom, Bob, Scotty--come up.  I want you all to take a drink with me
and Arkansas--old Arkansas, I call him--bully old Arkansas.  Gimme your
hand agin.  Look at him, boys--just take a look at him.  Thar stands the
whitest man in America!--and the man that denies it has got to fight me,
that's all.  Gimme that old flipper agin!"

They embraced, with drunken affection on the landlord's part and
unresponsive toleration on the part of Arkansas, who, bribed by a drink,
was disappointed of his prey once more.  But the foolish landlord was so
happy to have escaped butchery, that he went on talking when he ought to
have marched himself out of danger.  The consequence was that Arkansas
shortly began to glower upon him dangerously, and presently said:

"Lan'lord, will you p-please make that remark over agin if you please?"

"I was a-sayin' to Scotty that my father was up'ards of eighty year old
when he died."

"Was that all that you said?"

"Yes, that was all."

"Didn't say nothing but that?"

"No--nothing."

Then an uncomfortable silence.

Arkansas played with his glass a moment, lolling on his elbows on the
counter.  Then he meditatively scratched his left shin with his right
boot, while the awkward silence continued.  But presently he loafed away
toward the stove, looking dissatisfied; roughly shouldered two or three
men out of a comfortable position; occupied it himself, gave a sleeping
dog a kick that sent him howling under a bench, then spread his long legs
and his blanket-coat tails apart and proceeded to warm his back.  In a
little while he fell to grumbling to himself, and soon he slouched back
to the bar and said:

"Lan'lord, what's your idea for rakin' up old personalities and blowin'
about your father?  Ain't this company agreeable to you?  Ain't it?  If
this company ain't agreeable to you, p'r'aps we'd better leave.  Is that
your idea?  Is that what you're coming at?"

"Why bless your soul, Arkansas, I warn't thinking of such a thing.  My
father and my mother--"

"Lan'lord, don't crowd a man!  Don't do it.  If nothing'll do you but a
disturbance, out with it like a man ('ic)--but don't rake up old bygones
and fling'em in the teeth of a passel of people that wants to be
peaceable if they could git a chance.  What's the matter with you this
mornin', anyway?  I never see a man carry on so."

"Arkansas, I reely didn't mean no harm, and I won't go on with it if it's
onpleasant to you.  I reckon my licker's got into my head, and what with
the flood, and havin' so many to feed and look out for--"

"So that's what's a-ranklin' in your heart, is it?  You want us to leave
do you?  There's too many on us.  You want us to pack up and swim.  Is
that it?  Come!"

"Please be reasonable, Arkansas.  Now you know that I ain't the man to--"

"Are you a threatenin' me?  Are you?  By George, the man don't live that
can skeer me!  Don't you try to come that game, my chicken--'cuz I can
stand a good deal, but I won't stand that.  Come out from behind that bar
till I clean you!  You want to drive us out, do you, you sneakin'
underhanded hound!  Come out from behind that bar!  I'll learn you to
bully and badger and browbeat a gentleman that's forever trying to
befriend you and keep you out of trouble!"

"Please, Arkansas, please don't shoot!  If there's got to be bloodshed--"

"Do you hear that, gentlemen?  Do you hear him talk about bloodshed?  So
it's blood you want, is it, you ravin' desperado!  You'd made up your
mind to murder somebody this mornin'--I knowed it perfectly well.  I'm
the man, am I?  It's me you're goin' to murder, is it?  But you can't do
it 'thout I get one chance first, you thievin' black-hearted,
white-livered son of a nigger!  Draw your weepon!"

With that, Arkansas began to shoot, and the landlord to clamber over
benches, men and every sort of obstacle in a frantic desire to escape.
In the midst of the wild hubbub the landlord crashed through a glass
door, and as Arkansas charged after him the landlord's wife suddenly
appeared in the doorway and confronted the desperado with a pair of
scissors!  Her fury was magnificent.  With head erect and flashing eye
she stood a moment and then advanced, with her weapon raised.  The
astonished ruffian hesitated, and then fell back a step.  She followed.
She backed him step by step into the middle of the bar-room, and then,
while the wondering crowd closed up and gazed, she gave him such another
tongue-lashing as never a cowed and shamefaced braggart got before,
perhaps!  As she finished and retired victorious, a roar of applause
shook the house, and every man ordered "drinks for the crowd" in one and
the same breath.

The lesson was entirely sufficient.  The reign of terror was over, and
the Arkansas domination broken for good.  During the rest of the season
of island captivity, there was one man who sat apart in a state of
permanent humiliation, never mixing in any quarrel or uttering a boast,
and never resenting the insults the once cringing crew now constantly
leveled at him, and that man was "Arkansas."

By the fifth or sixth morning the waters had subsided from the land, but
the stream in the old river bed was still high and swift and there was no
possibility of crossing it.  On the eighth it was still too high for an
entirely safe passage, but life in the inn had become next to
insupportable by reason of the dirt, drunkenness, fighting, etc., and so
we made an effort to get away.  In the midst of a heavy snow-storm we
embarked in a canoe, taking our saddles aboard and towing our horses
after us by their halters.  The Prussian, Ollendorff, was in the bow,
with a paddle, Ballou paddled in the middle, and I sat in the stern
holding the halters.  When the horses lost their footing and began to
swim, Ollendorff got frightened, for there was great danger that the
horses would make our aim uncertain, and it was plain that if we failed
to land at a certain spot the current would throw us off and almost
surely cast us into the main Carson, which was a boiling torrent, now.
Such a catastrophe would be death, in all probability, for we would be
swept to sea in the "Sink" or overturned and drowned.  We warned
Ollendorff to keep his wits about him and handle himself carefully, but
it was useless; the moment the bow touched the bank, he made a spring and
the canoe whirled upside down in ten-foot water.

Ollendorff seized some brush and dragged himself ashore, but Ballou and I
had to swim for it, encumbered with our overcoats.  But we held on to the
canoe, and although we were washed down nearly to the Carson, we managed
to push the boat ashore and make a safe landing.  We were cold and
water-soaked, but safe.  The horses made a landing, too, but our saddles
were gone, of course.  We tied the animals in the sage-brush and there
they had to stay for twenty-four hours.  We baled out the canoe and
ferried over some food and blankets for them, but we slept one more night
in the inn before making another venture on our journey.

The next morning it was still snowing furiously when we got away with our
new stock of saddles and accoutrements.  We mounted and started.  The
snow lay so deep on the ground that there was no sign of a road
perceptible, and the snow-fall was so thick that we could not see more
than a hundred yards ahead, else we could have guided our course by the
mountain ranges.  The case looked dubious, but Ollendorff said his
instinct was as sensitive as any compass, and that he could "strike a
bee-line" for Carson city and never diverge from it.  He said that if he
were to straggle a single point out of the true line his instinct would
assail him like an outraged conscience.  Consequently we dropped into his
wake happy and content.  For half an hour we poked along warily enough,
but at the end of that time we came upon a fresh trail, and Ollendorff
shouted proudly:

"I knew I was as dead certain as a compass, boys!  Here we are, right in
somebody's tracks that will hunt the way for us without any trouble.
Let's hurry up and join company with the party."

So we put the horses into as much of a trot as the deep snow would allow,
and before long it was evident that we were gaining on our predecessors,
for the tracks grew more distinct.  We hurried along, and at the end of
an hour the tracks looked still newer and fresher--but what surprised us
was, that the number of travelers in advance of us seemed to steadily
increase.  We wondered how so large a party came to be traveling at such
a time and in such a solitude.  Somebody suggested that it must be a
company of soldiers from the fort, and so we accepted that solution and
jogged along a little faster still, for they could not be far off now.
But the tracks still multiplied, and we began to think the platoon of
soldiers was miraculously expanding into a regiment--Ballou said they had
already increased to five hundred!  Presently he stopped his horse and
said:

"Boys, these are our own tracks, and we've actually been circussing round
and round in a circle for more than two hours, out here in this blind
desert!  By George this is perfectly hydraulic!"

Then the old man waxed wroth and abusive.  He called Ollendorff all
manner of hard names--said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and
ended with the peculiarly venomous opinion that he "did not know as much
as a logarythm!"

We certainly had been following our own tracks.  Ollendorff and his
"mental compass" were in disgrace from that moment.

After all our hard travel, here we were on the bank of the stream again,
with the inn beyond dimly outlined through the driving snow-fall.  While
we were considering what to do, the young Swede landed from the canoe and
took his pedestrian way Carson-wards, singing his same tiresome song
about his "sister and his brother" and "the child in the grave with its
mother," and in a short minute faded and disappeared in the white
oblivion.  He was never heard of again.  He no doubt got bewildered and
lost, and Fatigue delivered him over to Sleep and Sleep betrayed him to
Death.  Possibly he followed our treacherous tracks till he became
exhausted and dropped.

Presently the Overland stage forded the now fast receding stream and
started toward Carson on its first trip since the flood came.  We
hesitated no longer, now, but took up our march in its wake, and trotted
merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver's bump of
locality.  But our horses were no match for the fresh stage team.  We
were soon left out of sight; but it was no matter, for we had the deep
ruts the wheels made for a guide.  By this time it was three in the
afternoon, and consequently it was not very long before night came--and
not with a lingering twilight, but with a sudden shutting down like a
cellar door, as is its habit in that country.  The snowfall was still as
thick as ever, and of course we could not see fifteen steps before us;
but all about us the white glare of the snow-bed enabled us to discern
the smooth sugar-loaf mounds made by the covered sage-bushes, and just in
front of us the two faint grooves which we knew were the steadily filling
and slowly disappearing wheel-tracks.

Now those sage-bushes were all about the same height--three or four feet;
they stood just about seven feet apart, all over the vast desert; each of
them was a mere snow-mound, now; in any direction that you proceeded (the
same as in a well laid out orchard) you would find yourself moving down a
distinctly defined avenue, with a row of these snow-mounds an either side
of it--an avenue the customary width of a road, nice and level in its
breadth, and rising at the sides in the most natural way, by reason of
the mounds.  But we had not thought of this.  Then imagine the chilly
thrill that shot through us when it finally occurred to us, far in the
night, that since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago
been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sage-brush
avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away
from it all the time.  Having a cake of ice slipped down one's back is
placid comfort compared to it.  There was a sudden leap and stir of blood
that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the
drowsing activities in our minds and bodies.  We were alive and awake at
once--and shaking and quaking with consternation, too.  There was an
instant halting and dismounting, a bending low and an anxious scanning of
the road-bed.  Useless, of course; for if a faint depression could not be
discerned from an altitude of four or five feet above it, it certainly
could not with one's nose nearly against it.



CHAPTER XXXII.

We seemed to be in a road, but that was no proof.  We tested this by
walking off in various directions--the regular snow-mounds and the
regular avenues between them convinced each man that he had found the
true road, and that the others had found only false ones.  Plainly the
situation was desperate.  We were cold and stiff and the horses were
tired.  We decided to build a sage-brush fire and camp out till morning.
This was wise, because if we were wandering from the right road and the
snow-storm continued another day our case would be the next thing to
hopeless if we kept on.

All agreed that a camp fire was what would come nearest to saving us,
now, and so we set about building it.  We could find no matches, and so
we tried to make shift with the pistols.  Not a man in the party had ever
tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that
it could be done, and without any trouble--because every man in the party
had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to believe
it, with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and
believed that other common book-fraud about Indians and lost hunters
making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together.

We huddled together on our knees in the deep snow, and the horses put
their noses together and bowed their patient heads over us; and while the
feathery flakes eddied down and turned us into a group of white statuary,
we proceeded with the momentous experiment.  We broke twigs from a sage
bush and piled them on a little cleared place in the shelter of our
bodies.  In the course of ten or fifteen minutes all was ready, and then,
while conversation ceased and our pulses beat low with anxious suspense,
Ollendorff applied his revolver, pulled the trigger and blew the pile
clear out of the county!  It was the flattest failure that ever was.

This was distressing, but it paled before a greater horror--the horses
were gone!  I had been appointed to hold the bridles, but in my absorbing
anxiety over the pistol experiment I had unconsciously dropped them and
the released animals had walked off in the storm.  It was useless to try
to follow them, for their footfalls could make no sound, and one could
pass within two yards of the creatures and never see them.  We gave them
up without an effort at recovering them, and cursed the lying books that
said horses would stay by their masters for protection and companionship
in a distressful time like ours.

We were miserable enough, before; we felt still more forlorn, now.
Patiently, but with blighted hope, we broke more sticks and piled them,
and once more the Prussian shot them into annihilation.  Plainly, to
light a fire with a pistol was an art requiring practice and experience,
and the middle of a desert at midnight in a snow-storm was not a good
place or time for the acquiring of the accomplishment.  We gave it up and
tried the other.  Each man took a couple of sticks and fell to chafing
them together.  At the end of half an hour we were thoroughly chilled,
and so were the sticks.  We bitterly execrated the Indians, the hunters
and the books that had betrayed us with the silly device, and wondered
dismally what was next to be done.  At this critical moment Mr. Ballou
fished out four matches from the rubbish of an overlooked pocket.  To
have found four gold bars would have seemed poor and cheap good luck
compared to this.

One cannot think how good a match looks under such circumstances--or how
lovable and precious, and sacredly beautiful to the eye.  This time we
gathered sticks with high hopes; and when Mr. Ballou prepared to light
the first match, there was an amount of interest centred upon him that
pages of writing could not describe.  The match burned hopefully a
moment, and then went out.  It could not have carried more regret with it
if it had been a human life.  The next match simply flashed and died.
The wind puffed the third one out just as it was on the imminent verge of
success.  We gathered together closer than ever, and developed a
solicitude that was rapt and painful, as Mr. Ballou scratched our last
hope on his leg.  It lit, burned blue and sickly, and then budded into a
robust flame.  Shading it with his hands, the old gentleman bent
gradually down and every heart went with him--everybody, too, for that
matter--and blood and breath stood still.  The flame touched the sticks
at last, took gradual hold upon them--hesitated--took a stronger hold
--hesitated again--held its breath five heart-breaking seconds, then gave a
sort of human gasp and went out.

Nobody said a word for several minutes.  It was a solemn sort of silence;
even the wind put on a stealthy, sinister quiet, and made no more noise
than the falling flakes of snow.  Finally a sad-voiced conversation
began, and it was soon apparent that in each of our hearts lay the
conviction that this was our last night with the living.  I had so hoped
that I was the only one who felt so.  When the others calmly acknowledged
their conviction, it sounded like the summons itself.  Ollendorff said:

"Brothers, let us die together.  And let us go without one hard feeling
towards each other.  Let us forget and forgive bygones.  I know that you
have felt hard towards me for turning over the canoe, and for knowing too
much and leading you round and round in the snow--but I meant well;
forgive me.  I acknowledge freely that I have had hard feelings against
Mr. Ballou for abusing me and calling me a logarythm, which is a thing I
do not know what, but no doubt a thing considered disgraceful and
unbecoming in America, and it has scarcely been out of my mind and has
hurt me a great deal--but let it go; I forgive Mr. Ballou with all my
heart, and--"

Poor Ollendorff broke down and the tears came.  He was not alone, for I
was crying too, and so was Mr. Ballou.  Ollendorff got his voice again
and forgave me for things I had done and said.  Then he got out his
bottle of whisky and said that whether he lived or died he would never
touch another drop.  He said he had given up all hope of life, and
although ill-prepared, was ready to submit humbly to his fate; that he
wished he could be spared a little longer, not for any selfish reason,
but to make a thorough reform in his character, and by devoting himself
to helping the poor, nursing the sick, and pleading with the people to
guard themselves against the evils of intemperance, make his life a
beneficent example to the young, and lay it down at last with the
precious reflection that it had not been lived in vain.  He ended by
saying that his reform should begin at this moment, even here in the
presence of death, since no longer time was to be vouchsafed wherein to
prosecute it to men's help and benefit--and with that he threw away the
bottle of whisky.

Mr. Ballou made remarks of similar purport, and began the reform he could
not live to continue, by throwing away the ancient pack of cards that had
solaced our captivity during the flood and made it bearable.

He said he never gambled, but still was satisfied that the meddling with
cards in any way was immoral and injurious, and no man could be wholly
pure and blemishless without eschewing them.  "And therefore," continued
he, "in doing this act I already feel more in sympathy with that
spiritual saturnalia necessary to entire and obsolete reform."  These
rolling syllables touched him as no intelligible eloquence could have
done, and the old man sobbed with a mournfulness not unmingled with
satisfaction.

My own remarks were of the same tenor as those of my comrades, and I know
that the feelings that prompted them were heartfelt and sincere.  We were
all sincere, and all deeply moved and earnest, for we were in the
presence of death and without hope.  I threw away my pipe, and in doing
it felt that at last I was free of a hated vice and one that had ridden
me like a tyrant all my days.  While I yet talked, the thought of the
good I might have done in the world and the still greater good I might
now do, with these new incentives and higher and better aims to guide me
if I could only be spared a few years longer, overcame me and the tears
came again.  We put our arms about each other's necks and awaited the
warning drowsiness that precedes death by freezing.

It came stealing over us presently, and then we bade each other a last
farewell.  A delicious dreaminess wrought its web about my yielding
senses, while the snow-flakes wove a winding sheet about my conquered
body.  Oblivion came.  The battle of life was done.



CHAPTER XXXIII.

I do not know how long I was in a state of forgetfulness, but it seemed
an age.  A vague consciousness grew upon me by degrees, and then came a
gathering anguish of pain in my limbs and through all my body.  I
shuddered.  The thought flitted through my brain, "this is death--this is
the hereafter."

Then came a white upheaval at my side, and a voice said, with bitterness:

"Will some gentleman be so good as to kick me behind?"

It was Ballou--at least it was a towzled snow image in a sitting posture,
with Ballou's voice.

I rose up, and there in the gray dawn, not fifteen steps from us, were
the frame buildings of a stage station, and under a shed stood our still
saddled and bridled horses!

An arched snow-drift broke up, now, and Ollendorff emerged from it, and
the three of us sat and stared at the houses without speaking a word.
We really had nothing to say.  We were like the profane man who could not
"do the subject justice," the whole situation was so painfully ridiculous
and humiliating that words were tame and we did not know where to
commence anyhow.

The joy in our hearts at our deliverance was poisoned; well-nigh
dissipated, indeed.  We presently began to grow pettish by degrees, and
sullen; and then, angry at each other, angry at ourselves, angry at
everything in general, we moodily dusted the snow from our clothing and
in unsociable single file plowed our way to the horses, unsaddled them,
and sought shelter in the station.

I have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd
adventure.  It occurred almost exactly as I have stated it.  We actually
went into camp in a snow-drift in a desert, at midnight in a storm,
forlorn and hopeless, within fifteen steps of a comfortable inn.

For two hours we sat apart in the station and ruminated in disgust.
The mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had
deserted us.  Without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a
minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed
all our confessions and lamentations.

After breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back.
The world looked bright again, and existence was as dear to us as ever.
Presently an uneasiness came over me--grew upon me--assailed me without
ceasing.  Alas, my regeneration was not complete--I wanted to smoke!
I resisted with all my strength, but the flesh was weak.  I wandered away
alone and wrestled with myself an hour.  I recalled my promises of reform
and preached to myself persuasively, upbraidingly, exhaustively.  But it
was all vain, I shortly found myself sneaking among the snow-drifts
hunting for my pipe.  I discovered it after a considerable search, and
crept away to hide myself and enjoy it.  I remained behind the barn a
good while, asking myself how I would feel if my braver, stronger, truer
comrades should catch me in my degradation.  At last I lit the pipe, and
no human being can feel meaner and baser than I did then.  I was ashamed
of being in my own pitiful company.  Still dreading discovery, I felt
that perhaps the further side of the barn would be somewhat safer, and so
I turned the corner.  As I turned the one corner, smoking, Ollendorff
turned the other with his bottle to his lips, and between us sat
unconscious Ballou deep in a game of "solitaire" with the old greasy
cards!

Absurdity could go no farther.  We shook hands and agreed to say no more
about "reform" and "examples to the rising generation."

The station we were at was at the verge of the Twenty-six-Mile Desert.
If we had approached it half an hour earlier the night before, we must
have heard men shouting there and firing pistols; for they were expecting
some sheep drovers and their flocks and knew that they would infallibly
get lost and wander out of reach of help unless guided by sounds.

While we remained at the station, three of the drovers arrived, nearly
exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never
heard of afterward.

We reached Carson in due time, and took a rest.  This rest, together with
preparations for the journey to Esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the
delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great
land-slide case of Hyde vs. Morgan--an episode which is famous in Nevada
to this day.  After a word or two of necessary explanation, I will set
down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired.



CHAPTER XXXIV.

The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and Washoe
Valleys--very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting
off fast in the Spring and the warm surface-earth begins to moisten and
soften, the disastrous land-slides commence.  The reader cannot know what
a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole
side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the
valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain's
front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he
may go on living within seventy miles of that place.

General Buncombe was shipped out to Nevada in the invoice of Territorial
officers, to be United States Attorney.  He considered himself a lawyer
of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it--partly
for the pure gratification of it and partly because his salary was
Territorially meagre (which is a strong expression).  Now the older
citizens of a new territory look down upon the rest of the world with a
calm, benevolent compassion, as long as it keeps out of the way--when it
gets in the way they snub it.  Sometimes this latter takes the shape of a
practical joke.

One morning Dick Hyde rode furiously up to General Buncombe's door in
Carson city and rushed into his presence without stopping to tie his
horse.  He seemed much excited.  He told the General that he wanted him
to conduct a suit for him and would pay him five hundred dollars if he
achieved a victory.  And then, with violent gestures and a world of
profanity, he poured out his grief.  He said it was pretty well known
that for some years he had been farming (or ranching as the more
customary term is) in Washoe District, and making a successful thing of
it, and furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the
edge of the valley, and that Tom Morgan owned a ranch immediately above
it on the mountain side.

And now the trouble was, that one of those hated and dreaded land-slides
had come and slid Morgan's ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns and
everything down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single
vestige of his property, to a depth of about thirty-eight feet.  Morgan
was in possession and refused to vacate the premises--said he was
occupying his own cabin and not interfering with anybody else's--and said
the cabin was standing on the same dirt and same ranch it had always
stood on, and he would like to see anybody make him vacate.

"And when I reminded him," said Hyde, weeping, "that it was on top of my
ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal meanness to ask me
why didn't I stay on my ranch and hold possession when I see him
a-coming!  Why didn't I stay on it, the blathering lunatic--by George,
when I heard that racket and looked up that hill it was just like the
whole world was a-ripping and a-tearing down that mountain side
--splinters, and cord-wood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and
ends of hay stacks, and awful clouds of dust!--trees going end over end
in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping 'bout a thousand feet high
and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and
a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!--and
in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed Morgan on
his gate-post, a-wondering why I didn't stay and hold possession!  Laws
bless me, I just took one glimpse, General, and lit out'n the county in
three jumps exactly.

"But what grinds me is that that Morgan hangs on there and won't move
off'n that ranch--says it's his'n and he's going to keep it--likes it
better'n he did when it was higher up the hill.  Mad!  Well, I've been so
mad for two days I couldn't find my way to town--been wandering around in
the brush in a starving condition--got anything here to drink, General?
But I'm here now, and I'm a-going to law.  You hear me!"

Never in all the world, perhaps, were a man's feelings so outraged as
were the General's.  He said he had never heard of such high-handed
conduct in all his life as this Morgan's.  And he said there was no use
in going to law--Morgan had no shadow of right to remain where he was
--nobody in the wide world would uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take
his case and no judge listen to it.  Hyde said that right there was where
he was mistaken--everybody in town sustained Morgan; Hal Brayton, a very
smart lawyer, had taken his case; the courts being in vacation, it was to
be tried before a referee, and ex-Governor Roop had already been
appointed to that office and would open his court in a large public hall
near the hotel at two that afternoon.

The General was amazed.  He said he had suspected before that the people
of that Territory were fools, and now he knew it.  But he said rest easy,
rest easy and collect the witnesses, for the victory was just as certain
as if the conflict were already over.  Hyde wiped away his tears and
left.

At two in the afternoon referee Roop's Court opened and Roop appeared
throned among his sheriffs, the witnesses, and spectators, and wearing
upon his face a solemnity so awe-inspiring that some of his
fellow-conspirators had misgivings that maybe he had not comprehended,
after all, that this was merely a joke.  An unearthly stillness
prevailed, for at the slightest noise the judge uttered sternly the
command:

"Order in the Court!"

And the sheriffs promptly echoed it.  Presently the General elbowed his
way through the crowd of spectators, with his arms full of law-books, and
on his ears fell an order from the judge which was the first respectful
recognition of his high official dignity that had ever saluted them, and
it trickled pleasantly through his whole system:

"Way for the United States Attorney!"

The witnesses were called--legislators, high government officers,
ranchmen, miners, Indians, Chinamen, negroes.  Three fourths of them were
called by the defendant Morgan, but no matter, their testimony invariably
went in favor of the plaintiff Hyde.  Each new witness only added new
testimony to the absurdity of a man's claiming to own another man's
property because his farm had slid down on top of it.  Then the Morgan
lawyers made their speeches, and seemed to make singularly weak ones
--they did really nothing to help the Morgan cause.  And now the General,
with exultation in his face, got up and made an impassioned effort; he
pounded the table, he banged the law-books, he shouted, and roared, and
howled, he quoted from everything and everybody, poetry, sarcasm,
statistics, history, pathos, bathos, blasphemy, and wound up with a grand
war-whoop for free speech, freedom of the press, free schools, the
Glorious Bird of America and the principles of eternal justice!
[Applause.]

When the General sat down, he did it with the conviction that if there
was anything in good strong testimony, a great speech and believing and
admiring countenances all around, Mr. Morgan's case was killed.
Ex-Governor Roop leant his head upon his hand for some minutes, thinking,
and the still audience waited for his decision.  Then he got up and stood
erect, with bended head, and thought again.  Then he walked the floor
with long, deliberate strides, his chin in his hand, and still the
audience waited.  At last he returned to his throne, seated himself, and
began impressively:

"Gentlemen, I feel the great responsibility that rests upon me this day.
This is no ordinary case.  On the contrary it is plain that it is the
most solemn and awful that ever man was called upon to decide.
Gentlemen, I have listened attentively to the evidence, and have
perceived that the weight of it, the overwhelming weight of it, is in
favor of the plaintiff Hyde.  I have listened also to the remarks of
counsel, with high interest--and especially will I commend the masterly
and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the
plaintiff.  But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human
testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to
influence us at a moment so solemn as this.  Gentlemen, it ill becomes
us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of Heaven.  It is plain
to me that Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to move this
defendant's ranch for a purpose.  We are but creatures, and we must
submit.  If Heaven has chosen to favor the defendant Morgan in this
marked and wonderful manner; and if Heaven, dissatisfied with the
position of the Morgan ranch upon the mountain side, has chosen to remove
it to a position more eligible and more advantageous for its owner, it
ill becomes us, insects as we are, to question the legality of the act or
inquire into the reasons that prompted it.  No--Heaven created the
ranches and it is Heaven's prerogative to rearrange them, to experiment
with them around at its pleasure.  It is for us to submit, without
repining.

"I warn you that this thing which has happened is a thing with which the
sacrilegious hands and brains and tongues of men must not meddle.
Gentlemen, it is the verdict of this court that the plaintiff, Richard
Hyde, has been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God!  And from
this decision there is no appeal."

Buncombe seized his cargo of law-books and plunged out of the court-room
frantic with indignation.  He pronounced Roop to be a miraculous fool, an
inspired idiot.  In all good faith he returned at night and remonstrated
with Roop upon his extravagant decision, and implored him to walk the
floor and think for half an hour, and see if he could not figure out some
sort of modification of the verdict.  Roop yielded at last and got up to
walk.  He walked two hours and a half, and at last his face lit up
happily and he told Buncombe it had occurred to him that the ranch
underneath the new Morgan ranch still belonged to Hyde, that his title to
the ground was just as good as it had ever been, and therefore he was of
opinion that Hyde had a right to dig it out from under there and--

The General never waited to hear the end of it.  He was always an
impatient and irascible man, that way.  At the end of two months the fact
that he had been played upon with a joke had managed to bore itself, like
another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding.



CHAPTER XXXV.

When we finally left for Esmeralda, horseback, we had an addition to the
company in the person of Capt. John Nye, the Governor's brother.  He had
a good memory, and a tongue hung in the middle.  This is a combination
which gives immortality to conversation.  Capt. John never suffered the
talk to flag or falter once during the hundred and twenty miles of the
journey.  In addition to his conversational powers, he had one or two
other endowments of a marked character.  One was a singular "handiness"
about doing anything and everything, from laying out a railroad or
organizing a political party, down to sewing on buttons, shoeing a horse,
or setting a broken leg, or a hen.  Another was a spirit of accommodation
that prompted him to take the needs, difficulties and perplexities of
anybody and everybody upon his own shoulders at any and all times, and
dispose of them with admirable facility and alacrity--hence he always
managed to find vacant beds in crowded inns, and plenty to eat in the
emptiest larders.  And finally, wherever he met a man, woman or child, in
camp, inn or desert, he either knew such parties personally or had been
acquainted with a relative of the same.  Such another traveling comrade
was never seen before.  I cannot forbear giving a specimen of the way in
which he overcame difficulties.  On the second day out, we arrived, very
tired and hungry, at a poor little inn in the desert, and were told that
the house was full, no provisions on hand, and neither hay nor barley to
spare for the horses--must move on.  The rest of us wanted to hurry on
while it was yet light, but Capt. John insisted on stopping awhile.
We dismounted and entered.  There was no welcome for us on any face.
Capt. John began his blandishments, and within twenty minutes he had
accomplished the following things, viz.: found old acquaintances in three
teamsters; discovered that he used to go to school with the landlord's
mother; recognized his wife as a lady whose life he had saved once in
California, by stopping her runaway horse; mended a child's broken toy
and won the favor of its mother, a guest of the inn; helped the hostler
bleed a horse, and prescribed for another horse that had the "heaves";
treated the entire party three times at the landlord's bar; produced a
later paper than anybody had seen for a week and sat himself down to read
the news to a deeply interested audience.  The result, summed up, was as
follows: The hostler found plenty of feed for our horses; we had a trout
supper, an exceedingly sociable time after it, good beds to sleep in, and
a surprising breakfast in the morning--and when we left, we left lamented
by all!  Capt. John had some bad traits, but he had some uncommonly
valuable ones to offset them with.

Esmeralda was in many respects another Humboldt, but in a little more
forward state.  The claims we had been paying assessments on were
entirely worthless, and we threw them away.  The principal one cropped
out of the top of a knoll that was fourteen feet high, and the inspired
Board of Directors were running a tunnel under that knoll to strike the
ledge.  The tunnel would have to be seventy feet long, and would then
strike the ledge at the same dept that a shaft twelve feet deep would
have reached!  The Board were living on the "assessments."  [N.B.--This
hint comes too late for the enlightenment of New York silver miners; they
have already learned all about this neat trick by experience.]  The Board
had no desire to strike the ledge, knowing that it was as barren of
silver as a curbstone.  This reminiscence calls to mind Jim Townsend's
tunnel.  He had paid assessments on a mine called the "Daley" till he was
well-nigh penniless.  Finally an assessment was levied to run a tunnel
two hundred and fifty feet on the Daley, and Townsend went up on the hill
to look into matters.

He found the Daley cropping out of the apex of an exceedingly
sharp-pointed peak, and a couple of men up there "facing" the proposed
tunnel. Townsend made a calculation.  Then he said to the men:

"So you have taken a contract to run a tunnel into this hill two hundred
and fifty feet to strike this ledge?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, do you know that you have got one of the most expensive and
arduous undertakings before you that was ever conceived by man?"

"Why no--how is that?"

"Because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side;
and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your
tunnel on trestle-work!"

The ways of silver mining Boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous.

We took up various claims, and commenced shafts and tunnels on them, but
never finished any of them.  We had to do a certain amount of work on
each to "hold" it, else other parties could seize our property after the
expiration of ten days.  We were always hunting up new claims and doing a
little work on them and then waiting for a buyer--who never came.  We
never found any ore that would yield more than fifty dollars a ton; and
as the mills charged fifty dollars a ton for working ore and extracting
the silver, our pocket-money melted steadily away and none returned to
take its place.  We lived in a little cabin and cooked for ourselves; and
altogether it was a hard life, though a hopeful one--for we never ceased
to expect fortune and a customer to burst upon us some day.

At last, when flour reached a dollar a pound, and money could not be
borrowed on the best security at less than eight per cent a month (I
being without the security, too), I abandoned mining and went to milling.
That is to say, I went to work as a common laborer in a quartz mill, at
ten dollars a week and board.



CHAPTER XXXVI.

I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow
down into the bowels of the earth and get out the coveted ore; and now I
learned that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to get the
silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it.
We had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark.
This mill was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam.  Six tall, upright
rods of iron, as large as a man's ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of
iron and steel at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate, and
these rose and fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance, in an
iron box called a "battery."  Each of these rods or stamps weighed six
hundred pounds.  One of us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up
masses of silver-bearing rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the
battery.  The ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to
powder, and a stream of water that trickled into the battery turned it to
a creamy paste.  The minutest particles were driven through a fine wire
screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed into great
tubs warmed by super-heated steam--amalgamating pans, they are called.
The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving
"mullers."  A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery, and
this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles and held on
to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also,
about every half hour, through a buckskin sack.  Quantities of coarse
salt and sulphate of copper were added, from time to time to assist the
amalgamation by destroying base metals which coated the gold and silver
and would not let it unite with the quicksilver.

All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly.  Streams of
dirty water flowed always from the pans and were carried off in broad
wooden troughs to the ravine.  One would not suppose that atoms of gold
and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and
in order to catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and
little obstructing "riffles" charged with quicksilver were placed here
and there across the troughs also.  These riffles had to be cleaned and
the blankets washed out every evening, to get their precious
accumulations--and after all this eternity of trouble one third of the
silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the
troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day.
There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling.  There never was any
idle time in that mill.  There was always something to do.  It is a pity
that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in
order to understand the full force of his doom to "earn his bread by the
sweat of his brow."  Every now and then, during the day, we had to scoop
some pulp out of the pans, and tediously "wash" it in a horn spoon--wash
it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was left but some
little dull globules of quicksilver in the bottom.  If they were soft and
yielding, the pan needed some salt or some sulphate of copper or some
other chemical rubbish to assist digestion; if they were crisp to the
touch and would retain a dint, they were freighted with all the silver
and gold they could seize and hold, and consequently the pan needed a
fresh charge of quicksilver.  When there was nothing else to do, one
could always "screen tailings."  That is to say, he could shovel up the
dried sand that had washed down to the ravine through the troughs and
dash it against an upright wire screen to free it from pebbles and
prepare it for working over.

The process of amalgamation differed in the various mills, and this
included changes in style of pans and other machinery, and a great
diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use, but none of the
methods employed, involved the principle of milling ore without
"screening the tailings."  Of all recreations in the world, screening
tailings on a hot day, with a long-handled shovel, is the most
undesirable.

At the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we "cleaned up."
That is to say, we got the pulp out of the pans and batteries, and washed
the mud patiently away till nothing was left but the long accumulating
mass of quicksilver, with its imprisoned treasures.  This we made into
heavy, compact snow-balls, and piled them up in a bright, luxurious heap
for inspection.  Making these snow-balls cost me a fine gold ring--that
and ignorance together; for the quicksilver invaded the ring with the
same facility with which water saturates a sponge--separated its
particles and the ring crumbled to pieces.

We put our pile of quicksilver balls into an iron retort that had a pipe
leading from it to a pail of water, and then applied a roasting heat.
The quicksilver turned to vapor, escaped through the pipe into the pail,
and the water turned it into good wholesome quicksilver again.
Quicksilver is very costly, and they never waste it.  On opening the
retort, there was our week's work--a lump of pure white, frosty looking
silver, twice as large as a man's head.  Perhaps a fifth of the mass was
gold, but the color of it did not show--would not have shown if two
thirds of it had been gold.  We melted it up and made a solid brick of it
by pouring it into an iron brick-mould.

By such a tedious and laborious process were silver bricks obtained.
This mill was but one of many others in operation at the time.  The first
one in Nevada was built at Egan Canyon and was a small insignificant
affair and compared most unfavorably with some of the immense
establishments afterwards located at Virginia City and elsewhere.

From our bricks a little corner was chipped off for the "fire-assay"--a
method used to determine the proportions of gold, silver and base metals
in the mass.  This is an interesting process.  The chip is hammered out
as thin as paper and weighed on scales so fine and sensitive that if you
weigh a two-inch scrap of paper on them and then write your name on the
paper with a course, soft pencil and weigh it again, the scales will take
marked notice of the addition.

Then a little lead (also weighed) is rolled up with the flake of silver
and the two are melted at a great heat in a small vessel called a cupel,
made by compressing bone ashes into a cup-shape in a steel mold.  The
base metals oxydize and are absorbed with the lead into the pores of the
cupel.  A button or globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left
behind, and by weighing it and noting the loss, the assayer knows the
proportion of base metal the brick contains.  He has to separate the gold
from the silver now.  The button is hammered out flat and thin, put in
the furnace and kept some time at a red heat; after cooling it off it is
rolled up like a quill and heated in a glass vessel containing nitric
acid; the acid dissolves the silver and leaves the gold pure and ready to
be weighed on its own merits.  Then salt water is poured into the vessel
containing the dissolved silver and the silver returns to palpable form
again and sinks to the bottom.  Nothing now remains but to weigh it; then
the proportions of the several metals contained in the brick are known,
and the assayer stamps the value of the brick upon its surface.

The sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that the
speculative miner, in getting a "fire-assay" made of a piece of rock from
his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out
the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the
contrary.  I have seen men hunt over a pile of nearly worthless quartz
for an hour, and at last find a little piece as large as a filbert, which
was rich in gold and silver--and this was reserved for a fire-assay!  Of
course the fire-assay would demonstrate that a ton of such rock would
yield hundreds of dollars--and on such assays many an utterly worthless
mine was sold.

Assaying was a good business, and so some men engaged in it,
occasionally, who were not strictly scientific and capable.  One assayer
got such rich results out of all specimens brought to him that in time he
acquired almost a monopoly of the business.  But like all men who achieve
success, he became an object of envy and suspicion.  The other assayers
entered into a conspiracy against him, and let some prominent citizens
into the secret in order to show that they meant fairly.  Then they broke
a little fragment off a carpenter's grindstone and got a stranger to take
it to the popular scientist and get it assayed.  In the course of an hour
the result came--whereby it appeared that a ton of that rock would yield
$1,184.40 in silver and $366.36 in gold!

Due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and the
popular assayer left town "between two days."

I will remark, in passing, that I only remained in the milling business
one week.  I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance
in my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it;
that I had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so
short a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to
intellectual activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and
nothing so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and
washing blankets--still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary.
He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round
sum.  How much did I want?

I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about
all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.

I was ordered off the premises!  And yet, when I look back to those days
and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I performed in that
mill, I only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand.

Shortly after this I began to grow crazy, along with the rest of the
population, about the mysterious and wonderful "cement mine," and to make
preparations to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer to go
and help hunt for it.



CHAPTER XXXVII.

It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake that the marvellous
Whiteman cement mine was supposed to lie.  Every now and then it would be
reported that Mr. W. had passed stealthily through Esmeralda at dead of
night, in disguise, and then we would have a wild excitement--because he
must be steering for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow him.
In less than three hours after daylight all the horses and mules and
donkeys in the vicinity would be bought, hired or stolen, and half the
community would be off for the mountains, following in the wake of
Whiteman.  But W. would drift about through the mountain gorges for days
together, in a purposeless sort of way, until the provisions of the
miners ran out, and they would have to go back home.  I have known it
reported at eleven at night, in a large mining camp, that Whiteman had
just passed through, and in two hours the streets, so quiet before, would
be swarming with men and animals.  Every individual would be trying to be
very secret, but yet venturing to whisper to just one neighbor that W.
had passed through.  And long before daylight--this in the dead of
Winter--the stampede would be complete, the camp deserted, and the whole
population gone chasing after W.

The tradition was that in the early immigration, more than twenty years
ago, three young Germans, brothers, who had survived an Indian massacre
on the Plains, wandered on foot through the deserts, avoiding all trails
and roads, and simply holding a westerly direction and hoping to find
California before they starved, or died of fatigue.  And in a gorge in
the mountains they sat down to rest one day, when one of them noticed a
curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of lumps of
dull yellow metal.  They saw that it was gold, and that here was a
fortune to be acquired in a single day.  The vein was about as wide as a
curbstone, and fully two thirds of it was pure gold.  Every pound of the
wonderful cement was worth well-nigh $200.

Each of the brothers loaded himself with about twenty-five pounds of it,
and then they covered up all traces of the vein, made a rude drawing of
the locality and the principal landmarks in the vicinity, and started
westward again.  But troubles thickened about them.  In their wanderings
one brother fell and broke his leg, and the others were obliged to go on
and leave him to die in the wilderness.  Another, worn out and starving,
gave up by and by, and laid down to die, but after two or three weeks of
incredible hardships, the third reached the settlements of California
exhausted, sick, and his mind deranged by his sufferings.  He had thrown
away all his cement but a few fragments, but these were sufficient to set
everybody wild with excitement.  However, he had had enough of the cement
country, and nothing could induce him to lead a party thither.  He was
entirely content to work on a farm for wages.  But he gave Whiteman his
map, and described the cement region as well as he could and thus
transferred the curse to that gentleman--for when I had my one accidental
glimpse of Mr. W. in Esmeralda he had been hunting for the lost mine, in
hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness, for twelve or thirteen years.
Some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he had
not.  I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have
been given to Whiteman by the young German, and it was of a seductive
nature.  Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice
of fruit cake.  The privilege of working such a mine one week would be
sufficient for a man of reasonable desires.

A new partner of ours, a Mr. Higbie, knew Whiteman well by sight, and a
friend of ours, a Mr. Van Dorn, was well acquainted with him, and not
only that, but had Whiteman's promise that he should have a private hint
in time to enable him to join the next cement expedition.  Van Dorn had
promised to extend the hint to us.  One evening Higbie came in greatly
excited, and said he felt certain he had recognized Whiteman, up town,
disguised and in a pretended state of intoxication.  In a little while
Van Dorn arrived and confirmed the news; and so we gathered in our cabin
and with heads close together arranged our plans in impressive whispers.

We were to leave town quietly, after midnight, in two or three small
parties, so as not to attract attention, and meet at dawn on the "divide"
overlooking Mono Lake, eight or nine miles distant.  We were to make no
noise after starting, and not speak above a whisper under any
circumstances.  It was believed that for once Whiteman's presence was
unknown in the town and his expedition unsuspected.  Our conclave broke
up at nine o'clock, and we set about our preparation diligently and with
profound secrecy.  At eleven o'clock we saddled our horses, hitched them
with their long riatas (or lassos), and then brought out a side of bacon,
a sack of beans, a small sack of coffee, some sugar, a hundred pounds of
flour in sacks, some tin cups and a coffee pot, frying pan and some few
other necessary articles.  All these things were "packed" on the back of
a led horse--and whoever has not been taught, by a Spanish adept, to pack
an animal, let him never hope to do the thing by natural smartness.  That
is impossible.  Higbie had had some experience, but was not perfect.  He
put on the pack saddle (a thing like a saw-buck), piled the property on
it and then wound a rope all over and about it and under it, "every which
way," taking a hitch in it every now and then, and occasionally surging
back on it till the horse's sides sunk in and he gasped for breath--but
every time the lashings grew tight in one place they loosened in another.
We never did get the load tight all over, but we got it so that it would
do, after a fashion, and then we started, in single file, close order,
and without a word.  It was a dark night.  We kept the middle of the
road, and proceeded in a slow walk past the rows of cabins, and whenever
a miner came to his door I trembled for fear the light would shine on us
an excite curiosity.  But nothing happened.  We began the long winding
ascent of the canyon, toward the "divide," and presently the cabins began
to grow infrequent, and the intervals between them wider and wider, and
then I began to breathe tolerably freely and feel less like a thief and a
murderer.  I was in the rear, leading the pack horse.  As the ascent grew
steeper he grew proportionately less satisfied with his cargo, and began
to pull back on his riata occasionally and delay progress.  My comrades
were passing out of sight in the gloom.  I was getting anxious.  I coaxed
and bullied the pack horse till I presently got him into a trot, and then
the tin cups and pans strung about his person frightened him and he ran.
His riata was wound around the pummel of my saddle, and so, as he went by
he dragged me from my horse and the two animals traveled briskly on
without me.  But I was not alone--the loosened cargo tumbled overboard
from the pack horse and fell close to me.  It was abreast of almost the
last cabin.

A miner came out and said:

"Hello!"

I was thirty steps from him, and knew he could not see me, it was so very
dark in the shadow of the mountain.  So I lay still.  Another head
appeared in the light of the cabin door, and presently the two men walked
toward me.  They stopped within ten steps of me, and one said:

"Sh!  Listen."

I could not have been in a more distressed state if I had been escaping
justice with a price on my head.  Then the miners appeared to sit down on
a boulder, though I could not see them distinctly enough to be very sure
what they did.  One said:

"I heard a noise, as plain as I ever heard anything.  It seemed to be
about there--"

A stone whizzed by my head.  I flattened myself out in the dust like a
postage stamp, and thought to myself if he mended his aim ever so little
he would probably hear another noise.  In my heart, now, I execrated
secret expeditions.  I promised myself that this should be my last,
though the Sierras were ribbed with cement veins.  Then one of the men
said:

"I'll tell you what!  Welch knew what he was talking about when he said
he saw Whiteman to-day.  I heard horses--that was the noise.  I am going
down to Welch's, right away."

They left and I was glad.  I did not care whither they went, so they
went.  I was willing they should visit Welch, and the sooner the better.

As soon as they closed their cabin door my comrades emerged from the
gloom; they had caught the horses and were waiting for a clear coast
again.  We remounted the cargo on the pack horse and got under way, and
as day broke we reached the "divide" and joined Van Dorn.  Then we
journeyed down into the valley of the Lake, and feeling secure, we halted
to cook breakfast, for we were tired and sleepy and hungry.  Three hours
later the rest of the population filed over the "divide" in a long
procession, and drifted off out of sight around the borders of the Lake!

Whether or not my accident had produced this result we never knew, but at
least one thing was certain--the secret was out and Whiteman would not
enter upon a search for the cement mine this time.  We were filled with
chagrin.

We held a council and decided to make the best of our misfortune and
enjoy a week's holiday on the borders of the curious Lake.  Mono, it is
sometimes called, and sometimes the "Dead Sea of California."  It is one
of the strangest freaks of Nature to be found in any land, but it is
hardly ever mentioned in print and very seldom visited, because it lies
away off the usual routes of travel and besides is so difficult to get at
that only men content to endure the roughest life will consent to take
upon themselves the discomforts of such a trip.  On the morning of our
second day, we traveled around to a remote and particularly wild spot on
the borders of the Lake, where a stream of fresh, ice-cold water entered
it from the mountain side, and then we went regularly into camp.  We
hired a large boat and two shot-guns from a lonely ranchman who lived
some ten miles further on, and made ready for comfort and recreation.
We soon got thoroughly acquainted with the Lake and all its
peculiarities.



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand
feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand
feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds.  This solemn,
silent, sail-less sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth
--is little graced with the picturesque.  It is an unpretending expanse
of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two
islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered
lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes,
the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has
seized upon and occupied.

The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong
with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into
them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it
had been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands.  While we camped
there our laundry work was easy.  We tied the week's washing astern of
our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all
to the wringing out.  If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a
rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high.  This water
is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin.  We had a
valuable dog.  He had raw places on him.  He had more raw places on him
than sound ones.  He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw.  He jumped
overboard one day to get away from the flies.  But it was bad judgment.
In his condition, it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the
fire.

The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he
struck out for the shore with considerable interest.  He yelped and
barked and howled as he went--and by the time he got to the shore there
was no bark to him--for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and
the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he
probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise.  He ran
round and round in a circle, and pawed  the earth and clawed the air, and
threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in
the most extraordinary manner.  He was not a demonstrative dog, as a
general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I
never saw him take so much interest in anything before.  He finally
struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two
hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet.  This was about
nine years ago.  We look for what is left of him along here every day.

A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure
lye.  It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes,
though.  It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever
saw.  [There will be no additional charge for this joke, except to
parties requiring an explanation of it.  This joke has received high
commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age.]

There are no fish in Mono Lake--no frogs, no snakes, no polliwigs
--nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable.  Millions of wild
ducks and sea-gulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists
under the surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch
long, which looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides.  If
you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of
these.  They give to the water a sort of grayish-white appearance.  Then
there is a fly, which looks something like our house fly.  These settle
on the beach to eat the worms that wash ashore--and any time, you can see
there a belt of flies an inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt
extends clear around the lake--a belt of flies one hundred miles long.
If you throw a stone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look
dense, like a cloud.  You can hold them under water as long as you
please--they do not mind it--they are only proud of it.  When you let
them go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent office report, and
walk off as unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a
view to affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular
way.  Providence leaves nothing to go by chance.  All things have their
uses and their part and proper place in Nature's economy: the ducks eat
the flies--the flies eat the worms--the Indians eat all three--the wild
cats eat the Indians--the white folks eat the wild cats--and thus all
things are lovely.

