Title: Fifteen Days - An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal
Author: Putnam, Mary Lowell
Language: English
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FIFTEEN DAYS.

An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal.


   "Aux plus déshérités le plus d'amour."



[Illustration]

Boston:
Ticknor and Fields.
1866.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by M. Lowell
Putnam, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District
of Massachusetts.



      "Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,
      Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
      I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
      And with forced fingers rude
      Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year."



FIFTEEN DAYS



                                 GOOD-FRIDAY EVENING, April 5, 1844.


No entry in my journal since the twenty-eighth of March. Yet these
seven silent days have a richer history than any that have arrived,
with their exactions or their gifts, since those liberal ones of two
springs ago came to endow me with your friendship.

Easy to tread and pleasant to look back upon is the level plain of our
life, uniform, yet diversified, familiar, yet always new; but, from
time to time, we find ourselves on little sunny heights from which the
way we have traversed shows yet fairer than we knew it, and that which
we are to take invites with more cheerful promise.

I did not know last Friday morning that anything was wanting to me.
And had I not enough? My farm-duties, which restrict my study-time
just enough to leave it always the zest of privilege; my books,
possessed or on the way; my mother's dear affection; your faithful
letters, true to the hour; Selden's, that come at last;--these, and
then the casual claims, the little countless pleasures infinitely
varied, special portion of each human day! always something to do,
something to enjoy, something to expect. And yet I would not now go
back and be where I was last Friday morning. Beautiful miracle! Our
cup is always full, yet its capacity is never reached!

Since the day I stood at my gate, listening for the fading sounds of
your horse's feet, many guests have crossed my threshold and recrossed
it,--all received with good-will, dismissed with good wishes. Last
Friday brought one whom I took to my heart and hold there. The first
clasp of his firm hand, the first look of his sweet, frank eyes, bound
me to him forever. Keith, I have more to love than I had a week ago,
and the world is more beautiful for me, life better worth living.

We had had gray weather for a week before he came; the blue sky
appeared with him, and smiled on us every day while he was here. I
cannot now separate the thought of him from that of sunshine, nor can
I tell how much of the glow and freshness of those days was of the
atmosphere, how much from his happy nature.

I had just come in from work, and was sitting near the window,
watching the slowly clearing sky, when I heard a step coming down the
road. You know I am used to listen to approaching footsteps, and to
judge beforehand what manner of man is about to present himself at my
door. This was a step that struck very cheerfully on the ear. Firm,
regular, it had no haste in it, yet a certain eagerness. My mother
heard it, too. "The feet of him that bringeth good tidings," she said,
smiling. The sun broke out full and clear as she spoke. "Can it be Dr.
Borrow?--it must be," I asked and answered myself; and my heart warmed
to him as it had not when I was reading his praises in Selden's
letter. I heard the gate open and close again. I went to the door, and
saw, coming along the path I guided you on that first dark night, a
figure that agreed perfectly with the step, but not at all with what I
had imagined Dr. Borrow. It was that of a man hardly more than twenty,
who carried about with him, it seemed, a world of youthful happiness,
but assuredly no great weight of learning. Erect, vigorous, animated,
his whole person spoke harmonious strength and freedom of soul and
body. His head was uncovered,--or, rather, it was protected only by
its masses of fair brown hair, whose curls the light wind that had
sprung up to meet him lifted tenderly, as if to show them sparkling in
the sunshine. This was no chance visitor; he walked as if he knew
where he was going, and felt himself an expected and a welcome guest.
He had come from far; his well-fitting travelling-suit of dark gray
told of a very distant skill and fashion, and was a little the worse
for the long road. He had a knapsack on his shoulders. From a strap
which crossed his breast hung a green tin case, such as botanists
carry on their tours. This, again, connected him with Dr. Borrow; but
the wild-flowers in his hand had been gathered for their beauty, not
their rarity, and the happy grace of their arrangement denoted rather
the artist than the savant.

He saw me as soon as I came to the door; for he quickened his step,
and, from where I stood, I could see his face brighten. You do not
know the face, and it is not like any other; how can you understand
the impression it made on me?

Our hands were soon joined in a cordial clasp. He answered my warm
welcome with a look full of youthful delight, behind which lay an
earnest, manly satisfaction.

The name which was in my mind came, though hesitatingly, to my lips:
"Dr. Borrow----" I began. A flash of merriment passed over my guest's
features; but they were instantly composed, as if he felt the mirthful
thought a disrespect to the absent.

"I am Harry Dudley. Dr. Borrow is coming. I walked on before to let
you know."

He laid his bouquet of wild-flowers in the shadow of the doorsteps,
threw off his knapsack, flung down on it the felt hat he had carried
crumpled up under his arm, and, turning, showed himself ready to walk
off with me to meet the Doctor. We had reached the gate, when he
stopped suddenly and looked towards the house.

"But do you not wish----?"

"No,"--I understood him at once,--"my mother is prepared; we have been
for some time expecting Dr. Borrow--and you," I ought in politeness to
have added, but in truth I could not. I looked at him a little
anxiously, fearing he might have remarked the omission, but his eyes
met mine, glad and frank.

Dr. Borrow had engrossed us. His visit, from the time it was first
promised, had been the one theme here within doors and without.
Morning and evening I had consulted with my mother over his
entertainment; Tabitha had, more than once, in his behalf, displaced
and reinstated every object in the house; Hans and his boys had
stimulated each other to unusual efforts, that the farm might find
favor in such enlightened eyes. Harry Dudley! certainly I ought to
have been expecting him. Certainly Selden's letter had told me he was
coming. But the mention of him had been so slight, or, I will now
rather say, so simple, that I had almost overlooked it. A line held
it, after three full pages given to Dr. Borrow. "Harry Dudley goes
with him,"--that was all. How little importance the name had for me
which was to have so much!

But, if no pains had been taken to prepossess me in Harry's favor,
full justice, I am sure, had been done me with him. He seemed to
regard me not as an acquaintance newly found, but as an old friend
rejoined: we were going out to meet and welcome the stranger whose
comforts we were to care for together.

"I suppose you will give Dr. Borrow your room, and you will take the
little one down-stairs, that you had when Selden was here? I shall
sleep in the barn on the hay."

I was, to be sure, just considering whether I should have one of our
little impromptu bedsteads set up for Harry, in a corner of the
room--yours--which had been assigned to the Doctor, or whether I
should share my little nook down-stairs with him. In the end, he had
it all his own way.

It was not long before we came upon the Doctor. I could not draw his
full portrait at first sight, as I did Harry's, for I had only a
profile view of his stooping figure, until I was quite close to him.
He, too, carried a knapsack;--a large russet one; Harry's was
black;--and strapped to it was a long umbrella, which protruded on
either side. He was grubbing in a meadow, and was either really so
intent that he did not see us, or thought it better not to let us
know that he did until he had finished his work. We stood near him
some minutes before he straightened himself up, booty in hand. He
scrutinized his prize for a moment, and then, apparently satisfied,
came forward and saluted mo in a very friendly tone. His dark-blue
spectacles prevented me from seeing whether the eyes seconded the
voice, and his other features are too heavy to be very expressive.
When I had made known my satisfaction at his arrival, and he had
acquiesced,--when I had inquired after Selden, and he had answered
that he had not seen our common friend for six weeks, we stood
opposite each other, I looking for a subject which could not be
disposed of so promptly, and he, apparently, waiting for me to bring
it forward. But Harry now spoke eagerly:--

"Have you found it?"--holding out his hand at the same time for the
poor little specimen which the Doctor held between his thumb and
finger.

"Yes."

"The very one you have been looking for?"

"The very thing."

"Shall I put it into the box?"

Harry received the little object respectfully, and deposited it in the
tin case with care. He then relieved Dr. Borrow's shoulders of the
knapsack and took it on his own, having first withdrawn the umbrella
and placed it in the hands of the owner, who watched its extrication
with interest, and received it in a way which showed it to be an
object of attachment. The Doctor gathered up some inferior spoil which
lay in a circle round the place where he had been at work. Harry found
room for all in the box. He had entered so fully into his companion's
success, that I thought he might after all be a botanist himself; but
he told me, as we walked towards the house, that he knew nothing of
plants except what he had learned in journeying with Dr. Borrow.

"But I know what it is to want to complete your collection," he added,
laughing. "We have been all the morning looking for this particular
kind of grass. Dr. Borrow thought it must grow somewhere in this
neighborhood, and here it is at last. The Doctor has a great
collection of grasses."

"The largest, I think I may say, on this continent,--one of the
largest, perhaps, that exists," said the Doctor, with the candor of a
man who feels called upon to render himself justice, since there is no
one else qualified to do it. And then he entered upon grasses; setting
forth the great part filled by this powerful family, in the history of
our earth, and vindicating triumphantly his regard for its humblest
member.

When we came within sight of the house, Harry walked rapidly on. By
the time the Doctor and I rejoined him at the door, he had
disencumbered himself of the knapsack, had taken his flowers from
their hiding-place, and stood ready to follow us in.

I introduced Dr. Borrow to my mother in form, and was about to do the
same by Harry, who had stood back modestly until his friend had been
presented; but he was now already taking her extended hand, bowing
over it with that air of filial deference which we hear that high-bred
Frenchmen have in their manner to elder women. I wondered that I had
before thought him so young; his finished courtesy was that of a man
versed in society. But the next moment he was offering her his
wild-flowers with the smile with which an infant brings its little
fistful of dandelions to its mother, delighting in the pleasure it has
been preparing for her. His name had made more impression on my mother
than on me. She called him by it at once. This redeemed all my
omissions, if, indeed, he had remarked them, and I believe he had not.

The Doctor, in the mean while, had lifted his spectacles to the top of
his head. You have not seen a man until you have looked into his eyes.
Dr. Borrow's, of a clear blue, made another being of him. His only
speaking feature, they speak intelligence and good-will. I felt that I
should like him, and I do. He did not, however, find himself so
immediately at home with us as Harry did. He took the chair I offered
him, but sat silent and abstracted, answering absently, by an
inclination of the head, my modest attempts at conversation. Harry,
interpreting his mood, brought him the green tin case. He took it a
little hastily, and looked about him, as if inquiring for a place
where he could give himself to the inspection of its contents. I
offered to conduct him to his room. Harry went out promptly and
brought in the well-stuffed russet knapsack,--took the respectable
umbrella from the corner where it was leaning, and followed us
up-stairs,--placed his load inside the chamber-door, and ran down
again. I introduced the Doctor to the chair and table in my little
study, where he installed himself contentedly.

When I came down, I found Harry standing by my mother. He was putting
the flowers into water for her,--consulting her, as he arranged them,
now by a look, now by a question. She answered the bright smile with
which he took leave of her, when his work was done, by one tender,
almost tearful. I knew to whom that smile was given. I knew that
beside her then stood the vision of a little boy, fair-haired,
dark-eyed, like Harry, and full of such lovely promise as Harry's
happy mother could see fulfilled in him. But the sadness flitted
lightly, and a soft radiance overspread the dear pale face.

The name of our little Charles had been in my mind too, and my
thoughts followed hers backward to that sweet infancy, and forward to
that unblemished maturity, attained in purer spheres, of which Harry's
noble and tender beauty had brought us a suggestion.

It was the absence of a moment. I was recalled by a greeting given in
Harry's cordial voice. Tabitha stood in the doorway. She studied the
stranger with a long look, and then, advancing in her stateliest
manner, bestowed on him an emphatic and elaborate welcome. He listened
with grave and courteous attention, as a prince on a progress might
receive the harangue of a village mayor, and answered with simple
thanks, which she, satisfied with having performed her own part,
accepted as an ample return, and applied herself to more practical
hospitality.