Mono Lake is a hundred miles in a straight line from the ocean--and
between it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains--yet
thousands of sea-gulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear
their young.  One would as soon expect to find sea-gulls in Kansas.
And in this connection let us observe another instance of Nature's
wisdom.  The islands in the lake being merely huge masses of lava, coated
over with ashes and pumice-stone, and utterly innocent of vegetation or
anything that would burn; and sea-gull's eggs being entirely useless to
anybody unless they be cooked, Nature has provided an unfailing spring of
boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in there,
and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any statement I have
made during the past fifteen years.  Within ten feet of the boiling
spring is a spring of pure cold water, sweet and wholesome.

So, in that island you get your board and washing free of charge--and if
nature had gone further and furnished a nice American hotel clerk who was
crusty and disobliging, and didn't know anything about the time tables,
or the railroad routes--or--anything--and was proud of it--I would not
wish for a more desirable boarding-house.

Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream
of any kind flows out of it.  It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and
what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.

There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono Lake--and these
are, the breaking up of one Winter and the beginning of the next.  More
than once (in Esmeralda) I have seen a perfectly blistering morning open
up with the thermometer at ninety degrees at eight o'clock, and seen the
snow fall fourteen inches deep and that same identical thermometer go
down to forty-four degrees under shelter, before nine o'clock at night.
Under favorable circumstances it snows at least once in every single
month in the year, in the little town of Mono.  So uncertain is the
climate in Summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be
prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and
her snow shoes under the other.  When they have a Fourth of July
procession it generally snows on them, and they do say that as a general
thing when a man calls for a brandy toddy there, the bar keeper chops it
off with a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper, like maple sugar.  And it
is further reported that the old soakers haven't any teeth--wore them out
eating gin cocktails and brandy punches.  I do not endorse that
statement--I simply give it for what it is worth--and it is worth--well,
I should say, millions, to any man who can believe it without straining
himself.  But I do endorse the snow on the Fourth of July--because I know
that to be true.



CHAPTER XXXIX.

About seven o'clock one blistering hot morning--for it was now dead
summer time--Higbie and I took the boat and started on a voyage of
discovery to the two islands.  We had often longed to do this, but had
been deterred by the fear of storms; for they were frequent, and severe
enough to capsize an ordinary row-boat like ours without great
difficulty--and once capsized, death would ensue in spite of the bravest
swimming, for that venomous water would eat a man's eyes out like fire,
and burn him out inside, too, if he shipped a sea.  It was called twelve
miles, straight out to the islands--a long pull and a warm one--but the
morning was so quiet and sunny, and the lake so smooth and glassy and
dead, that we could not resist the temptation.  So we filled two large
tin canteens with water (since we were not acquainted with the locality
of the spring said to exist on the large island), and started.  Higbie's
brawny muscles gave the boat good speed, but by the time we reached our
destination we judged that we had pulled nearer fifteen miles than
twelve.

We landed on the big island and went ashore.  We tried the water in the
canteens, now, and found that the sun had spoiled it; it was so brackish
that we could not drink it; so we poured it out and began a search for
the spring--for thirst augments fast as soon as it is apparent that one
has no means at hand of quenching it.  The island was a long, moderately
high hill of ashes--nothing but gray ashes and pumice-stone, in which we
sunk to our knees at every step--and all around the top was a forbidding
wall of scorched and blasted rocks.  When we reached the top and got
within the wall, we found simply a shallow, far-reaching basin, carpeted
with ashes, and here and there a patch of fine sand.  In places,
picturesque jets of steam shot up out of crevices, giving evidence that
although this ancient crater had gone out of active business, there was
still some fire left in its furnaces.  Close to one of these jets of
steam stood the only tree on the island--a small pine of most graceful
shape and most faultless symmetry; its color was a brilliant green, for
the steam drifted unceasingly through its branches and kept them always
moist.  It contrasted strangely enough, did this vigorous and beautiful
outcast, with its dead and dismal surroundings.  It was like a cheerful
spirit in a mourning household.

We hunted for the spring everywhere, traversing the full length of the
island (two or three miles), and crossing it twice--climbing ash-hills
patiently, and then sliding down the other side in a sitting posture,
plowing up smothering volumes of gray dust.  But we found nothing but
solitude, ashes and a heart-breaking silence.  Finally we noticed that
the wind had risen, and we forgot our thirst in a solicitude of greater
importance; for, the lake being quiet, we had not taken pains about
securing the boat.  We hurried back to a point overlooking our landing
place, and then--but mere words cannot describe our dismay--the boat was
gone!  The chances were that there was not another boat on the entire
lake.  The situation was not comfortable--in truth, to speak plainly, it
was frightful.  We were prisoners on a desolate island, in aggravating
proximity to friends who were for the present helpless to aid us; and
what was still more uncomfortable was the reflection that we had neither
food nor water.  But presently we sighted the boat.  It was drifting
along, leisurely, about fifty yards from shore, tossing in a foamy sea.
It drifted, and continued to drift, but at the same safe distance from
land, and we walked along abreast it and waited for fortune to favor us.
At the end of an hour it approached a jutting cape, and Higbie ran ahead
and posted himself on the utmost verge and prepared for the assault.  If
we failed there, there was no hope for us.  It was driving gradually
shoreward all the time, now; but whether it was driving fast enough to
make the connection or not was the momentous question.  When it got
within thirty steps of Higbie I was so excited that I fancied I could
hear my own heart beat.  When, a little later, it dragged slowly along
and seemed about to go by, only one little yard out of reach, it seemed
as if my heart stood still; and when it was exactly abreast him and began
to widen away, and he still standing like a watching statue, I knew my
heart did stop.  But when he gave a great spring, the next instant, and
lit fairly in the stern, I discharged a war-whoop that woke the
solitudes!

But it dulled my enthusiasm, presently, when he told me he had not been
caring whether the boat came within jumping distance or not, so that it
passed within eight or ten yards of him, for he had made up his mind to
shut his eyes and mouth and swim that trifling distance.  Imbecile that I
was, I had not thought of that.  It was only a long swim that could be
fatal.

The sea was running high and the storm increasing.  It was growing late,
too--three or four in the afternoon.  Whether to venture toward the
mainland or not, was a question of some moment.  But we were so
distressed by thirst that we decide to try it, and so Higbie fell to work
and I took the steering-oar.  When we had pulled a mile, laboriously,
we were evidently in serious peril, for the storm had greatly augmented;
the billows ran very high and were capped with foaming crests,
the heavens were hung with black, and the wind blew with great fury.
We would have gone back, now, but we did not dare to turn the boat
around, because as soon as she got in the trough of the sea she would
upset, of course.  Our only hope lay in keeping her head-on to the seas.
It was hard work to do this, she plunged so, and so beat and belabored
the billows with her rising and falling bows.  Now and then one of
Higbie's oars would trip on the top of a wave, and the other one would
snatch the boat half around in spite of my cumbersome steering apparatus.
We were drenched by the sprays constantly, and the boat occasionally
shipped water.  By and by, powerful as my comrade was, his great
exertions began to tell on him, and he was anxious that I should change
places with him till he could rest a little.  But I told him this was
impossible; for if the steering oar were dropped a moment while we
changed, the boat would slue around into the trough of the sea, capsize,
and in less than five minutes we would have a hundred gallons of
soap-suds in us and be eaten up so quickly that we could not even be
present at our own inquest.

But things cannot last always.  Just as the darkness shut down we came
booming into port, head on.  Higbie dropped his oars to hurrah--I dropped
mine to help--the sea gave the boat a twist, and over she went!

The agony that alkali water inflicts on bruises, chafes and blistered
hands, is unspeakable, and nothing but greasing all over will modify it
--but we ate, drank and slept well, that night, notwithstanding.

In speaking of the peculiarities of Mono Lake, I ought to have mentioned
that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking
masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles
inferior mortar dried hard; and if one breaks off fragments of this rock
he will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls' eggs deeply
imbedded in the mass.  How did they get there?  I simply state the fact
--for it is a fact--and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his
leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion.

At the end of a week we adjourned to the Sierras on a fishing excursion,
and spent several days in camp under snowy Castle Peak, and fished
successfully for trout in a bright, miniature lake whose surface was
between ten and eleven thousand feet above the level of the sea; cooling
ourselves during the hot August noons by sitting on snow banks ten feet
deep, under whose sheltering edges fine grass and dainty flowers
flourished luxuriously; and at night entertaining ourselves by almost
freezing to death.  Then we returned to Mono Lake, and finding that the
cement excitement was over for the present, packed up and went back to
Esmeralda.  Mr. Ballou reconnoitred awhile, and not liking the prospect,
set out alone for Humboldt.

About this time occurred a little incident which has always had a sort of
interest to me, from the fact that it came so near "instigating" my
funeral.  At a time when an Indian attack had been expected, the citizens
hid their gunpowder where it would be safe and yet convenient to hand
when wanted.  A neighbor of ours hid six cans of rifle powder in the
bake-oven of an old discarded cooking stove which stood on the open
ground near a frame out-house or shed, and from and after that day never
thought of it again.  We hired a half-tamed Indian to do some washing for
us, and he took up quarters under the shed with his tub.  The ancient
stove reposed within six feet of him, and before his face.  Finally it
occurred to him that hot water would be better than cold, and he went out
and fired up under that forgotten powder magazine and set on a kettle of
water.  Then he returned to his tub.

I entered the shed presently and threw down some more clothes, and was
about to speak to him when the stove blew up with a prodigious crash, and
disappeared, leaving not a splinter behind.  Fragments of it fell in the
streets full two hundred yards away.  Nearly a third of the shed roof
over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a
small stanchion half in two in front of the Indian, whizzed between us
and drove partly through the weather-boarding beyond.  I was as white as
a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless.  But the Indian betrayed
no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort.  He simply stopped
washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment,
and then remarked:

"Mph!  Dam stove heap gone!"--and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if
it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do.  I will explain,
that "heap" is "Injun-English" for "very much."  The reader will perceive
the exhaustive expressiveness of it in the present instance.



CHAPTER XL.
I now come to a curious episode--the most curious, I think, that had yet
accented my slothful, valueless, heedless career.  Out of a hillside
toward the upper end of the town, projected a wall of reddish looking
quartz-croppings, the exposed comb of a silver-bearing ledge that
extended deep down into the earth, of course.  It was owned by a company
entitled the "Wide West."  There was a shaft sixty or seventy feet deep
on the under side of the croppings, and everybody was acquainted with the
rock that came from it--and tolerably rich rock it was, too, but nothing
extraordinary.  I will remark here, that although to the inexperienced
stranger all the quartz of a particular "district" looks about alike, an
old resident of the camp can take a glance at a mixed pile of rock,
separate the fragments and tell you which mine each came from, as easily
as a confectioner can separate and classify the various kinds and
qualities of candy in a mixed heap of the article.

All at once the town was thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement.
In mining parlance the Wide West had "struck it rich!"  Everybody went to
see the new developments, and for some days there was such a crowd of
people about the Wide West shaft that a stranger would have supposed
there was a mass meeting in session there.  No other topic was discussed
but the rich strike, and nobody thought or dreamed about anything else.
Every man brought away a specimen, ground it up in a hand mortar, washed
it out in his horn spoon, and glared speechless upon the marvelous
result.  It was not hard rock, but black, decomposed stuff which could be
crumbled in the hand like a baked potato, and when spread out on a paper
exhibited a thick sprinkling of gold and particles of "native" silver.
Higbie brought a handful to the cabin, and when he had washed it out his
amazement was beyond description.  Wide West stock soared skywards.  It
was said that repeated offers had been made for it at a thousand dollars
a foot, and promptly refused.  We have all had the "blues"--the mere
sky-blues--but mine were indigo, now--because I did not own in the Wide
West.  The world seemed hollow to me, and existence a grief.  I lost my
appetite, and ceased to take an interest in anything.  Still I had to
stay, and listen to other people's rejoicings, because I had no money to
get out of the camp with.

The Wide West company put a stop to the carrying away of "specimens," and
well they might, for every handful of the ore was worth a sun of some
consequence.  To show the exceeding value of the ore, I will remark that
a sixteen-hundred-pounds parcel of it was sold, just as it lay, at the
mouth of the shaft, at one dollar a pound; and the man who bought it
"packed" it on mules a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles, over the
mountains, to San Francisco, satisfied that it would yield at a rate that
would richly compensate him for his trouble.  The Wide West people also
commanded their foreman to refuse any but their own operatives permission
to enter the mine at any time or for any purpose.  I kept up my "blue"
meditations and Higbie kept up a deal of thinking, too, but of a
different sort.  He puzzled over the "rock," examined it with a glass,
inspected it in different lights and from different points of view, and
after each experiment delivered himself, in soliloquy, of one and the
same unvarying opinion in the same unvarying formula:

"It is not Wide West rock!"

He said once or twice that he meant to have a look into the Wide West
shaft if he got shot for it.  I was wretched, and did not care whether he
got a look into it or not.  He failed that day, and tried again at night;
failed again; got up at dawn and tried, and failed again.  Then he lay in
ambush in the sage brush hour after hour, waiting for the two or three
hands to adjourn to the shade of a boulder for dinner; made a start once,
but was premature--one of the men came back for something; tried it
again, but when almost at the mouth of the shaft, another of the men rose
up from behind the boulder as if to reconnoitre, and he dropped on the
ground and lay quiet; presently he crawled on his hands and knees to the
mouth of the shaft, gave a quick glance around, then seized the rope and
slid down the shaft.

He disappeared in the gloom of a "side drift" just as a head appeared in
the mouth of the shaft and somebody shouted "Hello!"--which he did not
answer.  He was not disturbed any more.  An hour later he entered the
cabin, hot, red, and ready to burst with smothered excitement, and
exclaimed in a stage whisper:

"I knew it!  We are rich!  IT'S A BLIND LEAD!"

I thought the very earth reeled under me.  Doubt--conviction--doubt
again--exultation--hope, amazement, belief, unbelief--every emotion
imaginable swept in wild procession through my heart and brain, and I
could not speak a word.  After a moment or two of this mental fury, I
shook myself to rights, and said:

"Say it again!"

"It's blind lead!"

"Cal, let's--let's burn the house--or kill somebody!  Let's get out where
there's room to hurrah!  But what is the use?  It is a hundred times too
good to be true."

"It's a blind lead, for a million!--hanging wall--foot wall--clay
casings--everything complete!" He swung his hat and gave three cheers,
and I cast doubt to the winds and chimed in with a will.  For I was worth
a million dollars, and did not care "whether school kept or not!"

But perhaps I ought to explain.  A "blind lead" is a lead or ledge that
does not "crop out" above the surface.  A miner does not know where to
look for such leads, but they are often stumbled upon by accident in the
course of driving a tunnel or sinking a shaft.  Higbie knew the Wide West
rock perfectly well, and the more he had examined the new developments
the more he was satisfied that the ore could not have come from the Wide
West vein.  And so had it occurred to him alone, of all the camp, that
there was a blind lead down in the shaft, and that even the Wide West
people themselves did not suspect it.  He was right.  When he went down
the shaft, he found that the blind lead held its independent way through
the Wide West vein, cutting it diagonally, and that it was enclosed in
its own well-defined casing-rocks and clay.  Hence it was public
property.  Both leads being perfectly well defined, it was easy for any
miner to see which one belonged to the Wide West and which did not.

We thought it well to have a strong friend, and therefore we brought the
foreman of the Wide West to our cabin that night and revealed the great
surprise to him.  Higbie said:

"We are going to take possession of this blind lead, record it and
establish ownership, and then forbid the Wide West company to take out
any more of the rock.  You cannot help your company in this matter
--nobody can help them.  I will go into the shaft with you and prove to
your entire satisfaction that it is a blind lead.  Now we propose to take
you in with us, and claim the blind lead in our three names.  What do you
say?"

What could a man say who had an opportunity to simply stretch forth his
hand and take possession of a fortune without risk of any kind and
without wronging any one or attaching the least taint of dishonor to his
name?  He could only say, "Agreed."

The notice was put up that night, and duly spread upon the recorder's
books before ten o'clock.  We claimed two hundred feet each--six hundred
feet in all--the smallest and compactest organization in the district,
and the easiest to manage.

No one can be so thoughtless as to suppose that we slept, that night.
Higbie and I went to bed at midnight, but it was only to lie broad awake
and think, dream, scheme.  The floorless, tumble-down cabin was a palace,
the ragged gray blankets silk, the furniture rosewood and mahogany.
Each new splendor that burst out of my visions of the future whirled me
bodily over in bed or jerked me to a sitting posture just as if an
electric battery had been applied to me.  We shot fragments of
conversation back and forth at each other.  Once Higbie said:

"When are you going home--to the States?"

"To-morrow!"--with an evolution or two, ending with a sitting position.
"Well--no--but next month, at furthest."

"We'll go in the same steamer."

"Agreed."

A pause.

"Steamer of the 10th?"

"Yes.  No, the 1st."

"All right."

Another pause.

"Where are you going to live?"  said Higbie.

"San Francisco."

"That's me!"

Pause.

"Too high--too much climbing"--from Higbie.

"What is?"

"I was thinking of Russian Hill--building a house up there."

"Too much climbing?  Shan't you keep a carriage?"

"Of course.  I forgot that."

Pause.

"Cal., what kind of a house are you going to build?"

"I was thinking about that.  Three-story and an attic."

"But what kind?"

"Well, I don't hardly know.  Brick, I suppose."

"Brick--bosh."

"Why?  What is your idea?"

"Brown stone front--French plate glass--billiard-room off the
dining-room--statuary and paintings--shrubbery and two-acre grass plat
--greenhouse--iron dog on the front stoop--gray horses--landau, and a
coachman with a bug on his hat!"

"By George!"

A long pause.

"Cal., when are you going to Europe?"

"Well--I hadn't thought of that.  When are you?"

"In the Spring."

"Going to be gone all summer?"

"All summer!  I shall remain there three years."

"No--but are you in earnest?"

"Indeed I am."

"I will go along too."

"Why of course you will."

"What part of Europe shall you go to?"

"All parts.  France, England, Germany--Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Syria,
Greece, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Egypt--all over--everywhere."

"I'm agreed."

"All right."

"Won't it be a swell trip!"

"We'll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it one,
anyway."

Another long pause.

"Higbie, we owe the butcher six dollars, and he has been threatening to
stop our--"

"Hang the butcher!"

"Amen."

And so it went on.  By three o'clock we found it was no use, and so we
got up and played cribbage and smoked pipes till sunrise.  It was my week
to cook.  I always hated cooking--now, I abhorred it.

The news was all over town.  The former excitement was great--this one
was greater still.  I walked the streets serene and happy.  Higbie said
the foreman had been offered two hundred thousand dollars for his third
of the mine.  I said I would like to see myself selling for any such
price.  My ideas were lofty.  My figure was a million.  Still, I honestly
believe that if I had been offered it, it would have had no other effect
than to make me hold off for more.

I found abundant enjoyment in being rich.  A man offered me a
three-hundred-dollar horse, and wanted to take my simple, unendorsed note
for it.  That brought the most realizing sense I had yet had that I was
actually rich, beyond shadow of doubt.  It was followed by numerous other
evidences of a similar nature--among which I may mention the fact of the
butcher leaving us a double supply of meat and saying nothing about
money.

By the laws of the district, the "locators" or claimants of a ledge were
obliged to do a fair and reasonable amount of work on their new property
within ten days after the date of the location, or the property was
forfeited, and anybody could go and seize it that chose.  So we
determined to go to work the next day.  About the middle of the
afternoon, as I was coming out of the post office, I met a Mr. Gardiner,
who told me that Capt. John Nye was lying dangerously ill at his place
(the "Nine-Mile Ranch"), and that he and his wife were not able to give
him nearly as much care and attention as his case demanded.  I said if he
would wait for me a moment, I would go down and help in the sick room.
I ran to the cabin to tell Higbie.  He was not there, but I left a note
on the table for him, and a few minutes later I left town in Gardiner's
wagon.



CHAPTER XLI.

Captain Nye was very ill indeed, with spasmodic rheumatism.  But the old
gentleman was himself--which is to say, he was kind-hearted and agreeable
when comfortable, but a singularly violent wild-cat when things did not
go well.  He would be smiling along pleasantly enough, when a sudden
spasm of his disease would take him and he would go out of his smile into
a perfect fury.  He would groan and wail and howl with the anguish, and
fill up the odd chinks with the most elaborate profanity that strong
convictions and a fine fancy could contrive.  With fair opportunity he
could swear very well and handle his adjectives with considerable
judgment; but when the spasm was on him it was painful to listen to him,
he was so awkward.  However, I had seen him nurse a sick man himself and
put up patiently with the inconveniences of the situation, and
consequently I was willing that he should have full license now that his
own turn had come.  He could not disturb me, with all his raving and
ranting, for my mind had work on hand, and it labored on diligently,
night and day, whether my hands were idle or employed.  I was altering
and amending the plans for my house, and thinking over the propriety of
having the billard-room in the attic, instead of on the same floor with
the dining-room; also, I was trying to decide between green and blue for
the upholstery of the drawing-room, for, although my preference was blue
I feared it was a color that would be too easily damaged by dust and
sunlight; likewise while I was content to put the coachman in a modest
livery, I was uncertain about a footman--I needed one, and was even
resolved to have one, but wished he could properly appear and perform his
functions out of livery, for I somewhat dreaded so much show; and yet,
inasmuch as my late grandfather had had a coachman and such things, but
no liveries, I felt rather drawn to beat him;--or beat his ghost, at any
rate; I was also systematizing the European trip, and managed to get it
all laid out, as to route and length of time to be devoted to it
--everything, with one exception--namely, whether to cross the desert from
Cairo to Jerusalem per camel, or go by sea to Beirut, and thence down
through the country per caravan.  Meantime I was writing to the friends
at home every day, instructing them concerning all my plans and
intentions, and directing them to look up a handsome homestead for my
mother and agree upon a price for it against my coming, and also
directing them to sell my share of the Tennessee land and tender the
proceeds to the widows' and orphans' fund of the typographical union of
which I had long been a member in good standing.  [This Tennessee land
had been in the possession of the family many years, and promised to
confer high fortune upon us some day; it still promises it, but in a less
violent way.]

When I had been nursing the Captain nine days he was somewhat better,
but very feeble.  During the afternoon we lifted him into a chair and
gave him an alcoholic vapor bath, and then set about putting him on the
bed again.  We had to be exceedingly careful, for the least jar produced
pain.  Gardiner had his shoulders and I his legs; in an unfortunate
moment I stumbled and the patient fell heavily on the bed in an agony of
torture.  I never heard a man swear so in my life.  He raved like a
maniac, and tried to snatch a revolver from the table--but I got it.
He ordered me out of the house, and swore a world of oaths that he would
kill me wherever he caught me when he got on his feet again.  It was
simply a passing fury, and meant nothing.  I knew he would forget it in
an hour, and maybe be sorry for it, too; but it angered me a little, at
the moment.  So much so, indeed, that I determined to go back to
Esmeralda.  I thought he was able to get along alone, now, since he was
on the war path.  I took supper, and as soon as the moon rose, began my
nine-mile journey, on foot.

Even millionaires needed no horses, in those days, for a mere nine-mile
jaunt without baggage.

As I "raised the hill" overlooking the town, it lacked fifteen minutes of
twelve.  I glanced at the hill over beyond the canyon, and in the bright
moonlight saw what appeared to be about half the population of the
village massed on and around the Wide West croppings.  My heart gave an
exulting bound, and I said to myself, "They have made a new strike
to-night--and struck it richer than ever, no doubt."  I started over
there, but gave it up.  I said the "strick" would keep, and I had climbed
hill enough for one night.  I went on down through the town, and as I was
passing a little German bakery, a woman ran out and begged me to come in
and help her.  She said her husband had a fit.  I went in, and judged she
was right--he appeared to have a hundred of them, compressed into one.
Two Germans were there, trying to hold him, and not making much of a
success of it.  I ran up the street half a block or so and routed out a
sleeping doctor, brought him down half dressed, and we four wrestled with
the maniac, and doctored, drenched and bled him, for more than an hour,
and the poor German woman did the crying.  He grew quiet, now, and the
doctor and I withdrew and left him to his friends.

It was a little after one o'clock.  As I entered the cabin door, tired
but jolly, the dingy light of a tallow candle revealed Higbie, sitting by
the pine table gazing stupidly at my note, which he held in his fingers,
and looking pale, old, and haggard.  I halted, and looked at him.  He
looked at me, stolidly.  I said:

"Higbie, what--what is it?"

"We're ruined--we didn't do the work--THE BLIND LEAD'S RELOCATED!"

It was enough.  I sat down sick, grieved--broken-hearted, indeed.  A
minute before, I was rich and brimful of vanity; I was a pauper now, and
very meek.  We sat still an hour, busy with thought, busy with vain and
useless self-upbraidings, busy with "Why didn't I do this, and why didn't
I do that," but neither spoke a word.  Then we dropped into mutual
explanations, and the mystery was cleared away.  It came out that Higbie
had depended on me, as I had on him, and as both of us had on the
foreman.  The folly of it!  It was the first time that ever staid and
steadfast Higbie had left an important matter to chance or failed to be
true to his full share of a responsibility.

But he had never seen my note till this moment, and this moment was the
first time he had been in the cabin since the day he had seen me last.
He, also, had left a note for me, on that same fatal afternoon--had
ridden up on horseback, and looked through the window, and being in a
hurry and not seeing me, had tossed the note into the cabin through a
broken pane.  Here it was, on the floor, where it had remained
undisturbed for nine days:

      "Don't fail to do the work before the ten days expire.  W.
      has passed through and given me notice.  I am to join him at
      Mono Lake, and we shall go on from there to-night.  He says
      he will find it this time, sure.  CAL."

"W."  meant Whiteman, of course.  That thrice accursed "cement!"

That was the way of it.  An old miner, like Higbie, could no more
withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this
"cement" foolishness, than he could refrain from eating when he was
famishing.  Higbie had been dreaming about the marvelous cement for
months; and now, against his better judgment, he had gone off and "taken
the chances" on my keeping secure a mine worth a million undiscovered
cement veins.  They had not been followed this time.  His riding out of
town in broad daylight was such a common-place thing to do that it had
not attracted any attention.  He said they prosecuted their search in the
fastnesses of the mountains during nine days, without success; they could
not find the cement.  Then a ghastly fear came over him that something
might have happened to prevent the doing of the necessary work to hold
the blind lead (though indeed he thought such a thing hardly possible),
and forthwith he started home with all speed.  He would have reached
Esmeralda in time, but his horse broke down and he had to walk a great
part of the distance.  And so it happened that as he came into Esmeralda
by one road, I entered it by another.  His was the superior energy,
however, for he went straight to the Wide West, instead of turning aside
as I had done--and he arrived there about five or ten minutes too late!
The "notice" was already up, the "relocation" of our mine completed
beyond recall, and the crowd rapidly dispersing.  He learned some facts
before he left the ground.  The foreman had not been seen about the
streets since the night we had located the mine--a telegram had called
him to California on a matter of life and death, it was said.  At any
rate he had done no work and the watchful eyes of the community were
taking note of the fact.  At midnight of this woful tenth day, the ledge
would be "relocatable," and by eleven o'clock the hill was black with men
prepared to do the relocating.  That was the crowd I had seen when I
fancied a new "strike" had been made--idiot that I was.

[We three had the same right to relocate the lead that other people had,
provided we were quick enough.] As midnight was announced, fourteen men,
duly armed and ready to back their proceedings, put up their "notice" and
proclaimed their ownership of the blind lead, under the new name of the
"Johnson."  But A. D. Allen our partner (the foreman) put in a sudden
appearance about that time, with a cocked revolver in his hand, and said
his name must be added to the list, or he would "thin out the Johnson
company some."  He was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to
be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was effected.  They
put in his name for a hundred feet, reserving to themselves the customary
two hundred feet each.  Such was the history of the night's events, as
Higbie gathered from a friend on the way home.

Higbie and I cleared out on a new mining excitement the next morning,
glad to get away from the scene of our sufferings, and after a month or
two of hardship and disappointment, returned to Esmeralda once more.
Then we learned that the Wide West and the Johnson companies had
consolidated; that the stock, thus united, comprised five thousand feet,
or shares; that the foreman, apprehending tiresome litigation, and
considering such a huge concern unwieldy, had sold his hundred feet for
ninety thousand dollars in gold and gone home to the States to enjoy it.
If the stock was worth such a gallant figure, with five thousand shares
in the corporation, it makes me dizzy to think what it would have been
worth with only our original six hundred in it.  It was the difference
between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it.  We
would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade
one little day on our property and so secured our ownership!

It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses,
and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is
easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history.  I can always have
it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million
dollars, once, for ten days.

A year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire
partner, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in
California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving,
he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred
dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way.
How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin
planning European trips and brown stone houses on Russian Hill!



CHAPTER XLII.

What to do next?

It was a momentous question.  I had gone out into the world to shift for
myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had endorsed for friends;
and although he left us a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginian
stock and its national distinction, I presently found that I could not
live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down with).  I had
gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled anybody
with my successes; still the list was before me, and the amplest liberty
in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to work--which I did not,
after being so wealthy.  I had once been a grocery clerk, for one day,
but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I was relieved from
further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he
could have my custom.  I had studied law an entire week, and then given
it up because it was so prosy and tiresome.  I had engaged briefly in the
study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix the bellows
so that it would blow itself, that the master turned me adrift in
disgrace, and told me I would come to no good.  I had been a bookseller's
clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read
with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to
put a limit to it.  I had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but
my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps
than soda water.  So I had to go.  I had made of myself a tolerable
printer, under the impression that I would be another Franklin some day,
but somehow had missed the connection thus far.  There was no berth open
in the Esmeralda Union, and besides I had always been such a slow
compositor that I looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices
of two years' standing; and when I took a "take," foremen were in the
habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time during the year."

I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no means
ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty
dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did long to stand behind a
wheel again and never roam any more--but I had been making such an ass of
myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my
European excursion that I did what many and many a poor disappointed
miner had done before; said "It is all over with me now, and I will never
go back home to be pitied--and snubbed."  I had been a private secretary,
a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less than
nothing in each, and now--

What to do next?

I yielded to Higbie's appeals and consented to try the mining once more.
We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little
rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep.  Higbie
descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened
up a deal of rock and dirt and then I went down with a long-handled
shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out.
You must brace the shovel forward with the side of your knee till it is
full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left
shoulder.  I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of the
shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck.
I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home.  I inwardly
resolved that I would starve before I would make a target of myself and
shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled shovel.

I sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid misery--so to
speak.  Now in pleasanter days I had amused myself with writing letters
to the chief paper of the Territory, the Virginia Daily Territorial
Enterprise, and had always been surprised when they appeared in print.
My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me
that they might have found something better to fill up with than my
literature.  I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from
the hill side, and finally I opened it.  Eureka!  [I never did know what
Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when
no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to me of
Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city editor of
the Enterprise.

I would have challenged the publisher in the "blind lead" days--I wanted
to fall down and worship him, now.  Twenty-Five Dollars a week--it looked
like bloated luxury--a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money.
But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent
unfitness for the position--and straightway, on top of this, my long
array of failures rose up before me.  Yet if I refused this place I must
presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing
necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a
humiliation since he was thirteen years old.  Not much to be proud of,
since it is so common--but then it was all I had to be proud of.  So I
was scared into being a city editor.  I would have declined, otherwise.
Necessity is the mother of "taking chances."  I do not doubt that if, at
that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the
original Hebrew, I would have accepted--albeit with diffidence and some
misgivings--and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.

I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation.  I was a rusty
looking city editor, I am free to confess--coatless, slouch hat, blue
woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to
the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt.  But I
secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver.

I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do
so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in
order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a
subject of remark.  But the other editors, and all the printers, carried
revolvers.  I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will
call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some
instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town
and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the
information gained, and write them out for publication.  And he added:

"Never say 'We learn' so-and-so, or 'It is reported,' or 'It is rumored,'
or 'We understand' so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute
facts, and then speak out and say 'It is so-and-so.'  Otherwise, people
will not put confidence in your news.  Unassailable certainly is the
thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation."

It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a
reporter commencing his article with "We understand," I gather a
suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he
ought to have done.  I moralize well, but I did not always practise well
when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too
often when there was a dearth of news.  I can never forget my first day's
experience as a reporter.  I wandered about town questioning everybody,
boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything.  At the end
of five hours my notebook was still barren.  I spoke to Mr. Goodman.  He
said:

"Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when
there were no fires or inquests.  Are there no hay wagons in from the
Truckee?  If there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all
that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know.

"It isn't sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business
like."

I canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay truck dragging
in from the country.  But I made affluent use of it.  I multiplied it by
sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made
sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay
as Virginia City had never seen in the world before.

This was encouraging.  Two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and I was
getting along.  Presently, when things began to look dismal again, a
desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more.  I never
was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life.  I said to the
murderer:

"Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day
which I can never forget.  If whole years of gratitude can be to you any
slight compensation, they shall be yours.  I was in trouble and you have
relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear.  Count me
your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor."

If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of itching
desire to do it.  I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to
details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret--namely,
that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work
him up too.

Next I discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the plaza and
found that they had lately come through the hostile Indian country and
had fared rather roughly.  I made the best of the item that the
circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within
rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I could
add particulars that would make the article much more interesting.
However, I found one wagon that was going on to California, and made some
judicious inquiries of the proprietor.  When I learned, through his short
and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on
and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, I got ahead of the
other papers, for I took down his list of names and added his party to
the killed and wounded.  Having more scope here, I put this wagon through
an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.

My two columns were filled.  When I read them over in the morning I felt
that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.  I reasoned within
myself that news, and stirring news, too, was what a paper needed, and I
felt that I was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it.
Mr. Goodman said that I was as good a reporter as Dan.  I desired no
higher commendation.  With encouragement like that, I felt that I could
take my pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and
the interests of the paper demanded it.



CHAPTER XLIII.

However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and learned the
run of the sources of information I ceased to require the aid of fancy to
any large extent, and became able to fill my columns without diverging
noticeably from the domain of fact.

I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we
swapped "regulars" with each other and thus economized work.  "Regulars"
are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, "clean-ups"
at the quartz mills, and inquests.  Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we
had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set
down among the "regulars."  We had lively papers in those days.  My great
competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union.  He was an
excellent reporter.  Once in three or four months he would get a little
intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker
although always ready to tamper a little with the enemy.  He had the
advantage of me in one thing; he could get the monthly public school
report and I could not, because the principal hated the Enterprise.
One snowy night when the report was due, I started out sadly wondering
how I was going to get it.  Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted
street I stumbled on Boggs and asked him where he was going.

"After the school report."

"I'll go along with you."

"No, sir.  I'll excuse you."

"Just as you say."

A saloon-keeper's boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and
Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully.  He gazed fondly after the boy
and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs.  I said:

"I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't,
I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get them to let me
have a proof of it after they have set it up, though I don't begin to
suppose they will.  Good night."

"Hold on a minute.  I don't mind getting the report and sitting around
with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down
to the principal's with me."

"Now you talk like a rational being.  Come along."

We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and
returned to our office.  It was a short document and soon copied.
Meantime Boggs helped himself to the punch.  I gave the manuscript back
to him and we started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots
near by.  We got the particulars with little loss of time, for it was
only an inferior sort of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the
public, and then we separated.  Away at three o'clock in the morning,
when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual
--for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on
the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion--the proprietor of the
Union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of
Boggs or the school report.  We stated the case, and all turned out to
help hunt for the delinquent.  We found him standing on a table in a
saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the
other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of
squandering the public moneys on education "when hundreds and hundreds of
honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey."  [Riotous
applause.]  He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for
hours.  We dragged him away and put him to bed.

Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me
accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass
its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the
misfortune had occurred.

But we were perfectly friendly.  The day that the school report was next
due, the proprietor of the "Genessee" mine furnished us a buggy and asked
us to go down and write something about the property--a very common
request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies,
for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people.  In due time
we arrived at the "mine"--nothing but a hole in the ground ninety feet
deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and
being lowered with a windlass.  The workmen had just gone off somewhere
to dinner.  I was not strong enough to lower Boggs's bulk; so I took an
unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the
rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start
of him, and then swung out over the shaft.  I reached the bottom muddy
and bruised about the elbows, but safe.  I lit the candle, made an
examination of the rock, selected some specimens and shouted to Boggs to
hoist away.  No answer.  Presently a head appeared in the circle of
daylight away aloft, and a voice came down:

"Are you all set?"

"All set--hoist away."

"Are you comfortable?"

"Perfectly."

"Could you wait a little?"

"Oh certainly--no particular hurry."

"Well--good by."

"Why?  Where are you going?"

"After the school report!"

And he did.  I staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when
they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock.
I walked home, too--five miles--up hill.  We had no school report next
morning; but the Union had.

Six months after my entry into journalism the grand "flush times" of
Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three
years.  All difficulty about filling up the "local department" ceased,
and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the
world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every
day.  Virginia had grown to be the "livest" town, for its age and
population, that America had ever produced.  The sidewalks swarmed with
people--to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter
to stem the human tide.  The streets themselves were just as crowded with
quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles.  The procession was
endless.  So great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half
an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street.  Joy sat on
every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in
every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in
every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart.  Money was
as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a
melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen.  There were military
companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres,
"hurdy-gurdy houses," wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows,
civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey
mill every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor,
a City Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and
Third Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police
force, two Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen
jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a
church.  The "flush times" were in magnificent flower!  Large fire-proof
brick buildings were going up in the principal streets, and the wooden
suburbs were spreading out in all directions.  Town lots soared up to
prices that were amazing.

The great "Comstock lode" stretched its opulent length straight through
the town from north to south, and every mine on it was in diligent
process of development.  One of these mines alone employed six hundred
and seventy-five men, and in the matter of elections the adage was, "as
the 'Gould and Curry' goes, so goes the city."  Laboring men's wages were
four and six dollars a day, and they worked in three "shifts" or gangs,
and the blasting and picking and shoveling went on without ceasing, night
and day.

The "city" of Virginia roosted royally midway up the steep side of Mount
Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and
in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty
miles!  It claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand,
and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets like bees
and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the
"Comstock," hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under those same
streets.  Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a
blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office.

The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it
like a roof.  Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street
below the descent was forty or fifty feet.  The fronts of the houses were
level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were
propped on lofty stilts; a man could stand at a rear first floor window
of a C street house and look down the chimneys of the row of houses below
him facing D street.  It was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere,
to ascend from D to A street, and you were panting and out of breath when
you got there; but you could turn around and go down again like a house
a-fire--so to speak.  The atmosphere was so rarified, on account of the
great altitude, that one's blood lay near the surface always, and the
scratch of a pin was a disaster worth worrying about, for the chances
were that a grievous erysipelas would ensue.  But to offset this, the
thin atmosphere seemed to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore,
to simply shoot your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely
to afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly certain
to be around looking for you within the month, and not with an opera
glass, either.

From Virginia's airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching
panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether the day was bright
or overcast, whether the sun was rising or setting, or flaming in the
zenith, or whether night and the moon held sway, the spectacle was always
impressive and beautiful.  Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray
dome, and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented
hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was
glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it, bordered
with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a delicate fringe;
and still further away the snowy mountains rose up and stretched their
long barrier to the filmy horizon--far enough beyond a lake that burned
in the desert like a fallen sun, though that, itself, lay fifty miles
removed.  Look from your window where you would, there was fascination in
the picture.  At rare intervals--but very rare--there were clouds in our
skies, and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this
mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of color that held the
eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music.



CHAPTER XLIV.

My salary was increased to forty dollars a week.  But I seldom drew it.
I had plenty of other resources, and what were two broad twenty-dollar
gold pieces to a man who had his pockets full of such and a cumbersome
abundance of bright half dollars besides?  [Paper money has never come
into use on the Pacific coast.]  Reporting was lucrative, and every man
in the town was lavish with his money and his "feet."  The city and all
the great mountain side were riddled with mining shafts.  There were more
mines than miners.  True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth
hauling to a mill, but everybody said, "Wait till the shaft gets down
where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!"  So nobody was
discouraged.  These were nearly all "wild cat" mines, and wholly
worthless, but nobody believed it then.  The "Ophir," the "Gould &
Curry," the "Mexican," and other great mines on the Comstock lead in
Virginia and Gold Hill were turning out huge piles of rich rock every
day, and every man believed that his little wild cat claim was as good as
any on the "main lead" and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a
foot when he "got down where it came in solid."  Poor fellow, he was
blessedly blind to the fact that he never would see that day.  So the
thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by
day, and all men were beside themselves with hope and happiness.  How
they labored, prophesied, exulted!  Surely nothing like it was ever seen
before since the world began.  Every one of these wild cat mines--not
mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines--was incorporated and
had handsomely engraved "stock" and the stock was salable, too.  It was
bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day.  You
could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there
was no lack of them), put up a "notice" with a grandiloquent name in it,
start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove
that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market
and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars.  To make money,
and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.

Every man owned "feet" in fifty different wild cat mines and considered
his fortune made.  Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!
One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a
wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not
located on the mother vein, i.e., the "Comstock") yielded a ton of rock
worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting
too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought
of such a thing.  They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.

New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run
straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty
"feet," and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of
it.  They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said
something.  Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect
that the "indications" were good, or that the ledge was "six feet wide,"
or that the rock "resembled the Comstock" (and so it did--but as a
general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you
down).  If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of
the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very
marvel in silver discoveries had transpired.  If the mine was a
"developed" one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn't), we
praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in
the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out
of ecstasies--but never said a word about the rock.  We would squander
half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed
pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of
admiration of the "gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent" of the mine
--but never utter a whisper about the rock.  And those people were always
pleased, always satisfied.  Occasionally we patched up and varnished our
reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving
some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones
rattle--and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting
notoriety thus conferred upon it.

There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable.
We received presents of "feet" every day.  If we needed a hundred dollars
or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would
ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot.  I had a trunk about half
full of "stock."  When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a
high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its stock
--and generally found it.

The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us
little, because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were
content to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it.
My pile of stock was not all given to me by people who wished their
claims "noticed."  At least half of it was given me by persons who had no
thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal
"thank you;" and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that.
If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in
your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a
few.  That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the "flush
times."  Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual
custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends
without the asking.

Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a
man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and
binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly
afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted.  Mr. Stewart
(Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet
of "Justis" stock if I would walk over to his office.  It was worth five
or ten dollars a foot.  I asked him to make the offer good for next day,
as I was just going to dinner.  He said he would not be in town; so I
risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock.  Within the week the
price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty,
but nothing could make that man yield.  I suppose he sold that stock of
mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket.  [My revenge will
be found in the accompanying portrait.]  I met three friends one
afternoon, who said they had been buying "Overman" stock at auction at
eight dollars a foot.  One said if I would come up to his office he would
give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said
he would do the same.  But I was going after an inquest and could not
stop.  A few weeks afterward they sold all their "Overman" at six hundred
dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also
to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried
to force on me.

These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still
confine myself strictly to the truth.  Many a time friends gave us as
much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars
a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a
guest a cigar.  These were "flush times" indeed!  I thought they were
going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.

To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community,
I will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for
cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins--and
not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city;
and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market.  It was
small matter who the cellar belonged to--the "ledge" belonged to the
finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as
the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in
Nevada--or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to
work it.  Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly
shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the
ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder!  It has been often done
in California.  In the middle of one of the principal business streets of
Virginia, a man "located" a mining claim and began a shaft on it.  He
gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of
clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue
for damages.  I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of
another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that "East India"
stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient
tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and
see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely
resembled one.

One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to "salt" a wild cat claim and
sell out while the excitement was up.  The process was simple.

The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon
load of rich "Comstock" ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and
piled the rest by its side, above ground.  Then he showed the property to
a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure.  Of course the wagon
load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase.
A most remarkable case of "salting" was that of the "North Ophir."
It was claimed that this vein was a "remote extension" of the original
"Ophir," a valuable mine on the "Comstock."  For a few days everybody was
talking about the rich developments in the North Ophir.  It was said that
it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps.  I went to the
place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the
bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish,
unpromising rock.  One would as soon expect to find silver in a
grindstone.  We got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle,
and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black,
bullet-looking pellets of unimpeachable "native" silver.  Nobody had ever
heard of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer
novelty.  The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure
the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding
interest and prepared to quit the stage once more--he was always doing
that.  And then it transpired that the mine had been "salted"--and not in
any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and
peculiarly original and outrageous fashion.  On one of the lumps of
"native" silver was discovered the minted legend, "TED STATES OF," and
then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted
half-dollars!  The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they
resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in
the bottom of the shaft.  It is literally true.  Of course the price of
the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined.  But for
this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.



CHAPTER XLV.

The "flush times" held bravely on.  Something over two years before, Mr.
Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and
set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of
Virginia.  They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken
weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die.  They bought it,
type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.
The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office,
bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment
and it was a small one, too.  The editors and printers slept on the
floor, a Chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the
general dinner table.  But now things were changed.  The paper was a
great daily, printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three
compositors; the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the
advertising rates were exorbitant, and the columns crowded.  The paper
was clearing from six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the
"Enterprise Building" was finished and ready for occupation--a stately
fireproof brick.  Every day from five all the way up to eleven columns
of "live" advertisements were left out or crowded into spasmodic and
irregular "supplements."

The "Gould & Curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at
a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars.  Gould &
Curry stock paid heavy dividends--a rare thing, and an experience
confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the "main lead," the
"Comstock."  The Superintendent of the Gould & Curry lived, rent free, in
a fine house built and furnished by the company.  He drove a fine pair of
horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve
thousand dollars a year.  The superintendent of another of the great
mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand
dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to
have had one per cent. on the gross yield of the bullion likewise.

Money was wonderfully plenty.  The trouble was, not how to get it,--but
how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.  And so it
was a happy thing that just at this juncture the news came over the wires
that a great United States Sanitary Commission had been formed and money
was wanted for the relief of the wounded sailors and soldiers of the
Union languishing in the Eastern hospitals.  Right on the heels of it
came word that San Francisco had responded superbly before the telegram
was half a day old.  Virginia rose as one man!  A Sanitary Committee was
hurriedly organized, and its chairman mounted a vacant cart in C street
and tried to make the clamorous multitude understand that the rest of the
committee were flying hither and thither and working with all their might
and main, and that if the town would only wait an hour, an office would
be ready, books opened, and the Commission prepared to receive
contributions.  His voice was drowned and his information lost in a
ceaseless roar of cheers, and demands that the money be received now
--they swore they would not wait.  The chairman pleaded and argued, but,
deaf to all entreaty, men plowed their way through the throng and rained
checks of gold coin into the cart and skurried away for more.  Hands
clutching money, were thrust aloft out of the jam by men who hoped this
eloquent appeal would cleave a road their strugglings could not open.
The very Chinamen and Indians caught the excitement and dashed their half
dollars into the cart without knowing or caring what it was all about.
Women plunged into the crowd, trimly attired, fought their way to the
cart with their coin, and emerged again, by and by, with their apparel in
a state of hopeless dilapidation.  It was the wildest mob Virginia had
ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable; and when at last it
abated its fury and dispersed, it had not a penny in its pocket.

To use its own phraseology, it came there "flush" and went away "busted."

After that, the Commission got itself into systematic working order, and
for weeks the contributions flowed into its treasury in a generous
stream.  Individuals and all sorts of organizations levied upon
themselves a regular weekly tax for the sanitary fund, graduated
according to their means, and there was not another grand universal
outburst till the famous "Sanitary Flour Sack" came our way.  Its history
is peculiar and interesting.  A former schoolmate of mine, by the name of
Reuel Gridley, was living at the little city of Austin, in the Reese
river country, at this time, and was the Democratic candidate for mayor.
He and the Republican candidate made an agreement that the defeated man
should be publicly presented with a fifty-pound sack of flour by the
successful one, and should carry it home on his shoulder.  Gridley was
defeated.  The new mayor gave him the sack of flour, and he shouldered it
and carried it a mile or two, from Lower Austin to his home in Upper
Austin, attended by a band of music and the whole population.  Arrived
there, he said he did not need the flour, and asked what the people
thought he had better do with it.  A voice said:

"Sell it to the highest bidder, for the benefit of the Sanitary fund."

The suggestion was greeted with a round of applause, and Gridley mounted
a dry-goods box and assumed the role of auctioneer.  The bids went higher
and higher, as the sympathies of the pioneers awoke and expanded, till at
last the sack was knocked down to a mill man at two hundred and fifty
dollars, and his check taken.  He was asked where he would have the flour
delivered, and he said:

"Nowhere--sell it again."

Now the cheers went up royally, and the multitude were fairly in the
spirit of the thing.  So Gridley stood there and shouted and perspired
till the sun went down; and when the crowd dispersed he had sold the sack
to three hundred different people, and had taken in eight thousand
dollars in gold.  And still the flour sack was in his possession.

The news came to Virginia, and a telegram went back:

"Fetch along your flour sack!"

Thirty-six hours afterward Gridley arrived, and an afternoon mass meeting
was held in the Opera House, and the auction began.  But the sack had
come sooner than it was expected; the people were not thoroughly aroused,
and the sale dragged.  At nightfall only five thousand dollars had been
secured, and there was a crestfallen feeling in the community.  However,
there was no disposition to let the matter rest here and acknowledge
vanquishment at the hands of the village of Austin.  Till late in the
night the principal citizens were at work arranging the morrow's
campaign, and when they went to bed they had no fears for the result.
At eleven the next morning a procession of open carriages, attended by
clamorous bands of music and adorned with a moving display of flags,
filed along C street and was soon in danger of blockade by a huzzaing
multitude of citizens.  In the first carriage sat Gridley, with the flour
sack in prominent view, the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt
lettering; also in the same carriage sat the mayor and the recorder.
The other carriages contained the Common Council, the editors and
reporters, and other people of imposing consequence.  The crowd pressed
to the corner of C and Taylor streets, expecting the sale to begin there,
but they were disappointed, and also unspeakably surprised; for the
cavalcade moved on as if Virginia had ceased to be of importance, and
took its way over the "divide," toward the small town of Gold Hill.
Telegrams had gone ahead to Gold Hill, Silver City and Dayton, and those
communities were at fever heat and rife for the conflict.  It was a very
hot day, and wonderfully dusty.  At the end of a short half hour we
descended into Gold Hill with drums beating and colors flying, and
enveloped in imposing clouds of dust.  The whole population--men, women
and children, Chinamen and Indians, were massed in the main street, all
the flags in town were at the mast head, and the blare of the bands was
drowned in cheers.  Gridley stood up and asked who would make the first
bid for the National Sanitary Flour Sack.  Gen. W. said:

"The Yellow Jacket silver mining company offers a thousand dollars,
coin!"

A tempest of applause followed.  A telegram carried the news to Virginia,
and fifteen minutes afterward that city's population was massed in the
streets devouring the tidings--for it was part of the programme that the
bulletin boards should do a good work that day.  Every few minutes a new
dispatch was bulletined from Gold Hill, and still the excitement grew.
Telegrams began to return to us from Virginia beseeching Gridley to bring
back the flour sack; but such was not the plan of the campaign.  At the
end of an hour Gold Hill's small population had paid a figure for the
flour sack that awoke all the enthusiasm of Virginia when the grand total
was displayed upon the bulletin boards.  Then the Gridley cavalcade moved
on, a giant refreshed with new lager beer and plenty of it--for the
people brought it to the carriages without waiting to measure it--and
within three hours more the expedition had carried Silver City and Dayton
by storm and was on its way back covered with glory.  Every move had been
telegraphed and bulletined, and as the procession entered Virginia and
filed down C street at half past eight in the evening the town was abroad
in the thoroughfares, torches were glaring, flags flying, bands playing,
cheer on cheer cleaving the air, and the city ready to surrender at
discretion.  The auction began, every bid was greeted with bursts of
applause, and at the end of two hours and a half a population of fifteen
thousand souls had paid in coin for a fifty-pound sack of flour a sum
equal to forty thousand dollars in greenbacks!  It was at a rate in the
neighborhood of three dollars for each man, woman and child of the
population.  The grand total would have been twice as large, but the
streets were very narrow, and hundreds who wanted to bid could not get
within a block of the stand, and could not make themselves heard.  These
grew tired of waiting and many of them went home long before the auction
was over.  This was the greatest day Virginia ever saw, perhaps.

Gridley sold the sack in Carson city and several California towns; also
in San Francisco.  Then he took it east and sold it in one or two
Atlantic cities, I think.  I am not sure of that, but I know that he
finally carried it to St. Louis, where a monster Sanitary Fair was being
held, and after selling it there for a large sum and helping on the
enthusiasm by displaying the portly silver bricks which Nevada's donation
had produced, he had the flour baked up into small cakes and retailed
them at high prices.

It was estimated that when the flour sack's mission was ended it had been
sold for a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
greenbacks!  This is probably the only instance on record where common
family flour brought three thousand dollars a pound in the public market.

It is due to Mr. Gridley's memory to mention that the expenses of his
sanitary flour sack expedition of fifteen thousand miles, going and
returning, were paid in large part if not entirely, out of his own
pocket.  The time he gave to it was not less than three months.
Mr. Gridley was a soldier in the Mexican war and a pioneer Californian.
He died at Stockton, California, in December, 1870, greatly regretted.



CHAPTER XLVI.

There were nabobs in those days--in the "flush times," I mean.  Every
rich strike in the mines created one or two.  I call to mind several of
these.  They were careless, easy-going fellows, as a general thing, and
the community at large was as much benefited by their riches as they were
themselves--possibly more, in some cases.

Two cousins, teamsters, did some hauling for a man and had to take a
small segregated portion of a silver mine in lieu of $300 cash.  They
gave an outsider a third to open the mine, and they went on teaming.  But
not long.  Ten months afterward the mine was out of debt and paying each
owner $8,000 to $10,000 a month--say $100,000 a year.

One of the earliest nabobs that Nevada was delivered of wore $6,000 worth
of diamonds in his bosom, and swore he was unhappy because he could not
spend his money as fast as he made it.

Another Nevada nabob boasted an income that often reached $16,000 a
month; and he used to love to tell how he had worked in the very mine
that yielded it, for five dollars a day, when he first came to the
country.

The silver and sage-brush State has knowledge of another of these pets of
fortune--lifted from actual poverty to affluence almost in a single
night--who was able to offer $100,000 for a position of high official
distinction, shortly afterward, and did offer it--but failed to get it,
his politics not being as sound as his bank account.

Then there was John Smith.  He was a good, honest, kind-hearted soul,
born and reared in the lower ranks of life, and miraculously ignorant.
He drove a team, and owned a small ranch--a ranch that paid him a
comfortable living, for although it yielded but little hay, what little
it did yield was worth from $250 to $300 in gold per ton in the market.
Presently Smith traded a few acres of the ranch for a small undeveloped
silver mine in Gold Hill.  He opened the mine and built a little
unpretending ten-stamp mill.  Eighteen months afterward he retired from
the hay business, for his mining income had reached a most comfortable
figure.  Some people said it was $30,000 a month, and others said it was
$60,000.  Smith was very rich at any rate.

And then he went to Europe and traveled.  And when he came back he was
never tired of telling about the fine hogs he had seen in England, and
the gorgeous sheep he had seen in Spain, and the fine cattle he had
noticed in the vicinity of Rome.  He was full of wonders of the old
world, and advised everybody to travel.  He said a man never imagined
what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled.

One day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $500, which was
to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run
of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours.  Next day, toward noon, the
figures were all in the purser's hands in sealed envelopes.  Smith was
serene and happy, for he had been bribing the engineer.  But another
party won the prize!  Smith said:

"Here, that won't do!  He guessed two miles wider of the mark than I did."

The purser said, "Mr. Smith, you missed it further than any man on board.
We traveled two hundred and eight miles yesterday."

"Well, sir," said Smith, "that's just where I've got you, for I guessed
two hundred and nine.  If you'll look at my figgers again you'll find a 2
and two 0's, which stands for 200, don't it?--and after 'em you'll find a
9 (2009), which stands for two hundred and nine.  I reckon I'll take that
money, if you please."

The Gould & Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all
belonged originally to the two men whose names it bears.  Mr. Curry owned
two thirds of it--and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred
dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in
hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch.  And he said that Gould
sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of
whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending
stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life.  Four years afterward
the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven
millions six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin.

In the early days a poverty-stricken Mexican who lived in a canyon
directly back of Virginia City, had a stream of water as large as a man's
wrist trickling from the hill-side on his premises.  The Ophir Company
segregated a hundred feet of their mine and traded it to him for the
stream of water.  The hundred feet proved to be the richest part of the
entire mine; four years after the swap, its market value (including its
mill) was $1,500,000.

An individual who owned twenty feet in the Ophir mine before its great
riches were revealed to men, traded it for a horse, and a very sorry
looking brute he was, too.  A year or so afterward, when Ophir stock went
up to $3,000 a foot, this man, who had not a cent, used to say he was the
most startling example of magnificence and misery the world had ever
seen--because he was able to ride a sixty-thousand-dollar horse--yet
could not scrape up cash enough to buy a saddle, and was obliged to
borrow one or ride bareback.  He said if fortune were to give him another
sixty-thousand-dollar horse it would ruin him.

A youth of nineteen, who was a telegraph operator in Virginia on a salary
of a hundred dollars a month, and who, when he could not make out German
names in the list of San Francisco steamer arrivals, used to ingeniously
select and supply substitutes for them out of an old Berlin city
directory, made himself rich by watching the mining telegrams that passed
through his hands and buying and selling stocks accordingly, through a
friend in San Francisco.  Once when a private dispatch was sent from
Virginia announcing a rich strike in a prominent mine and advising that
the matter be kept secret till a large amount of the stock could be
secured, he bought forty "feet" of the stock at twenty dollars a foot,
and afterward sold half of it at eight hundred dollars a foot and the
rest at double that figure.  Within three months he was worth $150,000,
and had resigned his telegraphic position.

Another telegraph operator who had been discharged by the company for
divulging the secrets of the office, agreed with a moneyed man in San
Francisco to furnish him the result of a great Virginia mining lawsuit
within an hour after its private reception by the parties to it in San
Francisco.  For this he was to have a large percentage of the profits on
purchases and sales made on it by his fellow-conspirator.  So he went,
disguised as a teamster, to a little wayside telegraph office in the
mountains, got acquainted with the operator, and sat in the office day
after day, smoking his pipe, complaining that his team was fagged out and
unable to travel--and meantime listening to the dispatches as they passed
clicking through the machine from Virginia.  Finally the private dispatch
announcing the result of the lawsuit sped over the wires, and as soon as
he heard it he telegraphed his friend in San Francisco:

"Am tired waiting.  Shall sell the team and go home."

It was the signal agreed upon.  The word "waiting" left out, would have
signified that the suit had gone the other way.

The mock teamster's friend picked up a deal of the mining stock, at low
figures, before the news became public, and a fortune was the result.

For a long time after one of the great Virginia mines had been
incorporated, about fifty feet of the original location were still in the
hands of a man who had never signed the incorporation papers.  The stock
became very valuable, and every effort was made to find this man, but he
had disappeared.  Once it was heard that he was in New York, and one or
two speculators went east but failed to find him.  Once the news came
that he was in the Bermudas, and straightway a speculator or two hurried
east and sailed for Bermuda--but he was not there.  Finally he was heard
of in Mexico, and a friend of his, a bar-keeper on a salary, scraped
together a little money and sought him out, bought his "feet" for a
hundred dollars, returned and sold the property for $75,000.

But why go on?  The traditions of Silverland are filled with instances
like these, and I would never get through enumerating them were I to
attempt do it.  I only desired to give, the reader an idea of a
peculiarity of the "flush times" which I could not present so strikingly
in any other way, and which some mention of was necessary to a realizing
comprehension of the time and the country.

I was personally acquainted with the majority of the nabobs I have
referred to, and so, for old acquaintance sake, I have shifted their
occupations and experiences around in such a way as to keep the Pacific
public from recognizing these once notorious men.  No longer notorious,
for the majority of them have drifted back into poverty and obscurity
again.

In Nevada there used to be current the story of an adventure of two of
her nabobs, which may or may not have occurred.  I give it for what it is
worth:

Col. Jim had seen somewhat of the world, and knew more or less of its
ways; but Col. Jack was from the back settlements of the States, had led
a life of arduous toil, and had never seen a city.  These two, blessed
with sudden wealth, projected a visit to New York,--Col. Jack to see the
sights, and Col. Jim to guard his unsophistication from misfortune.  They
reached San Francisco in the night, and sailed in the morning.  Arrived
in New York, Col.  Jack said:

"I've heard tell of carriages all my life, and now I mean to have a ride
in one; I don't care what it costs.  Come along."

They stepped out on the sidewalk, and Col. Jim called a stylish barouche.
But Col. Jack said:

"No, sir!  None of your cheap-John turn-outs for me.  I'm here to have a
good time, and money ain't any object.  I mean to have the nobbiest rig
that's going.  Now here comes the very trick.  Stop that yaller one with
the pictures on it--don't you fret--I'll stand all the expenses myself."

So Col. Jim stopped an empty omnibus, and they got in.  Said Col. Jack:

"Ain't it gay, though?  Oh, no, I reckon not!  Cushions, and windows, and
pictures, till you can't rest.  What would the boys say if they could see
us cutting a swell like this in New York?  By George, I wish they could
see us."

Then he put his head out of the window, and shouted to the driver:

"Say, Johnny, this suits me!--suits yours truly, you bet, you!  I want
this shebang all day.  I'm on it, old man!  Let 'em out!  Make 'em go!
We'll make it all right with you, sonny!"

The driver passed his hand through the strap-hole, and tapped for his
fare--it was before the gongs came into common use.  Col. Jack took the
hand, and shook it cordially.  He said:

"You twig me, old pard!  All right between gents.  Smell of that, and see
how you like it!"

And he put a twenty-dollar gold piece in the driver's hand.  After a
moment the driver said he could not make change.

"Bother the change!  Ride it out.  Put it in your pocket."

Then to Col.  Jim, with a sounding slap on his thigh:

"Ain't it style, though?  Hanged if I don't hire this thing every day for
a week."

The omnibus stopped, and a young lady got in.  Col. Jack stared a moment,
then nudged Col. Jim with his elbow:

"Don't say a word," he whispered.  "Let her ride, if she wants to.
Gracious, there's room enough."

The young lady got out her porte-monnaie, and handed her fare to Col.
Jack.

"What's this for?"  said he.

"Give it to the driver, please."

"Take back your money, madam.  We can't allow it.  You're welcome to ride
here as long as you please, but this shebang's chartered, and we can't
let you pay a cent."

The girl shrunk into a corner, bewildered.  An old lady with a basket
climbed in, and proffered her fare.

"Excuse me," said Col. Jack.  "You're perfectly welcome here, madam, but
we can't allow you to pay.  Set right down there, mum, and don't you be
the least uneasy.  Make yourself just as free as if you was in your own
turn-out."

Within two minutes, three gentlemen, two fat women, and a couple of
children, entered.

"Come right along, friends," said Col.  Jack; "don't mind us.  This is a
free blow-out."  Then he whispered to Col.  Jim,

"New York ain't no sociable place, I don't reckon--it ain't no name for
it!"

He resisted every effort to pass fares to the driver, and made everybody
cordially welcome.  The situation dawned on the people, and they pocketed
their money, and delivered themselves up to covert enjoyment of the
episode.  Half a dozen more passengers entered.

"Oh, there's plenty of room," said Col.  Jack.  "Walk right in, and make
yourselves at home.  A blow-out ain't worth anything as a blow-out,
unless a body has company."  Then in a whisper to Col.  Jim: "But ain't
these New Yorkers friendly?  And ain't they cool about it, too?  Icebergs
ain't anywhere.  I reckon they'd tackle a hearse, if it was going their
way."

More passengers got in; more yet, and still more.  Both seats were
filled, and a file of men were standing up, holding on to the cleats
overhead.  Parties with baskets and bundles were climbing up on the roof.
Half-suppressed laughter rippled up from all sides.

"Well, for clean, cool, out-and-out cheek, if this don't bang anything
that ever I saw, I'm an Injun!" whispered Col. Jack.

A Chinaman crowded his way in.

"I weaken!" said Col. Jack.  "Hold on, driver!  Keep your seats, ladies,
and gents.  Just make yourselves free--everything's paid for.  Driver,
rustle these folks around as long as they're a mind to go--friends of
ours, you know.  Take them everywheres--and if you want more money, come
to the St. Nicholas, and we'll make it all right.  Pleasant journey to
you, ladies and gents--go it just as long as you please--it shan't cost
you a cent!"

The two comrades got out, and Col. Jack said:

"Jimmy, it's the sociablest place I ever saw.  The Chinaman waltzed in as
comfortable as anybody.  If we'd staid awhile, I reckon we'd had some
niggers.  B' George, we'll have to barricade our doors to-night, or some
of these ducks will be trying to sleep with us."



CHAPTER XLVII.

Somebody has said that in order to know a community, one must observe the
style of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most
ceremony.  I cannot say which class we buried with most eclat in our
"flush times," the distinguished public benefactor or the distinguished
rough--possibly the two chief grades or grand divisions of society
honored their illustrious dead about equally; and hence, no doubt the
philosopher I have quoted from would have needed to see two
representative funerals in Virginia before forming his estimate of the
people.

There was a grand time over Buck Fanshaw when he died.  He was a
representative citizen.  He had "killed his man"--not in his own quarrel,
it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset by numbers.
He had kept a sumptuous saloon.  He had been the proprietor of a dashing
helpmeet whom he could have discarded without the formality of a divorce.
He had held a high position in the fire department and been a very
Warwick in politics.  When he died there was great lamentation throughout
the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum of society.

On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of a
wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body,
cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his
neck--and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with
intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by
the visitation of God."  What could the world do without juries?

Prodigious preparations were made for the funeral.  All the vehicles in
town were hired, all the saloons put in mourning, all the municipal and
fire-company flags hung at half-mast, and all the firemen ordered to
muster in uniform and bring their machines duly draped in black.  Now
--let us remark in parenthesis--as all the peoples of the earth had
representative adventurers in the Silverland, and as each adventurer had
brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination
made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and
copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in
the mines of California in the "early days."  Slang was the language of
Nevada.  It was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood.
Such phrases as "You bet!"  "Oh, no, I reckon not!"  "No Irish need
apply," and a hundred others, became so common as to fall from the lips
of a speaker unconsciously--and very often when they did not touch the
subject under discussion and consequently failed to mean anything.

After Buck Fanshaw's inquest, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood
was held, for nothing can be done on the Pacific coast without a public
meeting and an expression of sentiment.  Regretful resolutions were
passed and various committees appointed; among others, a committee of one
was deputed to call on the minister, a fragile, gentle, spiritual new
fledgling from an Eastern theological seminary, and as yet unacquainted
with the ways of the mines.  The committeeman, "Scotty" Briggs, made his
visit; and in after days it was worth something to hear the minister tell
about it.  Scotty was a stalwart rough, whose customary suit, when on
weighty official business, like committee work, was a fire helmet,
flaming red flannel shirt, patent leather belt with spanner and revolver
attached, coat hung over arm, and pants stuffed into boot tops.
He formed something of a contrast to the pale theological student.  It is
fair to say of Scotty, however, in passing, that he had a warm heart, and
a strong love for his friends, and never entered into a quarrel when he
could reasonably keep out of it.  Indeed, it was commonly said that
whenever one of Scotty's fights was investigated, it always turned out
that it had originally been no affair of his, but that out of native
good-heartedness he had dropped in of his own accord to help the man who
was getting the worst of it.  He and Buck Fanshaw were bosom friends, for
years, and had often taken adventurous "pot-luck" together.  On one
occasion, they had thrown off their coats and taken the weaker side in a
fight among strangers, and after gaining a hard-earned victory, turned
and found that the men they were helping had deserted early, and not only
that, but had stolen their coats and made off with them!  But to return
to Scotty's visit to the minister.  He was on a sorrowful mission, now,
and his face was the picture of woe.  Being admitted to the presence he
sat down before the clergyman, placed his fire-hat on an unfinished
manuscript sermon under the minister's nose, took from it a red silk
handkerchief, wiped his brow and heaved a sigh of dismal impressiveness,
explanatory of his business.

He choked, and even shed tears; but with an effort he mastered his voice
and said in lugubrious tones:

"Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?"

"Am I the--pardon me, I believe I do not understand?"

With another sigh and a half-sob, Scotty rejoined:

"Why you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you
would give us a lift, if we'd tackle you--that is, if I've got the rights
of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door."

"I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door."

"The which?"

"The spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary
adjoins these premises."

Scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said:

"You ruther hold over me, pard.  I reckon I can't call that hand.  Ante
and pass the buck."

"How? I beg pardon.  What did I understand you to say?"

"Well, you've ruther got the bulge on me.  Or maybe we've both got the
bulge, somehow.  You don't smoke me and I don't smoke you.  You see, one
of the boys has passed in his checks and we want to give him a good
send-off, and so the thing I'm on now is to roust out somebody to jerk
a little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome."

"My friend, I seem to grow more and more bewildered.  Your observations
are wholly incomprehensible to me.  Cannot you simplify them in some way?
At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now.  Would it
not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements
of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and
allegory?"

Another pause, and more reflection.  Then, said Scotty:

"I'll have to pass, I judge."

"How?"

"You've raised me out, pard."

"I still fail to catch your meaning."

"Why, that last lead of yourn is too many for me--that's the idea.  I
can't neither-trump nor follow suit."

The clergyman sank back in his chair perplexed.  Scotty leaned his head
on his hand and gave himself up to thought.

Presently his face came up, sorrowful but confident.

"I've got it now, so's you can savvy," he said.  "What we want is a
gospel-sharp.  See?"

"A what?"

"Gospel-sharp.  Parson."

"Oh!  Why did you not say so before?  I am a clergyman--a parson."

"Now you talk!  You see my blind and straddle it like a man.  Put it
there!"--extending a brawny paw, which closed over the minister's small
hand and gave it a shake indicative of fraternal sympathy and fervent
gratification.

"Now we're all right, pard.  Let's start fresh.  Don't you mind my
snuffling a little--becuz we're in a power of trouble.  You see, one of
the boys has gone up the flume--"

"Gone where?"

"Up the flume--throwed up the sponge, you understand."

"Thrown up the sponge?"

"Yes--kicked the bucket--"

"Ah--has departed to that mysterious country from whose bourne no
traveler returns."

"Return!  I reckon not.  Why pard, he's dead!"

"Yes, I understand."

"Oh, you do?  Well I thought maybe you might be getting tangled some
more.  Yes, you see he's dead again--"

"Again?  Why, has he ever been dead before?"

"Dead before?  No!  Do you reckon a man has got as many lives as a cat?
But you bet you he's awful dead now, poor old boy, and I wish I'd never
seen this day.  I don't want no better friend than Buck Fanshaw.
I knowed him by the back; and when I know a man and like him, I freeze to
him--you hear me.  Take him all round, pard, there never was a bullier
man in the mines.  No man ever knowed Buck Fanshaw to go back on a
friend.  But it's all up, you know, it's all up.  It ain't no use.
They've scooped him."

"Scooped him?"

"Yes--death has.  Well, well, well, we've got to give him up.  Yes
indeed.  It's a kind of a hard world, after all, ain't it?  But pard, he
was a rustler!  You ought to seen him get started once.  He was a bully
boy with a glass eye!  Just spit in his face and give him room according
to his strength, and it was just beautiful to see him peel and go in.
He was the worst son of a thief that ever drawed breath.  Pard, he was on
it!  He was on it bigger than an Injun!"

"On it?  On what?"

"On the shoot.  On the shoulder.  On the fight, you understand.
He didn't give a continental for any body.  Beg your pardon, friend, for
coming so near saying a cuss-word--but you see I'm on an awful strain, in
this palaver, on account of having to cramp down and draw everything so
mild.  But we've got to give him up.  There ain't any getting around
that, I don't reckon.  Now if we can get you to help plant him--"

"Preach the funeral discourse?  Assist at the obsequies?"

"Obs'quies is good.  Yes.  That's it--that's our little game.  We are
going to get the thing up regardless, you know.  He was always nifty
himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain't going to be no slouch
--solid silver door-plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse, and a
nigger on the box in a biled shirt and a plug hat--how's that for high?
And we'll take care of you, pard.  We'll fix you all right.  There'll be
a kerridge for you; and whatever you want, you just 'scape out and we'll
'tend to it.  We've got a shebang fixed up for you to stand behind, in
No. 1's house, and don't you be afraid.  Just go in and toot your horn,
if you don't sell a clam.  Put Buck through as bully as you can, pard,
for anybody that knowed him will tell you that he was one of the whitest
men that was ever in the mines.  You can't draw it too strong.  He never
could stand it to see things going wrong.  He's done more to make this
town quiet and peaceable than any man in it.  I've seen him lick four
Greasers in eleven minutes, myself.  If a thing wanted regulating, he
warn't a man to go browsing around after somebody to do it, but he would
prance in and regulate it himself.  He warn't a Catholic.  Scasely.  He
was down on 'em.  His word was, 'No Irish need apply!'  But it didn't
make no difference about that when it came down to what a man's rights
was--and so, when some roughs jumped the Catholic bone-yard and started
in to stake out town-lots in it he went for 'em!  And he cleaned 'em,
too!  I was there, pard, and I seen it myself."

"That was very well indeed--at least the impulse was--whether the act was
strictly defensible or not.  Had deceased any religious convictions?
That is to say, did he feel a dependence upon, or acknowledge allegiance
to a higher power?"

More reflection.

"I reckon you've stumped me again, pard.  Could you say it over once
more, and say it slow?"

"Well, to simplify it somewhat, was he, or rather had he ever been
connected with any organization sequestered from secular concerns and
devoted to self-sacrifice in the interests of morality?"

"All down but nine--set 'em up on the other alley, pard."

"What did I understand you to say?"

"Why, you're most too many for me, you know.  When you get in with your
left I hunt grass every time.  Every time you draw, you fill; but I don't
seem to have any luck.  Lets have a new deal."

"How?  Begin again?"

"That's it."

"Very well.  Was he a good man, and--"

"There--I see that; don't put up another chip till I look at my hand.
A good man, says you?  Pard, it ain't no name for it.  He was the best
man that ever--pard, you would have doted on that man.  He could lam any
galoot of his inches in America.  It was him that put down the riot last
election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man
that could have done it.  He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a
trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less
than three minutes.  He had that riot all broke up and prevented nice
before anybody ever got a chance to strike a blow.  He was always for
peace, and he would have peace--he could not stand disturbances.  Pard,
he was a great loss to this town.  It would please the boys if you could
chip in something like that and do him justice.  Here once when the Micks
got to throwing stones through the Methodis' Sunday school windows, Buck
Fanshaw, all of his own notion, shut up his saloon and took a couple of
six-shooters and mounted guard over the Sunday school.  Says he, 'No
Irish need apply!'  And they didn't.  He was the bulliest man in the
mountains, pard!  He could run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and hold
more tangle-foot whisky without spilling it than any man in seventeen
counties.  Put that in, pard--it'll please the boys more than anything
you could say.  And you can say, pard, that he never shook his mother."

"Never shook his mother?"

"That's it--any of the boys will tell you so."

"Well, but why should he shake her?"

"That's what I say--but some people does."

"Not people of any repute?"

"Well, some that averages pretty so-so."

"In my opinion the man that would offer personal violence to his own
mother, ought to--"

"Cheese it, pard; you've banked your ball clean outside the string.
What I was a drivin' at, was, that he never throwed off on his mother
--don't you see?  No indeedy.  He give her a house to live in, and town
lots, and plenty of money; and he looked after her and took care of her
all the time; and when she was down with the small-pox I'm d---d if he
didn't set up nights and nuss her himself!  Beg your pardon for saying
it, but it hopped out too quick for yours truly.

"You've treated me like a gentleman, pard, and I ain't the man to hurt
your feelings intentional.  I think you're white.  I think you're a
square man, pard.  I like you, and I'll lick any man that don't.  I'll
lick him till he can't tell himself from a last year's corpse!  Put it
there!" [Another fraternal hand-shake--and exit.]

The obsequies were all that "the boys" could desire.  Such a marvel of
funeral pomp had never been seen in Virginia.  The plumed hearse, the
dirge-breathing brass bands, the closed marts of business, the flags
drooping at half mast, the long, plodding procession of uniformed secret
societies, military battalions and fire companies, draped engines,
carriages of officials, and citizens in vehicles and on foot, attracted
multitudes of spectators to the sidewalks, roofs and windows; and for
years afterward, the degree of grandeur attained by any civic display in
Virginia was determined by comparison with Buck Fanshaw's funeral.

Scotty Briggs, as a pall-bearer and a mourner, occupied a prominent place
at the funeral, and when the sermon was finished and the last sentence of
the prayer for the dead man's soul ascended, he responded, in a low
voice, but with feelings:

"AMEN.  No Irish need apply."

As the bulk of the response was without apparent relevancy, it was
probably nothing more than a humble tribute to the memory of the friend
that was gone; for, as Scotty had once said, it was "his word."

Scotty Briggs, in after days, achieved the distinction of becoming the
only convert to religion that was ever gathered from the Virginia roughs;
and it transpired that the man who had it in him to espouse the quarrel
of the weak out of inborn nobility of spirit was no mean timber whereof
to construct a Christian.  The making him one did not warp his generosity
or diminish his courage; on the contrary it gave intelligent direction to
the one and a broader field to the other.

If his Sunday-school class progressed faster than the other classes, was
it matter for wonder?  I think not.  He talked to his pioneer small-fry
in a language they understood!  It was my large privilege, a month before
he died, to hear him tell the beautiful story of Joseph and his brethren
to his class "without looking at the book."  I leave it to the reader to
fancy what it was like, as it fell, riddled with slang, from the lips of
that grave, earnest teacher, and was listened to by his little learners
with a consuming interest that showed that they were as unconscious as he
was that any violence was being done to the sacred proprieties!



CHAPTER XLVIII.

The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by
murdered men.  So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will
always say and believe.  The reason why there was so much slaughtering
done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates,
and a person is not respected until he has "killed his man."  That was
the very expression used.

If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable,
honest, industrious, but--had he killed his man?  If he had not, he
gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small
consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated
according to the number of his dead.  It was tedious work struggling up
to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with
the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at
once and his acquaintance sought.

In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief
desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon keeper, occupied the same
level in society, and it was the highest.  The cheapest and easiest way
to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at
large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell
whisky.  I am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade higher
rank than any other member of society.  His opinion had weight.  It was
his privilege to say how the elections should go.  No great movement
could succeed without the countenance and direction of the
saloon-keepers.  It was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper
consented to serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen.

Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the
army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon.

To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious.  Hence the
reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed
in Nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the
slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being
held in indifferent repute by his associates.  I knew two youths who
tried to "kill their men" for no other reason--and got killed themselves
for their pains.  "There goes the man that killed Bill Adams" was higher
praise and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people than any
other speech that admiring lips could utter.

The men who murdered Virginia's original twenty-six cemetery-occupants
were never punished.  Why?  Because Alfred the Great, when he invented
trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice
in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the
condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from
the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove
the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human
wisdom could contrive.  For how could he imagine that we simpletons would
go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its
usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his
candle-clock after we had invented chronometers?  In his day news could
not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest,
intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try
--but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear
in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly
excludes honest men and men of brains.

I remember one of those sorrowful farces, in Virginia, which we call a
jury trial.  A noted desperado killed Mr. B., a good citizen, in the most
wanton and cold-blooded way.  Of course the papers were full of it, and
all men capable of reading, read about it.  And of course all men not
deaf and dumb and idiotic, talked about it.  A jury-list was made out,
and Mr. B. L., a prominent banker and a valued citizen, was questioned
precisely as he would have been questioned in any court in America:

"Have you heard of this homicide?"

"Yes."

"Have you held conversations upon the subject?"

"Yes."

"Have you formed or expressed opinions about it?"

"Yes."

"Have you read the newspaper accounts of it?"

"Yes."

"We do not want you."

A minister, intelligent, esteemed, and greatly respected; a merchant of
high character and known probity; a mining superintendent of intelligence
and unblemished reputation; a quartz mill owner of excellent standing,
were all questioned in the same way, and all set aside.  Each said the
public talk and the newspaper reports had not so biased his mind but that
sworn testimony would overthrow his previously formed opinions and enable
him to render a verdict without prejudice and in accordance with the
facts.  But of course such men could not be trusted with the case.
Ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice.

When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men
was impaneled--a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked
about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle
in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the
streets were cognizant of!  It was a jury composed of two desperadoes,
two low beer-house politicians, three bar-keepers, two ranchmen who could
not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys!  It actually came out
afterward, that one of these latter thought that incest and arson were
the same thing.

The verdict rendered by this jury was, Not Guilty.  What else could one
expect?

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium
upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.  It is a shame that we must
continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years
ago.  In this age, when a gentleman of high social standing, intelligence
and probity, swears that testimony given under solemn oath will outweigh,
with him, street talk and newspaper reports based upon mere hearsay, he
is worth a hundred jurymen who will swear to their own ignorance and
stupidity, and justice would be far safer in his hands than in theirs.
Why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and
honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants?  Is it right to show
the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on
another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and
equal?  I am a candidate for the legislature.  I desire to tamper with
the jury law.  I wish to so alter it as to put a premium on intelligence
and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and
people who do not read newspapers.  But no doubt I shall be defeated
--every effort I make to save the country "misses fire."

My idea, when I began this chapter, was to say something about
desperadoism in the "flush times" of Nevada.  To attempt a portrayal of
that era and that land, and leave out the blood and carnage, would be
like portraying Mormondom and leaving out polygamy.  The desperado
stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his
homicides, and a nod of recognition from him was sufficient to make a
humble admirer happy for the rest of the day.  The deference that was
paid to a desperado of wide reputation, and who "kept his private
graveyard," as the phrase went, was marked, and cheerfully accorded.
When he moved along the sidewalk in his excessively long-tailed
frock-coat, shiny stump-toed boots, and with dainty little slouch hat
tipped over left eye, the small-fry roughs made room for his majesty;
when he entered the restaurant, the waiters deserted bankers and
merchants to overwhelm him with obsequious service; when he shouldered
his way to a bar, the shouldered parties wheeled indignantly, recognized
him, and --apologized.

They got a look in return that froze their marrow, and by that time a
curled and breast-pinned bar keeper was beaming over the counter, proud
of the established acquaintanceship that permitted such a familiar form
of speech as:

"How're ye, Billy, old fel?  Glad to see you.  What'll you take--the old
thing?"

The "old thing" meant his customary drink, of course.

The best known names in the Territory of Nevada were those belonging to
these long-tailed heroes of the revolver.  Orators, Governors,
capitalists and leaders of the legislature enjoyed a degree of fame, but
it seemed local and meagre when contrasted with the fame of such men as
Sam Brown, Jack Williams, Billy Mulligan, Farmer Pease, Sugarfoot Mike,
Pock Marked Jake, El Dorado Johnny, Jack McNabb, Joe McGee, Jack Harris,
Six-fingered Pete, etc., etc.  There was a long list of them.  They were
brave, reckless men, and traveled with their lives in their hands.  To
give them their due, they did their killing principally among themselves,
and seldom molested peaceable citizens, for they considered it small
credit to add to their trophies so cheap a bauble as the death of a man
who was "not on the shoot," as they phrased it.  They killed each other
on slight provocation, and hoped and expected to be killed themselves
--for they held it almost shame to die otherwise than "with their boots
on," as they expressed it.

I remember an instance of a desperado's contempt for such small game as a
private citizen's life.  I was taking a late supper in a restaurant one
night, with two reporters and a little printer named--Brown, for
instance--any name will do.  Presently a stranger with a long-tailed coat
on came in, and not noticing Brown's hat, which was lying in a chair, sat
down on it.  Little Brown sprang up and became abusive in a moment.  The
stranger smiled, smoothed out the hat, and offered it to Brown with
profuse apologies couched in caustic sarcasm, and begged Brown not to
destroy him.  Brown threw off his coat and challenged the man to fight
--abused him, threatened him, impeached his courage, and urged and even
implored him to fight; and in the meantime the smiling stranger placed
himself under our protection in mock distress.  But presently he assumed
a serious tone, and said:

"Very well, gentlemen, if we must fight, we must, I suppose.  But don't
rush into danger and then say I gave you no warning.  I am more than a
match for all of you when I get started.  I will give you proofs, and
then if my friend here still insists, I will try to accommodate him."

The table we were sitting at was about five feet long, and unusually
cumbersome and heavy.  He asked us to put our hands on the dishes and
hold them in their places a moment--one of them was a large oval dish
with a portly roast on it.  Then he sat down, tilted up one end of the
table, set two of the legs on his knees, took the end of the table
between his teeth, took his hands away, and pulled down with his teeth
till the table came up to a level position, dishes and all!  He said he
could lift a keg of nails with his teeth.  He picked up a common glass
tumbler and bit a semi-circle out of it.  Then he opened his bosom and
showed us a net-work of knife and bullet scars; showed us more on his
arms and face, and said he believed he had bullets enough in his body to
make a pig of lead.  He was armed to the teeth.  He closed with the
remark that he was Mr. ---- of Cariboo--a celebrated name whereat we shook
in our shoes.  I would publish the name, but for the suspicion that he
might come and carve me.  He finally inquired if Brown still thirsted for
blood.  Brown turned the thing over in his mind a moment, and then--asked
him to supper.

With the permission of the reader, I will group together, in the next
chapter, some samples of life in our small mountain village in the old
days of desperadoism.  I was there at the time.  The reader will observe
peculiarities in our official society; and he will observe also, an
instance of how, in new countries, murders breed murders.



CHAPTER XLIX.

An extract or two from the newspapers of the day will furnish a
photograph that can need no embellishment:

      FATAL SHOOTING AFFRAY.--An affray occurred, last evening, in a
      billiard saloon on C street, between Deputy Marshal Jack Williams
      and Wm. Brown, which resulted in the immediate death of the latter.
      There had been some difficulty between the parties for several
      months.

      An inquest was immediately held, and the following testimony
      adduced:

      Officer GEO. BIRDSALL, sworn, says:--I was told Wm. Brown was drunk
      and was looking for Jack Williams; so soon as I heard that I started
      for the parties to prevent a collision; went into the billiard
      saloon; saw Billy Brown running around, saying if anybody had
      anything against him to show cause; he was talking in a boisterous
      manner, and officer Perry took him to the other end of the room to
      talk to him; Brown came back to me; remarked to me that he thought
      he was as good as anybody, and knew how to take care of himself; he
      passed by me and went to the bar; don't know whether he drank or
      not; Williams was at the end of the billiard-table, next to the
      stairway; Brown, after going to the bar, came back and said he was
      as good as any man in the world; he had then walked out to the end
      of the first billiard-table from the bar; I moved closer to them,
      supposing there would be a fight; as Brown drew his pistol I caught
      hold of it; he had fired one shot at Williams; don't know the effect
      of it; caught hold of him with one hand, and took hold of the pistol
      and turned it up; think he fired once after I caught hold of the
      pistol; I wrenched the pistol from him; walked to the end of the
      billiard-table and told a party that I had Brown's pistol, and to
      stop shooting; I think four shots were fired in all; after walking
      out, Mr. Foster remarked that Brown was shot dead.

Oh, there was no excitement about it--he merely "remarked" the small
circumstance!

Four months later the following item appeared in the same paper (the
Enterprise).  In this item the name of one of the city officers above
referred to (Deputy Marshal Jack Williams) occurs again:

      ROBBERY AND DESPERATE AFFRAY.--On Tuesday night, a German named
      Charles Hurtzal, engineer in a mill at Silver City, came to this
      place, and visited the hurdy-gurdy house on B street.  The music,
      dancing and Teutonic maidens awakened memories of Faderland until
      our German friend was carried away with rapture.  He evidently had
      money, and was spending if freely.  Late in the evening Jack
      Williams and Andy Blessington invited him down stairs to take a cup
      of coffee.  Williams proposed a game of cards and went up stairs to
      procure a deck, but not finding any returned.  On the stairway he
      met the German, and drawing his pistol knocked him down and rifled
      his pockets of some seventy dollars.  Hurtzal dared give no alarm,
      as he was told, with a pistol at his head, if he made any noise or
      exposed them, they would blow his brains out.  So effectually was he
      frightened that he made no complaint, until his friends forced him.
      Yesterday a warrant was issued, but the culprits had disappeared.

This efficient city officer, Jack Williams, had the common reputation of
being a burglar, a highwayman and a desperado.  It was said that he had
several times drawn his revolver and levied money contributions on
citizens at dead of night in the public streets of Virginia.

Five months after the above item appeared, Williams was assassinated
while sitting at a card table one night; a gun was thrust through the
crack of the door and Williams dropped from his chair riddled with balls.
It was said, at the time, that Williams had been for some time aware that
a party of his own sort (desperadoes) had sworn away his life; and it was
generally believed among the people that Williams's friends and enemies
would make the assassination memorable--and useful, too--by a wholesale
destruction of each other.

It did not so happen, but still, times were not dull during the next
twenty-four hours, for within that time a woman was killed by a pistol
shot, a man was brained with a slung shot, and a man named Reeder was
also disposed of permanently.  Some matters in the Enterprise account of
the killing of Reeder are worth nothing--especially the accommodating
complaisance of a Virginia justice of the peace.  The italics in the
following narrative are mine:

      MORE CUTTING AND SHOOTING.--The devil seems to have again broken
      loose in our town.  Pistols and guns explode and knives gleam in our
      streets as in early times.  When there has been a long season of
      quiet, people are slow to wet their hands in blood; but once blood
      is spilled, cutting and shooting come easy.  Night before last Jack
      Williams was assassinated, and yesterday forenoon we had more bloody
      work, growing out of the killing of Williams, and on the same street
      in which he met his death.  It appears that Tom Reeder, a friend of
      Williams, and George Gumbert were talking, at the meat market of the
      latter, about the killing of Williams the previous night, when
      Reeder said it was a most cowardly act to shoot a man in such a way,
      giving him "no show."  Gumbert said that Williams had "as good a
      show as he gave Billy Brown," meaning the man killed by Williams
      last March.  Reeder said it was a d---d lie, that Williams had no
      show at all.  At this, Gumbert drew a knife and stabbed Reeder,
      cutting him in two places in the back.  One stroke of the knife cut
      into the sleeve of Reeder's coat and passed downward in a slanting
      direction through his clothing, and entered his body at the small of
      the back; another blow struck more squarely, and made a much more
      dangerous wound.  Gumbert gave himself up to the officers of
      justice, and was shortly after discharged by Justice Atwill, on his
      own recognizance, to appear for trial at six o'clock in the evening.
      In the meantime Reeder had been taken into the office of Dr. Owens,
      where his wounds were properly dressed.  One of his wounds was
      considered quite dangerous, and it was thought by many that it would
      prove fatal.  But being considerably under the influence of liquor,
      Reeder did not feel his wounds as he otherwise would, and he got up
      and went into the street.  He went to the meat market and renewed
      his quarrel with Gumbert, threatening his life.  Friends tried to
      interfere to put a stop to the quarrel and get the parties away from
      each other.  In the Fashion Saloon Reeder made threats against the
      life of Gumbert, saying he would kill him, and it is said that he
      requested the officers not to arrest Gumbert, as he intended to kill
      him.  After these threats Gumbert went off and procured a
      double-barreled shot gun, loaded with buck-shot or revolver balls,
      and went after Reeder.  Two or three persons were assisting him along
      the street, trying to get him home, and had him just in front of the
      store of Klopstock & Harris, when Gumbert came across toward him
      from the opposite side of the street with his gun.  He came up
      within about ten or fifteen feet of Reeder, and called out to those
      with him to "look out! get out of the way!" and they had only time
      to heed the warning, when he fired.  Reeder was at the time
      attempting to screen himself behind a large cask, which stood
      against the awning post of Klopstock & Harris's store, but some of
      the balls took effect in the lower part of his breast, and he reeled
      around forward and fell in front of the cask.  Gumbert then raised
      his gun and fired the second barrel, which missed Reeder and entered
      the ground.  At the time that this occurred, there were a great many
      persons on the street in the vicinity, and a number of them called
      out to Gumbert, when they saw him raise his gun, to "hold on," and
      "don't shoot!"  The cutting took place about ten o'clock and the
      shooting about twelve.  After the shooting the street was instantly
      crowded with the inhabitants of that part of the town, some
      appearing much excited and laughing--declaring that it looked like
      the "good old times of '60."  Marshal Perry and officer Birdsall
      were near when the shooting occurred, and Gumbert was immediately
      arrested and his gun taken from him, when he was marched off to
      jail.  Many persons who were attracted to the spot where this bloody
      work had just taken place, looked bewildered and seemed to be asking
      themselves what was to happen next, appearing in doubt as to whether
      the killing mania had reached its climax, or whether we were to turn
      in and have a grand killing spell, shooting whoever might have given
      us offence.  It was whispered around that it was not all over yet
      --five or six more were to be killed before night.  Reeder was taken
      to the Virginia City Hotel, and doctors called in to examine his
      wounds.  They found that two or three balls had entered his right
      side; one of them appeared to have passed through the substance of
      the lungs, while another passed into the liver.  Two balls were also
      found to have struck one of his legs.  As some of the balls struck
      the cask, the wounds in Reeder's leg were probably from these,
      glancing downwards, though they might have been caused by the second
      shot fired.  After being shot, Reeder said when he got on his feet
      --smiling as he spoke--"It will take better shooting than that to
      kill me."  The doctors consider it almost impossible for him to
      recover, but as he has an excellent constitution he may survive,
      notwithstanding the number and dangerous character of the wounds he
      has received.  The town appears to be perfectly quiet at present, as
      though the late stormy times had cleared our moral atmosphere; but
      who can tell in what quarter clouds are lowering or plots ripening?

Reeder--or at least what was left of him--survived his wounds two days!
Nothing was ever done with Gumbert.

Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties.  I do not know what a
palladium is, having never seen a palladium, but it is a good thing no
doubt at any rate.  Not less than a hundred men have been murdered in
Nevada--perhaps I would be within bounds if I said three hundred--and as
far as I can learn, only two persons have suffered the death penalty
there.  However, four or five who had no money and no political influence
have been punished by imprisonment--one languished in prison as much as
eight months, I think.  However, I do not desire to be extravagant--it
may have been less.

However, one prophecy was verified, at any rate.  It was asserted by the
desperadoes that one of their brethren (Joe McGee, a special policeman)
was known to be the conspirator chosen by lot to assassinate Williams;
and they also asserted that doom had been pronounced against McGee, and
that he would be assassinated in exactly the same manner that had been
adopted for the destruction of Williams--a prophecy which came true a
year later.  After twelve months of distress (for McGee saw a fancied
assassin in every man that approached him), he made the last of many
efforts to get out of the country unwatched.  He went to Carson and sat
down in a saloon to wait for the stage--it would leave at four in the
morning.  But as the night waned and the crowd thinned, he grew uneasy,
and told the bar-keeper that assassins were on his track.  The bar-keeper
told him to stay in the middle of the room, then, and not go near the
door, or the window by the stove.  But a fatal fascination seduced him to
the neighborhood of the stove every now and then, and repeatedly the
bar-keeper brought him back to the middle of the room and warned him to
remain there.  But he could not.  At three in the morning he again
returned to the stove and sat down by a stranger.  Before the bar-keeper
could get to him with another warning whisper, some one outside fired
through the window and riddled McGee's breast with slugs, killing him
almost instantly.  By the same discharge the stranger at McGee's side
also received attentions which proved fatal in the course of two or three
days.



CHAPTER L.

These murder and jury statistics remind me of a certain very
extraordinary trial and execution of twenty years ago; it is a scrap of
history familiar to all old Californians, and worthy to be known by other
peoples of the earth that love simple, straightforward justice
unencumbered with nonsense.  I would apologize for this digression but
for the fact that the information I am about to offer is apology enough
in itself.  And since I digress constantly anyhow, perhaps it is as well
to eschew apologies altogether and thus prevent their growing irksome.

Capt. Ned Blakely--that name will answer as well as any other fictitious
one (for he was still with the living at last accounts, and may not
desire to be famous)--sailed ships out of the harbor of San Francisco for
many years.  He was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle-eyed veteran, who had
been a sailor nearly fifty years--a sailor from early boyhood.  He was a
rough, honest creature, full of pluck, and just as full of hard-headed
simplicity, too.  He hated trifling conventionalities--"business" was the
word, with him.  He had all a sailor's vindictiveness against the quips
and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that the first and last
aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice.

He sailed for the Chincha Islands in command of a guano ship.  He had a
fine crew, but his negro mate was his pet--on him he had for years
lavished his admiration and esteem.  It was Capt. Ned's first voyage to
the Chinchas, but his fame had gone before him--the fame of being a man
who would fight at the dropping of a handkerchief, when imposed upon, and
would stand no nonsense.  It was a fame well earned.  Arrived in the
islands, he found that the staple of conversation was the exploits of one
Bill Noakes, a bully, the mate of a trading ship.  This man had created a
small reign of terror there.  At nine o'clock at night, Capt. Ned, all
alone, was pacing his deck in the starlight.  A form ascended the side,
and approached him.  Capt. Ned said:

"Who goes there?"

"I'm Bill Noakes, the best man in the islands."

"What do you want aboard this ship?"

"I've heard of Capt. Ned Blakely, and one of us is a better man than
'tother--I'll know which, before I go ashore."

"You've come to the right shop--I'm your man.  I'll learn you to come
aboard this ship without an invite."

He seized Noakes, backed him against the mainmast, pounded his face to a
pulp, and then threw him overboard.

Noakes was not convinced.  He returned the next night, got the pulp
renewed, and went overboard head first, as before.

He was satisfied.