Harry had been intent on some purpose when Tabitha intercepted him. He
now went quickly out, brought in the knapsack he had thrown down
beside the door on his first arrival, and began to undo the straps. I
felt myself interested, for there was a happy earnestness in his
manner which told of a pleasure on the way for somebody, and it seemed
to be my turn. I was not mistaken. He drew out a book, and then
another and another.

"These are from Selden."

He watched me as I read the title-pages, entering warmly into my
satisfaction, which was great enough, I am sure, to be more than a
reward for the weight Selden's gift had added to his pack.

"It does not take long to know Harry Dudley. Dear, affectionate boy,
in what Arcadia have you grown up, that you have thus carried the
innocence and simplicity of infancy through your twenty years!" This I
said within myself, as I looked upon his pure forehead, and met the
sweet, confiding expression of his beautiful eyes. Yet, even then,
something about the mouth arrested me, something of deep, strong,
resolute, which spoke the man who had already thought and renounced
and resisted. It does not take long to love Harry Dudley, but I have
learned that he is not to be known in an hour. Selden might well leave
him to make his own introduction. I can understand, that, to those who
are familiar with him, his very name should seem to comprehend a
eulogium.

Tabitha gave Dr. Borrow no such ceremonious reception as she had
bestowed on Harry. She was hospitable, however, and gracious, with a
touch of familiarity in her manner just enough to balance the
condescension in his. As he had not been witness of the greater state
with which Harry was received, he was not, I trust, sensible of any
want.

We sat up late that evening. The hours passed rapidly. Dr. Borrow had
laid aside his preoccupations, and gave himself up to the pleasures of
discourse. He passed over a wide range of topics, opening freely for
us his magazines of learning, scientific and scholastic, and
displaying a power of graphic narration I was not prepared for. He
aids himself with apt and not excessive gesture. In relating
conversations, without descending to mimicry, he characterizes his
personages for you, so that you are never in doubt.

Selden, telling me almost everything else about the Doctor, had said
nothing of his age; but he spoke of him as of a friend of his own, and
is himself only twenty-seven; so I had supposed it to lie on the
brighter side of thirty. It did, indeed, seem marvellous that the
stores of erudition attributed to him could have been gathered in so
early, but I made allowance for Selden's generous faculty of
admiration.

Dr. Borrow must be forty, or perhaps a little more. He is of middle
height, square-built, of a dull complexion, which makes his open blue
eyes look very blue and open. You are to imagine for him a strong,
clear voice, a rapid, yet distinct utterance, and a manner which
denotes long habit of easy and secure superiority.

I have never known the Doctor in finer vein than that first evening.
We were only three to listen to him, but it was long since he had had
even so large an audience capable of admiring, I will not say of
appreciating him. Whatever his topic, he enchained our attention; but
he made his power most felt, perhaps, when treating of his own
specialty, or scientific subjects connected with it. He is, as he told
us, emphatically a practical man, preferring facts to speculations. He
propounds no theories of his own, but he develops those of others very
happily, setting forth the most opposite with the same ingenuity and
clearness. When, in these expositions, he sometimes approached the
limits where earthly science merges in the heavenly, Harry's face
showed his mind tending powerfully forward. But the Doctor always
stopped short of the point to which he seemed leading, and was on the
ground again without sharing in the fall he had prepared for his
listeners.

Very entertaining to me were Dr. Borrow's accounts of his travelling
experiences and observations in our own State and neighborhood. His
judgments he had brought with him, and I soon found that his inquiry
had been conducted with the view rather of confirming than of testing
them. I felt myself compelled to demur at some of his conclusions; but
I cannot flatter myself that I did anything towards shaking his faith
in them: he only inculcated them upon me with greater zeal and
confidence. When a little debate of this kind occurred, Harry followed
it attentively, but took no part in it. I sometimes felt that his
sympathies were on my side, and my opponent certainly thought
so,--for, when I pressed him a little hard, he would turn upon his
travelling-companion a burst of refutation too lively to be addressed
to a new acquaintance. The pleasant laugh in Harry's eyes showed him
amused, yet still far within the limits of respect.

Sometimes, in the course of his narrations, or of his disquisitions
upon men and manners, American or foreign, the Doctor turned for
corroboration to Harry, who gave it promptly and gladly when he could.
If he felt himself obliged to dissent, he did so with deference, and
forbore to urge his objections, if they were overruled, as they
commonly were.

I found, however, before the first evening was over, that, with all
his modesty, Harry maintained his independence. When the Doctor, who
is no Utopist, found occasion to aim a sarcasm at the hopes and
prospects of the lovers of humanity, or pronounced in a slighting tone
some name dear to them, Harry never failed to put in a quiet, but
express protest, which should at least exempt him from complicity. And
Dr. Borrow would turn upon him a satirical smile, which gradually
softened into an indulgent one, and then take up again quietly the
thread of his discourse. At times, Harry was forced into more direct
and sustained opposition. I observed that his tone was then, if less
positive than his antagonist's, quite as decided. If the Doctor's
words came with all the weight of a justifiable self-esteem, Harry's
had that of deep and intimate conviction. I am persuaded that
conversation would lose all zest for the Doctor, if conducted long
with persons who agreed with him. He kindles at the first hint of
controversy, as the horse at the sound of the trumpet. To Harry
sympathy is dearer than triumph; he enters upon contest only when
compelled by loyalty to principle or to friendship.

The elder man needs companionship as much as the younger, and perhaps
enjoys it as much, though very differently. The admiration he excites
reacts upon him and stimulates to new efforts. Harry's tender and
grateful nature expands to affectionate interest, as a flower to the
sunshine.

The Doctor has a certain intellectual fervor, which quickens the flow
of his thought and language, and enables him to lead you, willingly
fascinated, along the road he chooses to walk in for the time. When
Harry is drawn out of his usual modest reserve to maintain a position,
his concentrated enthusiasm sometimes gives to a few words, spoken in
his calm, resolute voice, the effect of a masterly eloquence. These
words pass into your heart to become a part of its possessions.

I think I never fully understood the meaning of the expression
_personal influence_, until I knew Harry Dudley. What a divine gift it
is, when of the force and quality of his! What a bright line his
life-stream will lead through the happy region it is to bless! And he
holds this magical power so unconsciously! Here is another point of
contrast between him and his friend. Dr. Borrow is very sensible of
all his advantages, and would be surprised, if others were insensible
to them. No one can do him this displeasure; his merits and
acquirements must be manifest on first acquaintance. But Harry
Dudley,--you do not think of asking whether he has this or that talent
or accomplishment. You feel what he is, and love him for it, before
you know whether he has anything.

These two companions, so different, are yet not ill-assorted. Harry's
simplicity and strength together prevent him from being injured by his
friend's love of domination, which might give umbrage to a more
self-conscious, or overbear a weaker man; his frankness and courage
only make his esteem of more value to the Doctor, who, with all his
tendency to the despotic, is manly and loves manliness.

I shall not attempt to write down for you any of the Doctor's
brilliant dissertations. You will know him some time, I hope, and he
will do himself a justice I could not do him. Harry you _must_ know.
He will go to see you on his way home, and, if he does not find you,
will make a visit to you the object of a special journey. He will be a
new bond between us. We shall watch his course together. It will not,
it cannot, disappoint us; for "spirits are not finely touched, but to
fine issues."

They are gone. We have promised each other that this parting shall not
be the final one. And yet my heart was heavy to-day at noon. When the
gate fell to after they had passed out, it seemed to me the sound had
in it something of determined and conclusive. I rebuked the regret
almost before it had made itself felt. Dudley is going out into the
world, which has so much need of men like him, true, brave, steadfast.
I can have no fear or anxiety for him. He must be safe everywhere in
God's universe. Do not all things work together for good to those that
love Him?



                                    SATURDAY EVENING, April 6, 1844.


My date ought to be March 30th, for I have been living over again
to-day the scenes of a week ago, and in my twilight talk with my
mother it was last Saturday that was reviewed, instead of this.

Last Saturday! The friends who now seem to belong to us, as if we had
never done without them, were then new acquisitions. The Doctor we had
not yet made out. How bright and pure that morning was! I was up
early, or thought I was, until I entered our little parlor, which I
had expected to find cheerless with the disorder that had made it
cheerful the evening before. But Tabitha, watchful against surprises,
had it in receiving-trim. She was giving it the last touches as I
entered. I had heard no sound from my mother's little chamber, which
my present one adjoins, and had been careful in my movements, thinking
her not yet awake. But here she was already in her place on the couch,
wearing a look of pleased solicitude, which I understood. I was not
myself wholly free from hospitable cares. Selden had been so exact in
forewarning me of Dr. Borrow's tastes and habits, that in the midst of
my anticipations intruded a little prosaic anxiety about the
breakfast. My mother, perhaps, shared it. Tabitha did not. She heard
some officious suggestions of mine with a lofty indifference. The
event justified her. How important she was, and how happy! How
considerately, yet how effectively, she rang the great bell! I did not
know it capable of such tones. When it summoned us, Harry was absent.
The Doctor and I took our places at the table without him. My mother
made his apology: he must have been very tired by his long walk the
day before, and had probably overslept himself. "Not he!" cried the
Doctor, with energy, as if repelling a serious accusation. "It's your
breakfast"--he pointed to the clock--"was ready four minutes too soon.
I've known two punctual men in my life, and Harry's one of them. He's
never two minutes after the time, _nor_ two minutes before it."

The Doctor had hardly done speaking when Harry's step was heard. It
was always the same, and always gave the same sensation of a joy in
prospect. Nor did it ever deceive. Dr. Borrow's good-morning was very
hearty. Harry had arrived just one minute before the time. If he had
come a minute earlier, or three minutes later, I do not know how it
might have been, for the Doctor does not like to be put in the wrong.

Harry brought in a bouquet for my mother. He did not fail in this
attention a single morning while he was here. I could not but
sometimes think of her who missed this little daily offering.

I had determined beforehand to give myself entirely to Dr. Borrow
during the time of his visit. I have often regretted the hours my farm
took from you. I had forewarned Hans of my intention of allowing
myself a vacation, and had arranged for the boys some work which did
not require oversight. They were to take hold of it, without further
notice, as soon as the distinguished stranger arrived. I could
therefore give myself up with an easy mind to the prolonged pleasures
of the breakfast-table. The Doctor was in excellent spirits,--full of
anecdote and of argument. I was very near being drawn into a
controversy more than once; but I was more willing to listen to him
than to myself, and avoided it successfully. Harry was in the same
peaceful disposition, but was not so fortunate.

A subject of difference between the friends, which seems to be a
standing one, is the character of the French. How did the Doctor bring
it on the table that morning? I think it was à-propos of the coffee.
He praised it and compared it with Paris coffee, which he did not
dispraise. But, once landed in France, that he should expatiate there
for a time was of course; and he found himself, as it appeared, in a
favorite field of animadversion. He began with some general
reflection,--I forget what; but, from the tone in which it was given,
I understood perfectly that it was a glove thrown down to Harry. It
was not taken up; and the Doctor, after a little defiant pause, went
forward. He drew highly colored sketches of the Gaul and the
Anglo-Saxon. Harry simply abstained from being amused. Dr. Borrow
passed to his individual experiences. It appeared, that,
notwithstanding the light regard in which he held the French, he had
done them the honor to pass several years in their country. This
intimate acquaintance had only given him the fairer opportunity of
making a comparison which was entirely to the advantage of the race he
himself represented. He declared, that, walking about among the
population of Paris, he felt himself on quite another scale and of
quite another clay. Harry here suggested that perhaps a Frenchman in
London, or in one of our cities, might have the same feeling.