A week after this, while Noakes was carousing with a sailor crowd on
shore, at noonday, Capt. Ned's colored mate came along, and Noakes tried
to pick a quarrel with him.  The negro evaded the trap, and tried to get
away.  Noakes followed him up; the negro began to run; Noakes fired on
him with a revolver and killed him.  Half a dozen sea-captains witnessed
the whole affair.  Noakes retreated to the small after-cabin of his ship,
with two other bullies, and gave out that death would be the portion of
any man that intruded there.  There was no attempt made to follow the
villains; there was no disposition to do it, and indeed very little
thought of such an enterprise.  There were no courts and no officers;
there was no government; the islands belonged to Peru, and Peru was far
away; she had no official representative on the ground; and neither had
any other nation.

However, Capt. Ned was not perplexing his head about such things.  They
concerned him not.  He was boiling with rage and furious for justice.
At nine o'clock at night he loaded a double-barreled gun with slugs,
fished out a pair of handcuffs, got a ship's lantern, summoned his
quartermaster, and went ashore.  He said:

"Do you see that ship there at the dock?"

"Ay-ay, sir."

"It's the Venus."

"Ay-ay, sir."

"You--you know me."

"Ay-ay, sir."

"Very well, then.  Take the lantern.  Carry it just under your chin.
I'll walk behind you and rest this gun-barrel on your shoulder, p'inting
forward--so.  Keep your lantern well up so's I can see things ahead of
you good.  I'm going to march in on Noakes--and take him--and jug the
other chaps.  If you flinch--well, you know me."

"Ay-ay, sir."

In this order they filed aboard softly, arrived at Noakes's den, the
quartermaster pushed the door open, and the lantern revealed the three
desperadoes sitting on the floor.  Capt.  Ned said:

"I'm Ned Blakely.  I've got you under fire.  Don't you move without
orders--any of you.  You two kneel down in the corner; faces to the wall
--now.  Bill Noakes, put these handcuffs on; now come up close.
Quartermaster, fasten 'em.  All right.  Don't stir, sir.  Quartermaster,
put the key in the outside of the door.  Now, men, I'm going to lock you
two in; and if you try to burst through this door--well, you've heard of
me.  Bill Noakes, fall in ahead, and march.  All set.  Quartermaster,
lock the door."

Noakes spent the night on board Blakely's ship, a prisoner under strict
guard.  Early in the morning Capt. Ned called in all the sea-captains in
the harbor and invited them, with nautical ceremony, to be present on
board his ship at nine o'clock to witness the hanging of Noakes at the
yard-arm!

"What!  The man has not been tried."

"Of course he hasn't.  But didn't he kill the nigger?"

"Certainly he did; but you are not thinking of hanging him without a
trial?"

"Trial!  What do I want to try him for, if he killed the nigger?"

"Oh, Capt.  Ned, this will never do.  Think how it will sound."

"Sound be hanged!  Didn't he kill the nigger?"

"Certainly, certainly, Capt.  Ned,--nobody denies that,--but--"

"Then I'm going to hang him, that's all.  Everybody I've talked to talks
just the same way you do.  Everybody says he killed the nigger, everybody
knows he killed the nigger, and yet every lubber of you wants him tried
for it.  I don't understand such bloody foolishness as that.  Tried!
Mind you, I don't object to trying him, if it's got to be done to give
satisfaction; and I'll be there, and chip in and help, too; but put it
off till afternoon--put it off till afternoon, for I'll have my hands
middling full till after the burying--"

"Why, what do you mean?  Are you going to hang him any how--and try him
afterward?"

"Didn't I say I was going to hang him?  I never saw such people as you.
What's the difference?  You ask a favor, and then you ain't satisfied
when you get it.  Before or after's all one--you know how the trial will
go.  He killed the nigger.  Say--I must be going.  If your mate would
like to come to the hanging, fetch him along.  I like him."

There was a stir in the camp.  The captains came in a body and pleaded
with Capt. Ned not to do this rash thing.  They promised that they would
create a court composed of captains of the best character; they would
empanel a jury; they would conduct everything in a way becoming the
serious nature of the business in hand, and give the case an impartial
hearing and the accused a fair trial.  And they said it would be murder,
and punishable by the American courts if he persisted and hung the
accused on his ship.  They pleaded hard.  Capt. Ned said:

"Gentlemen, I'm not stubborn and I'm not unreasonable.  I'm always
willing to do just as near right as I can.  How long will it take?"

"Probably only a little while."

"And can I take him up the shore and hang him as soon as you are done?"

"If he is proven guilty he shall be hanged without unnecessary delay."

"If he's proven guilty.  Great Neptune, ain't he guilty?  This beats my
time.  Why you all know he's guilty."

But at last they satisfied him that they were projecting nothing
underhanded.  Then he said:

"Well, all right.  You go on and try him and I'll go down and overhaul
his conscience and prepare him to go--like enough he needs it, and I
don't want to send him off without a show for hereafter."

This was another obstacle.  They finally convinced him that it was
necessary to have the accused in court.  Then they said they would send a
guard to bring him.

"No, sir, I prefer to fetch him myself--he don't get out of my hands.
Besides, I've got to go to the ship to get a rope, anyway."

The court assembled with due ceremony, empaneled a jury, and presently
Capt. Ned entered, leading the prisoner with one hand and carrying a
Bible and a rope in the other.  He seated himself by the side of his
captive and told the court to "up anchor and make sail."  Then he turned
a searching eye on the jury, and detected Noakes's friends, the two
bullies.

He strode over and said to them confidentially:

"You're here to interfere, you see.  Now you vote right, do you hear?--or
else there'll be a double-barreled inquest here when this trial's off,
and your remainders will go home in a couple of baskets."

The caution was not without fruit.  The jury was a unit--the verdict.
"Guilty."

Capt.  Ned sprung to his feet and said:

"Come along--you're my meat now, my lad, anyway.  Gentlemen you've done
yourselves proud.  I invite you all to come and see that I do it all
straight.  Follow me to the canyon, a mile above here."

The court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the
hanging, and--

Capt.  Ned's patience was at an end.  His wrath was boundless.  The
subject of a sheriff was judiciously dropped.

When the crowd arrived at the canyon, Capt. Ned climbed a tree and
arranged the halter, then came down and noosed his man.  He opened his
Bible, and laid aside his hat.  Selecting a chapter at random, he read it
through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity.  Then he said:

"Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the
lighter a man's manifest is, as far as sin's concerned, the better for
him.  Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that'll bear
inspection.  You killed the nigger?"

No reply.  A long pause.

The captain read another chapter, pausing, from time to time, to impress
the effect.  Then he talked an earnest, persuasive sermon to him, and
ended by repeating the question:

"Did you kill the nigger?"

No reply--other than a malignant scowl.  The captain now read the first
and second chapters of Genesis, with deep feeling--paused a moment,
closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of
satisfaction:

"There.  Four chapters.  There's few that would have took the pains with
you that I have."

Then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and
timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to the
court.  A little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless figure,
a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of conscience--a
misgiving--and he said with a sigh:

"Well, p'raps I ought to burnt him, maybe.  But I was trying to do for
the best."

When the history of this affair reached California (it was in the "early
days") it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain's
popularity in any degree.  It increased it, indeed.  California had a
population then that "inflicted" justice after a fashion that was
simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire
appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere.



CHAPTER LI.

Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times."  The
saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the
gambling dens, the brothels and the jails--unfailing signs of high
prosperity in a mining region--in any region for that matter.  Is it not
so?  A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade
is brisk and money plenty.  Still, there is one other sign; it comes
last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the "flush
times" are at the flood.  This is the birth of the "literary" paper.
The Weekly Occidental, "devoted to literature," made its appearance in
Virginia.  All the literary people were engaged to write for it.  Mr. F.
was to edit it.  He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who
could say happy things in a crisp, neat way.  Once, while editor of the
Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack made
upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance,
seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment--viz.: "THE LOGIC OF
OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,"--and left it to the reader's
memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more
different" meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the
rest of the Scripture--"in that it passeth understanding."  He once said
of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no subsistence
except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers who stopped
over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage, that in their
Church service they had altered the Lord's Prayer to read: "Give us this
day our daily stranger!"

We expected great things of the Occidental.  Of course it could not get
along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into
the work the full strength of the company.  Mrs. F. was an able romancist
of the ineffable school--I know no other name to apply to a school whose
heroes are all dainty and all perfect.  She wrote the opening chapter,
and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls
and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity.  She also
introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement, in love with the
blonde.  Mr. F. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer who set about
getting the Duke's estates into trouble, and a sparkling young lady of
high society who fell to fascinating the Duke and impairing the appetite
of the blonde.  Mr. D., a dark and bloody editor of one of the dailies,
followed Mr. F., the third  week, introducing a mysterious Roscicrucian
who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a cave at
dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and heroines
in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their future careers
and breed a solemn and awful public interest in the novel.  He also
introduced a cloaked and masked melodramatic miscreant, put him on a
salary and set him on the midnight track of the Duke with a poisoned
dagger.  He also created an Irish coachman with a rich brogue and placed
him in the service of the society-young-lady with an ulterior mission to
carry billet-doux to the Duke.

About this time there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger with a
literary turn of mind--rather seedy he was, but very quiet and
unassuming; almost diffident, indeed.  He was so gentle, and his manners
were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he
made friends of all who came in contact with him.  He applied for
literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and
practiced pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the novel.
His chapter was to follow Mr. D.'s, and mine was to come next.  Now what
does this fellow do but go off and get drunk and then proceed to his
quarters and set to work with his imagination in a state of chaos, and
that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity.  The result may be
guessed.  He scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found plenty of
heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with them; he
decided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that whisky
inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then
launched himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to the
society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to the
blonde's stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the
desperado's salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the
Roscicrucian; threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands;
made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to
delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman's neck; let his
widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and consumption; caused the
blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the
customary note pinned to them forgiving the Duke and hoping he would be
happy; revealed to the Duke, by means of the usual strawberry mark on
left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his
long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the Duke
and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice; opened the earth
and let the Roscicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed smoke
and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in
the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the
surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil!
It read with singular smoothness, and with a "dead" earnestness that was
funny enough to suffocate a body.  But there was war when it came in.
The other novelists were furious.  The mild stranger, not yet more than
half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and
bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering
what he could have done to invoke such a storm.  When a lull came at
last, he said his say gently and appealingly--said he did not rightly
remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he
could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant
and plausible but instructive and----

The bombardment began again.  The novelists assailed his ill-chosen
adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule.
And so the siege went on.  Every time the stranger tried to appease the
enemy he only made matters worse.  Finally he offered to rewrite the
chapter.  This arrested hostilities.  The indignation gradually quieted
down, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in safety and got him
to his own citadel.

But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again.
And again his imagination went mad.  He led the heroes and heroines a
wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing
air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work.  He got
the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through
the most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk!
But the chapter cannot be described.  It was symmetrically crazy; it was
artistically absurd; and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as
curious as the text.  I remember one of the "situations," and will offer
it as an example of the whole.  He altered the character of the brilliant
lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow; gave him fame and
riches, and set his age at thirty-three years.  Then he made the blonde
discover, through the help of the Roscicrucian and the melodramatic
miscreant, that while the Duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he
secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society-young-lady.  Stung to
the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with
tenfold power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal.  But
the parents would none of it.  What they wanted in the family was a Duke;
and a Duke they were determined to have; though they confessed that next
to the Duke the lawyer had their preference.  Necessarily the blonde now
went into a decline.  The parents were alarmed.  They pleaded with her to
marry the Duke, but she steadfastly refused, and pined on.  Then they
laid a plan.  They told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end
of that time she still felt that she could not marry the Duke, she might
marry the lawyer with their full consent.  The result was as they had
foreseen: gladness came again, and the flush of returning health.  Then
the parents took the next step in their scheme.  They had the family
physician recommend a long sea voyage and much land travel for the
thorough restoration of the blonde's strength; and they invited the Duke
to be of the party.  They judged that the Duke's constant presence and
the lawyer's protracted absence would do the rest--for they did not
invite the lawyer.

So they set sail in a steamer for America--and the third day out, when
their sea-sickness called truce and permitted them to take their first
meal at the public table, behold there sat the lawyer!  The Duke and
party made the best of an awkward situation; the voyage progressed, and
the vessel neared America.

But, by and by, two hundred miles off New Bedford, the ship took fire;
she burned to the water's edge; of all her crew and passengers, only
thirty were saved.  They floated about the sea half an afternoon and all
night long.  Among them were our friends.  The lawyer, by superhuman
exertions, had saved the blonde and her parents, swimming back and forth
two hundred yards and bringing one each time--(the girl first).  The Duke
had saved himself.  In the morning two whale ships arrived on the scene
and sent their boats.  The weather was stormy and the embarkation was
attended with much confusion and excitement.  The lawyer did his duty
like a man; helped his exhausted and insensible blonde, her parents and
some others into a boat (the Duke helped himself in); then a child fell
overboard at the other end of the raft and the lawyer rushed thither and
helped half a dozen people fish it out, under the stimulus of its
mother's screams.  Then he ran back--a few seconds too late--the blonde's
boat was under way.  So he had to take the other boat, and go to the
other ship.  The storm increased and drove the vessels out of sight of
each other--drove them whither it would.

When it calmed, at the end of three days, the blonde's ship was seven
hundred miles north of Boston and the other about seven hundred south of
that port.  The blonde's captain was bound on a whaling cruise in the
North Atlantic and could not go back such a distance or make a port
without orders; such being nautical law.  The lawyer's captain was to
cruise in the North Pacific, and he could not go back or make a port
without orders.  All the lawyer's money and baggage were in the blonde's
boat and went to the blonde's ship--so his captain made him work his
passage as a common sailor.  When both ships had been cruising nearly a
year, the one was off the coast of Greenland and the other in Behring's
Strait.  The blonde had long ago been well-nigh persuaded that her lawyer
had been washed overboard and lost just before the whale ships reached
the raft, and now, under the pleadings of her parents and the Duke she
was at last beginning to nerve herself for the doom of the covenant, and
prepare for the hated marriage.

But she would not yield a day before the date set.  The weeks dragged on,
the time narrowed, orders were given to deck the ship for the wedding--a
wedding at sea among icebergs and walruses.  Five days more and all would
be over.  So the blonde reflected, with a sigh and a tear.  Oh where was
her true love--and why, why did he not come and save her?  At that moment
he was lifting his harpoon to strike a whale in Behring's Strait, five
thousand miles away, by the way of the Arctic Ocean, or twenty thousand
by the way of the Horn--that was the reason.  He struck, but not with
perfect aim--his foot slipped and he fell in the whale's mouth and went
down his throat.  He was insensible five days.  Then he came to himself
and heard voices; daylight was streaming through a hole cut in the
whale's roof.  He climbed out and astonished the sailors who were
hoisting blubber up a ship's side.  He recognized the vessel, flew
aboard, surprised the wedding party at the altar and exclaimed:

"Stop the proceedings--I'm here!  Come to my arms, my own!"

There were foot-notes to this extravagant piece of literature wherein the
author endeavored to show that the whole thing was within the
possibilities; he said he got the incident of the whale traveling from
Behring's Strait to the coast of Greenland, five thousand miles in five
days, through the Arctic Ocean, from Charles Reade's "Love Me Little Love
Me Long," and considered that that established the fact that the thing
could be done; and he instanced Jonah's adventure as proof that a man
could live in a whale's belly, and added that if a preacher could stand
it three days a lawyer could surely stand it five!

There was a fiercer storm than ever in the editorial sanctum now, and the
stranger was peremptorily discharged, and his manuscript flung at his
head.  But he had already delayed things so much that there was not time
for some one else to rewrite the chapter, and so the paper came out
without any novel in it.  It was but a feeble, struggling, stupid
journal, and the absence of the novel probably shook public confidence;
at any rate, before the first side of the next issue went to press, the
Weekly Occidental died as peacefully as an infant.

An effort was made to resurrect it, with the proposed advantage of a
telling new title, and Mr. F. said that The Phenix would be just the name
for it, because it would give the idea of a resurrection from its dead
ashes in a new and undreamed of condition of splendor; but some
low-priced smarty on one of the dailies suggested that we call it the
Lazarus; and inasmuch as the people were not profound in Scriptural
matters but thought the resurrected Lazarus and the dilapidated mendicant
that begged in the rich man's gateway were one and the same person, the
name became the laughing stock of the town, and killed the paper for good
and all.

I was sorry enough, for I was very proud of being connected with a
literary paper--prouder than I have ever been of anything since, perhaps.
I had written some rhymes for it--poetry I considered it--and it was a
great grief to me that the production was on the "first side" of the
issue that was not completed, and hence did not see the light.  But time
brings its revenges--I can put it in here; it will answer in place of a
tear dropped to the memory of the lost Occidental.  The idea (not the
chief idea, but the vehicle that bears it) was probably suggested by the
old song called "The Raging Canal," but I cannot remember now.  I do
remember, though, that at that time I thought my doggerel was one of the
ablest poems of the age:


THE AGED PILOT MAN.

On the Erie Canal, it was,
All on a summer's day,
I sailed forth with my parents
Far away to Albany.

From out the clouds at noon that day
There came a dreadful storm,
That piled the billows high about,
And filled us with alarm.

A man came rushing from a house,
Saying, "Snub up your boat I pray,
[The customary canal technicality for "tie up."]
Snub up your boat, snub up, alas,
Snub up while yet you may."

Our captain cast one glance astern,
Then forward glanced he,
And said, "My wife and little ones
I never more shall see."

Said Dollinger the pilot man,
In noble words, but few,
--"Fear not, but lean on Dollinger,
And he will fetch you through."

The boat drove on, the frightened mules
Tore through the rain and wind,
And bravely still, in danger's post,
The whip-boy strode behind.

"Come 'board, come 'board," the captain cried,
"Nor tempt so wild a storm;"
But still the raging mules advanced,
And still the boy strode on.

Then said the captain to us all,
"Alas, 'tis plain to me,
The greater danger is not there,
But here upon the sea.

"So let us strive, while life remains,
To save all souls on board,
And then if die at last we must,
Let .  .  .  .  I cannot speak the word!"

Said Dollinger the pilot man,
Tow'ring above the crew,
"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,
And he will fetch you through."

"Low bridge!  low bridge!" all heads went down,
The laboring bark sped on;
A mill we passed, we passed church,
Hamlets, and fields of corn;
And all the world came out to see,
And chased along the shore
Crying, "Alas, alas, the sheeted rain,
The wind, the tempest's roar!
Alas, the gallant ship and crew,
Can nothing help them more?"

And from our deck sad eyes looked out
Across the stormy scene:
The tossing wake of billows aft,
The bending forests green,
The chickens sheltered under carts
In lee of barn the cows,
The skurrying swine with straw in mouth,
The wild spray from our bows!

"She balances!
She wavers!
Now let her go about!
If she misses stays and broaches to,
We're all"--then with a shout,
"Huray!  huray!
Avast!  belay!
Take in more sail!
Lord, what a gale!
Ho, boy, haul taut on the hind mule's tail!"
"Ho! lighten ship! ho! man the pump!
Ho, hostler, heave the lead!"

"A quarter-three!--'tis shoaling fast!
Three feet large!--t-h-r-e-e feet!
--Three feet scant!" I cried in fright
"Oh, is there no retreat?"

Said Dollinger, the pilot man,
As on the vessel flew,
"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,
And he will fetch you through."

A panic struck the bravest hearts,
The boldest cheek turned pale;
For plain to all, this shoaling said
A leak had burst the ditch's bed!
And, straight as bolt from crossbow sped,
Our ship swept on, with shoaling lead,
Before the fearful gale!

"Sever the tow-line!  Cripple the mules!"
Too late!  There comes a shock!
Another length, and the fated craft
Would have swum in the saving lock!

Then gathered together the shipwrecked crew
And took one last embrace,
While sorrowful tears from despairing eyes
Ran down each hopeless face;
And some did think of their little ones
Whom they never more might see,
And others of waiting wives at home,
And mothers that grieved would be.

But of all the children of misery there
On that poor sinking frame,
But one spake words of hope and faith,
And I worshipped as they came:
Said Dollinger the pilot man,
--(O brave heart, strong and true!)
--"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,
For he will fetch you through."

Lo!  scarce the words have passed his lips
The dauntless prophet say'th,
When every soul about him seeth
A wonder crown his faith!

"And count ye all, both great and small,
As numbered with the dead:
For mariner for forty year,
On Erie, boy and man,
I never yet saw such a storm,
Or one't with it began!"

So overboard a keg of nails
And anvils three we threw,
Likewise four bales of gunny-sacks,
Two hundred pounds of glue,
Two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat,
A box of books, a cow,
A violin, Lord Byron's works,
A rip-saw and a sow.

A curve!  a curve!  the dangers grow!
"Labbord!--stabbord!--s-t-e-a-d-y!--so!
--Hard-a-port, Dol!--hellum-a-lee!
Haw the head mule!--the aft one gee!
Luff!--bring her to the wind!"

For straight a farmer brought a plank,
--(Mysteriously inspired)
--And laying it unto the ship,
In silent awe retired.

Then every sufferer stood amazed
That pilot man before;
A moment stood.  Then wondering turned,
And speechless walked ashore.



CHAPTER LII.

Since I desire, in this chapter, to say an instructive word or two about
the silver mines, the reader may take this fair warning and skip, if he
chooses.  The year 1863 was perhaps the very top blossom and culmination
of the "flush times."  Virginia swarmed with men and vehicles to that
degree that the place looked like a very hive--that is when one's vision
could pierce through the thick fog of alkali dust that was generally
blowing in summer.  I will say, concerning this dust, that if you drove
ten miles through it, you and your horses would be coated with it a
sixteenth of an inch thick and present an outside appearance that was a
uniform pale yellow color, and your buggy would have three inches of dust
in it, thrown there by the wheels.  The delicate scales used by the
assayers were inclosed in glass cases intended to be air-tight, and yet
some of this dust was so impalpable and so invisibly fine that it would
get in, somehow, and impair the accuracy of those scales.

Speculation ran riot, and yet there was a world of substantial business
going on, too.  All freights were brought over the mountains from
California (150 miles) by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons
drawn by such long mule teams that each team amounted to a procession,
and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals
stretched unbroken from Virginia to California.  Its long route was
traceable clear across the deserts of the Territory by the writhing
serpent of dust it lifted up.  By these wagons, freights over that
hundred and fifty miles were $200 a ton for small lots (same price for
all express matter brought by stage), and $100 a ton for full loads.
One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid
$10,000 a month freightage.  In the winter the freights were much higher.
All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco (a bar was
usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $1,500
to $3,000 according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the
freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per
cent. of its intrinsic value.

So, the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than $25
each.  Small shippers paid two per cent.  There were three stages a day,
each way, and I have seen the out-going stages carry away a third of a
ton of bullion each, and more than once I saw them divide a two-ton lot
and take it off.  However, these were extraordinary events.
[Mr. Valentine, Wells Fargo's agent, has handled all the bullion shipped
through the Virginia office for many a month.  To his memory--which is
excellent--we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company's
business in the Virginia office since the first of January, 1862: From
January 1st to April 1st, about $270,000 worth of bullion passed through
that office, during the next quarter, $570,000; next quarter, $800,000;
next quarter, $956,000; next quarter, $1,275,000; and for the quarter
ending on the 30th of last June, about $1,600,000.  Thus in a year and a
half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion.  During the
year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments
have more than doubled in the last six months.  This gives us room to
promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863
(though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are
under estimating, somewhat).  This gives us $6,000,000 for the year.
Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us--we will give them
$10,000,000.  To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir and Carson City, we will
allow an aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps,
and may possibly be a little under it.  To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000.
To Reese River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not
be before the year is out.  So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion
this year will be about $30,000,000.  Placing the number of mills in the
Territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing
$300,000 in bullion during the twelve months.  Allowing them to run three
hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes
their work average $1,000 a day.  Say the mills average twenty tons of
rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the
actual work of our one hundred mills figured down "to a spot"--$1,000 a
day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate.--Enterprise.
[A considerable over estimate--M.  T.]]

Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars,
and the freight on it over $1,000.  Each coach always carried a deal of
ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty
passengers at from $25 to $30 a head.  With six stages going all the
time, Wells, Fargo and Co.'s Virginia City business was important and
lucrative.

All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of
miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode--a vein of ore from fifty to
eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock--a vein as wide as some
of New York's streets.  I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a
coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.

Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground.  Under it
was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great
population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels
and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of
lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers
that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart.  These timbers were as
large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no
eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom.  It was like
peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal
skeleton.  Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and
higher than any church spire in America.  Imagine this stately
lattice-work stretching down Broadway, from the St. Nicholas to Wall
street, and a Fourth of July procession, reduced to pigmies, parading on
top of it and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of Trinity
steeple. One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that
forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries
beyond Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious
rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine
and built up there.  Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the
greatest of those silver mines.  The Spanish proverb says it requires a
gold mine to "run" a silver one, and it is true.  A beggar with a silver
mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell.

I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city.  The Gould and Curry is
only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the
Gould and Curry's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in
extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners.  Taken as a
whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a
population of five or six thousand.  In this present day some of those
populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under
Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the
superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as
we strike a fire alarm.  Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a
thousand feet deep.  In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest.

If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel
about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan
of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform.  It is like
tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first.  When you reach the
bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where
throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full
of great lumps of stone--silver ore; you select choice specimens from the
mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you
reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet
below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery"
to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when
your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped
"incline" like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight
feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it.
Arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending
cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of
bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins are rows
of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and down the
long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver
mills with their rich freight.  It is all "done," now, and there you are.
You need never go down again, for you have seen it all.  If you have
forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the
silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda chapters
if so disposed.

Of course these mines cave in, in places, occasionally, and then it is
worth one's while to take the risk of descending into them and observing
the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling mountain.
I published such an experience in the Enterprise, once, and from it I
will take an extract:

      AN HOUR IN THE CAVED MINES.--We journeyed down into the Ophir mine,
      yesterday, to see the earthquake.  We could not go down the deep
      incline, because it still has a propensity to cave in places.
      Therefore we traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill
      above the Ophir office, and then by means of a series of long
      ladders, climbed away down from the first to the fourth gallery.
      Traversing a drift, we came to the Spanish line, passed five sets of
      timbers still uninjured, and found the earthquake.  Here was as
      complete a chaos as ever was seen--vast masses of earth and
      splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together, with
      scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through.
      Rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber
      which had braced others earlier in the day, was now crushed down out
      of its former position, showing that the caving and settling of the
      tremendous mass was still going on.  We were in that portion of the
      Ophir known as the "north mines."  Returning to the surface, we
      entered a tunnel leading into the Central, for the purpose of
      getting into the main Ophir.  Descending a long incline in this
      tunnel, we traversed a drift or so, and then went down a deep shaft
      from whence we proceeded into the fifth gallery of the Ophir.  From
      a side-drift we crawled through a small hole and got into the midst
      of the earthquake again--earth and broken timbers mingled together
      without regard to grace or symmetry.  A large portion of the second,
      third and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to destruction--the
      two latter at seven o'clock on the previous evening.

      At the turn-table, near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery,
      two big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth
      gallery, and from the looks of the timbers, more was about to come.
      These beams are solid--eighteen inches square; first, a great beam
      is laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on
      it, supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above
      square, like the framework of a window.  The superincumbent weight
      was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly
      into the solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing
      and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow.  Before the
      Spanish caved in, some of their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were
      compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick!
      Imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in
      that way.  Here, also, was a range of timbers, for a distance of
      twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the
      weight resting upon them from the caved galleries above.  You could
      hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know
      that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon
      you.  The men down in the mine do not mind it, however.

      Returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the
      Ophir incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten
      inches of water there, and had to come back.  In repairing the
      damage done to the incline, the pump had to be stopped for two
      hours, and in the meantime the water gained about a foot.  However,
      the pump was at work again, and the flood-water was decreasing.
      We climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a deep shaft,
      whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth, out of reach
      of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the men had gone to
      dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass.  So, having seen
      the earthquake, we climbed out at the Union incline and tunnel, and
      adjourned, all dripping with candle grease and perspiration, to
      lunch at the Ophir office.

      During the great flush year of 1863, Nevada [claims to have]
      produced $25,000,000 in bullion--almost, if not quite, a round
      million to each thousand inhabitants, which is very well,
      considering that she was without agriculture and manufactures.
      Silver mining was her sole productive industry. [Since the above was
      in type, I learn from an official source that the above figure is
      too high, and that the yield for 1863 did not exceed $20,000,000.]
      However, the day for large figures is approaching; the Sutro Tunnel
      is to plow through the Comstock lode from end to end, at a depth of
      two thousand feet, and then mining will be easy and comparatively
      inexpensive; and the momentous matters of drainage, and hoisting and
      hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome.  This vast work will
      absorb many years, and millions of dollars, in its completion; but
      it will early yield money, for that desirable epoch will begin as
      soon as it strikes the first end of the vein.  The tunnel will be
      some eight miles long, and will develop astonishing riches.  Cars
      will carry the ore through the tunnel and dump it in the mills and
      thus do away with the present costly system of double handling and
      transportation by mule teams.  The water from the tunnel will
      furnish the motive power for the mills.  Mr. Sutro, the originator
      of this prodigious enterprise, is one of the few men in the world
      who is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up
      and hound such an undertaking to its completion.  He has converted
      several obstinate Congresses to a deserved friendliness toward his
      important work, and has gone up and down and to and fro in Europe
      until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it there.



CHAPTER LIII.

Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to
get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather's old
ram--but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless Jim
was drunk at the time--just comfortably and sociably drunk.  They kept
this up until my curiosity was on the rack to hear the story.  I got to
haunting Blaine; but it was of no use, the boys always found fault with
his condition; he was often moderately but never satisfactorily drunk.
I never watched a man's condition with such absorbing interest, such
anxious solicitude; I never so pined to see a man uncompromisingly drunk
before.  At last, one evening I hurried to his cabin, for I learned that
this time his situation was such that even the most fastidious could find
no fault with it--he was tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk--not a
hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to
obscure his memory.  As I entered, he was sitting upon an empty
powder-keg, with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command
silence.  His face was round, red, and very serious; his throat was bare
and his hair tumbled; in general appearance and costume he was a stalwart
miner of the period.  On the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light
revealed "the boys" sitting here and there on bunks, candle-boxes,
powder-kegs, etc.  They said:

"Sh--!  Don't speak--he's going to commence."


                THE STORY OF THE OLD RAM.

I found a seat at once, and Blaine said:

'I don't reckon them times will ever come again.  There never was a more
bullier old ram than what he was.  Grandfather fetched him from Illinois
--got him of a man by the name of Yates--Bill Yates--maybe you might have
heard of him; his father was a deacon--Baptist--and he was a rustler,
too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful
Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my
grandfather when he moved west.

'Seth Green was prob'ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson
--Sarah Wilkerson--good cretur, she was--one of the likeliest heifers that
was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her.  She
could heft a bar'l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack.  And spin?
Don't mention it!  Independent?  Humph!  When Sile Hawkins come a
browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn't
trot in harness alongside of her.  You see, Sile Hawkins was--no, it
warn't Sile Hawkins, after all--it was a galoot by the name of Filkins
--I disremember his first name; but he was a stump--come into pra'r meeting
drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary;
and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit
on old Miss Jefferson's head, poor old filly.  She was a good soul--had a
glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn't any, to
receive company in; it warn't big enough, and when Miss Wagner warn't
noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe,
or out to one side, and every which way, while t' other one was looking
as straight ahead as a spy-glass.

'Grown people didn't mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it
was so sort of scary.  She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it
wouldn't work, somehow--the cotton would get loose and stick out and look
so kind of awful that the children couldn't stand it no way.  She was
always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company
empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it
hopped out, being blind on that side, you see.  So somebody would have to
hunch her and say, "Your game eye has fetched loose.  Miss Wagner dear"
--and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in
again--wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird's egg,
being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company.  But being wrong
side before warn't much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was
sky-blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way
she turned it it didn't match nohow.

'Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was.  When she had a
quilting, or Dorcas S'iety at her house she gen'ally borrowed Miss
Higgins's wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than
her other pin, but much she minded that.  She said she couldn't abide
crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had
company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself.
She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacops's wig
--Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler's wife--a ratty old buzzard, he was,
that used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for 'em;
and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade, on a coffin that
he judged would fit the can'idate; and if it was a slow customer and kind
of uncertain, he'd fetch his rations and a blanket along and sleep in the
coffin nights.  He was anchored out that way, in frosty weather, for
about three weeks, once, before old Robbins's place, waiting for him; and
after that, for as much as two years, Jacops was not on speaking terms
with the old man, on account of his disapp'inting him.  He got one of his
feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old Robbins took a favorable turn
and got well.  The next time Robbins got sick, Jacops tried to make up
with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but
old Robbins was too many for him; he had him in, and 'peared to be
powerful weak; he bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay
it back and twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn't like the coffin
after he'd tried it.  And then Robbins died, and at the funeral he
bursted off the lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let
up on the performances, becuz he could not stand such a coffin as that.
You see he had been in a trance once before, when he was young, and he
took the chances on another, cal'lating that if he made the trip it was
money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn't lose a cent.  And
by George he sued Jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up
the coffin in his back parlor and said he 'lowed to take his time, now.
It was always an aggravation to Jacops, the way that miserable old thing
acted.  He moved back to Indiany pretty soon--went to Wellsville
--Wellsville was the place the Hogadorns was from.  Mighty fine family.
Old Maryland stock.  Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed
licker, and cuss better than most any man I ever see.  His second wife
was the widder Billings--she that was Becky Martin; her dam was deacon
Dunlap's first wife.  Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and
died in grace--et up by the savages.  They et him, too, poor feller
--biled him.  It warn't the custom, so they say, but they explained to
friends of his'n that went down there to bring away his things, that
they'd tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good
out of 'em--and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that
man's life was fooled away just out of a dern'd experiment, so to speak.
But mind you, there ain't anything ever reely lost; everything that
people can't understand and don't see the reason of does good if you only
hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov'dence don't fire no blank
ca'tridges, boys.  That there missionary's substance, unbeknowns to
himself, actu'ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a
chance at the barbacue.  Nothing ever fetched them but that.  Don't tell
me it was an accident that he was biled.  There ain't no such a thing as
an accident.

'When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk,
or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the
third story and broke the old man's back in two places.  People said it
was an accident.  Much accident there was about that.  He didn't know
what he was there for, but he was there for a good object.  If he hadn't
been there the Irishman would have been killed.  Nobody can ever make me
believe anything different from that.  Uncle Lem's dog was there.  Why
didn't the Irishman fall on the dog?  Becuz the dog would a seen him a
coming and stood from under.  That's the reason the dog warn't appinted.
A dog can't be depended on to carry out a special providence.  Mark my
words it was a put-up thing.  Accidents don't happen, boys.  Uncle Lem's
dog--I wish you could a seen that dog.  He was a reglar shepherd--or
ruther he was part bull and part shepherd--splendid animal; belonged to
parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him.  Parson Hagar belonged to the
Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his
sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got
nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than
a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his
remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to 'tend the funeral.
There was fourteen yards in the piece.

'She wouldn't let them roll him up, but planted him just so--full length.
The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they
had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window.  They didn't
bury him--they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument.
And they nailed a sign on it and put--put on--put on it--sacred to--the
m-e-m-o-r-y--of fourteen y-a-r-d-s--of three-ply--car---pet--containing
all that was--m-o-r-t-a-l--of--of--W-i-l-l-i-a-m--W-h-e--'

Jim Blaine had been growing gradually drowsy and drowsier--his head
nodded, once, twice, three times--dropped peacefully upon his breast, and
he fell tranquilly asleep.  The tears were running down the boys' cheeks
--they were suffocating with suppressed laughter--and had been from the
start, though I had never noticed it.  I perceived that I was "sold."
I learned then that Jim Blaine's peculiarity was that whenever he reached
a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from
setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure
which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram--and the mention of
the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him
get, concerning it.  He always maundered off, interminably, from one
thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep.
What the thing was that happened to him and his grandfather's old ram is
a dark mystery to this day, for nobody has ever yet found out.



CHAPTER LIV.

Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia--it is the
case with every town and city on the Pacific coast.  They are a harmless
race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than
dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom
think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries.  They are
quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as
industrious as the day is long.  A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a
lazy one does not exist.  So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his
hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want
of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to
find something to do.  He is a great convenience to everybody--even to
the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins,
suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies,
and death for their murders.  Any white man can swear a Chinaman's life
away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man.
Ours is the "land of the free"--nobody denies that--nobody challenges it.
[Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.] As I write, news
comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an
inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed
the shameful deed, no one interfered.

There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) Chinamen
on the Pacific coast.  There were about a thousand in Virginia.  They
were penned into a "Chinese quarter"--a thing which they do not
particularly object to, as they are fond of herding together.  Their
buildings were of wood; usually only one story high, and set thickly
together along streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through.
Their quarter was a little removed from the rest of the town.  The chief
employment of Chinamen in towns is to wash clothing.  They always send a
bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes.  It is mere ceremony, for
it does not enlighten the customer much.  Their price for washing was
$2.50 per dozen--rather cheaper than white people could afford to wash
for at that time.  A very common sign on the Chinese houses was: "See
Yup, Washer and Ironer"; "Hong Wo, Washer"; "Sam Sing & Ah Hop, Washing."
The house servants, cooks, etc., in California and Nevada, were chiefly
Chinamen.  There were few white servants and no Chinawomen so employed.
Chinamen make good house servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick
to learn and tirelessly industrious.  They do not need to be taught a
thing twice, as a general thing.  They are imitative.  If a Chinaman were
to see his master break up a centre table, in a passion, and kindle a
fire with it, that Chinaman would be likely to resort to the furniture
for fuel forever afterward.

All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy facility--pity but all
our petted voters could.  In California they rent little patches of
ground and do a deal of gardening.  They will raise surprising crops of
vegetables on a sand pile.  They waste nothing.  What is rubbish to a
Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or
another.  He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white
people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by
melting.  He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure.
In California he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men
have abandoned as exhausted and worthless--and then the officers come
down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the
legislature has given the broad, general name of "foreign" mining tax,
but it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen.  This swindle
has in some cases been repeated once or twice on the same victim in the
course of the same month--but the public treasury was no additionally
enriched by it, probably.

Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence--they worship their departed
ancestors, in fact.  Hence, in China, a man's front yard, back yard, or
any other part of his premises, is made his family burying ground, in
order that he may visit the graves at any and all times.  Therefore that
huge empire is one mighty cemetery; it is ridged and wringled from its
centre to its circumference with graves--and inasmuch as every foot of
ground must be made to do its utmost, in China, lest the swarming
population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and yield a
harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the dead.  Since the
departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a Chinaman cannot bear
that any indignity be offered the places where they sleep.
Mr. Burlingame said that herein lay China's bitter opposition to
railroads; a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without
disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends.

A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body
lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive, himself, after
death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him.
Therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have
his bones returned to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a
foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that
his body shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells
a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is
specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to China in
case of death.  On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or
another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies
keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies
home when they die.  The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of
these.  The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand
members on the coast.  Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it
has a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal
state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a
numerous priesthood.  In it I was shown a register of its members, with
the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked.  Every ship
that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese
corpses--or did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious
refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat
underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration.  The bill was offered,
whether it passed or not.  It is my impression that it passed.  There was
another bill--it became a law--compelling every incoming Chinaman to be
vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no decent doctor
would defile himself with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it.
As few importers of Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the
law-makers thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese
immigration.

What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like--or, indeed, what the
Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is like--may be
gathered from this item which I printed in the Enterprise while reporting
for that paper:

      CHINATOWN.--Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through
      our Chinese quarter the other night.  The Chinese have built their
      portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither
      carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a
      general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles.  At ten o'clock
      at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory.  In every little
      cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning
      Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly,
      guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed
      vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium,
      motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess
      of satisfaction--or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately
      after having passed the pipe to his neighbor--for opium-smoking is a
      comfortless operation, and requires constant attention.  A lamp sits
      on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker's
      mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on
      fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a
      hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds
      to smoke--and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of
      the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue.
      John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen
      whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we
      could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature.  Possibly in his
      visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular
      washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds'-nests in Paradise.

Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No.  13 Wang
street.  He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest
way.  He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies,
with unpronouncable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs,
and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of
porcelain.  He offered us a mess of birds'-nests; also, small, neat
sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen
to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse,
and therefore refrained.  Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles
of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and
beyond our ability to describe.

His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were
split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that
shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which
kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.

We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery
scheme--in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in
various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a
lottery, and the balance of the tribe "buck" at it.  "Tom," who speaks
faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the Territorial
Enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor's hall two years ago,
said that "Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree
hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight um
seventy--may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good."

However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are,
as a general thing, that "he get whip heself."  We could not see that
these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the
figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed
in telling "t'other from which;" the manner of drawing is similar to
ours.

Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street.  He sold us fans of
white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like
Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone
unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the
inner coat of a sea-shell.  As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented
the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with
peacocks' feathers.

We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our
comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their
want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our
hosts and "dickered" for a pagan God or two.  Finally, we were impressed
with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a
machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different
rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands.  He fingered them
with incredible rapidity--in fact, he pushed them from place to place as
fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a piano.

They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well
treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast.  No Californian
gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any
circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East.
Only the scum of the population do it--they and their children; they,
and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise,
for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as
well as elsewhere in America.



CHAPTER LV.

I began to get tired of staying in one place so long.

There was no longer satisfying variety in going down to Carson to report
the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse-races and
pumpkin-shows once in three months; (they had got to raising pumpkins and
potatoes in Washoe Valley, and of course one of the first achievements of
the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar Agricultural Fair
to show off forty dollars' worth of those pumpkins in--however, the
territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum").  I wanted
to see San Francisco.  I wanted to go somewhere.  I wanted--I did not
know what I wanted.  I had the "spring fever" and wanted a change,
principally, no doubt.  Besides, a convention had framed a State
Constitution; nine men out of every ten wanted an office; I believed that
these gentlemen would "treat" the moneyless and the irresponsible among
the population into adopting the constitution and thus well-nigh killing
the country (it could not well carry such a load as a State government,
since it had nothing to tax that could stand a tax, for undeveloped mines
could not, and there were not fifty developed ones in the land, there was
but little realty to tax, and it did seem as if nobody was ever going to
think of the simple salvation of inflicting a money penalty on murder).
I believed that a State government would destroy the "flush times," and I
wanted to get away.  I believed that the mining stocks I had on hand
would soon be worth $100,000, and thought if they reached that before the
Constitution was adopted, I would sell out and make myself secure from
the crash the change of government was going to bring.  I considered
$100,000 sufficient to go home with decently, though it was but a small
amount compared to what I had been expecting to return with.  I felt
rather down-hearted about it, but I tried to comfort myself with the
reflection that with such a sum I could not fall into want.  About this
time a schoolmate of mine whom I had not seen since boyhood, came
tramping in on foot from Reese River, a very allegory of Poverty.
The son of wealthy parents, here he was, in a strange land, hungry,
bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless
hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have
"taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son himself," as he pleasantly
remarked.

He wanted to borrow forty-six dollars--twenty-six to take him to San
Francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe,
for he needed it.  I found I had but little more than the amount wanted,
in my pocket; so I stepped in and borrowed forty-six dollars of a banker
(on twenty days' time, without the formality of a note), and gave it him,
rather than walk half a block to the office, where I had some specie laid
up.  If anybody had told me that it would take me two years to pay back
that forty-six dollars to the banker (for I did not expect it of the
Prodigal, and was not disappointed), I would have felt injured.  And so
would the banker.

I wanted a change.  I wanted variety of some kind.  It came.  Mr. Goodman
went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor.  It destroyed
me.  The first day, I wrote my "leader" in the forenoon.  The second day,
I had no subject and put it off till the afternoon.  The third day I put
it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the
"American Cyclopedia," that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this
land.  The fourth day I "fooled around" till midnight, and then fell back
on the Cyclopedia again.  The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till
midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter
personalities on six different people.  The sixth day I labored in
anguish till far into the night and brought forth--nothing.  The paper
went to press without an editorial.  The seventh day I resigned.  On the
eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands--my
personalities had borne fruit.

Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor.  It is
easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy
to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a
correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write
editorials.  Subjects are the trouble--the dreary lack of them, I mean.
Every day, it is drag, drag, drag--think, and worry and suffer--all the
world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled.
Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is no trouble to
write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains
dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year.  It makes one low
spirited simply to think of it.  The matter that each editor of a daily
paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to
eight bulky volumes like this book!  Fancy what a library an editor's
work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service.  Yet people often
marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to
produce so many books.  If these authors had wrought as voluminously as
newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed.
How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting
consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere
mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year
after year, is incomprehensible.  Preachers take two months' holiday in
midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing,
in the long run.  In truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how
an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten
to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year
round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever.  Ever since I survived
my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper
that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial,
and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it!

Mr. Goodman's return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become
a reporter again.  I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks
after being General of the army.  So I thought I would depart and go
abroad into the world somewhere.  Just at this juncture, Dan, my
associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two
citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and
aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured
in a new mining district in our neighborhood.  He said they offered to
pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale.
He had refused to go.  It was the very opportunity I wanted.  I abused
him for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner.  He said
it had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had
recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper.
I asked Dan if it was a good, honest mine, and no swindle.  He said the
men had shown him nine tons of the rock, which they had got out to take
to New York, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little rock
in Nevada that was richer; and moreover, he said that they had secured a
tract of valuable timber and a mill-site, near the mine.  My first idea
was to kill Dan.  But I changed my mind, notwithstanding I was so angry,
for I thought maybe the chance was not yet lost.  Dan said it was by no
means lost; that the men were absent at the mine again, and would not be
in Virginia to leave for the East for some ten days; that they had
requested him to do the talking to Marshall, and he had promised that he
would either secure Marshall or somebody else for them by the time they
got back; he would now say nothing to anybody till they returned, and
then fulfil his promise by furnishing me to them.

It was splendid.  I went to bed all on fire with excitement; for nobody
had yet gone East to sell a Nevada silver mine, and the field was white
for the sickle.  I felt that such a mine as the one described by Dan
would bring a princely sum in New York, and sell without delay or
difficulty.  I could not sleep, my fancy so rioted through its castles in
the air.  It was the "blind lead" come again.

Next day I got away, on the coach, with the usual eclat attending
departures of old citizens,--for if you have only half a dozen friends
out there they will make noise for a hundred rather than let you seem to
go away neglected and unregretted--and Dan promised to keep strict watch
for the men that had the mine to sell.

The trip was signalized but by one little incident, and that occurred
just as we were about to start.  A very seedy looking vagabond passenger
got out of the stage a moment to wait till the usual ballast of silver
bricks was thrown in.  He was standing on the pavement, when an awkward
express employee, carrying a brick weighing a hundred pounds, stumbled
and let it fall on the bummer's foot.  He instantly dropped on the ground
and began to howl in the most heart-breaking way.  A sympathizing crowd
gathered around and were going to pull his boot off; but he screamed
louder than ever and they desisted; then he fell to gasping, and between
the gasps ejaculated "Brandy!  for Heaven's sake, brandy!"  They poured
half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him.
Then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done.
The express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he
declined, and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along with
him, to soothe his paroxyms of pain when they came on, he would be
grateful and content.  He was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we
drove off.  He was so smiling and happy after that, that I could not
refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a
crushed foot.

"Well," said he, "I hadn't had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn't a
cent to my name.  I was most perishing--and so, when that duffer dropped
that hundred-pounder on my foot, I see my chance.  Got a cork leg, you
know!" and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it.

He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his
timely ingenuity.

One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another.  I once heard a
gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a Californian
bar-room.  He entitled it "Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink."  It was nothing
but a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering, and worthy
of Toodles himself.  The modest man, tolerably far gone with beer and
other matters, enters a saloon (twenty-five cents is the price for
anything and everything, and specie the only money used) and lays down a
half dollar; calls for whiskey and drinks it; the bar-keeper makes change
and lays the quarter in a wet place on the counter; the modest man
fumbles at it with nerveless fingers, but it slips and the water holds
it; he contemplates it, and tries again; same result; observes that
people are interested in what he is at, blushes; fumbles at the quarter
again--blushes--puts his forefinger carefully, slowly down, to make sure
of his aim--pushes the coin toward the bar-keeper, and says with a sigh:

"Gimme a cigar!"

Naturally, another gentleman present told about another drunken man.  He
said he reeled toward home late at night; made a mistake and entered the
wrong gate; thought he saw a dog on the stoop; and it was--an iron one.

He stopped and considered; wondered if it was a dangerous dog; ventured
to say "Be (hic) begone!"  No effect.  Then he approached warily, and
adopted conciliation; pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, but
failed; still approached, saying, "Poor dog!--doggy, doggy, doggy!--poor
doggy-dog!"  Got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names; till
master of the advantages; then exclaimed, "Leave, you thief!"--planted a
vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head-over-heels overboard, of
course.  A pause; a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a
reflective voice:

"Awful solid dog.  What could he ben eating?  ('ic!) Rocks, p'raps.
Such animals is dangerous.--'  At's what I say--they're dangerous.  If a
man--('ic!)--if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him feed him on
rocks; 'at's all right; but let him keep him at home--not have him layin'
round promiscuous, where ('ic!) where people's liable to stumble over him
when they ain't noticin'!"

It was not without regret that I took a last look at the tiny flag (it
was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide) fluttering like a lady's
handkerchief from the topmost peak of Mount Davidson, two thousand feet
above Virginia's roofs, and felt that doubtless I was bidding a permanent
farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous enjoyment of
life I had ever experienced.  And this reminds me of an incident which
the dullest memory Virginia could boast at the time it happened must
vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies.  Late one summer
afternoon we had a rain shower.

That was astonishing enough, in itself, to set the whole town buzzing,
for it only rains (during a week or two weeks) in the winter in Nevada,
and even then not enough at a time to make it worth while for any
merchant to keep umbrellas for sale.  But the rain was not the chief
wonder.  It only lasted five or ten minutes; while the people were still
talking about it all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense blackness
as of midnight.  All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson,
over-looking the city, put on such a funereal gloom that only the
nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly
distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested
against.  This unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain;
and as they looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving
and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme
summit! In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing with
hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding world
of darkness.  It flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger; but
with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was.  It
was the flag!--though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like a
supernatural visitor of some kind--a mysterious messenger of good
tidings, some were fain to believe.  It was the nation's emblem
transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled from
view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad
panorama of mountain ranges and deserts.  Not even upon the staff of the
flag--for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched
by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom.  For a whole hour the
weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the
thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest.  How the
people were wrought up!  The superstition grew apace that this was a
mystic courier come with great news from the war--the poetry of the idea
excusing and commending it--and on it spread, from heart to heart, from
lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse to
have out the military and welcome the bright waif with a salvo of
artillery!

And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to
official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a
silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the
speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen
that day in the east--Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at
Gettysburg!

But for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment
of eastern news till a day after its publication in the California
papers, the glorified flag on Mount Davidson would have been saluted and
re-saluted, that memorable evening, as long as there was a charge of
powder to thunder with; the city would have been illuminated, and every
man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk,--as was the
custom of the country on all occasions of public moment.  Even at this
distant day I cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity
without regret.  What a time we might have had!



CHAPTER LVI.

We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the
clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California.  And I will remark
here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires distance to
give it its highest charm.  The mountains are imposing in their sublimity
and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view--but one
must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings;
a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad
poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous
family--redwood, pine, spruce, fir--and so, at a near view there is a
wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched down ward
and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to "Sh!
--don't say a word!--you might disturb somebody!"  Close at hand, too,
there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine; there
is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage; one
walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of
the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall;
he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for substantial,
shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon, and finds none,
for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt, enemies to
pensive musing and clean apparel.  Often a grassy plain in California, is
what it should be, but often, too, it is best contemplated at a distance,
because although its grass blades are tall, they stand up vindictively
straight and self-sufficient, and are unsociably wide apart, with
uncomely spots of barren sand between.

One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from "the
States" go into ecstasies over the loveliness of "ever-blooming
California."  And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies.  But
perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with
the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer
greens of Californian "verdure," stand astonished, and filled with
worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the
brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form
and species and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision of
Paradise itself.  The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and
sombre California, when that man has seen New England's meadow-expanses
and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire,
or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes
very near being funny--would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic.
No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful.  The tropics are
not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them.  They seem beautiful
at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by.  Change is the
handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.  The land that has
four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony.
Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of
its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating
graces--and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a
radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.
And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its
turn, seems the loveliest.

San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and
handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the
architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of
decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward
the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently.  Even the kindly
climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally
experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by,
and then when the longed for rain does come it stays.  Even the playful
earthquake is better contemplated at a dis----

However there are varying opinions about that.

The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable.  The
thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round.  It hardly
changes at all.  You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and
Winter, and never use a mosquito bar.  Nobody ever wears Summer clothing.
You wear black broadcloth--if you have it--in August and January, just
the same.  It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the
other.  You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans.  It is as
pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is
doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world.  The wind blows there a
good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if
you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there.  It has
only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only
remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set them
to wondering what the feathery stuff was.

During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and
cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls.  But when the other four
months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella.  Because
you will require it.  Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days
in hardly varying succession.  When you want to go visiting, or attend
church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it
is likely to rain or not--you look at the almanac.  If it is Winter, it
will rain--and if it is Summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it.
You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never
lightens.  And after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every
night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your
heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies
once, and make everything alive--you will wish the prisoned lightnings
would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding
glare for one little instant.  You would give anything to hear the old
familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody.  And along
in the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous,
pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for
rain--hail--snow--thunder and lightning--anything to break the monotony
--you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better.  And the
chances are that you'll get it, too.

San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills.
They yield a generous vegetation.  All the rare flowers which people in
"the States" rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and
green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year
round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss
roses--I do not know the names of a tenth part of them.  I only know that
while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow,
Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only
keep their hands off and let them grow.  And I have heard that they have
also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful
Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it--or flower of the Holy Spirit
--though I thought it grew only in Central America--down on the Isthmus.
In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure as snow.
The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it.  The blossom has
been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been
taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived,
has failed.

I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and
but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco.  Now if we travel
a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of
Sacramento.  One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San
Francisco--but they can be found in Sacramento.  Not always and
unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve
years, perhaps.  Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily
believe--people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and
wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves.  It gets hot there,
but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter.  Fort Yuma is
probably the hottest place on earth.  The thermometer stays at one
hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time--except when it varies
and goes higher.  It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so
used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it.  There is a
tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty
different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed
to steal one.--M.  T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there,
once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,
--and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets.  There is no doubt
about the truth of this statement--there can be no doubt about it.  I
have seen the place where that soldier used to board.  In Sacramento it
is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries
and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at
eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon
put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner
Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet
deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty
crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.

There is a transition for you!  Where will you find another like it in
the Western hemisphere?  And some of us have swept around snow-walled
curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above
the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of
the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage,
its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted
atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance--a
dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and
striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow,
and savage crags and precipices.



CHAPTER LVII.

It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the
most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,
in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured
by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago.  You may see
such disfigurements far and wide over California--and in some such
places, where only meadows and forests are visible--not a living
creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a
sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness--you will find
it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing
little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper,
fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth
of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco
smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with
tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German
principality--streets crowded and rife with business--town lots worth
four hundred dollars a front foot--labor, laughter, music, dancing,
swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing--a bloody inquest and a man for
breakfast every morning--everything that delights and adorns existence
--all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and
promising young city,--and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless,
homeless solitude.  The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the
name of the place is forgotten.  In no other land, in modern times, have
towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of
California.

It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days.  It was a
curious population.  It was the only population of the kind that the
world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the
world will ever see its like again.  For observe, it was an assemblage of
two hundred thousand young men--not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved
weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of
push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to
make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of
the world's glorious ones.  No women, no children, no gray and stooping
veterans,--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young
giants--the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant
host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.
And where are they now?  Scattered to the ends of the earth--or
prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or
dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all
--victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust
that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward.  It is pitiful to
think upon.

It was a splendid population--for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained
sloths staid at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers
--you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material.  It was that
population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding
enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring
and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this
day--and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as
usual, and says "Well, that is California all over."

But they were rough in those times!  They fairly reveled in gold, whisky,
fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy.  The honest miner
raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and
what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn't a
cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck.  They cooked their own
bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts
--blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any
annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt
or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.  For those people
hated aristocrats.  They had a particular and malignant animosity toward
what they called a "biled shirt."

It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society!  Men--only swarming
hosts of stalwart men--nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible
anywhere!

In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that
rare and blessed spectacle, a woman!  Old inhabitants tell how, in a
certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was
come!  They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the
camping-ground--sign of emigrants from over the great plains.  Everybody
went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was
discovered fluttering in the wind!  The male emigrant was visible.  The
miners said:

"Fetch her out!"

He said: "It is my wife, gentlemen--she is sick--we have been robbed of
money, provisions, everything, by the Indians--we want to rest."

"Fetch her out!  We've got to see her!"

"But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she--"

"FETCH HER OUT!"

He "fetched her out," and they swung their hats and sent up three rousing
cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and gazed at her, and touched
her dress, and listened to her voice with the look of men who listened to
a memory rather than a present reality--and then they collected
twenty-five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man, and swung
their hats again and gave three more cheers, and went home satisfied.


Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer, and talked
with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in San Francisco
was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was only
two or three years old at the time.  Her father said that, after landing
from the ship, they were walking up the street, a servant leading the
party with the little girl in her arms.  And presently a huge miner,
bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons--just down
from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently-barred the way, stopped
the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with gratification
and astonishment.  Then he said, reverently:

"Well, if it ain't a child!" And then he snatched a little leather sack
out of his pocket and said to the servant:

"There's a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I'll give it to
you to let me kiss the child!"

That anecdote is true.

But see how things change.  Sitting at that dinner-table, listening to
that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of
kissing the same child, I would have been refused.  Seventeen added years
have far more than doubled the price.

And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star City, in the
Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long, post-office single
file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a crack in
the cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation--a genuine, live
Woman!  And at the end of half of an hour my turn came, and I put my eye
to the crack, and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and tossing
flap-jacks in a frying-pan with the other.

And she was one hundred and sixty-five [Being in calmer mood, now, I
voluntarily knock off a hundred from that.--M.T.] years old, and hadn't a
tooth in her head.



CHAPTER LVIII.

For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of
existence--a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible
to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness.  I fell in love with the
most cordial and sociable city in the Union.  After the sage-brush and
alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me.  I lived at
the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places,
infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which
oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the
vulgar honesty to confess it.  However, I suppose I was not greatly worse
than the most of my countrymen in that.  I had longed to be a butterfly,
and I was one at last.  I attended private parties in sumptuous evening
dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkad and
schottisched with a step peculiar to myself--and the kangaroo.  In a
word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars
(prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that
silver-mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East.  I spent
money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an
interested eye and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.

Something very important happened.  The property holders of Nevada voted
against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose
were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads.  But
after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though
unquestionably it was one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then
concluded not to sell.  Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad;
bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very
washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver
stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers
enriched and rich men beggared.  What a gambling carnival it was!  Gould
and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot!  And then
--all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went
to ruin and destruction!  The wreck was complete.

The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it.  I was an
early beggar and a thorough one.  My hoarded stocks were not worth the
paper they were printed on.  I threw them all away.  I, the cheerful
idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself
beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when
I gathered together my various debts and paid them.  I removed from the
hotel to a very private boarding house.  I took a reporter's berth and
went to work.  I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building
confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east.  But I could not
hear from Dan.  My letters miscarried or were not answered.

One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office.  The
next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk
which had been there twenty-four hours.  It was signed "Marshall"--the
Virginia reporter--and contained a request that I should call at the
hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for
the east in the morning.  A postscript added that their errand was a big
mining speculation!  I was hardly ever so sick in my life.  I abused
myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I
ought to have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away from
the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there.
And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and
arrived just in time to be too late.  The ship was in the stream and
under way.

I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would
amount to nothing--poor comfort at best--and then went back to my
slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget
all about it.

A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake.  It was one which was
long called the "great" earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished
till this day.  It was just after noon, on a bright October day.  I was
coming down Third street.  The only objects in motion anywhere in sight
in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind
me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street.  Otherwise, all
was solitude and a Sabbath stillness.  As I turned the corner, around a
frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that
here was an item!--no doubt a fight in that house.  Before I could turn
and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground seemed
to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down,
and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together.
I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow.  I knew what it was,
now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else, took out my watch
and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and still severer shock
came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing,
I saw a sight!  The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in
Third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the
street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke!  And here came the
buggy--overboard went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the
vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of
street.

One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds
and rags down the thoroughfare.  The street car had stopped, the horses
were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends,
and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side
of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an
impaled madman.  Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could
reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could
execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people
stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded.
Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.

Of the wonders wrought by "the great earthquake," these were all that
came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide
over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.

The destruction of property was trifling--the injury to it was
wide-spread and somewhat serious.

The "curiosities" of the earthquake were simply endless.  Gentlemen and
ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had dissipated till a
late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public streets
in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all.  One woman
who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it by the
ankles as if it were a dressed turkey.  Prominent citizens who were
supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in their
shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands.  Dozens of men with
necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the eyes
or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy
stubble.  Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a
short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had
not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up.

A prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with nothing
on but one brief undergarment--met a chambermaid, and exclaimed:

"Oh, what shall I do!  Where shall I go!"

She responded with naive serenity:

"If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!"

A certain foreign consul's lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion,
and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies
in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands' purses and arrayed
themselves similarly.  One man who had suffered considerably and growled
accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the
next instant the consul's wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no
other apology for clothing than--a bath-towel!  The sufferer rose
superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:

"Now that is something like!  Get out your towel my dear!"

The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would
have covered several acres of ground.  For some days afterward, groups of
eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long
zig-zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground.  Four feet of
the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned
around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.

A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of
one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up
the meeting earth like a slender grave.  A lady sitting in her rocking
and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut
twice, like a mouth, and then-drop the end of a brick on the floor like a
tooth.  She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose
and went out of there.  One lady who was coming down stairs was
astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to
strike her with its club.  They both reached the bottom of the flight at
the same time,--the woman insensible from the fright.  Her child, born
some little time afterward, was club-footed.  However--on second
thought,--if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at
his own risk.

The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the
churches.  The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the
services.  He glanced up, hesitated, and said:

"However, we will omit the benediction!"--and the next instant there was
a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.

After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:

"Keep your seats!  There is no better place to die than this"--

And added, after the third:

"But outside is good enough!"  He then skipped out at the back door.

Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the
earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before.  There was hardly a
girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of this kind.  Suspended
pictures were thrown down, but oftener still, by a curious freak of the
earthquake's humor, they were whirled completely around with their faces
to the wall!  There was great difference of opinion, at first, as to the
course or direction the earthquake traveled, but water that splashed out
of various tanks and buckets settled that.  Thousands of people were made
so sea-sick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they
were weak and bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days
afterward.--Hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely.

The queer earthquake--episodes that formed the staple of San Francisco
gossip for the next week would fill a much larger book than this, and so
I will diverge from the subject.

By and by, in the due course of things, I picked up a copy of the
Enterprise one day, and fell under this cruel blow:

      NEVADA MINES IN NEW YORK.--G.  M.  Marshall, Sheba Hurs and Amos H.
      Rose, who left San Francisco last July for New York City, with ores
      from mines in Pine Wood District, Humboldt County, and on the Reese
      River range, have disposed of a mine containing six thousand feet
      and called the Pine Mountains Consolidated, for the sum of
      $3,000,000.  The stamps on the deed, which is now on its way to
      Humboldt County, from New York, for record, amounted to $3,000,
      which is said to be the largest amount of stamps ever placed on one
      document.  A working capital of $1,000,000 has been paid into the
      treasury, and machinery has already been purchased for a large
      quartz mill, which will be put up as soon as possible.  The stock in
      this company is all full paid and entirely unassessable.  The ores
      of the mines in this district somewhat resemble those of the Sheba
      mine in Humboldt.  Sheba Hurst, the discoverer of the mines, with
      his friends corralled all the best leads and all the land and timber
      they desired before making public their whereabouts.  Ores from
      there, assayed in this city, showed them to be exceedingly rich in
      silver and gold--silver predominating.  There is an abundance of
      wood and water in the District.  We are glad to know that New York
      capital has been enlisted in the development of the mines of this
      region.  Having seen the ores and assays, we are satisfied that the
      mines of the District are very valuable--anything but wild-cat.

Once more native imbecility had carried the day, and I had lost a
million!  It was the "blind lead" over again.

Let us not dwell on this miserable matter.  If I were inventing these
things, I could be wonderfully humorous over them; but they are too true
to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant day. [True, and
yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly.  I saw Marshall,
months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim to
have captured an entire million.  In fact I gathered that he had not then
received $50,000.  Beyond that figure his fortune appeared to consist of
uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious certainties.  However,
when the above item appeared in print I put full faith in it, and
incontinently wilted and went to seed under it.] Suffice it that I so
lost heart, and so yielded myself up to repinings and sighings and
foolish regrets, that I neglected my duties and became about worthless,
as a reporter for a brisk newspaper.  And at last one of the proprietors
took me aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect,
and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth and so save myself the
disgrace of a dismissal.



CHAPTER LIX.

For a time I wrote literary screeds for the Golden Era. C. H. Webb had
established a very excellent literary weekly called the Californian, but
high merit was no guaranty of success; it languished, and he sold out to
three printers, and Bret Harte became editor at $20 a week, and I was
employed to contribute an article a week at $12.  But the journal still
languished, and the printers sold out to Captain Ogden, a rich man and a
pleasant gentleman who chose to amuse himself with such an expensive
luxury without much caring about the cost of it.  When he grew tired of
the novelty, he re-sold to the printers, the paper presently died a
peaceful death, and I was out of work again.  I would not mention these
things but for the fact that they so aptly illustrate the ups and downs
that characterize life on the Pacific coast.  A man could hardly stumble
into such a variety of queer vicissitudes in any other country.

For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during
that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay
my board.  I became a very adept at "slinking."  I slunk from back street
to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar,
I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every
mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after
wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I
slunk to my bed.  I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the
worms.  During all this time I had but one piece of money--a silver ten
cent piece--and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest
the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless,
might suggest suicide.  I had pawned every thing but the clothes I had
on; so I clung to my dime desperately, till it was smooth with handling.

However, I am forgetting.  I did have one other occupation beside that of
"slinking."  It was the entertaining of a collector (and being
entertained by him,) who had in his hands the Virginia banker's bill for
forty-six dollars which I had loaned my schoolmate, the "Prodigal."  This
man used to call regularly once a week and dun me, and sometimes oftener.
He did it from sheer force of habit, for he knew he could get nothing.
He would get out his bill, calculate the interest for me, at five per
cent a month, and show me clearly that there was no attempt at fraud in
it and no mistakes; and then plead, and argue and dun with all his might
for any sum--any little trifle--even a dollar--even half a dollar, on
account.  Then his duty was accomplished and his conscience free.  He
immediately dropped the subject there always; got out a couple of cigars
and divided, put his feet in the window, and then we would have a long,
luxurious talk about everything and everybody, and he would furnish me a
world of curious dunning adventures out of the ample store in his memory.
By and by he would clap his hat on his head, shake hands and say briskly:

"Well, business is business--can't stay with you always!"--and was off in
a second.

The idea of pining for a dun!  And yet I used to long for him to come,
and would get as uneasy as any mother if the day went by without his
visit, when I was expecting him.  But he never collected that bill, at
last nor any part of it.  I lived to pay it to the banker myself.

Misery loves company.  Now and then at night, in out-of-the way, dimly
lighted places, I found myself happening on another child of misfortune.
He looked so seedy and forlorn, so homeless and friendless and forsaken,
that I yearned toward him as a brother.  I wanted to claim kinship with
him and go about and enjoy our wretchedness together.  The drawing toward
each other must have been mutual; at any rate we got to falling together
oftener, though still seemingly by accident; and although we did not
speak or evince any recognition, I think the dull anxiety passed out of
both of us when we saw each other, and then for several hours we would
idle along contentedly, wide apart, and glancing furtively in at home
lights and fireside gatherings, out of the night shadows, and very much
enjoying our dumb companionship.

Finally we spoke, and were inseparable after that.  For our woes were
identical, almost.  He had been a reporter too, and lost his berth, and
this was his experience, as nearly as I can recollect it.  After losing
his berth he had gone down, down, down, with never a halt: from a
boarding house on Russian Hill to a boarding house in Kearney street;
from thence to Dupont; from thence to a low sailor den; and from thence
to lodgings in goods boxes and empty hogsheads near the wharves.  Then;
for a while, he had gained a meagre living by sewing up bursted sacks of
grain on the piers; when that failed he had found food here and there as
chance threw it in his way.  He had ceased to show his face in daylight,
now, for a reporter knows everybody, rich and poor, high and low, and
cannot well avoid familiar faces in the broad light of day.

This mendicant Blucher--I call him that for convenience--was a splendid
creature.  He was full of hope, pluck and philosophy; he was well read
and a man of cultivated taste; he had a bright wit and was a master of
satire; his kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes
and changed his curb-stone seat to a throne and his damaged hat to a
crown.

He had an adventure, once, which sticks fast in my memory as the most
pleasantly grotesque that ever touched my sympathies.  He had been
without a penny for two months.  He had shirked about obscure streets,
among friendly dim lights, till the thing had become second nature to
him.  But at last he was driven abroad in daylight.  The cause was
sufficient; he had not tasted food for forty-eight hours, and he could
not endure the misery of his hunger in idle hiding.  He came along a back
street, glowering at the loaves in bake-shop windows, and feeling that he
could trade his life away for a morsel to eat.  The sight of the bread
doubled his hunger; but it was good to look at it, any how, and imagine
what one might do if one only had it.

Presently, in the middle of the street he saw a shining spot--looked
again--did not, and could not, believe his eyes--turned away, to try
them, then looked again.  It was a verity--no vain, hunger-inspired
delusion--it was a silver dime!

He snatched it--gloated over it; doubted it--bit it--found it genuine
--choked his heart down, and smothered a halleluiah.  Then he looked
around--saw that nobody was looking at him--threw the dime down where it
was before--walked away a few steps, and approached again, pretending he
did not know it was there, so that he could re-enjoy the luxury of
finding it.  He walked around it, viewing it from different points; then
sauntered about with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the signs
and now and then glancing at it and feeling the old thrill again.
Finally he took it up, and went away, fondling it in his pocket.  He
idled through unfrequented streets, stopping in doorways and corners to
take it out and look at it.  By and by he went home to his lodgings--an
empty queens-ware hogshead,--and employed himself till night trying to
make up his mind what to buy with it.  But it was hard to do.  To get the
most for it was the idea.  He knew that at the Miner's Restaurant he
could get a plate of beans and a piece of bread for ten cents; or a
fish-ball and some few trifles, but they gave "no bread with one
fish-ball" there.  At French Pete's he could get a veal cutlet, plain,
and some radishes and bread, for ten cents; or a cup of coffee--a pint at
least--and a slice of bread; but the slice was not thick enough by the
eighth of an inch, and sometimes they were still more criminal than that
in the cutting of it.  At seven o'clock his hunger was wolfish; and still
his mind was not made up.  He turned out and went up Merchant street,
still ciphering; and chewing a bit of stick, as is the way of starving
men.

He passed before the lights of Martin's restaurant, the most aristocratic
in the city, and stopped.  It was a place where he had often dined, in
better days, and Martin knew him well.  Standing aside, just out of the
range of the light, he worshiped the quails and steaks in the show
window, and imagined that may be the fairy times were not gone yet and
some prince in disguise would come along presently and tell him to go in
there and take whatever he wanted.  He chewed his stick with a hungry
interest as he warmed to his subject.  Just at this juncture he was
conscious of some one at his side, sure enough; and then a finger touched
his arm.  He looked up, over his shoulder, and saw an apparition--a very
allegory of Hunger!  It was a man six feet high, gaunt, unshaven, hung
with rags; with a haggard face and sunken cheeks, and eyes that pleaded
piteously.  This phantom said:

"Come with me--please."

He locked his arm in Blucher's and walked up the street to where the
passengers were few and the light not strong, and then facing about, put
out his hands in a beseeching way, and said:

"Friend--stranger--look at me!  Life is easy to you--you go about, placid
and content, as I did once, in my day--you have been in there, and eaten
your sumptuous supper, and picked your teeth, and hummed your tune, and
thought your pleasant thoughts, and said to yourself it is a good world
--but you've never suffered!  You don't know what trouble is--you don't
know what misery is--nor hunger!  Look at me!  Stranger have pity on a
poor friendless, homeless dog!  As God is my judge, I have not tasted
food for eight and forty hours!--look in my eyes and see if I lie!  Give
me the least trifle in the world to keep me from starving--anything
--twenty-five cents!  Do it, stranger--do it, please.  It will be nothing
to you, but life to me.  Do it, and I will go down on my knees and lick
the dust before you!  I will kiss your footprints--I will worship the
very ground you walk on!  Only twenty-five cents!  I am famishing
--perishing--starving by inches!  For God's sake don't desert me!"

Blucher was bewildered--and touched, too--stirred to the depths.  He
reflected.  Thought again.  Then an idea struck him, and he said:

"Come with me."

He took the outcast's arm, walked him down to Martin's restaurant, seated
him at a marble table, placed the bill of fare before him, and said:

"Order what you want, friend.  Charge it to me, Mr. Martin."

"All right, Mr. Blucher," said Martin.

Then Blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter and watched the
man stow away cargo after cargo of buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents
a plate; cup after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth two
dollars apiece; and when six dollars and a half's worth of destruction
had been accomplished, and the stranger's hunger appeased, Blucher went
down to French Pete's, bought a veal cutlet plain, a slice of bread, and
three radishes, with his dime, and set to and feasted like a king!

Take the episode all around, it was as odd as any that can be culled from
the myriad curiosities of Californian life, perhaps.



CHAPTER LX.

By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the
decayed mining camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him.
We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five
other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest.  Yet a
flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this
grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years
before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming
hive, the centre of the city.  When the mines gave out the town fell into
decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared--streets, dwellings, shops,
everything--and left no sign.  The grassy slopes were as green and smooth
and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed.  The mere
handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread,
grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and
pass away like a dream.  With it their hopes had died, and their zest of
life.  They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased
to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward
their early homes.  They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and
been forgotten of the world.  They were far from telegraphs and
railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the
events that stirred the globe's great populations, dead to the common
interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind.
It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy
exile that fancy can imagine.--One of my associates in this locality, for
two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but
now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded,
rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and
soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and
Greek sentences--dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts
of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a
tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a
man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end.

In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining
which is seldom or never mentioned in print.  It is called "pocket
mining" and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little
corner.  The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as
in ordinary placer mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are
very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one
you reap a rich and sudden harvest.  There are not now more than twenty
pocket miners in that entire little region.  I think I know every one of
them personally.  I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the
hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make
a snuff-box--his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time--and
then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in two dips of
his shovel.  I have known him to take out three thousand dollars in two
hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness, then enter on a
dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure before the night
was gone.  And the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual,
and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the hills hunting
pockets again happy and content.  This is the most fascinating of all the
different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of
victims to the lunatic asylum.

Pocket hunting is an ingenious process.  You take a spadeful of earth
from the hill-side and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash it
gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine sediment.
Whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being the
heaviest, it has sought the bottom.  Among the sediment you will find
half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pin-heads.  You are
delighted.  You move off to one side and wash another pan.  If you find
gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan.  If you
find no gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are
on the right scent.

You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the
hill--for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich
deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been
washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they
wandered.  And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and
narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that
you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up the
hill your lines have converged to a point--a single foot from that point
you cannot find any gold.  Your breath comes short and quick, you are
feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you
pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down,
they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic
interest--and all at once you strike it!  Up comes a spadeful of earth
and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of
gold.  Sometimes that one spadeful is all--$500.  Sometimes the nest
contains $10,000, and it takes you three or four days to get it all out.
The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men
exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000 to a
party who never got $300 out of it afterward.

The hogs are good pocket hunters.  All the summer they root around the
bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners
long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash
them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket.  Two pockets
were found in this way by the same man in one day.  One had $5,000 in it
and the other $8,000.  That man could appreciate it, for he hadn't had a
cent for about a year.

In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in
the afternoon and return every night with household supplies.  Part of
the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest
on a great boulder that lay beside the path.  In the course of thirteen
years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it.  By and
by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat.  They began to
amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a
sledge-hammer.  They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with
gold. That boulder paid them $800 afterward.  But the aggravating
circumstance was that these "Greasers" knew that there must be more gold
where that boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and
found what was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced.
It took three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $120,000.  The two
American miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they
take turn about in getting up early in the morning to curse those
Mexicans--and when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native
American is gifted above the sons of men.

I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it
is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged
that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches
to novelty.



CHAPTER LXI.

One of my comrades there--another of those victims of eighteen years of
unrequited toil and blighted hopes--was one of the gentlest spirits that
ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick
Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-House Gulch.--He was forty-six, gray as a
rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and
clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever
brought to light--than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.

Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to
mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women
and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they
must love something).  And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of
that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that
there was something human about it--may be even supernatural.

I heard him talking about this animal once.  He said:

"Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which
you'd a took an interest in I reckon--most any body would.  I had him
here eight year--and he was the remarkablest cat I ever see.  He was a
large gray one of the Tom specie, an' he had more hard, natchral sense
than any man in this camp--'n' a power of dignity--he wouldn't let the
Gov'ner of Californy be familiar with him.  He never ketched a rat in his
life--'peared to be above it.  He never cared for nothing but mining.
He knowed more about mining, that cat did, than any man I ever, ever see.
You couldn't tell him noth'n 'bout placer diggin's--'n' as for pocket
mining, why he was just born for it.

"He would dig out after me an' Jim when we went over the hills
prospect'n', and he would trot along behind us for as much as five mile,
if we went so fur.  An' he had the best judgment about mining ground--why
you never see anything like it.  When we went to work, he'd scatter a
glance around, 'n' if he didn't think much of the indications, he would
give a look as much as to say, 'Well, I'll have to get you to excuse me,'
'n' without another word he'd hyste his nose into the air 'n' shove for
home.  But if the ground suited him, he would lay low 'n' keep dark till
the first pan was washed, 'n' then he would sidle up 'n' take a look, an'
if there was about six or seven grains of gold he was satisfied--he
didn't want no better prospect 'n' that--'n' then he would lay down on
our coats and snore like a steamboat till we'd struck the pocket, an'
then get up 'n' superintend.  He was nearly lightnin' on superintending.

"Well, bye an' bye, up comes this yer quartz excitement.  Every body was
into it--every body was pick'n' 'n' blast'n' instead of shovelin' dirt on
the hill side--every body was put'n' down a shaft instead of scrapin' the
surface.  Noth'n' would do Jim, but we must tackle the ledges, too, 'n'
so we did.  We commenced put'n' down a shaft, 'n' Tom Quartz he begin to
wonder what in the Dickens it was all about.  He hadn't ever seen any
mining like that before, 'n' he was all upset, as you may say--he
couldn't come to a right understanding of it no way--it was too many for
him.  He was down on it, too, you bet you--he was down on it powerful
--'n' always appeared to consider it the cussedest foolishness out.  But
that cat, you know, was always agin new fangled arrangements--somehow he
never could abide'em.  You know how it is with old habits.  But by an' by
Tom Quartz begin to git sort of reconciled a little, though he never
could altogether understand that eternal sinkin' of a shaft an' never
pannin' out any thing.  At last he got to comin' down in the shaft,
hisself, to try to cipher it out.  An' when he'd git the blues, 'n' feel
kind o'scruffy, 'n' aggravated 'n' disgusted--knowin' as he did, that the
bills was runnin' up all the time an' we warn't makin' a cent--he would
curl up on a gunny sack in the corner an' go to sleep.  Well, one day
when the shaft was down about eight foot, the rock got so hard that we
had to put in a blast--the first blast'n' we'd ever done since Tom Quartz
was born.  An' then we lit the fuse 'n' clumb out 'n' got off 'bout fifty
yards--'n' forgot 'n' left Tom Quartz sound asleep on the gunny sack.

"In 'bout a minute we seen a puff of smoke bust up out of the hole, 'n'
then everything let go with an awful crash, 'n' about four million ton of
rocks 'n' dirt 'n' smoke 'n; splinters shot up 'bout a mile an' a half
into the air, an' by George, right in the dead centre of it was old Tom
Quartz a goin' end over end, an' a snortin' an' a sneez'n', an' a clawin'
an' a reachin' for things like all possessed.  But it warn't no use, you
know, it warn't no use.  An' that was the last we see of him for about
two minutes 'n' a half, an' then all of a sudden it begin to rain rocks
and rubbage, an' directly he come down ker-whop about ten foot off f'm
where we stood Well, I reckon he was p'raps the orneriest lookin' beast
you ever see.  One ear was sot back on his neck, 'n' his tail was stove
up, 'n' his eye-winkers was swinged off, 'n' he was all blacked up with
powder an' smoke, an' all sloppy with mud 'n' slush f'm one end to the
other.

"Well sir, it warn't no use to try to apologize--we couldn't say a word.
He took a sort of a disgusted look at hisself, 'n' then he looked at us
--an' it was just exactly the same as if he had said--'Gents, may be you
think it's smart to take advantage of a cat that 'ain't had no experience
of quartz minin', but I think different'--an' then he turned on his heel
'n' marched off home without ever saying another word.

"That was jest his style.  An' may be you won't believe it, but after
that you never see a cat so prejudiced agin quartz mining as what he was.
An' by an' bye when he did get to goin' down in the shaft agin, you'd 'a
been astonished at his sagacity.  The minute we'd tetch off a blast 'n'
the fuse'd begin to sizzle, he'd give a look as much as to say: 'Well,
I'll have to git you to excuse me,' an' it was surpris'n' the way he'd
shin out of that hole 'n' go f'r a tree.  Sagacity?  It ain't no name for
it.  'Twas inspiration!"

I said, "Well, Mr. Baker, his prejudice against quartz-mining was
remarkable, considering how he came by it.  Couldn't you ever cure him of
it?"

"Cure him!  No!  When Tom Quartz was sot once, he was always sot--and you
might a blowed him up as much as three million times 'n' you'd never a
broken him of his cussed prejudice agin quartz mining."

The affection and the pride that lit up Baker's face when he delivered
this tribute to the firmness of his humble friend of other days, will
always be a vivid memory with me.

At the end of two months we had never "struck" a pocket.  We had panned
up and down the hillsides till they looked plowed like a field; we could
have put in a crop of grain, then, but there would have been no way to
get it to market.  We got many good "prospects," but when the gold gave
out in the pan and we dug down, hoping and longing, we found only
emptiness--the pocket that should have been there was as barren as our
own.--At last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the
hills to try new localities.  We prospected around Angel's Camp, in
Calaveras county, during three weeks, but had no success.  Then we
wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under the trees at night,
for the weather was mild, but still we remained as centless as the last
rose of summer.  That is a poor joke, but it is in pathetic harmony with
the circumstances, since we were so poor ourselves.  In accordance with
the custom of the country, our door had always stood open and our board
welcome to tramping miners--they drifted along nearly every day, dumped
their paust shovels by the threshold and took "pot luck" with us--and now
on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality.

Our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now I could give the
reader a vivid description of the Big Trees and the marvels of the Yo
Semite--but what has this reader done to me that I should persecute him?
I will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take
his blessing.  Let me be charitable, though I fail in all virtues else.

Note: Some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities, purely,
and may be a little obscure to the general reader.  In "placer diggings"
the gold is scattered all through the surface dirt; in "pocket" diggings
it is concentrated in one little spot; in "quartz" the gold is in a
solid, continuous vein of rock, enclosed between distinct walls of some
other kind of stone--and this is the most laborious and expensive of all
the different kinds of mining.  "Prospecting" is hunting for a "placer";
"indications" are signs of its presence; "panning out" refers to the
washing process by which the grains of gold are separated from the dirt;
a "prospect" is what one finds in the first panful of dirt--and its value
determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect, and whether it is
worth while to tarry there or seek further.



CHAPTER LXII.

After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again,
without a cent.  When my credit was about exhausted, (for I had become
too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper, and there were no
vacancies on the evening journals,) I was created San Francisco
correspondent of the Enterprise, and at the end of five months I was out
of debt, but my interest in my work was gone; for my correspondence being
a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it.
I wanted another change.  The vagabond instinct was strong upon me.
Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one.  It was to go
down to the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the Sacramento
Union, an excellent journal and liberal with employees.

We sailed in the propeller Ajax, in the middle of winter.  The almanac
called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was a compromise
between spring and summer.  Six days out of port, it became summer
altogether.  We had some thirty passengers; among them a cheerful soul
by the name of Williams, and three sea-worn old whaleship captains going
down to join their vessels.  These latter played euchre in the smoking
room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whisky without
being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people I think
I ever saw.  And then there was "the old Admiral--"  a retired whaleman.
He was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder,
and earnest, whole-souled profanity.  But nevertheless he was
tender-hearted as a girl.  He was a raving, deafening, devastating
typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the
centre where all comers were safe and at rest.  Nobody could know the
"Admiral" without liking him; and in a sudden and dire emergency I think
no friend of his would know which to choose--to be cursed by him or
prayed for by a less efficient person.

His Title of "Admiral" was more strictly "official" than any ever worn by
a naval officer before or since, perhaps--for it was the voluntary
offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the people themselves
without any intermediate red tape--the people of the Sandwich Islands.
It was a title that came to him freighted with affection, and honor, and
appreciation of his unpretending merit.  And in testimony of the
genuineness of the title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag
should be devised for him and used solely to welcome his coming and wave
him God-speed in his going.  From that time forth, whenever his ship was
signaled in the offing, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea,
that ensign streamed from the royal halliards on the parliament house and
the nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord.

Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life.  When I knew
him on board the Ajax, he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the
salt water sixty-one of them.  For sixteen years he had gone in and out
of the harbor of Honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen more
had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger packet
and had never had an accident or lost a vessel.  The simple natives knew
him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children
regard a father.  It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the
roaring Admiral was around.

Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the sea on a
competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would
"never go within smelling distance of the salt water again as long as he
lived."  And he had conscientiously kept it.  That is to say, he
considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to
suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea
voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that had transpired since
he "retired," was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the
strict letter.

The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in any and all
cases where there was a fight, and that was to shoulder his way straight
in without an inquiry as to the rights or the merits of it, and take the
part of the weaker side.--And this was the reason why he was always sure
to be present at the trial of any universally execrated criminal to
oppress and intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime of what he
would do to them if he ever caught them out of the box.  And this was why
harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently took sanctuary
under his chair in time of trouble.  In the beginning he was the most
frantic and bloodthirsty Union man that drew breath in the shadow of the
Flag; but the instant the Southerners began to go down before the sweep
of the Northern armies, he ran up the Confederate colors and from that
time till the end was a rampant and inexorable secessionist.

He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity than any
individual I have ever met, of either sex; and he was never tired of
storming against it and beseeching friends and strangers alike to be wary
and drink with moderation.  And yet if any creature had been guileless
enough to intimate that his absorbing nine gallons of "straight" whiskey
during our voyage was any fraction short of rigid or inflexible
abstemiousness, in that self-same moment the old man would have spun him
to the uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of his wrath.  Mind,
I am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or his legs, for it did
not, in even the slightest degree.  He was a capacious container, but he
did not hold enough for that.  He took a level tumblerful of whisky every
morning before he put his clothes on--"to sweeten his bilgewater," he
said.--He took another after he got the most of his clothes on, "to
settle his mind and give him his bearings."  He then shaved, and put on a
clean shirt; after which he recited the Lord's Prayer in a fervent,
thundering bass that shook the ship to her kelson and suspended all
conversation in the main cabin.  Then, at this stage, being invariably
"by the head," or "by the stern," or "listed to port or starboard," he
took one more to "put him on an even keel so that he would mind his
hellum and not miss stays and go about, every time he came up in the
wind."--And now, his state-room door swung open and the sun of his
benignant face beamed redly out upon men and women and children, and he
roared his "Shipmets a'hoy!" in a way that was calculated to wake the
dead and precipitate the final resurrection; and forth he strode, a
picture to look at and a presence to enforce attention.  Stalwart and
portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed slouch hat; semi-sailor toggery of
blue navy flannel--roomy and ample; a stately expanse of shirt-front and
a liberal amount of black silk neck-cloth tied with a sailor knot; large
chain and imposing seals impending from his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and
"a hand like the hand of Providence," as his whaling brethren expressed
it; wrist-bands and sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of
respect for the warm weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and
blue anchors, ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India ink.
But these details were only secondary matters--his face was the lodestone
that chained the eye.  It was a sultry disk, glowing determinedly out
through a weather beaten mask of mahogany, and studded with warts, seamed
with scars, "blazed" all over with unfailing fresh slips of the razor;
and with cheery eyes, under shaggy brows, contemplating the world from
over the back of a gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out
of the undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations.
At his heels frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier
"Fan," a creature no larger than a squirrel.  The main part of his daily
life was occupied in looking after "Fan," in a motherly way, and
doctoring her for a hundred ailments which existed only in his
imagination.

The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never believed
anything they said.  He read nothing, and believed in nothing, but "The
Old Guard," a secession periodical published in New York.  He carried a
dozen copies of it with him, always, and referred to them for all
required information.  If it was not there, he supplied it himself, out
of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and every thing
else necessary to make his point good in an argument.  Consequently he
was a formidable antagonist in a dispute.  Whenever he swung clear of the
record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to
surrender.  Indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little
spark of indignation at his manufactured history--and when it came to
indignation, that was the Admiral's very "best hold."  He was always
ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it
himself.  With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and
within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his
smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left
solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs,
and roaring a hurricane of profanity.  It got so, after a while, that
whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the passengers
would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him; and he would camp
on a deserted field.

But he found his match at last, and before a full company.  At one time
or another, everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed,
except the quiet passenger Williams.  He had never been able to get an
expression of opinion out of him on politics.  But now, just as the
Admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out,
Williams said:

"Admiral, are you certain about that circumstance concerning the
clergymen you mentioned the other day?"--referring to a piece of the
Admiral's manufactured history.

Every one was amazed at the man's rashness.  The idea of deliberately
inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible.  The retreat came to
a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of
it.  The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one.  He paused in the
door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and
contemplated the daring reptile in the corner.

"Certain of it?  Am I certain of it?  Do you think I've been lying about
it?  What do you take me for?  Anybody that don't know that circumstance,
don't know anything; a child ought to know it.  Read up your history!
Read it up-----, and don't come asking a man if he's certain about a bit
of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know all about."

Here the Admiral's fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the
coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten.  Within three
minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames
and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft,
and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater.  Meantime
Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in
what the old man was saying.  By and by, when the lull came, he said in
the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had
a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably:

"Now I understand it.  I always thought I knew that piece of history well
enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that
convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history; but
when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every date, and every
little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I said to myself,
this sounds something like--this is history--this is putting it in a
shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself afterward, I will
just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if
he is I will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me.
And that is what I want to do now--for until you set that matter right it
was nothing but just a confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it."

Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased.
Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its
genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks;
but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful
for the dose.  He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his
profanity failed him.  Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly:

"But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that
this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you
are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory.  Now I
grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail--to wit:
that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named
Waite and Granger, went in disguise to the house of John Moody, in
Rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and
their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed
them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and I
also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession
of South Carolina on the 20th of December following.  Very well."  [Here
the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams proceed to come
back at the Admiral with his own invincible weapon--clean, pure,
manufactured history, without a word of truth in it.]  "Very well, I say.
But Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina?
You are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance.
Your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be intimately
conversant with every detail of this national quarrel.  You develop
matters of history every day that show plainly that you are no smatterer
in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a man who has searched
the depths and possessed yourself of everything that has a bearing upon
the great question.  Therefore, let me just recall to your mind that
Willis and Morgan case--though I see by your face that the whole thing is
already passing through your memory at this moment.  On the 12th of
August, 1860, two months before the Waite and Granger affair, two South
Carolina clergymen, named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L.  Willis, one a
Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist, disguised themselves, and
went at midnight to the house of a planter named Thompson--Archibald F.
Thompson, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson,--and took thence, at
midnight, his widowed aunt, (a Northern woman,) and her adopted child, an
orphan--named Mortimer Highie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at
the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on
crutches in consequence; and the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings
of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and
afterward burned them at the stake in the city of Charleston.  You
remember perfectly well what a stir it made; you remember perfectly well
that even the Charleston Courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant,
of questionable propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it
would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued.  And you remember
also, that this thing was the cause of the Massachusetts outrage.  Who,
indeed, were the two Massachusetts ministers?  and who were the two
Southern women they burned?  I do not need to remind you, Admiral, with
your intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was the nephew of the
woman burned in Charleston; that Granger was her cousin in the second
degree, and that the woman they burned in Boston was the wife of John H.
Morgan, and the still loved but divorced wife of Winthrop L. Willis.
Now, Admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge that the first
provocation came from the Southern preachers and that the Northern ones
were justified in retaliating.  In your arguments you never yet have
shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise
unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore
I have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the
Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the South
Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs."

The Admiral was conquered.  This sweet spoken creature who swallowed his
fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life; basked in his furious
blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine; found only calm, even-handed
justice in his rampart partisanship; and flooded him with invented
history so sugarcoated with flattery and deference that there was no
rejecting it, was "too many" for him.  He stammered some awkward, profane
sentences about the-----Willis and Morgan business having escaped his
memory, but that he "remembered it now," and then, under pretence of
giving Fan some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle
and went away, a vanquished man.  Then cheers and laughter went up, and
Williams, the ship's benefactor was a hero.  The news went about the
vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception instituted in
the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the
conqueror.  The wheelman said afterward, that the Admiral stood up behind
the pilot house and "ripped and cursed all to himself" till he loosened
the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail.

The Admiral's power was broken.  After that, if he began argument,
somebody would bring Williams, and the old man would grow weak and begin
to quiet down at once.  And as soon as he was done, Williams in his
dulcet, insinuating way, would invent some history (referring for proof,
to the old man's own excellent memory and to copies of "The Old Guard"
known not to be in his possession) that would turn the tables completely
and leave the Admiral all abroad and helpless.  By and by he came to so
dread Williams and his gilded tongue that he would stop talking when he
saw him approach, and finally ceased to mention politics altogether, and
from that time forward there was entire peace and serenity in the ship.



CHAPTER LXIII.

On a certain bright morning the Islands hove in sight, lying low on the
lonely sea, and everybody climbed to the upper deck to look.  After two
thousand miles of watery solitude the vision was a welcome one.  As we
approached, the imposing promontory of Diamond Head rose up out of the
ocean its rugged front softened by the hazy distance, and presently the
details of the land began to make themselves manifest: first the line of
beach; then the plumed coacoanut trees of the tropics; then cabins of the
natives; then the white town of Honolulu, said to contain between twelve
and fifteen thousand inhabitants spread over a dead level; with streets
from twenty to thirty feet wide, solid and level as a floor, most of them
straight as a line and few as crooked as a corkscrew.

The further I traveled through the town the better I liked it.
Every step revealed a new contrast--disclosed something I was
unaccustomed to. In place of the grand mud-colored brown fronts of
San Francisco, I saw dwellings built of straw, adobies, and cream-colored
pebble-and-shell-conglomerated coral, cut into oblong blocks and laid in
cement; also a great number of neat white cottages, with green
window-shutters; in place of front yards like billiard-tables with iron
fences around them, I saw these homes surrounded by ample yards, thickly
clad with green grass, and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense
foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in place of the customary
geranium, calla lily, etc., languishing in dust and general debility, I
saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a
rain, and glowing with the richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors of
San Francisco's pleasure grove, the "Willows," I saw huge-bodied,
wide-spreading forest trees, with strange names and stranger appearance
--trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand
alone without being tied to green poles; in place of gold fish, wiggling
around in glass globes, assuming countless shades and degrees of
distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities of their
transparent prison houses, I saw cats--Tom-cats, Mary Ann cats,
long-tailed cats, bob-tailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed
cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats,
striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual
cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of
cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of
them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep. I looked on a multitude of
people, some white, in white coats, vests, pantaloons, even white cloth
shoes, made snowy with chalk duly laid on every morning; but the majority
of the people were almost as dark as negroes--women with comely features,
fine black eyes, rounded forms, inclining to the voluptuous, clad in a
single bright red or white garment that fell free and unconfined from
shoulder to heel, long black hair falling loose, gypsy hats, encircled
with wreaths of natural flowers of a brilliant carmine tint; plenty of
dark men in various costumes, and some with nothing on but a battered
stove-pipe hat tilted on the nose, and a very scant breech-clout;
--certain smoke-dried children were clothed in nothing but sunshine
--a very neat fitting and picturesque apparel indeed.

In place of roughs and rowdies staring and blackguarding on the corners,
I saw long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens sitting on the
ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or
whoever happened along; instead of wretched cobble-stone pavements, I
walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea
by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of
lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless
perdition long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands
dead and harmless in the distance now; instead of cramped and crowded
street-cars, I met dusky native women sweeping by, free as the wind, on
fleet horses and astride, with gaudy riding-sashes, streaming like
banners behind them; instead of the combined stenches of Chinadom and
Brannan street slaughter-houses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of
jessamine, oleander, and the Pride of India; in place of the hurry and
bustle and noisy confusion of San Francisco, I moved in the midst of a
Summer calm as tranquil as dawn in the Garden of Eden; in place of the
Golden City's skirting sand hills and the placid bay, I saw on the one
side a frame-work of tall, precipitous mountains close at hand, clad in
refreshing green, and cleft by deep, cool, chasm-like valleys--and in
front the grand sweep of the ocean; a brilliant, transparent green near
the shore, bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray dashing
against the reef, and further out the dead blue water of the deep sea,
flecked with "white caps," and in the far horizon a single, lonely sail
--a mere accent-mark to emphasize a slumberous calm and a solitude that
were without sound or limit.  When the sun sunk down--the one intruder
from other realms and persistent in suggestions of them--it was tranced
luxury to sit in the perfumed air and forget that there was any world but
these enchanted islands.