"He can't,--he can't, if he would. No race dreams of asserting
superiority over the Anglo-Saxon,--least of all the French."

"If the French do not assert their superiority," Harry answered,
laughing, "it is because they are ignorant that it has been
questioned."

"That gives the measure of their ignorance; and they take care to
maintain it: a Frenchman never learns a foreign language."

"Because--as I once heard a Frenchman say--foreigners pay him the
compliment of learning his."

The Doctor burst out upon French vanity.

"At least you will admit that it is a quiet one," Harry replied. "The
French are content with their own good opinion. The tribute that
foreigners pay them is voluntary."

The Doctor arraigned those who foster the conceit of the French, first
by trying to copy them and then by failing in it. He was very
entertaining on this head. Neither Harry nor I thought it necessary to
remind him that the pictures he drew of the French and their imitators
did not precisely illustrate Anglo-Saxon superiority. He told the
origin of several little French customs, which, founded simply in
motives of economy or convenience, have been superstitiously adopted,
without any such good reason, and even made a test of breeding, by
weak-minded persons in England and this country. No one took up the
defence of those unfortunates, but the Doctor was not satisfied with
this acquiescence. He had an uneasy sense that his advantage in the
encounter with Harry had not been decisive. He soon returned to the
old field. Harry continued to parry his attacks playfully for a time,
but at last said seriously,--

"Doctor, I know you are not half in earnest; but if I hear ill spoken
of France, without replying, I feel as if I were not as true to my
friends there as I know they are to me. One of the best and noblest
men I ever knew is a Frenchman. This is not to argue with you. You
know better than anybody what the world owes to France. If you were to
take up my side, you would find a great deal more to say for it than I
could. I wish you would!"

A pause followed, long enough for the bright, earnest look with which
Harry made this appeal to fade from his face. As I did not think there
was much hope of the Doctor's taking the part proposed to him, at
least until he should find himself in company with persons who
professed the opinions he was now maintaining, I tried to divert him
to another topic, and succeeded; but it was only to bring about a yet
warmer passage between him and his friend. I was not sorry, however;
for this time the subject was one that interested me strongly. He had
referred, the evening before, to some dangerous adventures Harry and
he had had among the mountains of Mantaw County, which they crossed,
going from Eden to Cyclops. I now asked him for the details. He turned
to me at once, and entered upon the story with great spirit. I am
familiar with the region in which the scene was laid, but, listening
to him, it took a new aspect. I believe those hills will always be
higher for me henceforth,--the glens deeper and darker; I shall hear
new voices in the rush of the torrents and the roar of the pines.
Harry listened admiringly too, until the Doctor, brought by the course
of his narrative to the services of a certain slave-guide, named
Jonas, took a jocular tone, seemingly as much amused by the black
man's acuteness and presence of mind as he might have been by the
tricks of an accomplished dog.

"A capital fellow!" interposed Harry, with emphasis.

"He showed himself intelligent and faithful, certainly. I sent his
master a good account of him. He did his duty by us." This in the
Doctor's mildest tone.

The answer was in Harry's firmest:--"His duty as a man. It was real,
hearty kindness that he showed us. We owe him a great deal. I am not
sure that we did not owe him our lives that dark night. I regard him
as a friend."

"Your other friends are flattered.--It is curious how these
negrophiles betray themselves";--the Doctor had turned to me;--"they
show that they think of the blacks just as we do, by their admiration
when they meet one who shows signs of intelligence and good feeling."
Ho looked at Harry, but in vain. "Here Harry, now, has been falling
into transports all along the road." Harry kept his eyes on the table,
but the Doctor was not to be balked. "Confess now, confess you have
been surprised--and a good deal more surprised than I was--to find
common sense and humanity in black men!"

"No, not in black men. I have been surprised to find not only talent
and judgment, but dignity and magnanimity, in _slaves_."

"You must find the system not altogether a bad one which has developed
such specimens of the human being,--out of such material, above all."

"You must admit that the race is a strong and a high one which has not
been utterly debased by such a system,--if it is to be called a
system. I only wish our own race"----

"Showed an equal power of resistance?"

"That was what I was going to say."

"You might have said it. Yes,--the whites are the real sufferers."

"I stopped because I remembered instances of men who have resisted
nobly."

"I am glad you can do justice to them. I thought you did not believe
in humane slaveholders."

"I was not thinking of them."

"Ah! to be sure not! My friend Harvey, who entertained us so
hospitably, is a bad man, I suppose?"

"A mistaken man."

"That is to be proved; he is trying to work out a difficult problem."

"He is attempting an impossible compromise."

"Compromise! Word of fear to the true New-Englander! Compromise? He is
trying to reconcile his own comfort with that of his laborers, I
suppose you mean."

"He is trying to reconcile injustice with humanity."

"See the stern old Puritan vein! I doubt whether his ancestor, the
model of Massachusetts governors, ever carried a stiffer upper lip."
And the Doctor surveyed Harry with a look from which he could not
exclude a certain softening of affectionate admiration. "And he, a
living exemplification of the persistence of race, is a stickler for
the equality of all mankind! It is hard for one of that strict line to
bend his views to circumstances," the Doctor went on, in a more
indulgent tone. "Harry, my boy, you are in a new latitude. You must
accept another standard. You cannot try things here by the weights and
measures of the Puritans of the North. But who are your examples of
resistance, though?"

"The Puritans of the South. The men here who have but one
standard,--that of right. The men here who are true to the principle
which our country represents, and by which it is to live."

"What principle?"

"That the laws of man must be founded on the law of God."

"You mean, to be explicit, such men as Judge Henley of Virginia, Dr.
Kirwin of South Carolina, and, above all, Shaler of this State?"

"Yes."

"Who, instead of living with the people among whom their lot had been
cast, and protecting and improving them, scattered them to the four
winds of heaven, and all for the comfort of their own sickly
consciences!"

"Charles Shaler does not look like a man of a sickly conscience."

The Doctor could not forbear smiling at the image Harry brought before
him. He was beginning to answer, but stopped short and turned to me
with a look of apology.

"The subject is ill-chosen," he said; "I do not know how we came upon
it; though, indeed, we are always coming upon it. We have sworn a
truce a dozen times, but the war breaks out again when we are least
expecting it."

"The subject cannot be more interesting to you than it is to me," I
answered.

"But your interest in it may be of a different sort from ours."

"It is quite as impartial. I am not a slaveholder."

"Is it possible?"

The Doctor's voice betrayed that there was pleasure in his surprise,
but, except in this involuntary way, he did not express it. He went on
in his former tone.

"Well, that is more than Harry here can say. Since he has been in your
State, he has become master, by right of purchase, of a human soul."

I looked at Harry.

"Yes," he said, gravely, "I have made myself my brother's keeper."

"And very literally of a soul," the Doctor continued. "The body was
merely thrown in as an inconsiderable part of the bargain. We were on
the road from Omocqua to Tenpinville, where we meant to dine. Harry
was a little ahead. I was walking slowly, looking along the side of
the road for what I might find, when I heard, in front of us and
coming towards us, a tramping and a shuffling and a clanking that I
knew well enough for the sound of a slave-coffle on the move. I did
not lift my head; I am not curious of such sights. But presently I
heard Harry calling, and in an imperative tone that he has sometimes,
though, perhaps, you would not think it. I looked up, upon that, and
saw him supporting in his arms a miserable stripling, who was falling,
fainting, out of the coffle. Harry was hailing the slave-trader, who
brought up the rear of the train on horseback. I foresaw vexation, and
made haste. The cavalier got there first, though. By the time I came
up, he had dismounted, and Harry and he were in treaty, or at least in
debate. It was a picture! The poor wretch they were parleying over was
lying with his wasted, lead-colored face on Harry's shoulder, but was
still held by the leg to his next man, who was scowling at him as if
he thought the boy had fainted only to make the shackles bite sharper
into the sore flesh of his comrade. Harry held his prize in a way
which showed he did not mean to part with it. 'Name your price! Name
your own price!' were the first words I heard. It seemed the
slave-dealer was making difficulties. I thought he would jump at the
chance of getting rid of what was only a burden, and plainly could
never be anything else to anybody; but no; he said he could not sell
the boy, and seemed to mean it. Harry is too much used to having his
own way to give it up very easily, but I don't know whether he
would have got it this time, if I had not interfered with my
remonstrances:--

"'What are you going to do with him? Where are you going to take him?
Who's to be his nurse on the road?'

"I meant to bring Harry to his senses. I only brought the slave-dealer
to his.

"'Do you belong in this State?' asked he, growing reasonable as he saw
a reasonable man to deal with.

"'No; in Massachusetts.'

"'Do you mean to take him off there?'

"'Yes!' cried Harry, without giving me a chance to answer.

"'How soon?'

"'In a few weeks.'

"'And what will you do with him in the mean while?'

"Harry seemed now to remember that I was a party concerned. He turned
to me with a deprecating and inquiring look, but I was not prepared to
make any suggestion.

"'If you care enough about having the boy to pay part of his price in
trouble,' says the dealer, 'perhaps we may manage it. I bought him
with conditions. If I sell him to you, I make them over to you, too.
If you'll engage to take him as far as Omocqua to-day, and never bring
him, or let him be brought, within twenty miles of Tenpinville in any
direction, you shall have him for fifty dollars; that will give me
back what he's cost me. I don't want to make anything on him. I only
took him to oblige.'

"I knew by experience that there was no use in opposing Harry in
anything he had made up his mind about. I looked grim, but said
nothing. So the bargain was struck; the money was paid; the boy
unfettered. The slave-dealer moved on with his drove, leaving us his
parting words of encouragement,--

"'If he lives, he'll be worth something to you.'

"And there we were in the middle of the road, with a dying boy on our
hands.

"'_If he lives!_' Harry's look answered,--'He will live!'

"For my own part, I hoped it very little, and was not sure that I
ought to hope it at all.

"It was my turn to fume now; for Harry, as soon as he had carried his
point, was as calm as a clock. He had everything planned out. I was to
go back to Quickster and hire some sort of wagon to take our patient
to Omocqua, where Harry had promised to have him before night. I had
permission to stay at Quickster, if I chose, until he came back,--or
to go on to Tenpinville, or even to Harvey's, without him. But I had
heard, since I left Omocqua, of a remarkable cave, not five miles from
there, which had some points of interest for me. I had had half a mind
to propose to Harry to go back and see it before we met with this
adventure. So, as I must humor him at any rate, I thought it as well
to do it with a good grace. I walked off to Quickster, got my wagon,
drove back, and found our godsend asleep, with Harry watching by him
like a miser over his treasure. We lifted him into the wagon without
waking him,--he was no great weight,--and got him safe to the hotel we
had left in the morning.