It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream--till you got a bite.

A scorpion bite.  Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and
kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or
brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in future.  Then
came an adjournment to the bed-chamber and the pastime of writing up the
day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the
other--a whole community of them at a slap.  Then, observing an enemy
approaching,--a hairy tarantula on stilts--why not set the spittoon on
him?  It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous
idea of the magnitude of his reach.  Then to bed and become a promenade
for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough
to burn a hole through a raw-hide.  More soaking with alcohol, and a
resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future.  Then wait,
and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in
under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully
on the floor till morning.  Meantime it is comforting to curse the
tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.

We had an abundance of fruit in Honolulu, of course.  Oranges,
pine-apples, bananas, strawberries, lemons, limes, mangoes, guavas,
melons, and a rare and curious luxury called the chirimoya, which is
deliciousness itself.  Then there is the tamarind.  I thought tamarinds
were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea.  I ate several, and
it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year.  They pursed up my
lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my
sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours.

They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them
a "wire edge" that I was afraid would stay; but a citizen said "no, it
will come off when the enamel does"--which was comforting, at any rate.
I found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds--but they only eat
them once.



CHAPTER LXIV.

In my diary of our third day in Honolulu, I find this:

I am probably the most sensitive man in Hawaii to-night--especially about
sitting down in the presence of my betters.  I have ridden fifteen or
twenty miles on horse-back since 5 P.M.  and to tell the honest truth, I
have a delicacy about sitting down at all.

An excursion to Diamond Head and the King's Coacoanut Grove was planned
to-day--time, 4:30 P.M.--the party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen
and three ladies.  They all started at the appointed hour except myself.
I was at the Government prison, (with Captain Fish and another
whaleship-skipper, Captain Phillips,) and got so interested in its
examination that I did not notice how quickly the time was passing.
Somebody remarked that it was twenty minutes past five o'clock, and that
woke me up.  It was a fortunate circumstance that Captain Phillips was
along with his "turn out," as he calls a top-buggy that Captain Cook
brought here in 1778, and a horse that was here when Captain Cook came.
Captain Phillips takes a just pride in his driving and in the speed of
his horse, and to his passion for displaying them I owe it that we were
only sixteen minutes coming from the prison to the American Hotel--a
distance which has been estimated to be over half a mile.  But it took
some fearful driving.  The Captain's whip came down fast, and the blows
started so much dust out of the horse's hide that during the last half of
the journey we rode through an impenetrable fog, and ran by a pocket
compass in the hands of Captain Fish, a whaler of twenty-six years
experience, who sat there through the perilous voyage as self-possessed
as if he had been on the euchre-deck of his own ship, and calmly said,
"Port your helm--port," from time to time, and "Hold her a little free
--steady--so--so," and "Luff--hard down to starboard!" and never once
lost his presence of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or
manner. When we came to anchor at last, and Captain Phillips looked at
his watch and said, "Sixteen minutes--I told you it was in her!  that's
over three miles an hour!" I could see he felt entitled to a compliment,
and so I said I had never seen lightning go like that horse.  And I never
had.

The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an hour,
but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could overtake
them.  I said, never mind--I preferred a safe horse to a fast one--I
would like to have an excessively gentle horse--a horse with no spirit
whatever--a lame one, if he had such a thing.  Inside of five minutes I
was mounted, and perfectly satisfied with my outfit.  I had no time to
label him "This is a horse," and so if the public took him for a sheep I
cannot help it.  I was satisfied, and that was the main thing.  I could
see that he had as many fine points as any man's horse, and so I hung my
hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the perspiration from
my face and started.  I named him after this island, "Oahu" (pronounced
O-waw-hee).  The first gate he came to he started in; I had neither whip
nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him.  He resisted
argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse.  He backed out of
that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street.
I triumphed by my former process.  Within the next six hundred yards he
crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in
the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave
the top of my head in, and I was literally dripping with perspiration.
He abandoned the gate business after that and went along peaceably
enough, but absorbed in meditation.  I noticed this latter circumstance,
and it soon began to fill me with apprehension.  I said to my self, this
creature is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry or other--no
horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just
for nothing.  The more this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy I
became, until the suspense became almost unbearable and I dismounted to
see if there was anything wild in his eye--for I had heard that the eye
of this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive.

I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I
found that he was only asleep.  I woke him up and started him into a
faster walk, and then the villainy of his nature came out again.  He
tried to climb over a stone wall, five or six feet high.  I saw that I
must apply force to this horse, and that I might as well begin first as
last.  I plucked a stout switch from a tamarind tree, and the moment he
saw it, he surrendered.  He broke into a convulsive sort of a canter,
which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me
alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthquake, and the
sweeping plunging of the Ajax in a storm.

And now there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a
left-handed blessing upon the man who invented the American saddle.
There is no seat to speak of about it--one might as well sit in a shovel
--and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance.  If I were to
write down here all the abuse I expended on those stirrups, it would make
a large book, even without pictures.  Sometimes I got one foot so far
through, that the stirrup partook of the nature of an anklet; sometimes
both feet were through, and I was handcuffed by the legs; and sometimes
my feet got clear out and left the stirrups wildly dangling about my
shins.  Even when I was in proper position and carefully balanced upon
the balls of my feet, there was no comfort in it, on account of my
nervous dread that they were going to slip one way or the other in a
moment.  But the subject is too exasperating to write about.

A mile and a half from town, I came to a grove of tall cocoanut trees,
with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet
and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of
cocoa-nuts--not more picturesque than a forest of collossal ragged
parasols, with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be.

I once heard a gouty northern invalid say that a cocoanut tree might be
poetical, possibly it was; but it looked like a feather-duster struck by
lightning.  I think that describes it better than a picture--and yet,
without any question, there is something fascinating about a cocoa-nut
tree--and graceful, too.

About a dozen cottages, some frame and the others of native grass,
nestled sleepily in the shade here and there.  The grass cabins are of a
grayish color, are shaped much like our own cottages, only with higher
and steeper roofs usually, and are made of some kind of weed strongly
bound together in bundles.  The roofs are very thick, and so are the
walls; the latter have square holes in them for windows.  At a little
distance these cabins have a furry appearance, as if they might be made
of bear skins.  They are very cool and pleasant inside.  The King's flag
was flying from the roof of one of the cottages, and His Majesty was
probably within.  He owns the whole concern thereabouts, and passes his
time there frequently, on sultry days "laying off."  The spot is called
"The King's Grove."

Near by is an interesting ruin--the meagre remains of an ancient heathen
temple--a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old
bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin
when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had
shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his
grandmother as an atoning sacrifice--in those old days when the luckless
sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical
happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the
missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them
permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a
place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed
the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily
liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his
ignorance he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose;
showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy
food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling
in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody
labored to provide but Nature.  How sad it is to think of the multitudes
who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew
there was a hell!

This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a
roofless inclosure a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy wide
--nothing but naked walls, very thick, but not much higher than a man's
head.  They will last for ages no doubt, if left unmolested.  Its three
altars and other sacred appurtenances have crumbled and passed away years
ago.  It is said that in the old times thousands of human beings were
slaughtered here, in the presence of naked and howling savages.  If these
mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell, what pictures they
could describe, of fettered victims writhing under the knife; of massed
forms straining forward out of the gloom, with ferocious faces lit up by
the sacrificial fires; of the background of ghostly trees; of the dark
pyramid of Diamond Head standing sentinel over the uncanny scene, and the
peaceful moon looking down upon it through rifts in the cloud-rack!

When Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ha-may-ah) the Great--who was a sort
of a Napoleon in military genius and uniform success--invaded this island
of Oahu three quarters of a century ago, and exterminated the army sent
to oppose him, and took full and final possession of the country, he
searched out the dead body of the King of Oahu, and those of the
principal chiefs, and impaled their heads on the walls of this temple.

Those were savage times when this old slaughter-house was in its prime.
The King and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron; made
them gather all the provisions the masters needed; build all the houses
and temples; stand all the expenses, of whatever kind; take kicks and
cuffs for thanks; drag out lives well flavored with misery, and then
suffer death for trifling offences or yield up their lives on the
sacrificial altars to purchase favors from the gods for their hard
rulers.  The missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the
tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right
to enjoy whatever their hands and brains produce with equal laws for all,
and punishment for all alike who transgress them.  The contrast is so
strong--the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so
prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable, that the frankest
compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the
condition of the Sandwich Islanders of Captain Cook's time, and their
condition to-day.

Their work speaks for itself.



CHAPTER LXV.

By and by, after a rugged climb, we halted on the summit of a hill which
commanded a far-reaching view.  The moon rose and flooded mountain and
valley and ocean with a mellow radiance, and out of the shadows of the
foliage the distant lights of Honolulu glinted like an encampment of
fireflies.  The air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers.  The halt
was brief.--Gayly laughing and talking, the party galloped on, and I
clung to the pommel and cantered after.  Presently we came to a place
where no grass grew--a wide expanse of deep sand.  They said it was an
old battle ground.  All around everywhere, not three feet apart, the
bleached bones of men gleamed white in the moonlight.  We picked up a lot
of them for mementoes.  I got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones
--of great chiefs, may be, who had fought savagely in that fearful battle
in the old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood--and wore
the choicest of them out on Oahu afterward, trying to make him go.  All
sorts of bones could be found except skulls; but a citizen said,
irreverently, that there had been an unusual number of "skull-hunters"
there lately--a species of sportsmen I had never heard of before.

Nothing whatever is known about this place--its story is a secret that
will never be revealed.  The oldest natives make no pretense of being
possessed of its history.  They say these bones were here when they were
children.  They were here when their grandfathers were children--but how
they came here, they can only conjecture.  Many people believe this spot
to be an ancient battle-ground, and it is usual to call it so; and they
believe that these skeletons have lain for ages just where their
proprietors fell in the great fight.  Other people believe that
Kamehameha I.  fought his first battle here.  On this point, I have heard
a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which
have been written concerning these islands--I do not know where the
narrator got it.  He said that when Kamehameha (who was at first merely a
subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii), landed here, he brought a
large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki.  The Oahuans marched
against him, and so confident were they of success that they readily
acceded to a demand of their priests that they should draw a line where
these bones now lie, and take an oath that, if forced to retreat at all,
they would never retreat beyond this boundary.  The priests told them
that death and everlasting punishment would overtake any who violated the
oath, and the march was resumed.  Kamehameha drove them back step by
step; the priests fought in the front rank and exhorted them both by
voice and inspiriting example to remember their oath--to die, if need be,
but never cross the fatal line.  The struggle was manfully maintained,
but at last the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and
the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back;
with a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward--the line was
crossed--the offended gods deserted the despairing army, and, accepting
the doom their perjury had brought upon them, they broke and fled over
the plain where Honolulu stands now--up the beautiful Nuuanu Valley
--paused a moment, hemmed in by precipitous mountains on either hand and
the frightful precipice of the Pari in front, and then were driven over
--a sheer plunge of six hundred feet!

The story is pretty enough, but Mr. Jarves' excellent history says the
Oahuans were intrenched in Nuuanu Valley; that Kamehameha ousted them,
routed them, pursued them up the valley and drove them over the
precipice.  He makes no mention of our bone-yard at all in his book.

Impressed by the profound silence and repose that rested over the
beautiful landscape, and being, as usual, in the rear, I gave voice to my
thoughts.  I said:

"What a picture is here slumbering in the solemn glory of the moon!  How
strong the rugged outlines of the dead volcano stand out against the
clear sky!  What a snowy fringe marks the bursting of the surf over the
long, curved reef!  How calmly the dim city sleeps yonder in the plain!
How soft the shadows lie upon the stately mountains that border the
dream-haunted Mauoa Valley!  What a grand pyramid of billowy clouds
towers above the storied Pari!  How the grim warriors of the past seem
flocking in ghostly squadrons to their ancient battlefield again--how the
wails of the dying well up from the--"

At this point the horse called Oahu sat down in the sand.  Sat down to
listen, I suppose.  Never mind what he heard, I stopped apostrophising
and convinced him that I was not a man to allow contempt of Court on the
part of a horse.  I broke the back-bone of a Chief over his rump and set
out to join the cavalcade again.

Very considerably fagged out we arrived in town at 9 o'clock at night,
myself in the lead--for when my horse finally came to understand that he
was homeward bound and hadn't far to go, he turned his attention strictly
to business.

This is a good time to drop in a paragraph of information.  There is no
regular livery stable in Honolulu, or, indeed, in any part of the Kingdom
of Hawaii; therefore unless you are acquainted with wealthy residents
(who all have good horses), you must hire animals of the wretchedest
description from the Kanakas.  (i.e.  natives.) Any horse you hire, even
though it be from a white man, is not often of much account, because it
will be brought in for you from some ranch, and has necessarily been
leading a hard life.  If the Kanakas who have been caring for him
(inveterate riders they are) have not ridden him half to death every day
themselves, you can depend upon it they have been doing the same thing by
proxy, by clandestinely hiring him out.  At least, so I am informed.  The
result is, that no horse has a chance to eat, drink, rest, recuperate, or
look well or feel well, and so strangers go about the Islands mounted as
I was to-day.

In hiring a horse from a Kanaka, you must have all your eyes about you,
because you can rest satisfied that you are dealing with a shrewd
unprincipled rascal.  You may leave your door open and your trunk
unlocked as long as you please, and he will not meddle with your
property; he has no important vices and no inclination to commit robbery
on a large scale; but if he can get ahead of you in the horse business,
he will take a genuine delight in doing it.  This traits is
characteristic of horse jockeys, the world over, is it not?  He will
overcharge you if he can; he will hire you a fine-looking horse at night
(anybody's--may be the King's, if the royal steed be in convenient view),
and bring you the mate to my Oahu in the morning, and contend that it is
the same animal.  If you make trouble, he will get out by saying it was
not himself who made the bargain with you, but his brother, "who went out
in the country this morning."  They have always got a "brother" to shift
the responsibility upon.  A victim said to one of these fellows one day:

"But I know I hired the horse of you, because I noticed that scar on your
cheek."

The reply was not bad: "Oh, yes--yes--my brother all same--we twins!"

A friend of mine, J.  Smith, hired a horse yesterday, the Kanaka
warranting him to be in excellent condition.

Smith had a saddle and blanket of his own, and he ordered the Kanaka to
put these on the horse.  The Kanaka protested that he was perfectly
willing to trust the gentleman with the saddle that was already on the
animal, but Smith refused to use it.  The change was made; then Smith
noticed that the Kanaka had only changed the saddles, and had left the
original blanket on the horse; he said he forgot to change the blankets,
and so, to cut the bother short, Smith mounted and rode away.  The horse
went lame a mile from town, and afterward got to cutting up some
extraordinary capers.  Smith got down and took off the saddle, but the
blanket stuck fast to the horse--glued to a procession of raw places.
The Kanaka's mysterious conduct stood explained.

Another friend of mine bought a pretty good horse from a native, a day or
two ago, after a tolerably thorough examination of the animal.  He
discovered today that the horse was as blind as a bat, in one eye.  He
meant to have examined that eye, and came home with a general notion that
he had done it; but he remembers now that every time he made the attempt
his attention was called to something else by his victimizer.

One more instance, and then I will pass to something else.  I am informed
that when a certain Mr. L., a visiting stranger, was here, he bought a
pair of very respectable-looking match horses from a native.  They were
in a little stable with a partition through the middle of it--one horse
in each apartment.  Mr. L.  examined one of them critically through a
window (the Kanaka's "brother" having gone to the country with the key),
and then went around the house and examined the other through a window on
the other side.  He said it was the neatest match he had ever seen, and
paid for the horses on the spot.  Whereupon the Kanaka departed to join
his brother in the country.  The fellow had shamefully swindled L.  There
was only one "match" horse, and he had examined his starboard side
through one window and his port side through another!  I decline to
believe this story, but I give it because it is worth something as a
fanciful illustration of a fixed fact--namely, that the Kanaka
horse-jockey is fertile in invention and elastic in conscience.

You can buy a pretty good horse for forty or fifty dollars, and a good
enough horse for all practical purposes for two dollars and a half.  I
estimate "Oahu" to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five
cents.  A good deal better animal than he is was sold here day before
yesterday for a dollar and seventy-five cents, and sold again to-day for
two dollars and twenty-five cents; Williams bought a handsome and lively
little pony yesterday for ten dollars; and about the best common horse on
the island (and he is a really good one) sold yesterday, with Mexican
saddle and bridle, for seventy dollars--a horse which is well and widely
known, and greatly respected for his speed, good disposition and
everlasting bottom.

You give your horse a little grain once a day; it comes from San
Francisco, and is worth about two cents a pound; and you give him as much
hay as he wants; it is cut and brought to the market by natives, and is
not very good it is baled into long, round bundles, about the size of a
large man; one of them is stuck by the middle on each end of a six foot
pole, and the Kanaka shoulders the pole and walks about the streets
between the upright bales in search of customers.  These hay bales, thus
carried, have a general resemblance to a colossal capital 'H.'

The hay-bundles cost twenty-five cents apiece, and one will last a horse
about a day.  You can get a horse for a song, a week's hay for another
song, and you can turn your animal loose among the luxuriant grass in
your neighbor's broad front yard without a song at all--you do it at
midnight, and stable the beast again before morning.  You have been at no
expense thus far, but when you come to buy a saddle and bridle they will
cost you from twenty to thirty-five dollars.  You can hire a horse,
saddle and bridle at from seven to ten dollars a week, and the owner will
take care of them at his own expense.

It is time to close this day's record--bed time.  As I prepare for sleep,
a rich voice rises out of the still night, and, far as this ocean rock is
toward the ends of the earth, I recognize a familiar home air.  But the
words seem somewhat out of joint:


"Waikiki lantoni oe Kaa hooly hooly wawhoo."

Translated, that means "When we were marching through Georgia."



CHAPTER LXVI.

Passing through the market place we saw that feature of Honolulu under
its most favorable auspices--that is, in the full glory of Saturday
afternoon, which is a festive day with the natives.  The native girls by
twos and threes and parties of a dozen, and sometimes in whole platoons
and companies, went cantering up and down the neighboring streets astride
of fleet but homely horses, and with their gaudy riding habits streaming
like banners behind them.  Such a troop of free and easy riders, in their
natural home, the saddle, makes a gay and graceful spectacle.  The riding
habit I speak of is simply a long, broad scarf, like a tavern table cloth
brilliantly colored, wrapped around the loins once, then apparently
passed between the limbs and each end thrown backward over the same, and
floating and flapping behind on both sides beyond the horse's tail like a
couple of fancy flags; then, slipping the stirrup-irons between her toes,
the girl throws her chest for ward, sits up like a Major General and goes
sweeping by like the wind.

The girls put on all the finery they can on Saturday afternoon--fine
black silk robes; flowing red ones that nearly put your eyes out; others
as white as snow; still others that discount the rainbow; and they wear
their hair in nets, and trim their jaunty hats with fresh flowers, and
encircle their dusky throats with home-made necklaces of the brilliant
vermillion-tinted blossom of the ohia; and they fill the markets and the
adjacent street with their bright presences, and smell like a rag factory
on fire with their offensive cocoanut oil.

Occasionally you see a heathen from the sunny isles away down in the
South Seas, with his face and neck tatooed till he looks like the
customary mendicant from Washoe who has been blown up in a mine.  Some
are tattooed a dead blue color down to the upper lip--masked, as it were
--leaving the natural light yellow skin of Micronesia unstained from
thence down; some with broad marks drawn down from hair to neck, on both
sides of the face, and a strip of the original yellow skin, two inches
wide, down the center--a gridiron with a spoke broken out; and some with
the entire face discolored with the popular mortification tint, relieved
only by one or two thin, wavy threads of natural yellow running across
the face from ear to ear, and eyes twinkling out of this darkness, from
under shadowing hat-brims, like stars in the dark of the moon.

Moving among the stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants,
squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and
surrounded by purchasers.  (The Sandwich Islanders always squat on their
hams, and who knows but they may be the old original "ham sandwiches?"
The thought is pregnant with interest.) The poi looks like common flour
paste, and is kept in large bowls formed of a species of gourd, and
capable of holding from one to three or four gallons.  Poi is the chief
article of food among the natives, and is prepared from the taro plant.

The taro root looks like a thick, or, if you please, a corpulent sweet
potato, in shape, but is of a light purple color when boiled.  When
boiled it answers as a passable substitute for bread.  The buck Kanakas
bake it under ground, then mash it up well with a heavy lava pestle, mix
water with it until it becomes a paste, set it aside and let if ferment,
and then it is poi--and an unseductive mixture it is, almost tasteless
before it ferments and too sour for a luxury afterward.  But nothing is
more nutritious.  When solely used, however, it produces acrid humors, a
fact which sufficiently accounts for the humorous character of the
Kanakas.  I think there must be as much of a knack in handling poi as
there is in eating with chopsticks.  The forefinger is thrust into the
mess and stirred quickly round several times and drawn as quickly out,
thickly coated, just as it it were poulticed; the head is thrown back,
the finger inserted in the mouth and the delicacy stripped off and
swallowed--the eye closing gently, meanwhile, in a languid sort of
ecstasy.  Many a different finger goes into the same bowl and many a
different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavor is added to the
virtues of its contents.

Around a small shanty was collected a crowd of natives buying the awa
root.  It is said that but for the use of this root the destruction of
the people in former times by certain imported diseases would have been
far greater than it was, and by others it is said that this is merely a
fancy.  All agree that poi will rejuvenate a man who is used up and his
vitality almost annihilated by hard drinking, and that in some kinds of
diseases it will restore health after all medicines have failed; but all
are not willing to allow to the awa the virtues claimed for it.  The
natives manufacture an intoxicating drink from it which is fearful in its
effects when persistently indulged in.  It covers the body with dry,
white scales, inflames the eyes, and causes premature decripitude.
Although the man before whose establishment we stopped has to pay a
Government license of eight hundred dollars a year for the exclusive
right to sell awa root, it is said that he makes a small fortune every
twelve-month; while saloon keepers, who pay a thousand dollars a year for
the privilege of retailing whiskey, etc., only make a bare living.

We found the fish market crowded; for the native is very fond of fish,
and eats the article raw and alive!  Let us change the subject.

In old times here Saturday was a grand gala day indeed.  All the native
population of the town forsook their labors, and those of the surrounding
country journeyed to the city.  Then the white folks had to stay indoors,
for every street was so packed with charging cavaliers and cavalieresses
that it was next to impossible to thread one's way through the cavalcades
without getting crippled.

At night they feasted and the girls danced the lascivious hula hula--a
dance that is said to exhibit the very perfection of educated notion of
limb and arm, hand, head and body, and the exactest uniformity of
movement and accuracy of "time."  It was performed by a circle of girls
with no raiment on them to speak of, who went through an infinite variety
of motions and figures without prompting, and yet so true was their
"time," and in such perfect concert did they move that when they were
placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs and heads waved,
swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted and
undulated as if they were part and parcel of a single individual; and it
was difficult to believe they were not moved in a body by some exquisite
piece of mechanism.

Of late years, however, Saturday has lost most of its quondam gala
features.  This weekly stampede of the natives interfered too much with
labor and the interests of the white folks, and by sticking in a law
here, and preaching a sermon there, and by various other means, they
gradually broke it up.  The demoralizing hula hula was forbidden to be
performed, save at night, with closed doors, in presence of few
spectators, and only by permission duly procured from the authorities and
the payment of ten dollars for the same.  There are few girls now-a-days
able to dance this ancient national dance in the highest perfection of
the art.

The missionaries have christianized and educated all the natives.  They
all belong to the Church, and there is not one of them, above the age of
eight years, but can read and write with facility in the native tongue.
It is the most universally educated race of people outside of China.
They have any quantity of books, printed in the Kanaka language, and all
the natives are fond of reading.  They are inveterate church-goers
--nothing can keep them away.  All this ameliorating cultivation has at
last built up in the native women a profound respect for chastity--in
other people.  Perhaps that is enough to say on that head.  The national
sin will die out when the race does, but perhaps not earlier.--But
doubtless this purifying is not far off, when we reflect that contact
with civilization and the whites has reduced the native population from
four hundred thousand (Captain Cook's estimate,) to fifty-five thousand
in something over eighty years!

Society is a queer medley in this notable missionary, whaling and
governmental centre.  If you get into conversation with a stranger and
experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are
treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike
out boldly and address him as "Captain."  Watch him narrowly, and if you
see by his countenance that you are on the wrong tack, ask him where he
preaches.  It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of
a whaler.  I am now personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and
ninety-six missionaries.  The captains and ministers form one-half of the
population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile
foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high
officers of the Hawaiian Government.  And there are just about cats
enough for three apiece all around.

A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs the other day, and said:

"Good morning, your reverence.  Preach in the stone church yonder, no
doubt?"

"No, I don't.  I'm not a preacher."

"Really, I beg your pardon, Captain.  I trust you had a good season.  How
much oil"--

"Oil?  What do you take me for?  I'm not a whaler."

"Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency.

"Major General in the household troops, no doubt?  Minister of the
Interior, likely?  Secretary of war?  First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber?
Commissioner of the Royal"--

"Stuff!  I'm no official.  I'm not connected in any way with the
Government."

"Bless my life!  Then, who the mischief are you?  what the mischief are
you?  and how the mischief did you get here, and where in thunder did you
come from?"

"I'm only a private personage--an unassuming stranger--lately arrived
from America."

"No?  Not a missionary!  Not a whaler!  not a member of his Majesty's
Government!  not even Secretary of the Navy!  Ah, Heaven!  it is too
blissful to be true; alas, I do but dream.  And yet that noble, honest
countenance--those oblique, ingenuous eyes--that massive head, incapable
of--of--anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif.  Excuse
these tears.  For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like
this, and"--

Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away.  I pitied
this poor creature from the bottom of my heart.  I was deeply moved.  I
shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother.  I then took what
small change he had and "shoved".



CHAPTER LXVII.

I still quote from my journal:

I found the national Legislature to consist of half a dozen white men and
some thirty or forty natives.  It was a dark assemblage.  The nobles and
Ministers (about a dozen of them altogether) occupied the extreme left of
the hall, with David Kalakaua (the King's Chamberlain) and Prince William
at the head.  The President of the Assembly, His Royal Highness M.
Kekuanaoa, [Kekuanaoa is not of the blood royal.  He derives his princely
rank from his wife, who was a daughter of Kamehameha the Great.  Under
other monarchies the male line takes precedence of the female in tracing
genealogies, but here the opposite is the case--the female line takes
precedence.  Their reason for this is exceedingly sensible, and I
recommend it to the aristocracy of Europe: They say it is easy to know
who a man's mother was, but, etc., etc.] and the Vice President (the
latter a white man,) sat in the pulpit, if I may so term it.
The President is the King's father.  He is an erect, strongly built,
massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of
age or thereabouts.  He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat
and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon
them.  He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of
noble presence.  He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under
that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago.  A
knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: "This man,
naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged
at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more
than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage;
has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of
his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at
a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had
never heard of the white man's God; has believed his enemy could secretly
pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a
crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a
plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the King--and now look at him; an
educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant
gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored
guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an
enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country
and in general, practical information.  Look at him, sitting there
presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are
white men--a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly
natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had
never been out of it in his life time.  How the experiences of this old
man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!"

The christianizing of the natives has hardly even weakened some of their
barbarian superstitions, much less destroyed them.  I have just referred
to one of these.  It is still a popular belief that if your enemy can get
hold of any article belonging to you he can get down on his knees over it
and pray you to death.  Therefore many a native gives up and dies merely
because he imagines that some enemy is putting him through a course of
damaging prayer.  This praying an individual to death seems absurd enough
at a first glance, but then when we call to mind some of the pulpit
efforts of certain of our own ministers the thing looks plausible.

In former times, among the Islanders, not only a plurality of wives was
customary, but a plurality of husbands likewise.  Some native women of
noble rank had as many as six husbands.  A woman thus supplied did not
reside with all her husbands at once, but lived several months with each
in turn.  An understood sign hung at her door during these months.  When
the sign was taken down, it meant "NEXT."

In those days woman was rigidly taught to "know her place."  Her place
was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and
content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his
dinner.  She was not only forbidden, by ancient law, and under penalty of
death, to eat with her husband or enter a canoe, but was debarred, under
the same penalty, from eating bananas, pine-apples, oranges and other
choice fruits at any time or in any place.  She had to confine herself
pretty strictly to "poi" and hard work.  These poor ignorant heathen seem
to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in
the garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances.
But the missionaries broke up this satisfactory arrangement of things.
They liberated woman and made her the equal of man.

The natives had a romantic fashion of burying some of their children
alive when the family became larger than necessary.  The missionaries
interfered in this matter too, and stopped it.

To this day the natives are able to lie down and die whenever they want
to, whether there is anything the matter with them or not.  If a Kanaka
takes a notion to die, that is the end of him; nobody can persuade him to
hold on; all the doctors in the world could not save him.

A luxury which they enjoy more than anything else, is a large funeral.
If a person wants to get rid of a troublesome native, it is only
necessary to promise him a fine funeral and name the hour and he will be
on hand to the minute--at least his remains will.

All the natives are Christians, now, but many of them still desert to the
Great Shark God for temporary succor in time of trouble.  An irruption of
the great volcano of Kilauea, or an earthquake, always brings a deal of
latent loyalty to the Great Shark God to the surface.  It is common
report that the King, educated, cultivated and refined Christian
gentleman as he undoubtedly is, still turns to the idols of his fathers
for help when disaster threatens.  A planter caught a shark, and one of
his christianized natives testified his emancipation from the thrall of
ancient superstition by assisting to dissect the shark after a fashion
forbidden by his abandoned creed.  But remorse shortly began to torture
him.  He grew moody and sought solitude; brooded over his sin, refused
food, and finally said he must die and ought to die, for he had sinned
against the Great Shark God and could never know peace any more.  He was
proof against persuasion and ridicule, and in the course of a day or two
took to his bed and died, although he showed no symptom of disease.
His young daughter followed his lead and suffered a like fate within the
week.  Superstition is ingrained in the native blood and bone and it is
only natural that it should crop out in time of distress.  Wherever one
goes in the Islands, he will find small piles of stones by the wayside,
covered with leafy offerings, placed there by the natives to appease evil
spirits or honor local deities belonging to the mythology of former days.

In the rural districts of any of the Islands, the traveler hourly comes
upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea
without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the
matter of hiding their nakedness.  When the missionaries first took up
their residence in Honolulu, the native women would pay their families
frequent friendly visits, day by day, not even clothed with a blush.
It was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather
indelicate.  Finally the missionaries provided them with long, loose
calico robes, and that ended the difficulty--for the women would troop
through the town, stark naked, with their robes folded under their arms,
march to the missionary houses and then  proceed to dress!--The natives
soon manifested a strong proclivity for clothing, but it was shortly
apparent that they only wanted it for grandeur.  The missionaries
imported a quantity of hats, bonnets, and other male and female wearing
apparel, instituted a general distribution, and begged the people not to
come to church naked, next Sunday, as usual.  And they did not; but the
national spirit of unselfishness led them to divide up with neighbors who
were not at the distribution, and next Sabbath the poor preachers could
hardly keep countenance before their vast congregations.  In the midst of
the reading of a hymn a brown, stately dame would sweep up the aisle with
a world of airs, with nothing in the world on but a "stovepipe" hat and a
pair of cheap gloves; another dame would follow, tricked out in a man's
shirt, and nothing else; another one would enter with a flourish, with
simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied around her waist and the
rest of the garment dragging behind like a peacock's tail off duty; a
stately "buck" Kanaka would stalk in with a woman's bonnet on, wrong side
before--only this, and nothing more; after him would stride his fellow,
with the legs of a pair of pantaloons tied around his neck, the rest of
his person untrammeled; in his rear would come another gentleman simply
gotten up in a fiery neck-tie and a striped vest.

The poor creatures were beaming with complacency and wholly unconscious
of any absurdity in their appearance.  They gazed at each other with
happy admiration, and it was plain to see that the young girls were
taking note of what each other had on, as naturally as if they had always
lived in a land of Bibles and knew what churches were made for; here was
the evidence of a dawning civilization.  The spectacle which the
congregation presented was so extraordinary and withal so moving, that
the missionaries found it difficult to keep to the text and go on with
the services; and by and by when the simple children of the sun began a
general swapping of garments in open meeting and produced some
irresistibly grotesque effects in the course of re-dressing, there was
nothing for it but to cut the thing short with the benediction and
dismiss the fantastic assemblage.

In our country, children play "keep house;" and in the same high-sounding
but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little material of
slender territory and meagre population, play "empire."  There is his
royal Majesty the King, with a New York detective's income of thirty or
thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the "royal civil list" and the
"royal domain."  He lives in a two-story frame "palace."

And there is the "royal family"--the customary hive of royal brothers,
sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual to monarchy,
--all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all bearing such titles as
his or her Royal Highness the Prince or Princess So-and-so.  Few of them
can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in carriages, however;
they sport the economical Kanaka horse or "hoof it" with the plebeians.

Then there is his Excellency the "royal Chamberlain"--a sinecure, for his
majesty dresses himself with his own hands, except when he is ruralizing
at Waikiki and then he requires no dressing.

Next we have his Excellency the Commander-in-chief of the Household
Troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually
placed under a corporal in other lands.

Next comes the royal Steward and the Grand Equerry in Waiting--high
dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do.

Then we have his Excellency the First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber--an
office as easy as it is magnificent.

Next we come to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American
from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of
"shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre
above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or
glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him--salary, $4,000 a
year, vast consequence, and no perquisites.

Then we have his Excellency the Imperial Minister of Finance, who handles
a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his annual "budget"
with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of "finance," suggests imposing
schemes for paying off the "national debt" (of $150,000,) and does it all
for $4,000 a year and unimaginable glory.

Next we have his Excellency the Minister of War, who holds sway over the
royal armies--they consist of two hundred and thirty uniformed Kanakas,
mostly Brigadier Generals, and if the country ever gets into trouble with
a foreign power we shall probably hear from them.  I knew an American
whose copper-plate visiting card bore this impressive legend:
"Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Infantry."  To say that he was proud of
this distinction is stating it but tamely.  The Minister of War has also
in his charge some venerable swivels on Punch-Bowl Hill wherewith royal
salutes are fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port.

Next comes his Excellency the Minister of the Navy--a nabob who rules the
"royal fleet," (a steam-tug and a sixty-ton schooner.)

And next comes his Grace the Lord Bishop of Honolulu, the chief dignitary
of the "Established Church"--for when the American Presbyterian
missionaries had completed the reduction of the nation to a compact
condition of Christianity, native royalty stepped in and erected the
grand dignity of an "Established (Episcopal) Church" over it, and
imported a cheap ready-made Bishop from England to take charge.  The
chagrin of the missionaries has never been comprehensively expressed, to
this day, profanity not being admissible.

Next comes his Excellency the Minister of Public Instruction.

Next, their Excellencies the Governors of Oahu, Hawaii, etc., and after
them a string of High Sheriffs and other small fry too numerous for
computation.

Then there are their Excellencies the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister
Plenipotentiary of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of the French; her
British Majesty's Minister; the Minister Resident, of the United States;
and some six or eight representatives of other foreign nations, all with
sounding titles, imposing dignity and prodigious but economical state.

Imagine all this grandeur in a play-house "kingdom" whose population
falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls!

The people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles and colossal magnates
that a foreign prince makes very little more stir in Honolulu than a
Western Congressman does in New York.

And let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly defined "court
costume" of so "stunning" a nature that it would make the clown in a
circus look tame and commonplace by comparison; and each Hawaiian
official dignitary has a gorgeous vari-colored, gold-laced uniform
peculiar to his office--no two of them are alike, and it is hard to tell
which one is the "loudest."  The King had a "drawing-room" at stated
intervals, like other monarchs, and when these varied uniforms congregate
there--weak-eyed people have to contemplate the spectacle through smoked
glass.  Is there not a gratifying contrast between this latter-day
exhibition and the one the ancestors of some of these magnates afforded
the missionaries the Sunday after the old-time distribution of clothing?
Behold what religion and civilization have wrought!



CHAPTER LXVIII.

While I was in Honolulu I witnessed the ceremonious funeral of the King's
sister, her Royal Highness the Princess Victoria.  According to the royal
custom, the remains had lain in state at the palace thirty days, watched
day and night by a guard of honor.  And during all that time a great
multitude of natives from the several islands had kept the palace grounds
well crowded and had made the place a pandemonium every night with their
howlings and wailings, beating of tom-toms and dancing of the (at other
times) forbidden "hula-hula" by half-clad maidens to the music of songs
of questionable decency chanted in honor of the deceased.  The printed
programme of the funeral procession interested me at the time; and after
what I have just said of Hawaiian grandiloquence in the matter of
"playing empire," I am persuaded that a perusal of it may interest the
reader:

      After reading the long list of dignitaries, etc., and remembering
      the sparseness of the population, one is almost inclined to wonder
      where the material for that portion of the procession devoted to
      "Hawaiian Population Generally" is going to be procured:

Undertaker.
Royal School.  Kawaiahao School.  Roman Catholic School.  Maemae School.
Honolulu Fire Department.
Mechanics' Benefit Union.
Attending Physicians.
Knonohikis (Superintendents) of the Crown Lands, Konohikis of the Private
  Lands of His Majesty Konohikis of the Private Lands of Her late Royal
Highness.
Governor of Oahu and Staff.
Hulumanu (Military Company).
Household Troops.
The Prince of Hawaii's Own (Military Company).
The King's household servants.
Servants of Her late Royal Highness.
Protestant Clergy.  The Clergy of the Roman Catholic Church.
His Lordship Louis Maigret, The Right Rev. Bishop of Arathea,
  Vicar-Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands.
The Clergy of the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church.
His Lordship the Right Rev.  Bishop of Honolulu.
Her Majesty Queen Emma's Carriage.
His Majesty's Staff.
Carriage of Her late Royal Highness.
Carriage of Her Majesty the Queen Dowager.
The King's Chancellor.
Cabinet Ministers.
His Excellency the Minister Resident of the United States.
H. B. M's Commissioner.
H. B. M's Acting Commissioner.
Judges of Supreme Court.
Privy Councillors.
Members of Legislative Assembly.
Consular Corps.
Circuit Judges.
Clerks of Government Departments.
Members of the Bar.
Collector General, Custom-house Officers and Officers of the Customs.
Marshal and Sheriffs of the different Islands.
King's Yeomanry.
Foreign Residents.
Ahahui Kaahumanu.
Hawaiian Population Generally.
Hawaiian Cavalry.
Police Force.

I resume my journal at the point where the procession arrived at the
royal mausoleum:

      As the procession filed through the gate, the military deployed
      handsomely to the right and left and formed an avenue through which
      the long column of mourners passed to the tomb.  The coffin was
      borne through the door of the mausoleum, followed by the King and
      his chiefs, the great officers of the kingdom, foreign Consuls,
      Embassadors and distinguished guests (Burlingame and General Van
      Valkenburgh).  Several of the kahilis were then fastened to a
      frame-work in front of the tomb, there to remain until they decay
      and fall to pieces, or, forestalling this, until another scion of
      royalty dies.  At this point of the proceedings the multitude set
      up such a heart-broken wailing as I hope never to hear again.

The soldiers fired three volleys of musketry--the wailing being
previously silenced to permit of the guns being heard.  His Highness
Prince William, in a showy military uniform (the "true prince," this
--scion of the house over-thrown by the present dynasty--he was formerly
betrothed to the Princess but was not allowed to marry her), stood guard
and paced back and forth within the door.  The privileged few who
followed the coffin into the mausoleum remained sometime, but the King
soon came out and stood in the door and near one side of it.  A stranger
could have guessed his rank (although he was so simply and
unpretentiously dressed) by the profound deference paid him by all
persons in his vicinity; by seeing his high officers receive his quiet
orders and suggestions with bowed and uncovered heads; and by observing
how careful those persons who came out of the mausoleum were to avoid
"crowding" him (although there was room enough in the doorway for a wagon
to pass, for that matter); how respectfully they edged out sideways,
scraping their backs against the wall and always presenting a front view
of their persons to his Majesty, and never putting their hats on until
they were well out of the royal presence.

He was dressed entirely in black--dress-coat and silk hat--and looked
rather democratic in the midst of the showy uniforms about him.  On his
breast he wore a large gold star, which was half hidden by the lapel of
his coat.  He remained at the door a half hour, and occasionally gave an
order to the men who were erecting the kahilis [Ranks of long-handled
mops made of gaudy feathers--sacred to royalty.  They are stuck in the
ground around the tomb and left there.]  before the tomb.  He had the
good taste to make one of them substitute black crape for the ordinary
hempen rope he was about to tie one of them to the frame-work with.
Finally he entered his carriage and drove away, and the populace shortly
began to drop into his wake.  While he was in view there was but one man
who attracted more attention than himself, and that was Harris (the
Yankee Prime Minister).  This feeble personage had crape enough around
his hat to express the grief of an entire nation, and as usual he
neglected no opportunity of making himself conspicuous and exciting the
admiration of the simple Kanakas.  Oh! noble ambition of this modern
Richelieu!

It is interesting to contrast the funeral ceremonies of the Princess
Victoria with those of her noted ancestor Kamehameha the Conqueror, who
died fifty years ago--in 1819, the year before the first missionaries
came.

      "On the 8th of May, 1819, at the age of sixty-six, he died, as he
      had lived, in the faith of his country.  It was his misfortune not
      to have come in contact with men who could have rightly influenced
      his religious aspirations.  Judged by his advantages and compared
      with the most eminent of his countrymen he may be justly styled not
      only great, but good.  To this day his memory warms the heart and
      elevates the national feelings of Hawaiians.  They are proud of
      their old warrior King; they love his name; his deeds form their
      historical age; and an enthusiasm everywhere prevails, shared even
      by foreigners who knew his worth, that constitutes the firmest
      pillar of the throne of his dynasty.

      "In lieu of human victims (the custom of that age), a sacrifice of
      three hundred dogs attended his obsequies--no mean holocaust when
      their national value and the estimation in which they were held are
      considered.  The bones of Kamehameha, after being kept for a while,
      were so carefully concealed that all knowledge of their final
      resting place is now lost.  There was a proverb current among the
      common people that the bones of a cruel King could not be hid; they
      made fish-hooks and arrows of them, upon which, in using them, they
      vented their abhorrence of his memory in bitter execrations."

The account of the circumstances of his death, as written by the native
historians, is full of minute detail, but there is scarcely a line of it
which does not mention or illustrate some by-gone custom of the country.
In this respect it is the most comprehensive document I have yet met
with.  I will quote it entire:

      "When Kamehameha was dangerously sick, and the priests were unable
      to cure him, they said: 'Be of good courage and build a house for
      the god' (his own private god or idol), that thou mayest recover.'
      The chiefs corroborated this advice of the priests, and a place of
      worship was prepared for Kukailimoku, and consecrated in the
      evening.  They proposed also to the King, with a view to prolong his
      life, that human victims should be sacrificed to his deity; upon
      which the greater part of the people absconded through fear of
      death, and concealed themselves in hiding places till the tabu [Tabu
      (pronounced tah-boo,) means prohibition (we have borrowed it,) or
      sacred.  The tabu was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary; and
      the person or thing placed under tabu was for the time being sacred
      to the purpose for which it was set apart.  In the above case the
      victims selected under the tabu would be sacred to the sacrifice]
      in which destruction impended, was past.  It is doubtful whether
      Kamehameha approved of the plan of the chiefs and priests to
      sacrifice men, as he was known to say, 'The men are sacred for the
      King;' meaning that they were for the service of his successor.
      This information was derived from Liholiho, his son.

      "After this, his sickness increased to such a degree that he had not
      strength to turn himself in his bed.  When another season,
      consecrated for worship at the new temple (heiau) arrived, he said
      to his son, Liholiho, 'Go thou and make supplication to thy god; I
      am not able to go, and will offer my prayers at home.'  When his
      devotions to his feathered god, Kukailimoku, were concluded, a
      certain religiously disposed individual, who had a bird god,
      suggested to the King that through its influence his sickness might
      be removed.  The name of this god was Pua; its body was made of a
      bird, now eaten by the Hawaiians, and called in their language alae.
      Kamehameha was willing that a trial should be made, and two houses
      were constructed to facilitate the experiment; but while dwelling in
      them he became so very weak as not to receive food.  After lying
      there three days, his wives, children and chiefs, perceiving that he
      was very low, returned him to his own house.  In the evening he was
      carried to the eating house,  where he took a little food in his
      mouth which he did not swallow; also a cup of water.  The chiefs
      requested him to give them his counsel; but he made no reply, and
      was carried back to the dwelling house; but when near midnight--ten
      o'clock, perhaps--he was carried again to the place to eat; but, as
      before, he merely tasted of what was presented to him.  Then
      Kaikioewa addressed him thus: 'Here we all are, your younger
      brethren, your son Liholiho and your foreigner; impart to us your
      dying charge, that Liholiho and Kaahumanu may hear.' Then Kamehameha
      inquired, 'What do you say?' Kaikioewa repeated, 'Your counsels for
      us.'

      "He then said, 'Move on in my good way and--.' He could proceed no
      further.  The foreigner, Mr. Young, embraced and kissed him.
      Hoapili also embraced him, whispering something in his ear, after
      which he was taken back to the house.  About twelve he was carried
      once more to the house for eating, into which his head entered,
      while his body was in the dwelling house immediately adjoining.  It
      should be remarked that this frequent carrying of a sick chief from
      one house to another resulted from the tabu system, then in force.
      There were at that time six houses (huts) connected with an
      establishment--one was for worship, one for the men to eat in, an
      eating house for the women, a house to sleep in, a house in which to
      manufacture kapa (native cloth) and one where, at certain intervals,
      the women might dwell in seclusion.

      "The sick was once more taken to his house, when he expired; this
      was at two o'clock, a circumstance from which Leleiohoku derived his
      name.  As he breathed his last, Kalaimoku came to the eating house
      to order those in it to go out.  There were two aged persons thus
      directed to depart; one went, the other remained on account of love
      to the King, by whom he had formerly been kindly sustained.  The
      children also were sent away.  Then Kalaimoku came to the house, and
      the chiefs had a consultation.  One of them spoke thus: 'This is my
      thought--we will eat him raw. [This sounds suspicious, in view of
      the fact that all Sandwich Island historians, white and black,
      protest that cannibalism never existed in the islands.  However,
      since they only proposed to "eat him raw" we "won't count that".
      But it would certainly have been cannibalism if they had cooked
      him.--M.  T.]  Kaahumanu (one of the dead King's widows) replied,
      'Perhaps his body is not at our disposal; that is more properly with
      his successor.  Our part in him--his breath--has departed; his
      remains will be disposed of by Liholiho.'

      "After this conversation the body was taken into the consecrated
      house for the performance of the proper rites by the priest and the
      new King.  The name of this ceremony is uko; and when the sacred hog
      was baked the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a
      god, the King at the same time repeating the customary prayers.

      "Then the priest, addressing himself to the King and chiefs, said:
      'I will now make known to you the rules to be observed respecting
      persons to be sacrificed on the burial of this body.  If you obtain
      one man before the corpse is removed, one will be sufficient; but
      after it leaves this house four will be required.  If delayed until
      we carry the corpse to the grave there must be ten; but after it is
      deposited in the grave there must be fifteen.  To-morrow morning
      there will be a tabu, and, if the sacrifice be delayed until that
      time, forty men must die.'

      "Then the high priest, Hewahewa, inquired of the chiefs, 'Where
      shall be the residence of King Liholiho?'  They replied, 'Where,
      indeed?  You, of all men, ought to know.'  Then the priest observed,
      'There are two suitable places; one is Kau, the other is Kohala.'
      The chiefs preferred the latter, as it was more thickly inhabited.
      The priest added, 'These are proper places for the King's residence;
      but he must not remain in Kona, for it is polluted.'  This was
      agreed to.  It was now break of day.  As he was being carried to the
      place of burial the people perceived that their King was dead, and
      they wailed.  When the corpse was removed from the house to the
      tomb, a distance of one chain, the procession was met by a certain
      man who was ardently attached to the deceased.  He leaped upon the
      chiefs who were carrying the King's body; he desired to die with him
      on account of his love.  The chiefs drove him away.  He persisted in
      making numerous attempts, which were unavailing.  Kalaimoka also had
      it in his heart to die with him, but was prevented by Hookio.

      "The morning following Kamehameha's death, Liholiho and his train
      departed for Kohala, according to the suggestions of the priest, to
      avoid the defilement occasioned by the dead.  At this time if a
      chief died the land was polluted, and the heirs sought a residence
      in another part of the country until the corpse was dissected and
      the bones tied in a bundle, which being done, the season of
      defilement terminated.  If the deceased were not a chief, the house
      only was defiled which became pure again on the burial of the body.
      Such were the laws on this subject.

      "On the morning on which Liholiho sailed in his canoe for Kohala,
      the chiefs and people mourned after their manner on occasion of a
      chief's death, conducting themselves like madmen and like beasts.
      Their conduct was such as to forbid description; The priests, also,
      put into action the sorcery apparatus, that the person who had
      prayed the King to death might die; for it was not believed that
      Kamehameha's departure was the effect either of sickness or old age.
      When the sorcerers set up by their fire-places sticks with a strip
      of kapa flying at the top, the chief Keeaumoku, Kaahumaun's brother,
      came in a state of intoxication and broke the flag-staff of the
      sorcerers, from which it was inferred that Kaahumanu and her friends
      had been instrumental in the King's death.  On this account they
      were subjected to abuse."

You have the contrast, now, and a strange one it is.  This great Queen,
Kaahumanu, who was "subjected to abuse" during the frightful orgies that
followed the King's death, in accordance with ancient custom, afterward
became a devout Christian and a steadfast and powerful friend of the
missionaries.

Dogs were, and still are, reared and fattened for food, by the natives
--hence the reference to their value in one of the above paragraphs.

Forty years ago it was the custom in the Islands to suspend all law for a
certain number of days after the death of a royal personage; and then a
saturnalia ensued which one may picture to himself after a fashion, but
not in the full horror of the reality.  The people shaved their heads,
knocked out a tooth or two, plucked out an eye sometimes, cut, bruised,
mutilated or burned their flesh, got drunk, burned each other's huts,
maimed or murdered one another according to the caprice of the moment,
and both sexes gave themselves up to brutal and unbridled licentiousness.

And after it all, came a torpor from which the nation slowly emerged
bewildered and dazed, as if from a hideous half-remembered nightmare.
They were not the salt of the earth, those "gentle children of the sun."

The natives still keep up an old custom of theirs which cannot be
comforting to an invalid.  When they think a sick friend is going to die,
a couple of dozen neighbors surround his hut and keep up a deafening
wailing night and day till he either dies or gets well.  No doubt this
arrangement has helped many a subject to a shroud before his appointed
time.

They surround a hut and wail in the same heart-broken way when its
occupant returns from a journey.  This is their dismal idea of a welcome.
A very little of it would go a great way with most of us.



CHAPTER LXIX.

Bound for Hawaii (a hundred and fifty miles distant,) to visit the great
volcano and behold the other notable things which distinguish that island
above the remainder of the group, we sailed from Honolulu on a certain
Saturday afternoon, in the good schooner Boomerang.

The Boomerang was about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as
one.  She was so small (though she was larger than the majority of the
inter-island coasters) that when I stood on her deck I felt but little
smaller than the Colossus of Rhodes must have felt when he had a
man-of-war under him.  I could reach the water when she lay over under a
strong breeze.  When the Captain and my comrade (a Mr. Billings), myself
and four other persons were all assembled on the little after portion of
the deck which is sacred to the cabin passengers, it was full--there was
not room for any more quality folks.  Another section of the deck, twice
as large as ours, was full of natives of both sexes, with their customary
dogs, mats, blankets, pipes, calabashes of poi, fleas, and other luxuries
and baggage of minor importance.  As soon as we set sail the natives all
lay down on the deck as thick as negroes in a slave-pen, and smoked,
conversed, and spit on each other, and were truly sociable.

The little low-ceiled cabin below was rather larger than a hearse, and as
dark as a vault.  It had two coffins on each side--I mean two bunks.
A small table, capable of accommodating three persons at dinner, stood
against the forward bulkhead, and over it hung the dingiest whale oil
lantern that ever peopled the obscurity of a dungeon with ghostly shapes.
The floor room unoccupied was not extensive.  One might swing a cat in
it, perhaps, but not a long cat.  The hold forward of the bulkhead had
but little freight in it, and from morning till night a portly old
rooster, with a voice like Baalam's ass, and the same disposition to use
it, strutted up and down in that part of the vessel and crowed.  He
usually took dinner at six o'clock, and then, after an hour devoted to
meditation, he mounted a barrel and crowed a good part of the night.
He got hoarser all the time, but he scorned to allow any personal
consideration to interfere with his duty, and kept up his labors in
defiance of threatened diphtheria.

Sleeping was out of the question when he was on watch.  He was a source
of genuine aggravation and annoyance.  It was worse than useless to shout
at him or apply offensive epithets to him--he only took these things for
applause, and strained himself to make more noise.  Occasionally, during
the day, I threw potatoes at him through an aperture in the bulkhead, but
he only dodged and went on crowing.

The first night, as I lay in my coffin, idly watching the dim lamp
swinging to the rolling of the ship, and snuffing the nauseous odors of
bilge water, I felt something gallop over me.  I turned out promptly.
However, I turned in again when I found it was only a rat.  Presently
something galloped over me once more.  I knew it was not a rat this time,
and I thought it might be a centipede, because the Captain had killed one
on deck in the afternoon.  I turned out.  The first glance at the pillow
showed me repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it--cockroaches as
large as peach leaves--fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery,
malignant eyes.  They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and
appeared to be dissatisfied about something.  I had often heard that
these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe
nails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more.  I lay
down on the floor.  But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward
a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair.  In a few
moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas
were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder,
and taking a bite every time they struck.  I was beginning to feel really
annoyed.  I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck.

The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island
schooner life.  There is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant
condition, when she carries molasses and Kanakas.

It was compensation for my sufferings to come unexpectedly upon so
beautiful a scene as met my eye--to step suddenly out of the sepulchral
gloom of the cabin and stand under the strong light of the moon--in the
centre, as it were, of a glittering sea of liquid silver--to see the
broad sails straining in the gale, the ship heeled over on her side, the
angry foam hissing past her lee bulwarks, and sparkling sheets of spray
dashing high over her bows and raining upon her decks; to brace myself
and hang fast to the first object that presented itself, with hat jammed
down and coat tails whipping in the breeze, and feel that exhilaration
that thrills in one's hair and quivers down his back bone when he knows
that every inch of canvas is drawing and the vessel cleaving through the
waves at her utmost speed.  There was no darkness, no dimness, no
obscurity there.  All was brightness, every object was vividly defined.
Every prostrate Kanaka; every coil of rope; every calabash of poi; every
puppy; every seam in the flooring; every bolthead; every object; however
minute, showed sharp and distinct in its every outline; and the shadow of
the broad mainsail lay black as a pall upon the deck, leaving Billings's
white upturned face glorified and his body in a total eclipse.
Monday morning we were close to the island of Hawaii.  Two of its high
mountains were in view--Mauna Loa and Hualaiai.

The latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is
seldom mentioned or heard of.  Mauna Loa is said to be sixteen thousand
feet high.  The rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped its summit
like a claw, looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we
were in.  One could stand on that mountain (wrapped up in blankets and
furs to keep warm), and while he nibbled a snowball or an icicle to
quench his thirst he could look down the long sweep of its sides and see
spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of
Winter prevails; lower down he could see sections devoted to production
that thrive in the temperate zone alone; and at the bottom of the
mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa-palms and other
species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal
Summer.  He could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of
the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of four or five
miles as the bird flies!

By and by we took boat and went ashore at Kailua, designing to ride
horseback through the pleasant orange and coffee region of Kona, and
rejoin the vessel at a point some leagues distant.  This journey is well
worth taking.  The trail passes along on high ground--say a thousand feet
above sea level--and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which
is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in
the forest in the midst of a rank tropical vegetation and a dense growth
of trees, whose great bows overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and
everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible
singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers.  It was pleasant to
ride occasionally in the warm sun, and feast the eye upon the
ever-changing panorama of the forest (beyond and below us), with its many
tints, its softened lights and shadows, its billowy undulations sweeping
gently down from the mountain to the sea.  It was pleasant also, at
intervals, to leave the sultry sun and pass into the cool, green depths
of this forest and indulge in sentimental reflections under the
inspiration of its brooding twilight and its whispering foliage.
We rode through one orange grove that had ten thousand tree in it!
They were all laden with fruit.

At one farmhouse we got some large peaches of excellent flavor.
This fruit, as a general thing, does not do well in the Sandwich Islands.
It takes a sort of almond shape, and is small and bitter.  It needs
frost, they say, and perhaps it does; if this be so, it will have a good
opportunity to go on needing it, as it will not be likely to get it.
The trees from which the fine fruit I have spoken of, came, had been
planted and replanted sixteen times, and to this treatment the proprietor
of the orchard attributed his-success.

We passed several sugar plantations--new ones and not very extensive.
The crops were, in most cases, third rattoons.  [NOTE.--The first crop is
called "plant cane;" subsequent crops which spring from the original
roots, without replanting, are called "rattoons."] Almost everywhere on
the island of Hawaii sugar-cane matures in twelve months, both rattoons
and plant, and although it ought to be taken off as soon as it tassels,
no doubt, it is not absolutely necessary to do it until about four months
afterward.  In Kona, the average yield of an acre of ground is two tons
of sugar, they say.  This is only a moderate yield for these islands, but
would be astounding for Louisiana and most other sugar growing countries.
The plantations in Kona being on pretty high ground--up among the light
and frequent rains--no irrigation whatever is required.



CHAPTER LXX.

We stopped some time at one of the plantations, to rest ourselves and
refresh the horses.  We had a chatty conversation with several gentlemen
present; but there was one person, a middle aged man, with an absent look
in his face, who simply glanced up, gave us good-day and lapsed again
into the meditations which our coming had interrupted.  The planters
whispered us not to mind him--crazy.  They said he was in the Islands for
his health; was a preacher; his home, Michigan.  They said that if he
woke up presently and fell to talking about a correspondence which he had
some time held with Mr. Greeley about a trifle of some kind, we must
humor him and listen with interest; and we must humor his fancy that this
correspondence was the talk of the world.

It was easy to see that he was a gentle creature and that his madness had
nothing vicious in it.  He looked pale, and a little worn, as if with
perplexing thought and anxiety of mind.  He sat a long time, looking at
the floor, and at intervals muttering to himself and nodding his head
acquiescingly or shaking it in mild protest.  He was lost in his thought,
or in his memories.  We continued our talk with the planters, branching
from subject to subject.  But at last the word "circumstance," casually
dropped, in the course of conversation, attracted his attention and
brought an eager look into his countenance.  He faced about in his chair
and said:

"Circumstance?  What circumstance?  Ah, I know--I know too well.  So you
have heard of it too."  [With a sigh.] "Well, no matter--all the world
has heard of it.  All the world.  The whole world.  It is a large world,
too, for a thing to travel so far in--now isn't it?  Yes, yes--the
Greeley correspondence with Erickson has created the saddest and
bitterest controversy on both sides of the ocean--and still they keep it
up!  It makes us famous, but at what a sorrowful sacrifice!  I was so
sorry when I heard that it had caused that bloody and distressful war
over there in Italy.  It was little comfort to me, after so much
bloodshed, to know that the victors sided with me, and the vanquished
with Greeley.--It is little comfort to know that Horace Greeley is
responsible for the battle of Sadowa, and not me.

"Queen Victoria wrote me that she felt just as I did about it--she said
that as much as she was opposed to Greeley and the spirit he showed in
the correspondence with me, she would not have had Sadowa happen for
hundreds of dollars.  I can show you her letter, if you would like to see
it.  But gentlemen, much as you may think you know about that unhappy
correspondence, you cannot know the straight of it till you hear it from
my lips.  It has always been garbled in the journals, and even in
history.  Yes, even in history--think of it!  Let me--please let me, give
you the matter, exactly as it occurred.  I truly will not abuse your
confidence."

Then he leaned forward, all interest, all earnestness, and told his
story--and told it appealingly, too, and yet in the simplest and most
unpretentious way; indeed, in such a way as to suggest to one, all the
time, that this was a faithful, honorable witness, giving evidence in the
sacred interest of justice, and under oath.  He said:

"Mrs. Beazeley--Mrs. Jackson Beazeley, widow, of the village of
Campbellton, Kansas,--wrote me about a matter which was near her heart
--a matter which many might think trivial, but to her it was a thing of
deep concern.  I was living in Michigan, then--serving in the ministry.
She was, and is, an estimable woman--a woman to whom poverty and hardship
have proven incentives to industry, in place of discouragements.
Her only treasure was her son William, a youth just verging upon manhood;
religious, amiable, and sincerely attached to agriculture.  He was the
widow's comfort and her pride.  And so, moved by her love for him, she
wrote me about a matter, as I have said before, which lay near her heart
--because it lay near her boy's.  She desired me to confer with
Mr. Greeley about turnips.  Turnips were the dream of her child's young
ambition.  While other youths were frittering away in frivolous
amusements the precious years of budding vigor which God had given them
for useful preparation, this boy was patiently enriching his mind with
information concerning turnips.  The sentiment which he felt toward the
turnip was akin to adoration.  He could not think of the turnip without
emotion; he could not speak of it calmly; he could not contemplate it
without exaltation.  He could not eat it without shedding tears.  All the
poetry in his sensitive nature was in sympathy with the gracious
vegetable.  With the earliest pipe of dawn he sought his patch, and when
the curtaining night drove him from it he shut himself up with his books
and garnered statistics till sleep overcame him.  On rainy days he sat
and talked hours together with his mother about turnips.  When company
came, he made it his loving duty to put aside everything else and
converse with them all the day long of his great joy in the turnip.

"And yet, was this joy rounded and complete?  Was there no secret alloy of
unhappiness in it?  Alas, there was.  There was a canker gnawing at his
heart; the noblest inspiration of his soul eluded his endeavor--viz: he
could not make of the turnip a climbing vine.  Months went by; the bloom
forsook his cheek, the fire faded out of his eye; sighings and
abstraction usurped the place of smiles and cheerful converse.  But a
watchful eye noted these things and in time a motherly sympathy unsealed
the secret.  Hence the letter to me.  She pleaded for attention--she said
her boy was dying by inches.

"I was a stranger to Mr. Greeley, but what of that?  The matter was
urgent.  I wrote and begged him to solve the difficult problem if
possible and save the student's life.  My interest grew, until it partook
of the anxiety of the mother.  I waited in much suspense.--At last the
answer came.

"I found that I could not read it readily, the handwriting being
unfamiliar and my emotions somewhat wrought up.  It seemed to refer in
part to the boy's case, but chiefly to other and irrelevant matters--such
as paving-stones, electricity, oysters, and something which I took to be
'absolution' or 'agrarianism,' I could not be certain which; still, these
appeared to be simply casual mentions, nothing more; friendly in spirit,
without doubt, but lacking the connection or coherence necessary to make
them useful.--I judged that my understanding was affected by my feelings,
and so laid the letter away till morning.

"In the morning I read it again, but with difficulty and uncertainty
still, for I had lost some little rest and my mental vision seemed
clouded.  The note was more connected, now, but did not meet the
emergency it was expected to meet.  It was too discursive.  It appeared
to read as follows, though I was not certain of some of the words:

      "Polygamy dissembles majesty; extracts redeem polarity; causes
      hitherto exist.  Ovations pursue wisdom, or warts inherit and
      condemn.  Boston, botany, cakes, folony undertakes, but who shall
      allay?  We fear not.  Yrxwly,
                               HEVACE EVEELOJ.'

"But there did not seem to be a word about turnips.  There seemed to be
no suggestion as to how they might be made to grow like vines.  There was
not even a reference to the Beazeleys.  I slept upon the matter; I ate no
supper, neither any breakfast next morning.  So I resumed my work with a
brain refreshed, and was very hopeful.  Now the letter took a different
aspect-all save the signature, which latter I judged to be only a
harmless affectation of Hebrew.  The epistle was necessarily from Mr.
Greeley, for it bore the printed heading of The Tribune, and I had
written to no one else there.  The letter, I say, had taken a different
aspect, but still its language was eccentric and avoided the issue.  It
now appeared to say:

      "Bolivia extemporizes mackerel; borax esteems polygamy; sausages
      wither in the east.  Creation perdu, is done; for woes inherent one
      can damn.  Buttons, buttons, corks, geology underrates but we shall
      allay.  My beer's out.  Yrxwly,
                                         HEVACE EVEELOJ.'

"I was evidently overworked.  My comprehension was impaired.  Therefore I
gave two days to recreation, and then returned to my task greatly
refreshed.  The letter now took this form:

      "Poultices do sometimes choke swine; tulips reduce posterity; causes
      leather to resist.  Our notions empower wisdom, her let's afford
      while we can.  Butter but any cakes, fill any undertaker, we'll wean
      him from his filly.  We feel hot.
                                    Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.'

"I was still not satisfied.  These generalities did not meet the
question.  They were crisp, and vigorous, and delivered with a confidence
that almost compelled conviction; but at such a time as this, with a
human life at stake, they seemed inappropriate, worldly, and in bad
taste.  At any other time I would have been not only glad, but proud, to
receive from a man like Mr. Greeley a letter of this kind, and would have
studied it earnestly and tried to improve myself all I could; but now,
with that poor boy in his far home languishing for relief, I had no heart
for learning.

"Three days passed by, and I read the note again.  Again its tenor had
changed.  It now appeared to say:

      "Potations do sometimes wake wines; turnips restrain passion; causes
      necessary to state.  Infest the poor widow; her lord's effects will
      be void.  But dirt, bathing, etc., etc., followed unfairly, will
      worm him from his folly--so swear not.
                                              Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.'

"This was more like it.  But I was unable to proceed.  I was too much
worn.  The word 'turnips' brought temporary joy and encouragement, but my
strength was so much impaired, and the delay might be so perilous for the
boy, that I relinquished the idea of pursuing the translation further,
and resolved to do what I ought to have done at first.  I sat down and
wrote Mr. Greeley as follows:

      "DEAR SIR: I fear I do not entirely comprehend your kind note.  It
      cannot be possible, Sir, that 'turnips restrain passion'--at least
      the study or contemplation of turnips cannot--for it is this very
      employment that has scorched our poor friend's mind and sapped his
      bodily strength.--But if they do restrain it, will you bear with us
      a little further and explain how they should be prepared?  I observe
      that you say 'causes necessary to state,' but you have omitted to
      state them.

      "Under a misapprehension, you seem to attribute to me interested
      motives in this matter--to call it by no harsher term.  But I assure
      you, dear sir, that if I seem to be 'infesting the widow,' it is all
      seeming, and void of reality.  It is from no seeking of mine that I
      am in this position.  She asked me, herself, to write you.  I never
      have infested her--indeed I scarcely know her.  I do not infest
      anybody.  I try to go along, in my humble way, doing as near right
      as I can, never harming anybody, and never throwing out
      insinuations.  As for 'her lord and his effects,' they are of no
      interest to me.  I trust I have effects enough of my own--shall
      endeavor to get along with them, at any rate, and not go mousing
      around to get hold of somebody's that are 'void.'  But do you not
      see?--this woman is a widow--she has no 'lord.'  He is dead--or
      pretended to be, when they buried him.  Therefore, no amount of
      'dirt, bathing,' etc., etc., howsoever 'unfairly followed' will be
      likely to 'worm him from his folly'--if being dead and a ghost is
      'folly.'  Your closing remark is as unkind as it was uncalled for;
      and if report says true you might have applied it to yourself, sir,
      with more point and less impropriety.
                               Very Truly Yours, SIMON ERICKSON.

"In the course of a few days, Mr. Greely did what would have saved a
world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and
misunderstanding, if he had done it sooner.  To wit, he sent an
intelligible rescript or translation of his original note, made in a
plain hand by his clerk.  Then the mystery cleared, and I saw that his
heart had been right, all the time.  I will recite the note in its
clarified form:

      [Translation.]
      'Potatoes do sometimes make vines; turnips remain passive: cause
      unnecessary to state.  Inform the poor widow her lad's efforts will
      be vain.  But diet, bathing, etc.  etc., followed uniformly, will
      wean him from his folly--so fear not.
                                         Yours, HORACE GREELEY.'

"But alas, it was too late, gentlemen--too late.  The criminal delay had
done its work--young Beazely was no more.  His spirit had taken its
flight to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires
gratified, all ambitions realized.  Poor lad, they laid him to his rest
with a turnip in each hand."

So ended Erickson, and lapsed again into nodding, mumbling, and
abstraction.  The company broke up, and left him so....  But they did not
say what drove him crazy.  In the momentary confusion, I forgot to ask.



CHAPTER LXXI.

At four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of
dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land
journey.  This lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire
after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island
structure higher and higher.  Underneath, it is honey-combed with caves;
it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold
water--you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter.
Consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns.

The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now
living who witnessed it.  In one place it enclosed and burned down a
grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks
stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark;
the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged,
left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf,
and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon
and wonder at.

There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at
that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as
the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did.  It is a pity it is
so, because such things are so interesting; but so it is.  They probably
went away.  They went away early, perhaps.  However, they had their
merits; the Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed the
sounder judgment.

Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to
every school-boy in the wide world--Kealakekua Bay--the place where
Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives,
nearly a hundred years ago.  The setting sun was flaming upon it, a
Summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent
rainbows.  Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these
and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor.
Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery
the Rainbow Islands?  These charming spectacles are present to you at
every turn; they are common in all the islands; they are visible every
day, and frequently at night also--not the silvery bow we see once in an
age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful
colors, like the children of the sun and rain.  I saw one of them a few
nights ago.  What the sailors call "raindogs"--little patches of rainbow
--are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like
stained cathedral windows.

Kealakekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell,
winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from
shore to shore.  It is bounded on one side--where the murder was done--by
a little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined
houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and
three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and
bounds the inner extremity of it.  From this wall the place takes its
name, Kealakekua, which in the native tongue signifies "The Pathway of
the Gods."  They say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal
education in Christianity), that the great god Lono, who used to live
upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business
connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a
hurry.

As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean
stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the
bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the
flat rock pressed by Captain Cook's feet when the blow was dealt which
took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man
struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages--the men
in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious dismay
toward the shore--the--but I discovered that I could not do it.

It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the
distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to
the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think,
and wish the ship would make the land--for we had not eaten much for ten
hours and were viciously hungry.

Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's
assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide.
Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and
welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all
manner of food.  He returned these kindnesses with insult and
ill-treatment.  Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished
and lamented god Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of
the limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at
this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen
thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly
origin with a groan.  It was his death-warrant.  Instantly a shout went
up: "He groans!--he is not a god!" So they closed in upon him and
dispatched him.

His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of
it which were sent on board the ships).  The heart was hung up in a
native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook
it for the heart of a dog.  One of these children grew to be a very old
man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago.  Some of Cook's bones were
recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships.

Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook.
They treated him well.  In return, he abused them.  He and his men
inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed
at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation.

Near the shore we found "Cook's Monument"--only a cocoanut stump, four
feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt.  It had lava boulders
piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was
entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets
of copper, such as ships' bottoms are coppered with.  Each sheet had a
rude inscription scratched upon it--with a nail, apparently--and in every
case the execution was wretched.  Most of these merely recorded the
visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this
legend:

     "Near this spot fell
      CAPTAIN JAMES COOK,
      The Distinguished Circumnavigator,
      Who Discovered these Islands
      A. D.  1778."

After Cook's murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened
fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls
cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing.
It looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy twilight.
But there is no other monument to Captain Cook.  True, up on the mountain
side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of
lava blocks, which marks the spot where Cook's flesh was stripped from
his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument since it was
erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the
circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him.
A thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall pole,
and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the memorable
occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and the wind have long
ago so defaced it as to render it illegible.

Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked
herself into the bay and cast anchor.  The boat came ashore for us, and
in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone.  The moon was
beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon
the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that
are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent.



CHAPTER LXXII.

In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the
last god Lono.  The high chief cook of this temple--the priest who
presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices--was uncle to Obookia,
and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him.  Obookia
was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native
boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the
reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the
attention of the religious world to their country.  This resulted in the
sending of missionaries there.  And this Obookia was the very same
sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his
people did not have the Bible.  That incident has been very elaborately
painted in many a charming Sunday School book--aye, and told so
plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School
myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know
much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands
needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a
Bible at all.

Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his
native land with the first missionaries, had he lived.  The other native
youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third,
William Kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold
excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to
mining, although he was fifty years old.  He succeeded pretty well, but
the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of six thousand dollars,
and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age
and he resumed service in the pulpit again.  He died in Honolulu in 1864.

Quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the sea to
the mountain top, was sacred to the god Lono in olden times--so sacred
that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was
judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come.  He might
go around it by water, but he could not cross it.  It was well sprinkled
with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of
logs of wood.  There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain--and with
fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side
that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be
likely to get it every time.  You would seldom get to your Amen before
you would have to hoist your umbrella.

And there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single
night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands
of dead men!  Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a
noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up
the mountain side at dead of night--flitting hither and thither and
bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers--appearing
and disappearing as the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded
away again.  Even to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread
structure in awe and reverence, and will not pass by it in the night.

At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea,
and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.
I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied
that they were running some risk.  But they were not afraid, and
presently went on with their sport.  They were finished swimmers and
divers, and enjoyed themselves to the last degree.

They swam races, splashed and ducked and tumbled each other about, and
filled the air with their laughter.  It is said that the first thing an
Islander learns is how to swim; learning to walk being a matter of
smaller consequence, comes afterward.  One hears tales of native men and
women swimming ashore from vessels many miles at sea--more miles, indeed,
than I dare vouch for or even mention.  And they tell of a native diver
who went down in thirty or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil!
I think he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me.
However I will not urge this point.

I have spoken, several times, of the god Lono--I may as well furnish two
or three sentences concerning him.

The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff
twelve feet long.  Tradition says he was a favorite god on the Island of
Hawaii--a great king who had been deified for meritorious services--just
our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that we would
have made him a Postmaster instead of a god, no doubt.  In an angry
moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Aiii.  Remorse of
conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular
spectacle of a god traveling "on the shoulder;" for in his gnawing grief
he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling with all whom
he met.  Of course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it
must necessarily have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a
frail human opponent "to grass" he never came back any more.  Therefore,
he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held
in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft,
stating that he would return some day--and that was the last of Lono.
He was never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps.  But the
people always expected his return, and thus they were easily led to
accept Captain Cook as the restored god.

Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of their death;
but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he
was a god.

Only a mile or so from Kealakekua Bay is a spot of historic interest--the
place where the last battle was fought for idolatry.  Of course we
visited it, and came away as wise as most people do who go and gaze upon
such mementoes of the past when in an unreflective mood.

While the first missionaries were on their way around the Horn, the
idolatrous customs which had obtained in the island, as far back as
tradition reached were suddenly broken up.  Old Kamehameha I., was dead,
and his son, Liholiho, the new King was a free liver, a roystering,
dissolute fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient tabu.  His
assistant in the Government, Kaahumanu, the Queen dowager, was proud and
high-spirited, and hated the tabu because it restricted the privileges of
her sex and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes.
So the case stood.  Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down,
Kaahumahu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whiskey did
the rest.  It was probably the rest.  It was probably the first time
whiskey ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization.  Liholiho
came up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast; the
determined Queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and
then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved
deliberately forward and sat down with the women!

They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled!
Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the King ate, still he
lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld!
Then conviction came like a revelation--the superstitions of a hundred
generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went
up, "the tabu is broken!  the tabu is broken!"

Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful whiskey preach the first sermon
and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over
the waves of the Atlantic.

The tabu broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege,
the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always
characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak
and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that
Captain Cook was no god, merely because he groaned, and promptly killed
him without stopping to inquire whether a god might not groan as well as
a man if it suited his convenience to do it; and satisfied that the idols
were powerless to protect themselves they went to work at once and pulled
them down--hacked them to pieces--applied the torch--annihilated them!

The pagan priests were furious.  And well they might be; they had held
the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared; they had
been great--they had stood above the chiefs--and now they were vagabonds.
They raised a revolt; they scared a number of people into joining their
standard, and Bekuokalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily
persuaded to become their leader.

In the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent
against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon Kailua.
The King sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near
being an envoy short by the operation; the savages not only refused to
listen to him, but wanted to kill him.  So the King sent his men forth
under Major General Kalaimoku and the two host met a Kuamoo.  The battle
was long and fierce--men and women fighting side by side, as was the
custom--and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every
direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the tabu were dead in the
land!

The royalists marched gayly home to Kailua glorifying the new
dispensation.  "There is no power in the gods," said they; "they are a
vanity and a lie.  The army with idols was weak; the army without idols
was strong and victorious!"

The nation was without a religion.

The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by
providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the Gospel was planted
as in a virgin soil.



CHAPTER LXXIII.

At noon, we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at
Honaunan in his canoe--price two dollars--reasonable enough, for a sea
voyage of eight miles, counting both ways.

The native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance.  I cannot think
of anything to liken it to but a boy's sled runner hollowed out, and that
does not quite convey the correct idea.  It is about fifteen feet long,
high and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and
so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it you might not get him out
again.  It sits on top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger
and does not upset easily, if you keep still.  This outrigger is formed
of two long bent sticks like plow handles, which project from one side,
and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely
light wood, which skims along the surface of the water and thus saves you
from an upset on that side, while the outrigger's weight is not so easily
lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly
feared.  Still, until one gets used to sitting perched upon this
knifeblade, he is apt to reason within himself that it would be more
comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also.
I had the bow seat, and Billings sat amidships and faced the Kanaka, who
occupied the stern of the craft and did the paddling.  With the first
stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow.
There was not much to see.  While we were on the shallow water of the
reef, it was pastime to look down into the limpid depths at the large
bunches of branching coral--the unique shrubbery of the sea.  We lost
that, though, when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep.
But we had the picture of the surf, then, dashing angrily against the
crag-bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air.

There was interest in this beetling border, too, for it was honey-combed
with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the
dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the
restless sea.  When this novelty ceased to be a novelty, we turned our
eyes shoreward and gazed at the long mountain with its rich green forests
stretching up into the curtaining clouds, and at the specks of houses in
the rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at
anchor.  And when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of
a school of huge, beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of
arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again and
keeping it up--always circling over, in that way, like so many
well-submerged wheels.  But the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and
then we were thrown upon our own resources.  It did not take many minutes
to discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather
was of a melting temperature.  It had a drowsing effect, too. In one
place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and
all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing.
Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking
a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly
prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his
board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would
come whizzing by like a bombshell!  It did not seem that a lightning
express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed.  I tried
surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it.  I got the
board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the
connection myself.--The board struck the shore in three quarters of a
second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time,
with a couple of barrels of water in me.  None but natives ever master
the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.

At the end of an hour, we had made the four miles, and landed on a level
point of land, upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a
tall cocoanut tree growing among them.  Here was the ancient City of
Refuge--a vast inclosure, whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the
base, and fifteen feet high; an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet
one way and a fraction under seven hundred the other.  Within this
inclosure, in early times, has been three rude temples; each two hundred
and ten feet long by one hundred wide, and thirteen high.

In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island the
relatives were privileged to take the murderer's life; and then a chase
for life and liberty began--the outlawed criminal flying through pathless
forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the
protecting walls of the City of Refuge, and the avenger of blood
following hotly after him!

Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the
panting pair sped through long files of excited natives, who watched the
contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted
refugee with sharp, inspiriting ejaculations, and sending up a ringing
shout of exultation when the saving gates closed upon him and the cheated
pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold.  But sometimes the flying
criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door, when one
more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have brought his
feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm.  Where did
these isolated pagans get this idea of a City of Refuge--this ancient
Oriental custom?

This old sanctuary was sacred to all--even to rebels in arms and invading
armies.  Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and
absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go forth
without fear and without danger--he was tabu, and to harm him was death.
The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to
claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved.

Close to the corner of the great inclosure is a round structure of stone,
some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve in
diameter.  This was the place of execution.  A high palisade of cocoanut
piles shut out the cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude.  Here
criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and
the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure.  If the man had
been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned.

The walls of the temple are a study.  The same food for speculation that
is offered the visitor to the Pyramids of Egypt he will find here--the
mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with
science and mechanics.  The natives have no invention of their own for
hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have never
even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever.  Yet some of the
lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground, and built
into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size
and would weigh tons.  How did they transport and how raise them?

Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and
are very creditable specimens of masonry.  The blocks are of all manner
of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest
exactness.  The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is
accurately preserved.

No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of
resisting storm and decay for centuries.  Who built this temple, and how
was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled.
Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven
feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end (it would
weigh a few thousand pounds), which the high chief who held sway over
this district many centuries ago brought thither on his shoulder one day
to use as a lounge!  This circumstance is established by the most
reliable traditions.  He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and
keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no
"soldiering" done.  And no doubt there was not any done to speak of,
because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to
business on the part of an employee.

He was fourteen or fifteen feet high.  When he stretched himself at full
length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored
he woke the dead.  These facts are all attested by irrefragable
tradition.

On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven
feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick.  It is raised a foot or
a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little
stony pedestals.  The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the
mountain, merely for fun (he had his own notions about fun), and propped
it up as we find it now and as others may find it a century hence, for it
would take a score of horses to budge it from its position.  They say
that fifty or sixty years ago the proud Queen Kaahumanu used to fly to
this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her
fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased.  But
these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest
efforts--for Kaahumanu was six feet high--she was bulky--she was built
like an ox--and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock
than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill.  What
could she gain by it, even if she succeeded?  To be chased and abused by
a savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high
spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose
under that rock would.

We walked a mile over a raised macadamized road of uniform width; a road
paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable
degree of engineering skill.  Some say that that wise old pagan,
Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long
before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out
of the traditions.  In either case, however, as the handiwork of an
untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest.  The
stones are worn and smooth, and pushed apart in places, so that the road
has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of
Rome which one sees in pictures.

The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the
base of the foothills--a congealed cascade of lava.  Some old forgotten
volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountain side
here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff
some fifty feet high to the ground below.  The flaming torrent cooled in
the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seamed, and frothed
and rippled a petrified Niagara.  It is very picturesque, and withal so
natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed.  A smaller stream
trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about thirty
feet high, which has the semblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted
vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together.

We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff
pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed a
long distance.

Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature's mining abilities.
Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are
gently arched.  Their height is not uniform, however.  We passed through
one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens
out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the
waves of the sea.  It is a commodious tunnel, except that there are
occasional places in it where one must stoop to pass under.  The roof is
lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles
an inch long, which hardened as they dripped.  They project as closely
together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up
straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of
charge.



CHAPTER LXXIV.

We got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down to Kau,
where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel.  Next day we
bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces,
toward the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah).  We made nearly a
two days' journey of it, but that was on account of laziness.  Toward
sunset on the second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand
feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy
wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax
of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near presence of
the volcano--signs in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets
of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the
bowels of the mountain.

Shortly the crater came into view.  I have seen Vesuvius since, but it
was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this.
Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater
an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a
thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest,
and docile.--But here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine
hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others,
level-floored, and ten miles in circumference!  Here was a yawning pit
upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare.

Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we
stood, was a small look-out house--say three miles away.  It assisted us,
by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin
--it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral.
After some little time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we
hurried on to the hotel.

By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the
lookout-house.  After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly
dark and then started to the crater.  The first glance in that direction
revealed a scene of wild beauty.  There was a heavy fog over the crater
and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below.  The
illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you
ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or
forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly
against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked
like.

A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air
immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its
vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a
pale rose tint in the depressions between.  It glowed like a muffled
torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith.  I
thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the
children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so
many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious "pillar of
fire."  And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the
majestic "pillar of fire" was like, which almost amounted to a
revelation.

Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the
railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the
sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us.  The view was a
startling improvement on my daylight experience.  I turned to see the
effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of
men I almost ever saw.  In the strong light every countenance glowed like
red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded
rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity!  The place below looked like
the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up
on a furlough.

I turned my eyes upon the volcano again.  The "cellar" was tolerably well
lighted up.  For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on
either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond
these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a
deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote
corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed--made them seem like
the camp-fires of a great army far away.  Here was room for the
imagination to work!  You could imagine those lights the width of a
continent away--and that hidden under the intervening darkness were
hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert--and even
then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!--to the fires and
far beyond!  You could not compass it--it was the idea of eternity made
tangible--and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!

The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as
ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was
ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of
liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!  It looked like a colossal railroad
map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight
sky.  Imagine it--imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled
net-work of angry fire!

Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in
the dark crust, and in them the melted lava--the color a dazzling white
just tinged with yellow--was boiling and surging furiously; and from
these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like
the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while
and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of
sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged
lightning.  These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and
crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like
skate tracks on a popular skating ground.  Sometimes streams twenty or
thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing
--and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small,
steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source,
but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate
lines of black and gold.  Every now and then masses of the dark crust
broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river.
Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke
through--split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet
long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the
cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice
when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the
crimson cauldron.  Then the wide expanse of the "thaw" maintained a ruddy
glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again.
During a "thaw," every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white
border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora borealis rays, which
were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence
toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale
carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and
then dimmed and turned black.  Some of the streams preferred to mingle
together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something
like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just
taken in sail and dropped anchor--provided one can imagine those ropes on
fire.

Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very
beautiful.  They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged
sprays of stringy red fire--of about the consistency of mush, for
instance--from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of
brilliant white sparks--a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood
and snow-flakes!

We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and
wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than
a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not
strictly "square"), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that
we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such
a splendid display--since any visitor had seen anything more than the now
snubbed and insignificant "North" and "South" lakes in action.  We had
been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the "Record Book" at
the Volcano House, and were posted.

I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the
outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava
streams.  In its individual capacity it looked very little more
respectable than a schoolhouse on fire.  True, it was about nine hundred
feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present
circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides
it was so distant from us.

I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great,
heard as we heard it from our lofty perch.  It makes three distinct
sounds--a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you
stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine
that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and
that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing
from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her
wheels.  The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.

We left the lookout house at ten o'clock in a half cooked condition,
because of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets,
for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel.



CHAPTER LXXV.

The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater, for
we desired to traverse its floor and see the "North Lake" (of fire) which
lay two miles away, toward the further wall.  After dark half a dozen of
us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a crazy,
thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and
reached the bottom in safety.

The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor
looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet,
to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the
underlying fires gleaming vindictively.  A neighboring cauldron was
threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the
situation.  So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and
then every body deserted except a stranger named Marlette.  He said he
had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could
find his way through it at night.  He thought that a run of three hundred
yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our
shoe-soles.  His pluck gave me back-bone.  We took one lantern and
instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house
to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party
started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run.
We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk
dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet.  Then
we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and
probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque
lava upheavals with considerable confidence.  When we got fairly away
from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert,
and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to
tower to the sky.  The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high
overhead.

By and by Marlette shouted "Stop!" I never stopped quicker in my life.
I asked what the matter was.  He said we were out of the path.  He said
we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded
with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge
down a thousand feet.  I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and
was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by
accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits.

He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern.  He said there
was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined.  We could not find
it.  The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light.  But he was an
ingenious man.  He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that
we were out of the path, but his feet.  He had noticed a crisp grinding
of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that
in the path these were all worn away.  So he put the lantern behind him,
and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes.  It was good
sagacity.  The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind
under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we
kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us
in time.

It was a long tramp, but an exciting one.  We reached the North Lake
between ten and eleven o'clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging
lava-shelf, tired but satisfied.  The spectacle presented was worth
coming double the distance to see.  Under us, and stretching away before
us, was a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent.  The
glare from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear
to look upon it steadily.

It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not
quite so white.  At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake
were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five feet
high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and
gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden--a ceaseless
bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable
splendor.  The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening
gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving
ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they
appeared.

Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm
down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and
then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary
dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst
asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and
float upward and vanish in the darkness--a released soul soaring homeward
from captivity with the damned, no doubt.  The crashing plunge of the
ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows
lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch.  By
and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the
lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and delivering a
suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not.  We did
not wait to see.

We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting for
the path.  We were where we could see the beacon lantern at the look-out
house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention to it.
We reached the hotel at two o'clock in the morning pretty well fagged
out.

Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its
lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the
destruction is fearful.  About 1840 it rent its overburdened stomach and
sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea, which swept away
forests, huts, plantations and every thing else that lay in its path.
The stream was five miles broad, in places, and two hundred feet deep,
and the distance it traveled was forty miles.  It tore up and bore away
acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts--rocks, trees and all
intact.  At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and
at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight.  The
atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling
ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and
blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with
a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets of lava
sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-sprays that
returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the laboring
mountain shook with Nature's great palsy and voiced its distress in
moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders.

Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava
entered the sea.  The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a
prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and
drowning a number of natives.  The devastation consummated along the
route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable.  Only
a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make
the story of the irruption immortal.



CHAPTER LXXVI.

We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked road
making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very
much.  We were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka
horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping--whip and spur
could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it
economized time to let them have their way.  Upon inquiry the mystery was
explained: the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never
pass a house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their horses
learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty
of man, and his salvation not to be compassed without it.  However, at a
former crisis of my life I had once taken an aristocratic young lady out
driving, behind a horse that had just retired from a long and honorable
career as the moving impulse of a milk wagon, and so this present
experience awoke a reminiscent sadness in me in place of the exasperation
more natural to the occasion.  I remembered how helpless I was that day,
and how humiliated; how ashamed I was of having intimated to the girl
that I had always owned the horse and was accustomed to grandeur; how
hard I tried to appear easy, and even vivacious, under suffering that was
consuming my vitals; how placidly and maliciously the girl smiled, and
kept on smiling, while my hot blushes baked themselves into a permanent
blood-pudding in my face; how the horse ambled from one side of the
street to the other and waited complacently before every third house two
minutes and a quarter while I belabored his back and reviled him in my
heart; how I tried to keep him from turning corners and failed; how I
moved heaven and earth to get him out of town, and did not succeed; how
he traversed the entire settlement and delivered imaginary milk at a
hundred and sixty-two different domiciles, and how he finally brought up
at a dairy depot and refused to budge further, thus rounding and
completing the revealment of what the plebeian service of his life had
been; how, in eloquent silence, I walked the girl home, and how, when I
took leave of her, her parting remark scorched my soul and appeared to
blister me all over: she said that my horse was a fine, capable animal,
and I must have taken great comfort in him in my time--but that if I
would take along some milk-tickets next time, and appear to deliver them
at the various halting places, it might expedite his movements a little.
There was a coolness between us after that.

In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled cataract
of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high;
but that sort of scenery finds its stanchest ally in the arithmetic
rather than in spectacular effect.  If one desires to be so stirred by a
poem of Nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque
rocks, glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows,
and failing water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so potent is
the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an
experience.  The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie
railway, is an example.  It would recede into pitiable insignificance if
the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the
honors simply on scenic grace and beauty--the grand, the august and the
sublime being barred the contest--it could challenge the old world and
the new to produce its peer.

In one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had been born
and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water, and
consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had been
always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating dew-laden or
shower-wetted leaves.  And now it was destructively funny to see them
sniff suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and
try to take a bite out of the fluid, as if it were a solid.  Finding it
liquid, they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling,
snorting and showing other evidences of fright.  When they became
convinced at last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust
in their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and
proceeded to chew it complacently.  We saw a man coax, kick and spur one
of them five or ten minutes before he could make it cross a running
stream.  It spread its nostrils, distended its eyes and trembled all
over, just as horses customarily do in the presence of a serpent--and for
aught I know it thought the crawling stream was a serpent.

In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kawaehae (usually
pronounced To-a-hi--and before we find fault with this elaborate
orthographical method of arriving at such an unostentatious result, let
us lop off the ugh from our word "though").  I made this horseback trip
on a mule.  I paid ten dollars for him at Kau (Kah-oo), added four to get
him shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen
dollars.  I mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of
chalk--for I never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything
with, though out of respect for the ancients I have tried it often
enough); for up to that day and date it was the first strictly commercial
transaction I had ever entered into, and come out winner.  We returned to
Honolulu, and from thence sailed to the island of Maui, and spent several
weeks there very pleasantly.  I still remember, with a sense of indolent
luxury, a picnicing excursion up a romantic gorge there, called the Iao
Valley.  The trail lay along the edge of a brawling stream in the bottom
of the gorge--a shady route, for it was well roofed with the verdant
domes of forest trees.  Through openings in the foliage we glimpsed
picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless changes and new charms with
every step of our progress.  Perpendicular walls from one to three
thousand feet high guarded the way, and were sumptuously plumed with
varied foliage, in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns.
Passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining
fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the
turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of
gleaming green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling
mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy curtain
descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually
away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it--then
swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again.  Now and then, as our
position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of
castellated ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and hung
with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back again
and hid themselves once more in the foliage.  Presently a verdure-clad
needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out from behind a corner,
and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley.  It seemed to me that
if Captain Cook needed a monument, here was one ready made--therefore,
why not put up his sign here, and sell out the venerable cocoanut stump?

But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala--which
means, translated, "the house of the sun."  We climbed a thousand feet up
the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next
day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit,
where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night.  With
the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us.
Mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent
wonders.  The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface
seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance.  A broad valley below
appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations
alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished
to mossy tufts.  Beyond the valley were mountains picturesquely grouped
together; but bear in mind, we fancied that we were looking up at these
things--not down.  We seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl
ten thousand feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away
into the sky above us!  It was curious; and not only curious, but
aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten
thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery.
However, we had to be content with it and make the best of it; for, all
we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds.
Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this
singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes,
I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy.

I have spoken of the outside view--but we had an inside one, too.  That
was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then tumbled rocks,
half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go careering down
the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet at a jump;
kicking up cast-clouds wherever they struck; diminishing to our view as
they sped farther into distance; growing invisible, finally, and only
betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to a
halt at last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred feet
down from where they started!  It was magnificent sport.  We wore
ourselves out at it.

The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about
a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of Kilauea
is somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference.  But what are either
of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala?  I will not offer
any figures of my own, but give official ones--those of Commander Wilkes,
U.S.N., who surveyed it and testifies that it is twenty-seven miles in
circumference!  If it had a level bottom it would make a fine site for a
city like London.  It must have afforded a spectacle worth contemplating
in the old days when its furnaces gave full rein to their anger.

Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and
the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing
squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly
together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean
--not a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim
of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a
ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted
through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and
gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the
brim with a fleecy fog).  Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence
reigned.  Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor
stretched without a break--not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow
creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory
architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain--some near
at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony
of the remote solitudes.  There was little conversation, for the
impressive scene overawed speech.  I felt like the Last Man, neglected of
the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a
vanished world.

While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection
appeared in the East.  A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon
the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of
ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes,
purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy
vapor-palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings
and combinations of rich coloring.

It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory
of it will remain with me always.



CHAPTER LXXVII.

I stumbled upon one curious character in the Island of Mani.  He became a
sore annoyance to me in the course of time.  My first glimpse of him was
in a sort of public room in the town of Lahaina.  He occupied a chair at
the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eyeing our party with
interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were
saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to
reply.  I thought it very sociable in a stranger.  Presently, in the
course of conversation, I made a statement bearing upon the subject under
discussion--and I made it with due modesty, for there was nothing
extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a
point at issue.  I had barely finished when this person spoke out with
rapid utterance and feverish anxiety:

"Oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to
have seen my chimney--you ought to have seen my chimney, sir!  Smoke!
I wish I may hang if--Mr. Jones, you remember that chimney--you must
remember that chimney!  No, no--I recollect, now, you warn't living on
this side of the island then.  But I am telling you nothing but the
truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn't
smoke so that the smoke actually got caked in it and I had to dig it out
with a pickaxe!  You may smile, gentlemen, but the High Sheriff's got a
hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it's perfectly easy
for you to go and examine for yourselves."

The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to
lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two,
and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest.

Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and
detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense
eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to
speak.  The moment I paused, he said:

"Beg your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered
remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation.  Sir,
contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it
instantly becomes commonplace.  No, not that--for I will not speak so
discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a
gentleman--but I am obliged to say that you could not, and you would not
ever again refer to this tree as a large one, if you could behold, as I
have, the great Yakmatack tree, in the island of Ounaska, sea of
Kamtchatka--a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen
feet in solid diameter!--and I wish I may die in a minute if it isn't so!
Oh, you needn't look so questioning, gentlemen; here's old Cap Saltmarsh
can say whether I know what I'm talking about or not.  I showed him the
tree."

Captain Saltmarsh--"Come, now, cat your anchor, lad--you're heaving too
taut.  You promised to show me that stunner, and I walked more than
eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle I ever see, a hunting
for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn't as big around as a beer
cask, and you know that your own self, Markiss."

"Hear the man talk!  Of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn't
I explain it?  Answer me, didn't I?  Didn't I say I wished you could have
seen it when I first saw it?  When you got up on your ear and called me
names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling,
didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had
been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?  And did you
s'pose the tree could last for-ever, con-found it?  I don't see why you
want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that's
never done you any harm."

Somehow this man's presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a
native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most
companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands,
desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found
trespassing on his grounds.