"Harry, when he was making his purchase, had his wits sufficiently
about him to require the means of proving his title in case of
question. The dealer promised to set all right at Omocqua. I had
doubts whether we should meet him again; but Harry had none, and was
right. The man arrived the next morning with his convoy, found us out,
and gave Harry a regular bill of sale. Being now twenty miles from
Tenpinville, he was somewhat more communicative than he had been in
the morning. It appeared the sick boy was a great musical genius. He
could sing anything he had ever heard, and many things that never had
been heard before he sang them. He played upon the piano without any
instruction except what he had got by listening under the windows.
Indeed, he could make any instrument that was put into his hands,
after a little feeling about, do whatever he wanted of it. But he had
accidentally received a blow on the chest that had spoiled his voice,
and had so injured his health besides, that his master, a
tender-hearted man, couldn't bear to see him about. The family,
tender-hearted too, couldn't bear to see him sold. So the master, to
spare pain all round, decided that the boy should disappear silently,
and that it should be understood in the house and neighborhood that he
had been enticed away by an amateur from the North, who hoped to cure
him and make a fortune out of his talent.

"'How came the master's sensibility to take such a different turn from
that of the rest of the family?' I asked,--and drew out that the boy,
being a genius, had some of the ways of one, and was at times
excessively provoking. He had silent fits, when he would sit dreaming,
moving his lips, but making no sound. There was no use in trying to
rouse him. You might have shaken him to pieces without his soul's
giving the least sign of being in his body. Not only this, but,
sometimes, when he did sing, he wouldn't sing well, though perhaps it
was just when he was most wanted. There were people he never would
sing before, if he could help it; and when he was obliged to, he did
himself no credit. Some of his caprices of this kind were
insupportable. His master was only too indulgent; but one day, it
seems, the provocation was too much for him. In a moment of anger, he
flung the unlucky boy down the door-steps, or over a bank, or out of
the open window, I forget which. Either the push on the chest or the
shock of the fall did a harm that was not meant. The master was a good
man, and was so accounted. He reproached himself, whenever he saw the
ailing boy, and felt as if others reproached him. Better out of sight
and out of mind.

"So Harry became the owner, or, as he says, the keeper, of a fragment
of humanity distinguished from the mass by the name of Orphy: Orphy
for Orpheus, I suppose; though Harry is modest for him, and calls him
Orfano. He has splendid visions for his protégé, nevertheless. He sees
in him the very type and representative of the African. I shouldn't
wonder if he were looking forward to the rehabilitation of the race
through him. He is to be a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Bach, or, perhaps,
something beyond either. The world is to listen and be converted."

"I wish you could have brought him here," I said.

"Your house is within the twenty miles, and so is Harvey's, or we
should have taken him on there with us. But he is well off where he
is. Harry, by the aid of our innkeeper,--a Northern man, by the
way,--installed him in a comfortable home at Omocqua. We are to take
him up there on our return. We expect to be there again on the
eighteenth of next month."

"So soon?" I exclaimed; for, with the Doctor's words the pang of
parting fell on me prematurely.

"We mean to stay with you, if you want us so long, until the fifth. We
have a few excursions to make yet; but we shall guide ourselves so as
to reach Omocqua at the appointed time."

"Meet us there," cried Harry. "Meet us there in fifteen days from the
time we leave you. Let us keep the nineteenth of April there
together."

My mother, who had not hitherto taken any part in the conversation,
spoke now to express her warm approbation of the plan. This was all
that was wanting. The project was ratified. My happiness was freed
again from the alloy of insecurity which had begun to mingle with it.

The Doctor divined my feeling, and smiling pleasantly,--"Our
leave-taking will not be so hard; it will be _au revoir_, not
_adieu_."

Harry was the first to leave the breakfast-table. He had made
acquaintance with Karl and Fritz that morning, and had promised to
help them on a drag they were getting up for hauling brush. He was to
join us again in two hours, and we were to have a walk to Ludlow's
Woods.

"He has been to the post-office this morning!" cried the Doctor, as
soon as Harry was out of hearing. It was evident that my mother's
unacceptable suggestion still rested on his mind. "He has been to the
post-office: that was it! You remember he asked you last night how far
to the nearest one? The first thing he does, when he arrives in a
place, is to inquire about the means of forwarding letters."

"How he must be missed in his home!" my mother said.

"Ah, indeed! He is an only son. But, contrary to the custom of only
sons, he thinks as much of his home as his home does of him. He has
not failed to write a single day of the thirty-five we have been
travelling together. His letters cannot have been received regularly
of late; but that is no fault of ours."

"His parents must be very anxious, when he is so far from them," said
my mother.

"He knows how to take care of himself,--and of me too," the Doctor
added, laughing. "I thought that on this journey I was to have charge
of him, but it turned out quite the other way. He assumed the business
department from the first. I acquiesced, thinking he would learn
something, but expecting to be obliged to come to his aid from time to
time. I think it wrong for a man to submit to imposition. I never do.
But Harry, open-hearted and lavish,--I thought anybody could take him
in. I did not find that anybody wanted to."

"I can understand," said my mother, "that, with his trusting
disposition and his force of character together, he should always find
people do what he expects of them."

"You are right,--you are quite right."--The Doctor seldom contradicted
my mother, and very considerately when he did.--"It is not your
generous men that tempt others to overreach, but your uncertain ones.
It seems he carries about with him something of the nature of a
divining-rod, that makes men's hearts reveal what of gold they have in
them. I have known a churlish-looking fellow, who has come to his door
on purpose to warn us thirsty wayfarers off from it, soften when his
eye met Harry's, urge us in as if he were afraid of losing us, do his
best for us, and then try to refuse our money when we went away. Well,
if son of mine could bring but one talent into the world with him, let
it be that for being loved; it is worth all others put together."

"How many does it not include?" asked my mother.

"Truly, there is perhaps more justice in the world than appears on the
outside."

I found this the place to put in a little apology for Tabitha, who had
persisted in treating Harry with marked distinction, although I had
tried to remind her of the elder guest's claims to precedence by
redoubling my attentions to him.

"Oh, I'm used to it, I'm used to it," cried the Doctor, cutting short
my apologies very good-humoredly. "Wherever we go, people treat him as
if he had done them some great service, or was going to do them one.
But I find my account in his good reception. I reap the practical
advantages. And then I am something of a fool about Harry myself; so I
can hardly blame the rest of the world. Think of his drawing me into
complicity in that affair of the negro Orpheus! I made a pretence to
myself that I wanted to see a foolish cave at Egerton, just to excuse
my weakness in humoring his whims; but, in truth, by the time we were
well on the road to Omocqua, I was feeling as if the welfare of the
world depended on our getting that poor wretch safely housed there.
Well, we shall see what will come of it! I remember, when Harry was a
little boy, saying to him once, after seeing him bestow a great deal
of labor in accomplishing a work not very important in older eyes,
'Well, Harry, now what have you done, after all?' 'I have done what I
meant to do,' said the child. I am so used now to seeing Harry do what
he means to do, that even in this case I can't help looking for some
result,--though, probably, it will be one not so important in my view
as in his, nor worth all that may be spent in arriving at it. I want
to see him once fairly engaged in some steady career to which he will
give himself heart and soul, as he does give himself to what he
undertakes; then he'll have no time nor thought for these little
extravagances."

"Does Harry intend to take a profession?"

"The law, I hope. He will study it in any case. This makes part of a
plan he formed for himself years ago. He considers the study of law as
a branch of the study of history, and a necessary preparation for the
writing of history,--his dream at present. But when he once takes hold
of the law, I hope he will stick to it."

"Harry has very little the look of a student."

"Yet he has already learned

      "'To scorn delights and live laborious days.'

"But he has measure in everything,--and it is something to say of a
boy of his ardent temper. He observes the balance between physical and
mental exercise. He follows the counsel Languet gave to Sir Philip
Sidney,--to 'take care of his health, and not be like one who, on a
long journey, attends to himself, but not to the horse that is to
carry him.'"

"Do his parents wish him to follow the law?" my mother asked.

"They wish whatever he does. It seems they hold their boy something
sacred, and do not dare to interfere with him. But I wish it. The law
is the threshold of public life. I want to see him in his place."

The Doctor sat smiling to himself for a little while, nodded his head
once or twice, and then, fixing his clear, cool blue eyes on my face,
said, in an emphatic voice,--"That boy will make his mark. Depend upon
it, he will make his mark in one way or another!" A shadow fell over
the eyes; the voice was lowered:--"I have only one fear for him. It is
that he may throw himself away on some fanaticism."

"How long have you known Harry Dudley?" I asked, when the pause had
lasted so long that I thought the Doctor would not begin again without
being prompted.

"All his life. Our families are connected;--not so nearly by blood;
but they have run down side by side for four or five generations. His
father and I pass for cousins. We were in college together. He was my
Senior, but I was more with him than with any of my own classmates
until he was graduated. He married very soon after, and then his house
was like a brother's to me. I went abroad after I left college, and
was gone three years. When I came back, we took things up just where
we left them. Dudley went to Europe himself afterwards with his
family, but I was backwards and forwards, so that I have never lost
sight of them. I have nobody nearer to me."

"I was surprised to learn, from what you said last evening, that
Harry had passed a good deal of time in Europe."

The Doctor turned upon me briskly. Perhaps my tone may have implied
that I was sorry to learn it.

"He has lost nothing by that. He has lost nothing by it, but that
fixed stamp of place and time that most men wear. Though I don't know
whether he would have had it at any rate: he was always himself. You
have seen some shallow fellow who has been spoiled for living at home
by a few years of sauntering and lounging about Europe. But rely on
it, he who comes back a coxcomb went out one. Never fear! Harry is as
good an American as if he had not been away,--and better. Living
abroad, he has had the simplicity to study the history of his own
country as carefully as if it had been a foreign one, not aware that
it is with us no necessary part of a polite education. As for its
institutions, he has an enthusiasm for them that I could almost envy
him while it lasts, though I know he has got to be cured of it."

"How long was he abroad?"

"More than seven years."

"Was he with his parents all the time?"

"They were near him. His home was always within reach. But he was for
several years at a large school in Paris, and again at one in
Germany. At sixteen he had done with school and took his education
into his own hands. He lived at home, but his parents did not meddle
with him, except to aid him to carry out his plans. It was a course
that would not answer with every young man, perhaps; but I don't know
that any other would have done with him. He is one to cut out his own
path. He chose not only his own studies, but, to a great extent, his
own acquaintances; took journeys when he pleased and as he pleased.
Wherever he was, with whomever, he always held his own walk straight
and firm. You would not think that boy had seen so much of the world?"

"I could have thought he had been carefully guarded from it, and
shielded almost from the very knowledge of wrong."

"He has never been kept out of danger of any kind; but it seems there
was none anywhere for him. He is now, as you say, just as much a
simple, innocent boy as if he were nothing more."

"His wings are grown, and shed off evil as the birds' do rain."

The Doctor started as this voice came from behind his chair. Tabitha,
who had disappeared as soon as her attendance on the table was no
longer needed, had reëntered unobserved, and stood, her basket of
vegetables poised on her head, absorbed in our conversation, until she
forgot herself into joining in it.



                                              SUNDAY, April 7, 1844.


The storm which has been gathering since Friday evening came on last
night. This morning the rain pelts heavily against the windows. This
is not the Easter-Sunday I was looking forward to when I urged Harry
Dudley to stay for it. He would have been glad to stay, I know; but he
did not think it right to ask Dr. Borrow to change his plans again,
and merely for a matter of pleasure. When I addressed the Doctor
himself on the subject, he showed me a paper on which he had planned
out occupation for every day and almost for every hour of the two
weeks that were to pass before our meeting at Omocqua. I had not the
courage to remonstrate.

I am afraid we shall have none of the neighbors here to-day. But the
table is set out with all the prettiest things the house affords,
ready for the collation which is to follow the morning reading. This
is a munificence we allow ourselves at Christmas and Easter. We keep
ceremoniously and heartily the chief holy days, the religious and the
national. In your large cities, where sources of emotion and
instruction are open on every hand, where the actual day is so full
and so animated that it is conscious of wanting nothing outside of
itself, it is not strange, perhaps, that men should become careless of
these commemorations or yield them only a formal regard. Our life must
widen and enrich itself, by stretching its sympathies and claims far
beyond its material limits. We cannot forego our part in the sorrows
and joys of universal humanity.

It was a pleasure to me to find that Harry, who has lived so long in
countries where the public observance of the Christian festivals is
too marked to allow even the indifferent to overlook them, remembers
them from affection as well as by habit. When I came into the parlor,
early last Sunday morning, I saw by the branches over the windows that
he had not forgotten it was Palm-Sunday. He was sitting on the
doorstep trimming some long sprays of a beautiful vine, which he had
brought from the thicket. As soon as I appeared, he called on me to
help him twine them round the engraving of the Transfiguration. You
did right to tell me to bring that engraving down-stairs. It hangs
between the windows. I have made a simple frame for it, which answers
very well; but next winter I am going to carve out quite an elaborate
one, after an Italian pattern which Harry has sketched for me. If I
could think that you would ever see it!

Harry and I had a walk before breakfast,--the first of the early
morning walks that were afterwards our rule. He is not a great
talker. The sweet modesty of his nature retains its sway even in the
most familiar moments. He is earnest; sometimes impassioned; but never
voluble, never excited, never diffuse. What he has to say is generally
put in the form of simple and concise statement or suggestion; but he
gives, and perhaps for that very reason, a great deal to be thought
and felt in an hour.

The bouquet that Harry brought in that morning was of green of
different shades, only in the centre there were a few delicate
wood-flowers.

"Has Dr. Borrow seen these?" my mother asked, looking at them with
pleasure.

"No," the Doctor answered for himself, laying down on the window-seat
beside him the microscope with which he had been engaged. "No," he
said, with a good-humored smile; "but I know Harry's choice in
flowers. He begins to have a nice tact as to what's what, when it is a
question of helping me; but, for himself, he still likes flowers for
their looks, or sometimes, I think, for their names. His favorites are
the May-flower and the Forget-me-not. They represent for him the New
World and the Old,--that of hope, and that of memory. But he is a
friend of all wild-flowers, especially of spring wild-flowers,--and
more especially of those of New England. He loves the blood-root,
though he ought not, for it is a dissembler; it wears outwardly the
garb of peace and innocence, but, out of sight, wraps itself in the
red robes of tyranny and war."

"No," Harry answered; "red is the color of tyrants only because they
have usurped that with the rest. Red, in the old tradition, is
symbolic of Divine Love, the source of righteous power. White is the
symbol of Divine Wisdom, and is that of peace, because where this
wisdom is there must be harmony."

This talk of New-England wild-flowers, the mention of names once so
familiar, was very pleasant to me. I must have the blood-root, if it
will grow here. I could never see it again without seeing in it a
great deal more than itself. For me, the pure white of the flower will
symbolize the wisdom of God, always manifest; the red of the root, His
love, sometimes latent, yet still there.

The Doctor, having made his protest, put the microscope into its case,
and came to my mother's table to examine. When he spied the little
flowers nestled in the green, he exclaimed,--

"Where did you find these, Harry? You must have gone far for them."

"No; I found them where the old forest used to be, among the stumps."

"Waiting for a new generation of protectors to grow up about them,"
said the Doctor, looking at them kindly; "this generous climate
leaves nothing long despoiled. If Nature is let alone, she will soon
have a forest there again. But, Harry, you must take me to that spot.
We'll see what else there is to find."

"Are these flowers scarce?" Harry asked.

"They are getting to be."

"I should have shown them to you, but they are so pretty I thought
they must be common."

"Well, to do you justice, you don't often make a mistake now.--When we
first set out," continued the Doctor, turning to me, "he was always
asking me to see this beautiful flower or that superb tree; but now he
never calls my attention to anything that is not worth looking at."

"I called you to see one superb tree that you found worth looking at,"
said Harry,--"Brompton's oak at Omocqua. Colvil, when you see that
tree!"

Love of trees is one of the things that Harry and I are alike in.

"Yes, that is one of the finest specimens of the live-oak I have met
with," affirmed the Doctor.

"We will hold our meeting under it on the nineteenth," said Harry.
"Colvil, come on the afternoon of the eighteenth. Be there before
sunset."

"Harry will bespeak fine weather," said the Doctor.

"You know how Omocqua stands?" asked Harry. "It is in a plain, but a
high plain."

"I have heard that it is a beautiful place."

"It is beautiful from a distance," said the Doctor; "and when you are
in it, the distant views are beautiful. The hotel we were at,--the
Jefferson Hotel, Harry?"

"The Jackson, I believe, Doctor."

"No, the Jefferson," decided the Doctor, after a moment's thought. "We
heard the two hotels discussed at Cyclops, and decided for the
oldest."

"They are opposite each other on Union Square," said Harry, waiving
the question.

"The hotel we were at," the Doctor began again, "is on the northern
side of the town. From the field behind it, where Harry's tree stands,
the prospect is certainly very grand. Hills, mountains, to the north
and east,--and west, a fine free country, intersected by a river, and
happily varied with low, round, wooded hills, and soft meadows, and
cultivated fields. Harry drew me there almost against my will, but it
needed no force to keep me there. I had my flowers to see to. Harry
brought out my press and my portfolios, and established me in a shed
that runs out from the barn, at right angles with it, fronting west.
He found a bench there that served me for a table, and brought me a
wooden block for a seat. So there I could sit and work,--my plants
and papers sheltered from the wind,--and look up at the view when I
chose. Harry is right. Meet us there on the afternoon of the
eighteenth. I wish it as much as he does; and the sunset will be worth
seeing, if there is one."

"Come on the eighteenth," said Harry,--"and if you arrive before us,
wait for us under that tree; if after, and you do not find me at the
door, look for me there. You go through the house by the main entry,
across the court, through the great barn; the field is in front of
you, and the tree."

"Or, if you like better," said the Doctor, "you can enter by a gate on
a side-street, from which a wagon-road leads straight to my work-shed.
The street runs west of the hotel. In any case, don't fail us on the
nineteenth. We'll hold your celebration under your tree, Harry,--that
is, if Colvil agrees to it."

There was no doubt about that.

After breakfast, I went up into the study to prepare for the morning's
reading. I had intended to choose a sermon suited to Palm-Sunday; but
I happened to take down first a volume of South, and, opening on the
text, "I have called you friends," could not lay it down again. What
lesson fitter to read on that beautiful day, and in that dear company,
than this, which aids us to comprehend the inexhaustible resources of
the Divine Affection,--its forbearance, its constancy, its eager
forgiveness, beforehand even with our prayer for it,--by drawing for
us the portrait of a true, manly friendship?

I have never been able to accept the doctrine that the Great Source of
Love is jealous of His own bounty, and reproaches us for bestowing
again what He has freely bestowed. Yet, though unassenting, I feel
pain when I read in the works of pious men that a devoted regard
yielded to a mortal is an infringement of the Highest Right, and I am
grateful to the teachers who permit us to learn to love the Father
whom we have not seen by loving the brother whom we have seen. In
those seasons which happen to us all, when a shadow seems to pass
between the spirit and its sun, I have brought myself back to a full
and delighted sense of the Supreme Benignity by supposing the
generosity and tenderness of a noble human heart infinitely augmented;
and I have invigorated my trust in the promises of God, the spoken and
the implied, by calling to mind what I have known of the loyalty of
man.

Human ties wind themselves very quickly and very closely round my
heart. I cannot be brought even casually into contact with others so
nearly that I am made aware of their interests and aims, without in
some sort receiving their lives into my own,--sharing, perhaps, in
disappointments, that, in my own person, I should not have
encountered, and rejoicing in successes which would have been none to
me. But friendship is still something very different from
this,--different even from a kind and pleasant intimacy. Nor can we
create it at will. I feel deeply the truth of South's assurance, that
"it is not a human production." "A friend," he says, "is the gift of
God: He only who made hearts can unite them. For it is He who creates
those sympathies and suitablenesses of nature that are the foundation
of all true friendship, and then by His providence brings persons so
affected together."

Last Sunday was one of those days that are remembered for their own
perfection, apart from the associations that may have gathered about
them; and it seems to be one of the properties of these transcendent
seasons to come attended by all harmonious circumstances. Nothing was
wanting to last Sunday. It stands cloudless and faultless in my
memory.

Harry proposed that we should hold our services in the open air. My
mother approved. We took up her couch and carried it out to your
favorite dreaming-ground, setting it down near the old tree that goes,
for your sake, by the name of Keith's Pine. The place is not rough as
when you were here. I have had the stumps cleared away, and your pine
no longer looks so lonely, now that it seems to have been always
alone.

We brought out a bench and all the chairs in the house. We placed the
bench opposite my mother's couch, about thirty feet off. We set the
great arm-chair for the Doctor, near the head of the couch, which we
considered the place of honor. My straight-backed oak chair was put
near the foot, with my mother's little table before it for the books.
The other chairs were arranged in a semicircle on each side, with
liberal spaces. Tabitha assisted at these dispositions, and chose a
place for her own favorite willow chair close to the trunk of the
pine-tree, between it and the couch, where, as she said, she had a
full view of the congregation. I understood very well that the poor
soul had another motive, and was guarding her dignity by selecting a
distinguished and at the same time a secluded station. When she saw
that all was in order, she went back to the house to stay until the
last moment, in order to direct late comers.

Harry, at first, sat down on the grass near me; but when Karl and
Fritz came, they looked toward him, evidently divided between their
desire to be near him and their fear of presuming. Discretion
prevailed, and they took their seats on the ground at a little
distance from the bench. Harry perceived their hesitation, and saw
Hans consulting me with his eyes. He was up in a moment, brought a
chair and put it beside mine for the old man, who is getting a little
deaf, and then exchanging a smiling recognition with the boys, took
his own place near them.

Barton, the landlord of the Rapid Run, at Quickster, came that
morning. You cannot have forgotten Quickster, the pretty village with
a water-fall, which charmed you so much,--about five miles from
Tenpinville, to the north. And I hope you remember Barton, the
landlord of the inn that takes its name and its sign from the swift
little river that courses by his door. He never sees me without
inquiring after you. He shows the delights of his neighborhood always
with the same zeal. He guided the Doctor and Harry about it for an
hour or two the day they passed through Quickster, coming from
Omocqua. It was to him the Doctor had recourse, when he went back to
hire a wagon for poor Orphy. I thought at first that Barton had
forgotten the custom of our Sunday morning, and had only meant to pay
me a visit. But it was not so. He had his son with him,--Isaac Davis
Barton,--who is now ten years old, and in whom, he says, he wants to
keep a little of the New-Englander, if he can, and so shall bring him
over to our reading every fair Sunday. I did not know whether I ought
to feel pleased or not. There is no church at Quickster yet; but
there is one at Tenpinville,--two, I think. I have no doubt at all
that I have done well to invite our few neighbors, who have no chance
of hearing a good word in any other way, to listen to a chapter in the
Bible and a sermon here on Sunday. I have had evidence that some of
them have been made happier, and I almost dare to think better, by
coming. But it is another thing when there is an opportunity of
attending regular religious services. I did not think it well to
discourage Barton by telling him my scruples on this first occasion.
It would have been rather ungracious after his ten miles' ride. I like
the little boy very much, and hope we shall be good friends. I shall
feel a better right to advise by and by. Barton had a chair near Dr.
Borrow's; his son sat in front of him on the grass.