I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement I
was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances,
and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a familiar voice
chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said:

"But, my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse, or the
circumstance either--nothing in the world!  I mean no sort of offence
when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about
speed.  Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta;
there was a beast!--there was lightning for you!  Trot!  Trot is no name
for it--she flew!  How she could whirl a buggy along!  I started her out
once, sir--Colonel Bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well
--I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the
awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of
eighteen miles!  It did, by the everlasting hills!  And I'm telling you
nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single drop of
rain fell on me--not a single drop, sir!  And I swear to it!  But my dog
was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!"

For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet this
person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me.  But one
evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a
sociable time.  About ten o'clock I chanced to be talking about a
merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark
slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his
workmen.  Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the
opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot--and for a moment I
trembled on the imminent verge of profanity:

"Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade that as a
surprising circumstance.  Bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of
the very A B C of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as
unborn twins!  You don't know anything about it!  It is pitiable to see
you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an
enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is
perfectly humiliating!  Look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the
eye.  John James Godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the
State of Mississippi--boyhood friend of mine--bosom comrade in later
years.  Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now.  John James
Godfrey was hired by the Hayblossom Mining Company in California to do
some blasting for them--the "Incorporated Company of Mean Men," the boys
used to call it.

"Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an awful
blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an iron
crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark and
fired the powder, and scat! away John Godfrey whizzed like a skyrocket,
him and his crowbar!  Well, sir, he kept on going up in the air higher
and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a boy--and he kept going
on up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a doll--and
he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger
than a little small bee--and then he went out of sight!  Presently he
came in sight again, looking like a little small bee--and he came along
down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll again--and down
further and further, till he was as big as a boy again--and further and
further, till he was a full-sized man once more; and then him and his
crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly in the same old
tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down, and r-ramming down
again, just the same as if nothing had happened!  Now do you know, that
poor cuss warn't gone only sixteen minutes, and yet that Incorporated
Company of Mean Men DOCKED HIM FOR THE LOST TIME!"

I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home.  And on
my diary I entered "another night spoiled" by this offensive loafer.
And a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company.  And
the very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the Island.

Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar.

The line of points represents an interval of years.  At the end of which
time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly
and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons.  The man
Markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the
doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his
breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to
suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for
that it was the work of his own hands entirely.  Yet the jury brought in
the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death "by the hands of
some person or persons unknown!"  They explained that the perfectly
undeviating consistency of Markiss's character for thirty years towered
aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement
he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as
a lie.  And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead,
and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he
was dead--and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as
possible, which was done.  And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the
coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him
up.  But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to "suicide
induced by mental aberration"--because, said they, with penetration, "he
said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he
had been in his right mind?  No, sir."



CHAPTER LXXVIII.

After half a year's luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took shipping in
a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San Francisco--a voyage in
every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long
weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may
rank as an incident.  Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day
they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the
least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack
of better sport.  Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be
still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship
had not moved out of her place in all that time.  The calm was absolutely
breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle.
For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that
had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her
passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately
acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard
of since.  This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely
voyage.  We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they
were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the
gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to
trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and
thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling
over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the
enterprise with absorbing interest.  We were at sea five Sundays; and
yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the
other days were Sundays too.

I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment.
I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a
public lecture occurred to me!  I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of
hopeful anticipation.  I showed it to several friends, but they all shook
their heads.  They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a
humiliating failure of it.

They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down in the
delivery, anyhow.  I was disconsolate now.  But at last an editor slapped
me on the back and told me to "go ahead."  He said, "Take the largest
house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."  The audacity of the
proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly
wisdom, however.  The proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the
advice, and said I might have his handsome new opera-house at half price
--fifty dollars.  In sheer desperation I took it--on credit, for
sufficient reasons.  In three days I did a hundred and fifty dollars'
worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and
frightened creature on the Pacific coast.  I could not sleep--who could,
under such circumstances?  For other people there was facetiousness in
the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when
I wrote it:

           "Doors open at 7 1/2.  The trouble will begin at 8."

That line has done good service since.  Showmen have borrowed it
frequently.  I have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement
reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin.  As
those three days of suspense dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy.
I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared
they might not come.  My lecture, which had seemed "humorous" to me, at
first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun
seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage
and turn the thing into a funeral.  I was so panic-stricken, at last,
that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature,
and stormy-voiced, and said:

"This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that
nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the parquette,
and help me through."

They said they would.  Then I went to the wife of a popular citizen, and
said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, I would be
glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand
stage-box, where the whole house could see them.  I explained that I
should need help, and would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when
I had been delivered of an obscure joke--"and then," I added, "don't wait
to investigate, but respond!"

She promised.  Down the street I met a man I never had seen before.  He
had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and good nature.  He said:

"My name's Sawyer.  You don't know me, but that don't matter.  I haven't
got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you'd give me a
ticket.  Come, now, what do you say?"

"Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?--that is, is it critical, or can
you get it off easy?"

My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a
specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted, and I
gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second circle, in the
centre, and be responsible for that division of the house.  I gave him
minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then went
away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea.

I ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days--I only suffered.
I had advertised that on this third day the box-office would be opened
for the sale of reserved seats.  I crept down to the theater at four in
the afternoon to see if any sales had been made.  The ticket seller was
gone, the box-office was locked up.  I had to swallow suddenly, or my
heart would have got out.  "No sales," I said to myself; "I might have
known it."  I thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight.  I thought
of these things in earnest, for I was very miserable and scared.  But of
course I had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate.  I could
not wait for half-past seven--I wanted to face the horror, and end it
--the feeling of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt.  I went down back
streets at six o'clock, and entered the theatre by the back door.
I stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and
stood on the stage.  The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness
depressing.  I went into the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour
and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly unconscious of
everything else.  Then I heard a murmur; it rose higher and higher, and
ended in a crash, mingled with cheers.  It made my hair raise, it was so
close to me, and so loud.

There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before I
well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring at
a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking
in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away.  The
house was full, aisles and all!

The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before
I could gain any command over myself.  Then I recognized the charity and
the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright
melted away, and I began to talk Within three or four minutes I was
comfortable, and even content.  My three chief allies, with three
auxiliaries, were on hand, in the parquette, all sitting together, all
armed with bludgeons, and all ready to make an onslaught upon the
feeblest joke that might show its head.  And whenever a joke did fall,
their bludgeons came down and their faces seemed to split from ear to
ear.

Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the centre of
the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely.
Inferior jokes never fared so royally before.  Presently I delivered a
bit of serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the
audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more than any
applause; and as I dropped the last word of the clause, I happened to
turn and catch Mrs.--'s intent and waiting eye; my conversation with her
flashed upon me, and in spite of all I could do I smiled.  She took it
for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off
the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of
the evening.  I thought that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself;
and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers.  But my poor
little morsel of pathos was ruined.  It was taken in good faith as an
intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and I wisely
let it go at that.

All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; I had a
abundance of money.  All's well that ends well.



CHAPTER LXXIX.

I launched out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness.  I had the field
all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in
the Pacific market.  They are not so rare, now, I suppose.  I took an old
personal friend along to play agent for me, and for two or three weeks we
roamed through Nevada and California and had a very cheerful time of it.
Two days before I lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were robbed
within two miles of the town.  The daring act was committed just at dawn,
by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches, presented
revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and commanded a
general dismount.  Everybody climbed down, and the robbers took their
watches and every cent they had.  Then they took gunpowder and blew up
the express specie boxes and got their contents.  The leader of the
robbers was a small, quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous
manner and his intrepidity was in everybody's mouth when we arrived.

The night after instructing Virginia, I walked over the desolate "divide"
and down to Gold Hill, and lectured there.  The lecture done, I stopped
to talk with a friend, and did not start back till eleven.  The "divide"
was high, unoccupied ground, between the towns, the scene of twenty
midnight murders and a hundred robberies.  As we climbed up and stepped
out on this eminence, the Gold Hill lights dropped out of sight at our
backs, and the night closed down gloomy and dismal.  A sharp wind swept
the place, too, and chilled our perspiring bodies through.

"I tell you I don't like this place at night," said Mike the agent.

"Well, don't speak so loud," I said.  "You needn't remind anybody that we
are here."

Just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of Virginia--a
man, evidently.  He came straight at me, and I stepped aside to let him
pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me again.  Then I saw that he
had a mask on and was holding something in my face--I heard a click-click
and recognized a revolver in dim outline.  I pushed the barrel aside with
my hand and said:

"Don't!"

He ejaculated sharply:

"Your watch!  Your money!"

I said:

"You can have them with pleasure--but take the pistol away from my face,
please.  It makes me shiver."

"No remarks!  Hand out your money!"

"Certainly--I--"

"Put up your hands!  Don't you go for a weapon!  Put 'em up!  Higher!"

I held them above my head.

A pause.  Then:

"Are you going to hand out your money or not?"

I dropped my hands to my pockets and said:

Certainly!  I--"

"Put up your hands!  Do you want your head blown off?  Higher!"

I put them above my head again.

Another pause.

Are you going to hand out your money or not?  Ah-ah--again?  Put up your
hands!  By George, you want the head shot off you awful bad!"

"Well, friend, I'm trying my best to please you.  You tell me to give up
my money, and when I reach for it you tell me to put up my hands.  If you
would only--.  Oh, now--don't!  All six of you at me!  That other man
will get away while.--Now please take some of those revolvers out of my
face--do, if you please!  Every time one of them clicks, my liver comes
up into my throat!  If you have a mother--any of you--or if any of you
have ever had a mother--or a--grandmother--or a--"

"Cheese it!  Will you give up your money, or have we got to--.  There
--there--none of that!  Put up your hands!"

"Gentlemen--I know you are gentlemen by your--"

"Silence!  If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and
places more fitting.  This is a serious business."

"You prick the marrow of my opinion.  The funerals I have attended in my
time were comedies compared to it.  Now I think--"

"Curse your palaver!  Your money!--your money!--your money!  Hold!--put
up your hands!"

"Gentlemen, listen to reason.  You see how I am situated--now don't put
those pistols so close--I smell the powder.

"You see how I am situated.  If I had four hands--so that I could hold up
two and--"

"Throttle him!  Gag him!  Kill him!"

"Gentlemen, don't!  Nobody's watching the other fellow.  Why don't some
of you--.  Ouch!  Take it away, please!

"Gentlemen, you see that I've got to hold up my hands; and so I can't take
out my money--but if you'll be so kind as to take it out for me, I will
do as much for you some--"

"Search him Beauregard--and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags
it again.  Help Beauregard, Stonewall."

Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to Mike and
fell to searching him.  I was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured
me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel
brother-generals of the South, but, considering the order they had
received, it was but common prudence to keep still.  When everything had
been taken from me,--watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small
value,--I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my
empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up
some latent courage--but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the
order came again:

They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands
above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said:

"Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you hide behind
that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush
there.  Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down
their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!"

Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the
other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia.

It was depressingly still, and miserably cold.  Now this whole thing was
a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in
disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the
whole operation, listening.  Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but
I suspected nothing of it.  To me it was most uncomfortably genuine.
When we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a
couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches,
Mike's interest in the joke began to wane.  He said:

"The time's up, now, aint it?"

"No, you keep still.  Do you want to take any chances with these bloody
savages?"

Presently Mike said:

"Now the time's up, anyway.  I'm freezing."

"Well freeze.  Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.
Maybe the time is up, but how do we know?--got no watch to tell by.
I mean to give them good measure.  I calculate to stand here fifteen
minutes or die.  Don't you move."

So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his contract.
When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and
fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the time
might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not
sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my
stiffened body.

The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon
themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full
hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so
chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again.  Moreover,
I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was
so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not
really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble
they had taken.  I was only afraid that their weapons would go off
accidentally.  Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no
blood would be intentionally spilled.  They were not smart; they ought to
have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they
desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree.

However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the
joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the
chilly exposure on the "divide" while I was in a perspiration gave me a
cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands
idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor's bills.
Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my
temper when one is played upon me.

When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan
and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again
changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to
the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent,
and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York--a trip that was not much
of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage
and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.  I found home a
dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known
were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I
had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and
happy--some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and
the rest had been hanged.  These changes touched me deeply, and I went
away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my
tears to foreign lands.

Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a "pleasure trip" to the
silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only
three months.  However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.


MORAL.

If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to
it, he is in error.  The moral of it is this: If you are of any account,
stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no
account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you
want to or not.  Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to
be a nuisance to them--if the people you go among suffer by the
operation.



APPENDIX. A.

BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY.

Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of
stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the
end.  Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the
country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated
all "Gentiles" indiscriminately and with all their might.  Joseph Smith,
the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven
from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous
stones he read their inscriptions with.  Finally he instituted his
"church" in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it.  The neighbors began to
persecute, and apostasy commenced.  Brigham held to the faith and worked
hard.  He arrested desertion.  He did more--he added converts in the
midst of the trouble.  He rose in favor and importance with the brethren.
He was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church.  He shortly fought
his way to a higher post and a more powerful--President of the Twelve.
The neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled
in Missouri.  Brigham went with them.  The Missourians drove them out and
they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois.  They prospered there, and built a
temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved
some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a
tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe.
But the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors.
All the proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing polygamy and
repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of the
neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that polygamy was
practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a little of
everything that was bad.  Brigham returned from a mission to England,
where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought back with him
several hundred converts to his preaching.  His influence among the
brethren augmented with every move he made.  Finally Nauvoo was invaded
by the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed.  A Mormon
named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and government,
in Smith's place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two.  But a
greater than he was at hand.  Brigham seized the advantage of the hour
and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and will,
hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself.  He did more.
He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he
pronounced Rigdon's "prophecies" emanations from the devil, and ended by
"handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a thousand
years"--probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois.  The people
recognized their master.  They straightway elected Brigham Young
President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in their
devotion to him from that day to this.  Brigham had forecast--a quality
which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed.
He recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than be moved.
By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned
their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and
on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the
frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning
temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired!  They camped,
several days afterward, on the western verge of Iowa, and poverty, want,
hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many
succumbed and died--martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have
been.  Two years the remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small
party crossed the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely
choosing a land which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the
hated American nation.  Note that.  This was in 1847.  Brigham moved his
people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall
again.  For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham's refuge to the
enemy--the United States!  In 1849 the Mormons organized a "free and
independent" government and erected the "State of Deseret," with Brigham
Young as its head.  But the very next year Congress deliberately snubbed
it and created the "Territory of Utah" out of the same accumulation of
mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,--but made Brigham
Governor of it.  Then for years the enormous migration across the plains
to California poured through the land of the Mormons and yet the church
remained staunch and true to its lord and master.  Neither hunger,
thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor persecution could drive the
Mormons from their faith or their allegiance; and even the thirst for
gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and strength of many nations
was not able to entice them!  That was the final test.  An experiment
that could survive that was an experiment with some substance to it
somewhere.

Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah.  One of the last
things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear in
the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet
Smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities,
emoluments and authorities, upon "President Brigham Young!"  The people
accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham's power
was sealed and secured for all time.  Within five years afterward he
openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a
"revelation" which he pretended had been received nine years before by
Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to
the day of his death.

Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning and
steady progress of his official grandeur.  He had served successively as
a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and
publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of all
Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the
will of heaven; "prophet," "seer," "revelator."  There was but one
dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and
took that--he proclaimed himself a God!

He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he
will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and
princesses.  Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their
families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of
their wives and children.  If a disciple dies before he has had time to
accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in
the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children
for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account and
his heavenly status advanced accordingly.

Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always been
ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with
the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of
these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children
likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it
be remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven,
driven, driven, relentlessly!  and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed,
despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they
journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes
with their lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their
dead--and all because they were simply trying to live and worship God in
the way which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the
true one.  Let all these things be borne in mind, and then it will not be
hard to account for the deathless hatred which the Mormons bear our
people and our government.

That hatred has "fed fat its ancient grudge" ever since Mormon Utah
developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and
strong.  Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was
for the Mormons.  The United States tried to rectify all that by
appointing territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon
localities, but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his
dominions difficult.  Three thousand United States troops had to go
across the plains and put these gentlemen in office.  And after they were
in office they were as helpless as so many stone images.  They made laws
which nobody minded and which could not be executed.  The federal judges
opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday
spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at--for there was nothing to try,
nothing to do nothing on the dockets!  And if a Gentile brought a suit,
the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict,
and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it
and no officer could execute it.  Our Presidents shipped one cargo of
officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same--they
sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day
by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its
reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of
a more and more dismal nature--and at last they either succumbed and
became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and
discomforted beyond all endurance and left the Territory.  If a brave
officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant
Buchanan or Pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place.
In 1857 General Harney came very near being appointed Governor of Utah.
And so it came very near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge!
--two men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky
comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the
dictionary.  Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have
made in a rather monotonous history of Federal servility and
helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together in
Utah.

Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial
record.  The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless
failure, and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land.  He was
an absolute monarch--a monarch who defied our President--a monarch who
laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital--a monarch who
received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United
States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth
calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.



B.
THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.

The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long--and which they
consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves
--they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay.  The now almost
forgotten "Mountain Meadows massacre" was their work.  It was very famous
in its day.  The whole United States rang with its horrors.  A few items
will refresh the reader's memory.  A great emigrant train from Missouri
and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few disaffected Mormons
joined it for the sake of the strong protection it afforded for their
escape.  In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot retaliation by the
Mormon chiefs.  Besides, these one hundred and forty-five or one hundred
and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from Arkansas, where a
noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in part from
Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter persecutor of
the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here were
substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers.
And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and
other property--and how could the Mormons consistently keep up their
coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not seize the "spoil"
of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly "delivered it into their
hand?"

Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite's entertaining book, "The Mormon
Prophet," it transpired that--

"A 'revelation' from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was
dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee
(adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they
could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (so read the
revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of the
Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale; and
if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the Indians as
their allies, promising them a share of the booty.  They were to be
neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in
sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the
mandate of Almighty God."

The command of the "revelation" was faithfully obeyed.  A large party of
Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of
emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and
made an attack.  But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses
of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for
five days!  Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the
sort of scurvy apologies for "Indians" which the southern part of Utah
affords.  He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.

At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy.  They
retired to the upper end of the "Meadows," resumed civilized apparel,
washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to
the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce!  When the emigrants
saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with
cheer after cheer!  And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt,
they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the flag
of truce!

The leaders of the timely white "deliverers" were President Haight and
Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church.  Mr. Cradlebaugh, who served a
term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to Congress from
Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these leaders next
proceeded:

"They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and represented
them as being very mad.  They also proposed to intercede and settle the
matter with the Indians.  After several hours parley they, having
(apparently) visited the Indians, gave the ultimatum of the savages;
which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving
everything behind them, even their guns.  It was promised by the Mormon
bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to the
settlements.  The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous of
saving the lives of their families.  The Mormons retired, and
subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men.  The emigrants were
marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the
Mormon guard being in the rear.  When they had marched in this way about
a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced.  The men were almost
all shot down at the first fire from the guard.  Two only escaped, who
fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before
they were overtaken and slaughtered.  The women and children ran on, two
or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid
of the Indians they were slaughtered.  Seventeen individuals only, of all
the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the
eldest of them being only seven years old.  Thus, on the 10th day of
September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and
bloody murders known in our history."

The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was one
hundred and twenty.

With unheard-of temerity Judge Cradlebaugh opened his court and proceeded
to make Mormondom answer for the massacre.  And what a spectacle it must
have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone in his pride and
his pluck, glowering down on his Mormon jury and Mormon auditory,
deriding them by turns, and by turns "breathing threatenings and
slaughter!"

An editorial in the Territorial Enterprise of that day says of him and of
the occasion:

"He spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a Jackson;
but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges, while
threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on the
U.S. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course.

"Finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were discharged
with a scathing rebuke from the judge.  And then, sitting as a committing
magistrate, he commenced his task alone.  He examined witnesses, made
arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in the camps of the
saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before, since Mormondom
was born.  At last accounts terrified elders and bishops were decamping
to save their necks; and developments of the most starling character were
being made, implicating the highest Church dignitaries in the many
murders and robberies committed upon the Gentiles during the past eight
years."

Had Harney been Governor, Cradlebaugh would have been supported in his
work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of Mormon guilt in this
massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred
gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use
them.  But Cumming was the Federal Governor, and he, under a curious
pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the Mormons from the demands
of justice.  On one occasion he even went so far as to publish his
protest against the use of the U.S. troops in aid of Cradlebaugh's
proceedings.

Mrs. C. V. Waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre with
the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony--and the
summary is concise, accurate and reliable:

"For the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the guilt of
Young and his Mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here collated
and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to fasten
conviction upon them by 'confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ:'

"1.  The evidence of Mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as shown
by the statements of Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy U.S.  Marshall Rodgers.

"2.  The failure of Brigham Young to embody any account of it in his
Report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs.  Also his failure to make any
allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the
occurrence

"3.  The flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the Mormon
Church and State, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a
judicial investigation.

"4.  The failure of the Deseret News, the Church organ, and the only
paper then published in the Territory, to notice the massacre until
several months afterward, and then only to deny that Mormons were engaged
in it.

"5.  The testimony of the children saved from the massacre.

"6.  The children and the property of the emigrants found in possession
of the Mormons, and that possession traced back to the very day after the
massacre.

"7.  The statements of Indians in the neighborhood of the scene of the
massacre: these statements are shown, not only by Cradlebaugh and
Rodgers, but by a number of military officers, and by J. Forney, who was,
in 1859, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory.  To all
these were such statements freely and frequently made by the Indians.

"8.  The testimony of R. P. Campbell, Capt.  2d Dragoons, who was sent in
the Spring of 1859 to Santa Clara, to protect travelers on the road to
California and to inquire into Indian depredations."



C.
CONCERNING A FRIGHTFUL ASSASSINATION THAT WAS NEVER CONSUMMATED

If ever there was a harmless man, it is Conrad Wiegand, of Gold Hill,
Nevada.  If ever there was a gentle spirit that thought itself unfired
gunpowder and latent ruin, it is Conrad Wiegand.  If ever there was an
oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o'lantern, confined to a
swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a
summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is Conrad Wiegand.
Therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the
world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look;
and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature?  When I met
Conrad, he was "Superintendent of the Gold Hill Assay Office"--and he was
not only its Superintendent, but its entire force.  And he was a street
preacher, too, with a mongrel religion of his own invention, whereby he
expected to regenerate the universe.  This was years ago.  Here latterly
he has entered journalism; and his journalism is what it might be
expected to be: colossal to ear, but pigmy to the eye.  It is extravagant
grandiloquence confined to a newspaper about the size of a double letter
sheet.  He doubtless edits, sets the type, and prints his paper, all
alone; but he delights to speak of the concern as if it occupies a block
and employs a thousand men.

[Something less than two years ago, Conrad assailed several people
mercilessly in his little "People's Tribune," and got himself into
trouble.  Straightway he airs the affair in the "Territorial Enterprise,"
in a communication over his own signature, and I propose to reproduce it
here, in all its native simplicity and more than human candor.  Long as
it is, it is well worth reading, for it is the richest specimen of
journalistic literature the history of America can furnish, perhaps:]

From the Territorial Enterprise, Jan. 20, 1870.

SEEMING PLOT FOR ASSASSINATION MISCARRIED.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ENTERPRISE: Months ago, when Mr. Sutro incidentally
exposed mining management on the Comstock, and among others roused me to
protest against its continuance, in great kindness you warned me that any
attempt by publications, by public meetings and by legislative action,
aimed at the correction of chronic mining evils in Storey County, must
entail upon me (a) business ruin, (b) the burden of all its costs, (c)
personal violence, and if my purpose were persisted in, then (d)
assassination, and after all nothing would be effected.

YOUR PROPHECY FULFILLING.
In large part at least your prophecies have been fulfilled, for (a)
assaying, which was well attended to in the Gold Hill Assay Office (of
which I am superintendent), in consequence of my publications, has been
taken elsewhere, so the President of one of the companies assures me.
With no reason assigned, other work has been taken away.  With but one or
two important exceptions, our assay business now consists simply of the
gleanings of the vicinity.  (b) Though my own personal donations to the
People's Tribune Association have already exceeded $1,500, outside of our
own numbers we have received (in money) less than $300 as contributions
and subscriptions for the journal.  (c) On Thursday last, on the main
street in Gold Hill, near noon, with neither warning nor cause assigned,
by a powerful blow I was felled to the ground, and while down I was
kicked by a man who it would seem had been led to believe that I had
spoken derogatorily of him.  By whom he was so induced to believe I am as
yet unable to say.  On Saturday last I was again assailed and beaten by a
man who first informed me why he did so, and who persisted in making his
assault even after the erroneous impression under which he also was at
first laboring had been clearly and repeatedly pointed out.  This same
man, after failing through intimidation to elicit from me the names of
our editorial contributors, against giving which he knew me to be
pledged, beat himself weary upon me with a raw hide, I not resisting, and
then pantingly threatened me with permanent disfiguring mayhem, if ever
again I should introduce his name into print, and who but a few minutes
before his attack upon me assured me that the only reason I was
"permitted" to reach home alive on Wednesday evening last (at which time
the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE was issued) was, that he deems me only half-witted,
and be it remembered the very next morning I was knocked down and kicked
by a man who seemed to be prepared for flight.

[He sees doom impending:]

WHEN WILL THE CIRCLE JOIN?
How long before the whole of your prophecy will be fulfilled I cannot
say, but under the shadow of so much fulfillment in so short a time, and
with such threats from a man who is one of the most prominent exponents
of the San Francisco mining-ring staring me and this whole community
defiantly in the face and pointing to a completion of your augury, do you
blame me for feeling that this communication is the last I shall ever
write for the Press, especially when a sense alike of personal
self-respect, of duty to this money-oppressed and fear-ridden community,
and of American fealty to the spirit of true Liberty all command me, and
each more loudly than love of life itself, to declare the name of that
prominent man to be JOHN B. WINTERS, President of the Yellow Jacket
Company, a political aspirant and a military General?  The name of his
partially duped accomplice and abettor in this last marvelous assault, is
no other than PHILIP LYNCH, Editor and Proprietor of the Gold Hill News.

Despite the insult and wrong heaped upon me by John B. Winters, on
Saturday afternoon, only a glimpse of which I shall be able to afford
your readers, so much do I deplore clinching (by publicity) a serious
mistake of any one, man or woman, committed under natural and not
self-wrought passion, in view of his great apparent excitement at the
time and in view of the almost perfect privacy of the assault, I am far
from sure that I should not have given him space for repentance before
exposing him, were it not that he himself has so far exposed the matter
as to make it the common talk of the town that he has horsewhipped me.
That fact having been made public, all the facts in connection need to be
also, or silence on my part would seem more than singular, and with many
would be proof either that I was conscious of some unworthy aim in
publishing the article, or else that my "non-combatant" principles are
but a convenient cloak alike of physical and moral cowardice.  I
therefore shall try to present a graphic but truthful picture of this
whole affair, but shall forbear all comments, presuming that the editors
of our own journal, if others do not, will speak freely and fittingly
upon this subject in our next number, whether I shall then be dead or
living, for my death will not stop, though it may suspend, the
publication of the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE. [The "non-combatant" sticks to
principle, but takes along a friend or two of a conveniently different
stripe:]

THE TRAP SET.
On Saturday morning John B. Winters sent verbal word to the Gold Hill
Assay Office that he desired to see me at the Yellow Jacket office.
Though such a request struck me as decidedly cool in view of his own
recent discourtesies to me there alike as a publisher and as a
stockholder in the Yellow Jacket mine, and though it seemed to me more
like a summons than the courteous request by one gentleman to another for
a favor, hoping that some conference with Sharon looking to the
betterment of mining matters in Nevada might arise from it, I felt
strongly inclined to overlook what possibly was simply an oversight in
courtesy.  But as then it had only been two days since I had been bruised
and beaten under a hasty and false apprehension of facts, my caution was
somewhat aroused.  Moreover I remembered sensitively his contemptuousness
of manner to me at my last interview in his office.  I therefore felt it
needful, if I went at all, to go accompanied by a friend whom he would
not dare to treat with incivility, and whose presence with me might
secure exemption from insult.  Accordingly I asked a neighbor to
accompany me.

THE TRAP ALMOST DETECTED.
Although I was not then aware of this fact, it would seem that previous
to my request this same neighbor had heard Dr. Zabriskie state publicly
in a saloon, that Mr. Winters had told him he had decided either to kill
or to horsewhip me, but had not finally decided on which.  My neighbor,
therefore, felt unwilling to go down with me until he had first called on
Mr. Winters alone.  He therefore paid him a visit.  From that interview
he assured me that he gathered the impression that he did not believe I
would have any difficulty with Mr. Winters, and that he (Winters) would
call on me at four o'clock in my own office.

MY OWN PRECAUTIONS.
As Sheriff Cummings was in Gold Hill that afternoon, and as I desired to
converse with him about the previous assault, I invited him to my office,
and he came.  Although a half hour had passed beyond four o'clock, Mr.
Winters had not called, and we both of us began preparing to go home.
Just then, Philip Lynch, Publisher of the Gold Hill News, came in and
said, blandly and cheerily, as if bringing good news:

"Hello, John B. Winters wants to see you."

I replied, "Indeed!  Why he sent me word that he would call on me here
this afternoon at four o'clock!"

"O, well, it don't do to be too ceremonious just now, he's in my office,
and that will do as well--come on in, Winters wants to consult with you
alone.  He's got something to say to you."

Though slightly uneasy at this change of programme, yet believing that in
an editor's house I ought to be safe, and anyhow that I would be within
hail of the street, I hurriedly, and but partially whispered my dim
apprehensions to Mr. Cummings, and asked him if he would not keep near
enough to hear my voice in case I should call.  He consented to do so
while waiting for some other parties, and to come in if he heard my voice
or thought I had need of protection.

On reaching the editorial part of the News office, which viewed from the
street is dark, I did not see Mr. Winters, and again my misgivings arose.
Had I paused long enough to consider the case, I should have invited
Sheriff Cummings in, but as Lynch went down stairs, he said: "This way,
Wiegand--it's best to be private," or some such remark.

[I do not desire to strain the reader's fancy, hurtfully, and yet it
would be a favor to me if he would try to fancy this lamb in battle, or
the duelling ground or at the head of a vigilance committee--M.  T.:]

I followed, and without Mr. Cummings, and without arms, which I never do
or will carry, unless as a soldier in war, or unless I should yet come to
feel I must fight a duel, or to join and aid in the ranks of a necessary
Vigilance Committee.  But by following I made a fatal mistake.  Following
was entering a trap, and whatever animal suffers itself to be caught
should expect the common fate of a caged rat, as I fear events to come
will prove.

Traps commonly are not set for benevolence.
[His body-guard is shut out:]

THE TRAP INSIDE.
I followed Lynch down stairs.  At their foot a door to the left opened
into a small room.  From that room another door opened into yet another
room, and once entered I found myself inveigled into what many will ever
henceforth regard as a private subterranean Gold Hill den, admirably
adapted in proper hands to the purposes of murder, raw or disguised, for
from it, with both or even one door closed, when too late, I saw that I
could not be heard by Sheriff Cummings, and from it, BY VIOLENCE AND BY
FORCE, I was prevented from making a peaceable exit, when I thought I saw
the studious object of this "consultation" was no other than to compass
my killing, in the presence of Philip Lynch as a witness, as soon as by
insult a proverbially excitable man should be exasperated to the point of
assailing Mr. Winters, so that Mr. Lynch, by his conscience and by his
well known tenderness of heart toward the rich and potent would be
compelled to testify that he saw Gen. John B. Winters kill Conrad Wiegand
in "self-defence."  But I am going too fast.

OUR HOST.
Mr. Lynch was present during the most of the time (say a little short of
an hour), but three times he left the room.  His testimony, therefore,
would be available only as to the bulk of what transpired.  On entering
this carpeted den I was invited to a seat near one corner of the room.
Mr. Lynch took a seat near the window.  J. B. Winters sat (at first) near
the door, and began his remarks essentially as follows:

"I have come here to exact of you a retraction, in black and white, of
those damnably false charges which you have preferred against me in
that---infamous lying sheet of yours, and you must declare yourself their
author, that you published them knowing them to be false, and that your
motives were malicious."

"Hold, Mr. Winters.  Your language is insulting and your demand an
enormity.  I trust I was not invited here either to be insulted or
coerced.  I supposed myself here by invitation of Mr. Lynch, at your
request."

"Nor did I come here to insult you.  I have already told you that I am
here for a very different purpose."

"Yet your language has been offensive, and even now shows strong
excitement.  If insult is repeated I shall either leave the room or call
in Sheriff Cummings, whom I just left standing and waiting for me outside
the door."

"No, you won't, sir.  You may just as well understand it at once as not.
Here you are my man, and I'll tell you why!  Months ago you put your
property out of your hands, boasting that you did so to escape losing it
on prosecution for libel."

"It is true that I did convert all my immovable property into personal
property, such as I could trust safely to others, and chiefly to escape
ruin through possible libel suits."

"Very good, sir.  Having placed yourself beyond the pale of the law, may
God help your soul if you DON'T make precisely such a retraction as I
have demanded.  I've got you now, and by--before you can get out of this
room you've got to both write and sign precisely the retraction I have
demanded, and before you go, anyhow--you---low-lived--lying---, I'll
teach you what personal responsibility is outside of the law; and, by--,
Sheriff Cummings and all the friends you've got in the world besides,
can't save you, you---, etc.!  No, sir.  I'm alone now, and I'm prepared
to be shot down just here and now rather than be villified by you as I
have been, and suffer you to escape me after publishing those charges,
not only here where I am known and universally respected, but where I am
not personally known and may be injured."

I confess this speech, with its terrible and but too plainly implied
threat of killing me if I did not sign the paper he demanded, terrified
me, especially as I saw he was working himself up to the highest possible
pitch of passion, and instinct told me that any reply other than one of
seeming concession to his demands would only be fuel to a raging fire,
so I replied:

"Well, if I've got to sign--," and then I paused some time.  Resuming,
I said, "But, Mr. Winters, you are greatly excited.  Besides, I see you
are laboring under a total misapprehension.  It is your duty not to
inflame but to calm yourself.  I am prepared to show you, if you will
only point out the article that you allude to, that you regard as
'charges' what no calm and logical mind has any right to regard as such.
Show me the charges, and I will try, at all events; and if it becomes
plain that no charges have been preferred, then plainly there can be
nothing to retract, and no one could rightly urge you to demand a
retraction.  You should beware of making so serious a mistake, for
however honest a man may be, every one is liable to misapprehend.
Besides you assume that I am the author of some certain article which you
have not pointed out.  It is hasty to do so."

He then pointed to some numbered paragraphs in a TRIBUNE article, headed
"What's the Matter with Yellow Jacket?" saying "That's what I refer to."

To gain time for general reflection and resolution, I took up the paper
and looked it over for awhile, he remaining silent, and as I hoped,
cooling.  I then resumed saying, "As I supposed.  I do not admit having
written that article, nor have you any right to assume so important a
point, and then base important action upon your assumption.  You might
deeply regret it afterwards.  In my published Address to the People, I
notified the world that no information as to the authorship of any
article would be given without the consent of the writer.  I therefore
cannot honorably tell you who wrote that article, nor can you exact it."

"If you are not the author, then I do demand to know who is?"

"I must decline to say."

"Then, by--, I brand you as its author, and shall treat you accordingly."

"Passing that point, the most important misapprehension which I notice
is, that you regard them as 'charges' at all, when their context, both at
their beginning and end, show they are not.  These words introduce them:
'Such an investigation [just before indicated], we think MIGHT result in
showing some of the following points.' Then follow eleven specifications,
and the succeeding paragraph shows that the suggested investigation
'might EXONERATE those who are generally believed guilty.' You see,
therefore, the context proves they are not preferred as charges, and this
you seem to have overlooked."

While making those comments, Mr. Winters frequently interrupted me in
such a way as to convince me that he was resolved not to consider
candidly the thoughts contained in my words.  He insisted upon it that
they were charges, and "By--," he would make me take them back as
charges, and he referred the question to Philip Lynch, to whom I then
appealed as a literary man, as a logician, and as an editor, calling his
attention especially to the introductory paragraph just before quoted.
He replied, "if they are not charges, they certainly are insinuations,"
whereupon Mr. Winters renewed his demands for retraction precisely such
as he had before named, except that he would allow me to state who did
write the article if I did not myself, and this time shaking his fist in
my face with more cursings and epithets.

When he threatened me with his clenched fist, instinctively I tried to
rise from my chair, but Winters then forcibly thrust me down, as he did
every other time (at least seven or eight), when under similar imminent
danger of bruising by his fist (or for aught I could know worse than that
after the first stunning blow), which he could easily and safely to
himself have dealt me so long as he kept me down and stood over me.

This fact it was, which more than anything else, convinced me that by
plan and plot I was purposely made powerless in Mr. Winters' hands, and
that he did not mean to allow me that advantage of being afoot, which he
possessed.  Moreover, I then became convinced, that Philip Lynch (and for
what reason I wondered) would do absolutely nothing to protect me in his
own house.  I realized then the situation thoroughly.  I had found it
equally vain to protest or argue, and I would make no unmanly appeal for
pity, still less apologize.  Yet my life had been by the plainest
possible implication threatened.  I was a weak man.  I was unarmed.  I
was helplessly down, and Winters was afoot and probably armed.  Lynch was
the only "witness."  The statements demanded, if given and not explained,
would utterly sink me in my own self-respect, in my family's eyes, and in
the eyes of the community.  On the other hand, should I give the author's
name how could I ever expect that confidence of the People which I should
no longer deserve, and how much dearer to me and to my family was my life
than the life of the real author to his friends.  Yet life seemed dear
and each minute that remained seemed precious if not solemn.  I sincerely
trust that neither you nor any of your readers, and especially none with
families, may ever be placed in such seeming direct proximity to death
while obliged to decide the one question I was compelled to, viz.: What
should I do--I, a man of family, and not as Mr. Winters is, "alone."
[The reader is requested not to skip the following.--M.  T.:]

STRATEGY AND MESMERISM.
To gain time for further reflection, and hoping that by a seeming
acquiescence I might regain my personal liberty, at least till I could
give an alarm, or take advantage of some momentary inadvertence of
Winters, and then without a cowardly flight escape, I resolved to write a
certain kind of retraction, but previously had inwardly decided:

First.--That I would studiously avoid every action which might be
construed into the drawing of a weapon, even by a self-infuriated man, no
matter what amount of insult might be heaped upon me, for it seemed to me
that this great excess of compound profanity, foulness and epithet must
be more than a mere indulgence, and therefore must have some object.
"Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird."  Therefore,
as before without thought, I thereafter by intent kept my hands away from
my pockets, and generally in sight and spread upon my knees.

Second.--I resolved to make no motion with my arms or hands which could
possibly be construed into aggression.

Third.--I resolved completely to govern my outward manner and suppress
indignation.  To do this, I must govern my spirit.  To do that, by force
of imagination I was obliged like actors on the boards to resolve myself
into an unnatural mental state and see all things through the eyes of an
assumed character.

Fourth.--I resolved to try on Winters, silently, and unconsciously to
himself a mesmeric power which I possess over certain kinds of people,
and which at times I have found to work even in the dark over the lower
animals.

Does any one smile at these last counts?  God save you from ever being
obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having
but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force
unshorn.  But if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of
will, do not despair.  Though mesmeric power may not save you, it may
help you; try it at all events.  In this instance I was conscious of
power coming into me, and by a law of nature, I know Winters was
correspondingly weakened.  If I could have gained more time I am sure he
would not even have struck me.

It takes time both to form such resolutions and to recite them.  That
time, however, I gained while thinking of my retraction, which I first
wrote in pencil, altering it from time to time till I got it to suit me,
my aim being to make it look like a concession to demands, while in fact
it should tersely speak the truth into Mr. Winters' mind.  When it was
finished, I copied it in ink, and if correctly copied from my first draft
it should read as follows.  In copying I do not think I made any material
change.

COPY.
To Philip Lynch, Editor of the Gold Hill News: I learn that Gen. John B.
Winters believes the following (pasted on) clipping from the PEOPLE'S
TRIBUNE of January to contain distinct charges of mine against him
personally, and that as such he desires me to retract them unqualifiedly.

In compliance with his request, permit me to say that, although Mr.
Winters and I see this matter differently, in view of his strong feelings
in the premises, I hereby declare that I do not know those "charges" (if
such they are) to be true, and I hope that a critical examination would
altogether disprove them.
                              CONRAD WIEGAND.
                         Gold Hill, January 15, 1870.


I then read what I had written and handed it to Mr. Lynch, whereupon Mr.
Winters said:

"That's not satisfactory, and it won't do;" and then addressing himself
to Mr. Lynch, he further said: "How does it strike you?"

"Well, I confess I don't see that it retracts anything."

"Nor do I," said Winters; "in fact, I regard it as adding insult to
injury.  Mr. Wiegand you've got to do better than that.  You are not the
man who can pull wool over my eyes."

"That, sir, is the only retraction I can write."

"No it isn't, sir, and if you so much as say so again you do it at your
peril, for I'll thrash you to within an inch of your life, and, by--,
sir, I don't pledge myself to spare you even that inch either.  I want
you to understand I have asked you for a very different paper, and that
paper you've got to sign."

"Mr. Winters, I assure you that I do not wish to irritate you, but, at
the same time, it is utterly impossible for me to write any other paper
than that which I have written.  If you are resolved to compel me to sign
something, Philip Lynch's hand must write at your dictation, and if, when
written, I can sign it I will do so, but such a document as you say you
must have from me, I never can sign.  I mean what I say."

"Well, sir, what's to be done must be done quickly, for I've been here
long enough already.  I'll put the thing in another shape (and then
pointing to the paper); don't you know those charges to be false?"

"I do not."

"Do you know them to be true?"

"Of my own personal knowledge I do not."

"Why then did you print them?"

"Because rightly considered in their connection they are not charges, but
pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a
correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable."

"Don't you know that I know they are false?"

"If you do, the proper course is simply to deny them and court an
investigation."

"And do YOU claim the right to make ME come out and deny anything you may
choose to write and print?"

To that question I think I made no reply, and he then further said:

"Come, now, we've talked about the matter long enough.  I want your final
answer--did you write that article or not?"

"I cannot in honor tell you who wrote it."

"Did you not see it before it was printed?"

"Most certainly, sir."

"And did you deem it a fit thing to publish?"

"Most assuredly, sir, or I would never have consented to its appearance.
Of its authorship I can say nothing whatever, but for its publication I
assume full, sole and personal responsibility."

"And do you then retract it or not?"

"Mr. Winters, if my refusal to sign such a paper as you have demanded
must entail upon me all that your language in this room fairly implies,
then I ask a few minutes for prayer."

"Prayer!---you, this is not your hour for prayer--your time to pray was
when you were writing those--lying charges.  Will you sign or not?"

"You already have my answer."

"What!  do you still refuse?"

"I do, sir."

"Take that, then," and to my amazement and inexpressible relief he drew
only a rawhide instead of what I expected--a bludgeon or pistol.  With
it, as he spoke, he struck at my left ear downwards, as if to tear it
off, and afterwards on the side of the head.  As he moved away to get a
better chance for a more effective shot, for the first time I gained a
chance under peril to rise, and I did so pitying him from the very bottom
of my soul, to think that one so naturally capable of true dignity, power
and nobility could, by the temptations of this State, and by unfortunate
associations and aspirations, be so deeply debased as to find in such
brutality anything which he could call satisfaction--but the great hope
for us all is in progress and growth, and John B.  Winters, I trust, will
yet be able to comprehend my feelings.

He continued to beat me with all his great force, until absolutely weary,
exhausted and panting for breath.  I still adhered to my purpose of
non-aggressive defence, and made no other use of my arms than to defend
my head and face from further disfigurement.  The mere pain arising from
the blows he inflicted upon my person was of course transient, and my
clothing to some extent deadened its severity, as it now hides all
remaining traces.

When I supposed he was through, taking the butt end of his weapon and
shaking it in my face, he warned me, if I correctly understood him, of
more yet to come, and furthermore said, if ever I again dared introduce
his name to print, in either my own or any other public journal, he would
cut off my left ear (and I do not think he was jesting) and send me home
to my family a visibly mutilated man, to be a standing warning to all
low-lived puppies who seek to blackmail gentlemen and to injure their
good names.  And when he did so operate, he informed me that his
implement would not be a whip but a knife.

When he had said this, unaccompanied by Mr. Lynch, as I remember it, he
left the room, for I sat down by Mr. Lynch, exclaiming: "The man is mad
--he is utterly mad--this step is his ruin--it is a mistake--it would be
ungenerous in me, despite of all the ill usage I have here received, to
expose him, at least until he has had an opportunity to reflect upon the
matter.  I shall be in no haste."

"Winters is very mad just now," replied Mr. Lynch, "but when he is
himself he is one of the finest men I ever met.  In fact, he told me the
reason he did not meet you upstairs was to spare you the humiliation of a
beating in the sight of others."

I submit that that unguarded remark of Philip Lynch convicts him of
having been privy in advance to Mr. Winters' intentions whatever they may
have been, or at least to his meaning to make an assault upon me, but I
leave to others to determine how much censure an editor deserves for
inveigling a weak, non-combatant man, also a publisher, to a pen of his
own to be horsewhipped, if no worse, for the simple printing of what is
verbally in the mouth of nine out of ten men, and women too, upon the
street.

While writing this account two theories have occurred to me as possibly
true respecting this most remarkable assault:
First--The aim may have been simply to extort from me such admissions as
in the hands of money and influence would have sent me to the
Penitentiary for libel.  This, however, seems unlikely, because any
statements elicited by fear or force could not be evidence in law or
could be so explained as to have no force.  The statements wanted so
badly must have been desired for some other purpose.
Second--The other theory has so dark and wilfully murderous a look that I
shrink from writing it, yet as in all probability my death at the
earliest practicable moment has already been decreed, I feel I should do
all I can before my hour arrives, at least to show others how to break up
that aristocratic rule and combination which has robbed all Nevada of
true freedom, if not of manhood itself.  Although I do not prefer this
hypothesis as a "charge," I feel that as an American citizen I still have
a right both to think and to speak my thoughts even in the land of Sharon
and Winters, and as much so respecting the theory of a brutal assault
(especially when I have been its subject) as respecting any other
apparent enormity.  I give the matter simply as a suggestion which may
explain to the proper authorities and to the people whom they should
represent, a well ascertained but notwithstanding a darkly mysterious
fact.  The scheme of the assault may have been:

First--To terrify me by making me conscious of my own helplessness after
making actual though not legal threats against my life.

Second--To imply that I could save my life only by writing or signing
certain specific statements which if not subsequently explained would
eternally have branded me as infamous and would have consigned my family
to shame and want, and to the dreadful compassion and patronage of the
rich.

Third--To blow my brains out the moment I had signed, thereby preventing
me from making any subsequent explanation such as could remove the
infamy.

Fourth--Philip Lynch to be compelled to testify that I was killed by John
B.  Winters in self-defence, for the conviction of Winters would bring
him in as an accomplice.  If that was the programme in John B.  Winters'
mind nothing saved my life but my persistent refusal to sign, when that
refusal seemed clearly to me to be the choice of death.

The remarkable assertion made to me by Mr. Winters, that pity only spared
my life on Wednesday evening last, almost compels me to believe that at
first he could not have intended me to leave that room alive; and why I
was allowed to, unless through mesmeric or some other invisible
influence, I cannot divine.  The more I reflect upon this matter, the
more probable as true does this horrible interpretation become.

The narration of these things I might have spared both to Mr. Winters and
to the public had he himself observed silence, but as he has both
verbally spoken and suffered a thoroughly garbled statement of facts to
appear in the Gold Hill News I feel it due to myself no less than to this
community, and to the entire independent press of America and Great
Britain, to give a true account of what even the Gold Hill News has
pronounced a disgraceful affair, and which it deeply regrets because of
some alleged telegraphic mistake in the account of it.  [Who received the
erroneous telegrams?]

Though he may not deem it prudent to take my life just now, the
publication of this article I feel sure must compel Gen. Winters (with
his peculiar views about his right to exemption from criticism by me) to
resolve on my violent death, though it may take years to compass it.
Notwithstanding I bear him no ill will; and if W. C. Ralston and William
Sharon, and other members of the San Francisco mining and milling Ring
feel that he above all other men in this State and California is the most
fitting man to supervise and control Yellow Jacket matters, until I am
able to vote more than half their stock I presume he will be retained to
grace his present post.

Meantime, I cordially invite all who know of any sort of important
villainy which only can be cured by exposure (and who would expose it if
they felt sure they would not be betrayed under bullying threats), to
communicate with the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE; for until I am murdered, so long
as I can raise the means to publish, I propose to continue my efforts at
least to revive the liberties of the State, to curb oppression, and to
benefit man's world and God's earth.

                              CONRAD WIEGAND.


[It does seem a pity that the Sheriff was shut out, since the good sense
of a general of militia and of a prominent editor failed to teach them
that the merited castigation of this weak, half-witted child was a thing
that ought to have been done in the street, where the poor thing could
have a chance to run.  When a journalist maligns a citizen, or attacks
his good name on hearsay evidence, he deserves to be thrashed for it,
even if he is a "non-combatant" weakling; but a generous adversary would
at least allow such a lamb the use of his legs at such a time.--M.  T.]



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