Next to Barton came an old man and his wife, who have
established themselves in one of the empty houses on the Shaler
plantation,--whether by permission or as squatters I do not know, and
nobody about here does. But as the man has a smattering of two or
three trades through which he makes himself acceptable, and the woman
some secrets in cookery and other household arts which she imparts
very readily, no umbrage is taken at them. Their name is Franket. They
have simple, honest faces, and bring nothing discordant with them.

The next place in this semicircle was filled by a man who has not a
very good name in the neighborhood. Meeting him one day, I asked him
to join us on Sundays, only because I ask all who live near enough to
come easily. I did it with a little trouble, expecting to see a sneer
on his face; but he thanked me quite civilly, and, though several
weeks passed without his taking any further notice of my invitation,
it seems he had not forgotten it. He is not an ill-looking man, when
you see him fairly. His expression is melancholy rather than morose,
as I used to think it. After this, I shall never take refusal for
granted, when I have anything to offer which I believe worth
accepting. This man's name is Winford. I assigned to him, as a
stranger, one of two remaining chairs; but he declined it, taking his
seat on the ground. The chairs were immediately after occupied by the
wife and daughter of Rufe Hantham, a man tolerated for abilities
convenient rather than useful. He is one of the class of parasites
that spring up about every large plantation. He is a hanger-on of the
Westlake estate, which lies just beyond Shaler's, between that and
Tenpinville. The wife is a poor little woman, whose face wears an
habitual expression of entreaty. It is the daughter who brings her, I
think. This young girl, of fifteen or less, has a look of thought and
determination, as if she held in her mind some clearly formed plan
which she will carry out to the end, towards which her coming here is
possibly one of the first steps. She keeps her eyes fixed on the
ground, but evidently is listening intently,--committing, as it seems,
everything she hears to a memory that never lets go what it has once
taken hold of. They have been twice before. When the reading is over,
the mother looks as if she would like to have a little chat with
somebody; but the daughter holds her in check with hand and eye,--not
unkindly, but effectually. They wait until some one sets the example
of going, and then follow quickly and silently. We have made no
attempt to invade a reserve which seems deliberate.

Harvey's plantation is on the other side of Tenpinville, more than
eighteen miles from us; but it had a representative here, in young
Lenox, one of the sons of the overseer. He came for the first time. He
sat in the opposite semicircle, next to Harry, with whom he was
already acquainted. The chairs on that side were occupied by the
Segrufs and Blantys, respectable neighbors, whom you may remember.

Another new-comer was a little boy whom we met in our morning walk,
and who joined himself to us at once with a confidence which was very
pleasant. Harry took a great fancy to him. I asked him to come to us
at ten, hardly hoping he would accept; but he did, eagerly. He does
not belong to our part of the world. He is the son of a carpenter who
has work here for a few months. I was glad to see him come in, and
another little fellow whose father has brought him once or twice, but
who has not been alone before. The father is not often well enough to
come.

There are one or two persons whom I am always glad _not_ to see; and
that morning my wishes were answered in those who came and in those
who stayed away. Of these last is Phil Phinn, who thinks to make up
for the time of mine he uses in the adjustment of his neighborly
differences by devoting an hour of his own, once in two or three
weeks, to the penance of listening to me. I could well spare his
vacant solemnity that day. His absence was of good augury, too, for he
is strict in attendance when an occasion for mediation is imminent.

At ten o'clock precisely we heard the great bell rung by Tabitha, who
until then kept watch at the house. While it was ringing, a family
came in of which I must speak more particularly, because I feel
already that I shall speak of it often. This family has only recently
arrived in the neighborhood. The father, I think, is Southern born;
the mother must be from the North. They brought all their children,
down to the baby, three years old, that listened with all its eyes, as
the rest with all their hearts. They had been here only twice before;
but the perfect unity of this little family, which seemed always
influenced by one feeling, moved by one will, the anxious watchfulness
of the parents, the close dependence of the children, had already
greatly interested me. This man and woman have certainly known more
prosperous, if not better days. The lines of their faces, their whole
bearing, tell of successive reverses, worthily, though not resolutely
borne,--of a down-hill path long trodden by patient, but unresisting
feet. There are no signs of struggle against adverse fortune. But, in
such a struggle, how often do the charm and joy of life perish, torn
and trampled by their very rescuers! These people have maintained
their equanimity, if not their cheerfulness. They have no reproaches
for themselves or each other. The bench was for this family. The
father, the mother with the baby in her lap, the daughter, and the
second son filled it; the eldest sat at his mother's feet, and, when
he was particularly moved or pleased by anything that was read, looked
up to her to see if he was right. A great gravity held the whole
group,--deepest on the elder faces, and gradually shading off into
the undue tranquillity of the infantile look.

When Tabitha came, she brought the little white vase with Harry's
flowers, and put it on the table, where, indeed, it ought to have
been.

I seldom read the whole of a sermon. I like to keep more time for the
Bible. And then I omit those passages which I foresee might provoke
questions which I should not dare to assume the responsibility of
answering. I do not presume to take upon myself the office of
religious teacher. I only strive, in the absence of one, to keep alive
in myself and those near me a constant sense of God's presence and
care, and of the bond which, uniting us to Him, unites us to each
other. This I do by reading the words of those who have had this sense
most strongly and have expressed it most vividly.

Of the sermon I had chosen I read the first paragraph, and then,
turning over nine pages, began with the Privileges of Friendship. I do
not know whether this discourse of South's is to others what it is to
me. Perhaps there is something in it particularly adapted to my
needs,--or perhaps it is because it came to me first at a time when I
was very eager for the assurances it gives; but I never read it
without feeling a new inflow of peace and security. At least some of
those who heard it with me that day felt with me. Harry I was sure of
beforehand. When we broke up, and I went forward to speak to the
strangers on the bench, it seemed to me that their anxieties were
soothed by something softer than patience. An indefinable change had
passed over the whole family. They all seemed lightened of a part of
the habitual burden. I took them up to my mother. She asked them to be
sure and come on Easter Sunday; they accepted in earnest; but with
their poor little wagon and poor old mule they will hardly encounter
the rain and the mud to-day.

I was so intent on my letter, that I forgot the weather, until,
writing the word _rain_, I looked towards the window. It does not
rain, and has apparently held up for some time. And now I hear a
racket in the road, and a stumping, that can come only from the poor
little wagon and the poor old mule.


                                               AFTERNOON, 3 O'CLOCK.

It is raining again; but I think our friends had time to reach their
homes before it began. We have had a happy day, notwithstanding its
dull promise. I read an Easter sermon,--"_Because it was not possible
that he should be holden of it_." The text itself is more than a
thousand sermons.

       *       *       *       *       *

The name of the family that was arriving this morning when I left off
writing is Linton. They are from Western Virginia. They stayed with us
for an hour after the reading was over. Our interest in them is still
increased. Winford came again. I asked him to stay; he declined; but I
think he was pleased at being invited. The Hanthams came, mother and
daughter. They arrived at the last moment, and went at the closing of
the book. The corner in which the table stood was curtained off, so
that there was no visible sign of unusual hospitality; but they had
perhaps heard of the custom of the day. Mrs. Hantham would not have
been inexorable; but she was summoned away by a gesture a little too
imperative, perhaps, from a daughter to her mother. Davis Barton came
on horseback, without his father. I set him off again at one o'clock;
for the sky threatened, and his road home was a difficult one at best.

But let me go back to last Sunday. I was just at the breaking-up of
our little assembly by the pine.

The Lintons--they had no name then--were the first to go. The Hanthams
were the next. Then the others dropped off, one by one and two by two:
some taking leave as if they felt themselves guests; others
withdrawing silently, as considering themselves only part of a
congregation. Barton went round shaking hands with one and another. I
was surprised to see him show this attention to Winford. Barton likes
to be well with the world,--that is, with as much of it as he
respects; but he respects himself, and does not seek popularity at the
expense of sincerity. I am confirmed in my belief that there is good
in Winford.

When all the rest were gone, Barton came up to have a talk with the
Doctor, for whom he evidently has a great admiration. Harry remained
with Karl and Fritz, who were holding him in conversation, apparently
on some important matter,--old Hans, a critical listener, completing
the group.

Barton inquired after the success of the Doctor's late excursions, and
complimented him warmly on his powers of endurance, which seemed
almost miraculous in a city man. This Doctor Borrow freely admitted,
declaring that he had hardly ever undertaken an expedition with a
party of people which had not turned out a disappointment,--that he
seldom, indeed, found even a single companion who could walk with him,
or who could rough it as he could.

"You've got one now, though," said Barton.

"Oh, for that," the Doctor answered, laughing, "Harry is a degree
beyond me. I can bear as much as any man, but I know that I'm bearing,
and like to give myself credit for it. Harry never feels either heat
or cold or damp or dust. Nothing disagreeable is able to get at him.
There is no such thing as hard fare for him; and if he knows what
fatigue is, he has never confessed to it."

"And yet I suppose he's something of a scholar, too?" asked Barton;
and he looked thoughtfully down at his son, who always kept close to
him, and who had been drinking all this in eagerly.

As the Doctor hesitated to reply, Barton added,--"I asked him, that
day you were at Quickster, if he had read a book that I had seen a
good deal of talk about in the newspapers, and he said, No, that he
had hardly read anything yet."

"Of course, of course, at his age! Still, you need not precisely take
him at his own estimate. His modesty misleads, as much as some
people's conceit does the other way. He is not always up to the
fashion of the moment in literature; does not try to read everything
that is talked about; but he has read the best of the best."

"Is that the best way, do you think?" asked Barton, anxiously.

"What do you think yourself?" asked the Doctor.

"I should think it must be a good one."

"It depends altogether on what you want to have," said the Doctor,
following the track of Barton's thought, and fixing a searching look
on Davis, as if to ascertain what material was there. "The queen-bee
is fed on special and choice food from the first; if you want a
king-man, you must follow the same course."

"You've seen some fine countries abroad, Sir?" said Barton, presently.
"Any finer than ours?"

"Finer than yours? No. You've a fine country here, Mr. Barton, and a
fresh country: Nature stands on her own merits, as yet. No
'associations' here; no 'scenes of historical interest' for sightseers
to gape at and enthusiasts to dream over. You have your Indian mounds,
to be sure; but these are simple objects of curiosity, and don't exact
any tribute of feeling: you've no 'glorious traditions,' and I assure
you, it is reposing to be out of their reach."

"We've only what we bring with us," answered Barton, a little touched;
"we don't leave our country when we come here."

"Colvil looks now as if he had something in reserve. But I'm not
alarmed. If there had been anything about here that had a tinge of
poetry, I should have heard of it long ago from Harry. Most people
think this sort of folly is in good taste only in Europe. But Harry
brought it home with him in full force. Before he'd been on land a
week, he'd seen Concord and Lexington."

"Had he, though?" cried Barton. "I am an Acton boy, you know," he
added, in a subdued tone, a little abashed by his own vivacity.

"Upon my word, Dudley has waked up the old-fashioned patriot in you
already."--Harry had now come up, and made one of the Doctor's
listeners.--"I saw he was getting hold of you that morning at
Quickster, when you were talking up your State to us. You were
beginning to feel that you had something to do about it. It isn't the
country that belongs to her sons, according to him, but her sons that
belong to the country. Take care! give him time, and he'll make a
convert of you."

"I will give him time," answered Barton, laughing.

"Don't be too confident of yourself. I have to stand on my guard,
myself, sometimes. And don't be misled into supposing that his notions
are the fashion in the part of the world we come from, or in any other
civilized part of it. Harry, you were born some hundreds of years too
late or too early. Fervor in anything, but above all in public
service, is out of place in the world of our day.

      "'Love your country; wish it well;
        Not with too intense a care:
      Let it suffice, that, when it fell,
        Thou its ruin didst not share.'

"That's modern patriotism, the patriotism of Europe. Ours is of the
same strain, only modified by our circumstances. Our Mother-land is a
good housekeeper. She spreads a plentiful table, and her sons
appreciate it. She wants no sentimental affection, and receives none.
She is not obliged to ask for painful sacrifice; and lucky for her
that she is not!"

Harry's cheek flushed, and his eye kindled:--

"Let her only have need of them, and it will be seen whether her sons
love her!"

Davis Barton was in more danger of conversion than his father; his
eyes were fixed ardently on Harry; his face glowed in sympathy.

"The nearest thing we have to a place with 'associations,'" I began
quickly, preventing whatever sarcastic answer may have been ready on
the Doctor's lips, "is the Shaler plantation."

"Yes," said Barton, "the Colonel was an old Revolutioner."

"The father?" asked the Doctor.

"Yes."

"To be sure. The son's title is an inherited one, like my friend
Harvey's, who, now he is beginning to get a little gray, is 'the
Judge,' I find, with everybody."

"And he looks it very well," said Barton. "I don't know whether it
will go down farther."

"And the present Colonel is a _new_ Revolutioner, probably," said the
Doctor, inquiringly.

"I suppose some people might think he only followed after his father,"
Barton answered.

We were getting on delicate ground. Barton is no trimmer, but he is
landlord of the Rapid Run. He made a diversion by inquiring after
Orphy, and the Doctor gave him the account of their journey as he had
given it to me,--yet not forgetting that he had given it to me. The
same in substantial facts, his story was amplified and varied in
details and in ornament, so that I heard it with as much interest as
if it had been the first time.

"Is musical genius of the force of Orphy's common among the negroes of
your plantations?" The Doctor addressed this question to me.

"Not common, certainly,--nor yet entirely singular. Almost all our
large plantations have their minstrel, of greater or less talent. Your
friend, Mr. Frank Harvey, has a boy on his place, who, if not equal to
Orphy, has yet a remarkable gift. Did not Mr. Harvey speak to you of
him?"

"I dare say. He had several prodigies of different kinds to exhibit to
us. But we were there so short a time! He introduced us to a
blacksmith of genius; to a specimen of ugliness supposed to be the
most superior extant,--out of Guinea; and to a few other notabilities.
But we had hardly time to see even the place itself, which really
offers a great deal to admire. I could have given a few more days to
it, but I saw that Harry was in a hurry to be off."

"I am sorry you did not see that boy. He would have taken hold of your
imagination, I think, and certainly of Harry's. Airy has seen only the
sunny side of life. He has all the _espièglerie_ of the African
child."

"Orphy has not much of that," said the Doctor.

You ought to have seen little Airy, too, Keith. He was already famous
when you were here. He is rightly named; a very Ariel for grace and
sportiveness. With the African light-heartedness, he has also
something of African pathos. In his silent smile there is a delicate
sadness,--not the trace of any pain he has known, but like the
lingering of an inherited regret. His transitions are more rapid than
belong to our race: while you are still laughing at his drollery, you
see that he has suddenly passed far away from you; his soft, shadowy
eyes are looking out from under their drooping lashes into a land
where your sight cannot follow them.

"If you were to go there again, it would be worth while to ask for
him," I said to the Doctor. "Airy Harvey is one of the wonders of our
world."

"Airy Harvey!" cried the Doctor; "does Harvey allow his servants to
bear his name? Westlake strictly forbids the use of his to his people.
But then he supplies them with magnificent substitutes. He doesn't
think any name but his own too good for them."

"Does he forbid them to take it?" asked Barton. "I heard so, but
thought it was a joke. Why, there isn't a living thing on his place
but goes by his name, down to that handsome hound that follows him,
who's known everywhere about as Nero Westlake."

Barton seemed to enjoy Westlake's failure, and so, I am afraid, did
the Doctor. He laughed heartily.

"He's rather unlucky," he said, "considering it's almost the only
thing he is particular about."

"I don't believe Mr. Harvey could change the custom either, if he
wished," I said; "but I do not think he does wish it. A name is a
strong bond."

"That's true," said the Doctor. "Harvey's a wise man; it's a means of
government."

"If I had to live under one of them," said Barton, "Westlake's
haphazard fashions would suit me better than Harvey's regular system:
a life in which everything is known beforehand tells on the nerves.
But, strangely enough, Mr. Harvey never loses one of his people, and
Westlake's are always slipping off."

"If Harvey carried on his plantation himself, as Westlake does,"
replied the Doctor, "he would be adored where now he is only loved.
His rule would abound in that element of uncertainty whose charm you
appreciate so justly. But he is wisely content to reign and not to
govern."

"Mr. Harvey has a good overseer, I understand," said
Barton,--"supervisor, though, I believe it is."

"Lenox; yes. He is able, perfectly temperate, cool, inflexible, and
just."

"You have learned his character from Mr. Harvey?"

"And from what I have myself seen. The estate is really well
ordered,--all things considered; Harvey tells me it is rare that a
complaint is heard from his negroes."

"Lenox takes care of that," said Harry.

"And he ought. I walked round among the cabins with Harvey. Not a
creature but had his petition; not one but would have had his
grievance, if he had dared."

"Do you suppose they have no real grievances, then?"

"I suppose no such thing. I never saw the man yet--the grown
man--without one; and as I did not expect to meet with him here, I
didn't look for him. Harvey allows no unnecessary severity; his
plantation is governed by fixed laws, to which the overseer is
amenable as well as the slaves. Every deviation from them has to be
accounted for. He sees that his people have justice done them,--that
is to say, as far as justice ever is done on this earth. He has
wrought no miracles, and probably did not expect to work any. He has
run into no extravagances of benevolence; and I respect him for it all
the more that I know he is by nature an impetuous man. I cannot but
think our friend Shaler would have done better to follow his example
than to abandon his negroes as he has."

"He gave them something to begin their new life with," said Harry.

"So much thrown away. Just a sop to his conscience, like the rest; a
mode of excusing himself to himself for shifting off his own
responsibilities upon other people. Two thirds of his rabble are
paupers by this time."

Harry looked to me for the answer.

"They have been free four years. Two of them have fallen back on his
hands,--two out of one hundred and seventy-three. He has not abandoned
them. They still apply to him when they need advice or aid."

"I was not so much arguing about this particular case, which I don't
pretend to have much knowledge of, as reasoning upon general grounds.
I still think he would have done better to keep his slaves and try to
make something of them here."

"The law would not let him make men of them here," Harry answered.

"A great deal may be done, still keeping within the law," replied the
Doctor, "by a man more intent on doing good than on doing it precisely
in his own way."

"Even in what it allowed, the law did not protect him. Where injustice
is made law, law loses respect,--most of all with those who have
perverted it to their service. You know Mr. Westlake's maxim,--'Those
who make the laws can judge what they are made for.'"

"The power of opinion in what are called free countries," replied the
Doctor, "is indeed excessive. It has long been a question with me,
whether a single hand to hold the sceptre is not preferable to this
Briareus. But we have chosen. I am not disposed to deliver myself up,
bound hand and foot, to this fetich of public opinion. Still, a man
owes some respect to the feelings and principles of the community in
which he lives. I may think the best way of disposing of old houses is
to burn them down; but my neighbors will have something to say, and
justly."

Harry did not reply; nor did I at that time.

Tabitha appeared and bore off three chairs,--one on her head and one
in each hand. We understood the signal. Harry and I took up my
mother's couch; Barton and his son loaded themselves with two chairs
each; the Doctor lifted the arm-chair with both hands, and, holding
it out before him, led the way, somewhat impeded by his burden; and so
we moved in slow procession to the house.

In the afternoon, when Barton and his son were gone, the Doctor,
Harry, and I took a walk to the site of the old forest. We found a few
more flowers like those Harry had brought to my mother in the morning,
but nothing else that the Doctor cared for. On our way back, I told
him the story of Shaler's attempt and failure. I wonder I did not tell
it to you when you were here. But we had so much to ask and to say,
and the time was so short! I will tell it to you now.

Shaler did not wish to burn down the old house, nor even to pull it
down. He wished to renew and remodel it so slowly and so cautiously
that those who were in it should hardly be aware of change until they
learned it by increase of comfort. He was not a self-centred, but a
very public-spirited man. He had a great ambition for his State. He
wished it to be a model of prosperity, material and moral. He saw that
its natural advantages entitled it to take this position. The most
practical of reformers, he began with himself. He found fault with
nobody; he preached to nobody; he meant to let his plantation speak
for him. His plan was simply to substitute inducement for
coercion,--to give his men a healthy interest in their labor by
letting them share the profits,--in short, to bring them under the
ordinary motives to exertion. This does not appear to you a very
original scheme, nor, probably, a very dangerous one. He entered upon
it, however, with great precautions, having due regard to law, and, as
he thought, to opinion. He did not pay his people wages, nor even make
them presents in money. He gave them better food, better clothes,
better houses, letting their comforts and luxuries increase in exact
proportion to their industry. The result was what he had hoped,--or
rather, it was beyond his hopes. The pecuniary advantage was greater
and more speedy than he had expected. He did not boast himself. He
waited for his abundant crops, his fine gardens and orchards, and his
hard-working people to bring him enviers and imitators. The report, in
fact, soon spread, that Shaler was trying a new system, and that it
was succeeding. Neighbors came to inspect and inquire,--first the
near, then the more distant. Shaler forgot his caution. He was an
enthusiast, after all. He saw proselytes in his guests. He laid bare
his schemes and hopes. These aimed at nothing less than the conversion
of the whole State, through his success, to more enlightened views;
thence, a revisal of the laws, a withdrawal of the checks on
benevolent effort; and finally, the merging of slavery in a new
system, which should have nothing of the past but the tradition of
grateful dependence on the part of the employed and of responsibility
on that of the employer, rendering their relation more kindly and more
permanent.

Among his visitors and hearers were generous men to be moved by his
ideas, and wise men to appreciate their practical fruit; but the
sensitiveness of delicate minds, and the caution of judicious ones,
withholding from prompt speech and action, too often leave the sway in
society to men of small heart, narrow mind, and strong, selfish
instincts. Such never hesitate. Their sight is not far enough or
strong enough to show them distant advantages or dangers. Their
nearest interest is all they inquire after. These men combine easily;
they know each other, and are sure of each other. The sensitive shrink
aside and let them pass on; the prudent deliberate until the moment
for arresting them has gone by. Men who are both good and brave come
singly, and, for the most part, stand and fall alone.

      "Great Tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,
      For Goodness _dares_ not check thee!"

Shaler had not miscalculated so much as the result would seem to show:
the opinion of the majority was perhaps with him; but the only voices
raised were against him. The storm had already gathered thick about
him before he was aware of its approach. The first intimations were
not violent. He was admonished that his course was disapproved,--was
advised to let things slip back quietly into the old track, and that
so his eccentricities would be forgotten. This mildness failing, he
was told that he was endangering the welfare of the community,--and,
lastly, that he would incur peril himself, if he persisted. He was not
a man to be driven from his ground by threats, nor by loss or
suffering which he was to bear alone. His cattle died; his horses fell
lame; his barns and store-houses took fire. He ignored the cause of
these disasters and kept quietly on, still hoping to overcome evil
with good. His great strength and courage, with his known skill in the
use of arms, deterred from personal violence. But there were surer
means: his people were subjected to annoyance and injury,--and,
moreover, were accused of every offence committed within a circuit of
twenty miles. His duty as their protector obliged him to give way: he
took the only course by which he could provide for their welfare.

"I have no quarrel with Shaler," said the Doctor, after he had heard
the story, which I gave him much less at length than I have told it to
you. "I have no quarrel with Shaler. He had a right to do what he
would with his own. I only ask the same liberty for my friend Harvey,
and for those who, like him, accept their lot as it is given to them."

"Mr. Harvey is not happy," said Harry, seriously. "There are lines of
pain on his face. I do not think he accepts his lot."

"Well, submits to it, then,--the next best thing."

"Hardly even submits. I think he begins to doubt himself."

"He is of the age for doubting himself. It is at twenty that we are
infallible. To be sure, some happy men are so all their lives. Shaler,
I dare say, wouldn't have a doubt of his own wisdom, if the whole
hundred and seventy-three were starved or hanged. If there are marks
of care on Harvey's face, reasons might be found for it without
inventing for him an uneasy conscience."

"I think he envies Shaler, and would follow his example, if he had the
resolution. It is strange to see a brave man under such a thraldom."

"If Frank Harvey wants courage, it is something new."

"There are men who have courage to face a foe, but not to stand up
against a friend."

"Certainly, in such a project, he would have his wife's family to
count with, to say nothing of his own children. I fancy he would
hardly find a co-adjutor in Fred. You know Fred Harvey, Harry; he was
at school with you in Paris. What sort of a fellow was he then?"

"I liked him."

"I was not ill-pleased with him, when I saw him in Paris four years
ago. A fine-looking fellow; formed manners; modest enough, too. I
thought he would fill his place in the world creditably. Did you see
much of him, Harry, after you left school?"

"For a year I saw him constantly. We went to the same lectures at the
Jardin des Plantes."

While this conversation was going on, a reminiscence had been waking
in my mind.

"Did you ever take a journey with Frederic Harvey?" I asked Harry.

"Yes, into Brittany."

"Were you at a Trappist monastery with him?"

"At La Meilleraie. We passed a night there."

It was clear. I had been present once at a conversation between
Frederic and his sister, in which he spoke of his companion on this
journey into Brittany more warmly than I had ever heard him speak of
any other man, and yet with a discrimination that individualized the
praise, and made it seem not only sincere, but accurate. This
conversation interested me very much at the time; but, as I had no
expectation of seeing the person who was the subject of it, his name
passed from me.

I was glad to hear Harry say he liked Frederic Harvey. It would have
been hard, if he had not. And yet I am not sure that I like him very
much myself. I am grateful for the preference he shows for my society;
but I cannot meet as I would his evident desire for intimacy. How true
is what South says:--"That heart shall surrender itself and its
friendship to one man, at first view, which another has long been
laying siege to in vain"!



                                              MONDAY, April 8, 1844.


Those full days must still furnish these.--My walk with Harry was the
first of last Monday's pleasures. Roaming over our fields with him, I
found myself now in one, now in another European scene; and
everywhere, hardly speaking of himself, he set his individual stamp on
every object he called up before me. He had seen and felt with his own
eyes and heart; and everywhere had been disclosed for him those
special sympathies which Nature and the works of genius hold for each
separate human soul.

Florence will always be dear to me among Italian cities because it was
so dear to Harry. He has taught me to love, beside those greatest
names in Art familiar to us all from infancy, and which we have
chiefly in mind when we long for _Europe_, others less universally
cherished, and for which I had before only a vague respect which I
should have found it hard to justify.

Rome is no longer for me merely the Rome I have read of. With the
distant historic interest is now mingled one near and familiar.
Harry's favorite spots are already mine. I would walk on the green
turf where the altar to Hercules stood, in that oldest time when
monuments were raised to benefactors, and not yet to oppressors. I
would bring away an ivy-leaf from the ruined heap, the ever "recent"
tomb of the young Marcellus. I would gather white daisies on the path
along which Saint Agnes was borne to the grave, which was to become a
shrine. I cannot, but you will for me. And you will find the little
chapel on the Appian Way which marks the place consecrated in popular
tradition as that where Peter, escaping, met Christ "going up to Rome
to be crucified again," and turned back to meet his martyrdom. You
will look up from the Ponte Molle to the beautiful blue Italian sky,
where the symbol of suffering appeared as the sign of victory.

When you are in Europe, old Europe, do not carry about with you among
the monuments of its past all the superiorities of the nineteenth
century. Respect the legend. Our age does not produce it, but it is
the part of our inheritance we could least do without. Be reverent
before the monuments of the early Christian martyrs: they are true
shrines. With the people they have not yet lost their sacredness, and
have not yet lost their use. Faith in something stronger than violence
and nobler than rank is kept alive by the homage paid to the
courageous defiers of older usurpations and oppressions.

When we came in, we found the Doctor in excellent spirits and in
excellent humor. He had not been idle that morning. He had been at
work over his pressed flowers, and, owing to the dry weather of the
last two days, had had no trouble with them. I proposed to take him,
after breakfast, to a piece of marsh land where I thought he might
find something to interest him.

Harry again left the table first. He had made an engagement with Karl
and Fritz. We were to find him at the place where they were at work,
which was almost on our way. The Doctor wanted an hour or two more for
his flowers. While he was busy with them, I occupied myself with the
books which Harry had brought me.

We set off for the marshes. We walked the first part of the way in
silence, or nearly so, only exchanging now and then an observation on
the weather or scenery, not very earnest. "How we miss Harry Dudley!"
I was just saying within myself, when the Doctor made the same
exclamation aloud. I wanted nothing better than to hear him talk of
Harry again. I saw he was ready, and turned to him with a look of
expectation which he understood.

"I told you I had known Harry all his life; and so I have. But our
friendship began when he was about five years old. The time before
that has left me only a general remembrance of his singular beauty
and a certain charming gayety that seemed to lighten the air all about
him. But I went one day to his father's house in the country with some
friends I wanted to introduce there,--strangers. There was no one at
home, the man who answered our knock said, except---- He stepped back,
and there came forward this lovely child, who received us in due form,
regretted his father's absence, conducted us in, ordered refreshments
for us, and, in short, did the honors of the house with the ease and
courtesy of a man of society, and, at the same time, with a sweet,
infantile grace not to be described. I was content with Young America
that day. Harry and I have been intimates ever since then. We had our
little differences from the first, just as we have now. I thought my
twenty years' advantage in experience gave me a right to have my
judgments accepted without being examined; but he took a different
view of my claims. When I went out to his father's, I always used to
look the little fellow up,--in the garden, or in the barn, or wherever
he might be. As soon as I appeared, his eyes took a merry sparkle, as
if he knew there was good sport ahead: and so there was, for both of
us. He maintained his side with an originality and quaint humor that
made a debate with him a very entertaining exercise. Some of his
childish sayings have stayed in my mind, though many wiser things
have passed out of it."

The Doctor enjoyed his thoughts a little while; and then, with a
graver, and something of a confidential tone,--

"If Harry should talk to you about his future, do not encourage that
little vein of Quixotism that runs in his blood."

"The enterprise of the Pilgrim Fathers was somewhat Quixotic,--was it
not?"

"Certainly it was; you would not have found me among them."

Again a silence, which I left the Doctor to break.

"At any rate, I need not begin to disturb myself already. He will not
enter upon active life before he has prepared himself well. That I
know. And preparation, as he understands it, involves long work and
hard. But I sometimes almost think in good earnest that he has come
into the world in the wrong age. He is made for great times, and he
has fallen on very little ones. These are the days of the supple and
the winding, not of the strong and the straightforward."

"Since he has been sent to these times," I answered, "without doubt
his part in them has been marked out for him."

Dr. Borrow's brow lowered. It seemed he had a misgiving that the part
allotted to Harry might not be that which he himself would have
assigned to him.

Here some flowers at a little distance caught the Doctor's eye, and he
ran off to examine them. They were not to his purpose, and were left
to nod and wave away their life unconscious that a great danger and a
great honor had been near them. When he came back, the cloud had
passed. He began talking pleasantly, and still on the subject on which
I most wished to hear him talk.

Harry has not always been an only son. He had once a brother, to whom
he was fondly, even passionately, attached. After his brother's death,
a deeper thoughtfulness was seen in him. He was not changed, but
matured and strengthened.

"You still see the fun look out of his eyes at times," said the
Doctor, "and his laugh has a quality that refreshes and refines for us
again the meaning of the good old word 'hearty'; but mirthfulness is
no longer so marked a characteristic in him as it once was."

When we came in sight of the little plantation prophetically known as
"The Grove," I could not help calling the Doctor's attention to it. He
took a much more flattering interest in it than you did, I must tell
you. He turned his steps towards it immediately, commended the spaces
which made full allowance for growth, and, seating himself on one of
the benches,--according to you, such premature constructions,--gave me
a dissertation on soils, very entertaining and very profitable. When
he had finished, I would gladly have carried him back to the subject
from which the sight of my trees had diverted us, but I felt that this
required a little skill: I had known him repelled by a question of too
incautious directness from a topic on which he would have been
eloquent, if he had led the way to it himself. However, as soon as we
were once walking forward on our former path again, his thoughts, too,
returned to the old track. Our intimacy had ripened fast on the common
ground of sympathy we had found in the grove. He was more expansive
than before, and revealed a latent gentleness I had begun to suspect
in him. He went on to tell of Harry's infancy and childhood, and to
relate instances of his early daring, self-reliance, and generosity of
heart,--smiling, indeed, a little at himself as he did so, and casting
now and then towards me a glance of inquiry, almost of apology, like
one who is conscious of being indiscreet, but who cannot resolve to
refrain. I could not but observe that the anecdotes related with most
pleasure illustrated that very side of Harry's character which gave
the Doctor uneasiness.

Karl and Fritz were employed that day in clearing a piece of ground
overgrown with brushwood. We had found them at their work in our
morning walk, and Harry had promised to come back and take a hand in
it. It was an animated scene that the Doctor and I came upon. Before
we reached it, we heard a pleasant clamor of voices and laughter. My
German boys are faithful workers, and generally cheerful ones; but now
they carried on their task with an ardor and an hilarity which doubled
their strength, and gave them an alertness which I had thought was not
of their race.

"Will you let me finish my stint?" Harry cried, as soon as we were
near enough to answer him. The merry light in his eye and the gleeful
earnestness of his manner brought up to me the little boy of whom the
Doctor had been talking to me. He was taking the lead. He could not
have been practised in the work; but the strong sweep of his arm, his
sure strokes, did not speak the novice. He directed and encouraged his
assistants in familiar and idiomatic German, which made me feel that
my carefully composed sentences must be somewhat stilted to their
native ears.

Old Hans found himself there, too, drawn by I don't know what
attraction,--for a share in this work did not belong to his day's
plan. He was not taking a principal part in it; he had a hatchet in
his hand and chopped a little now and then in a careless and fitful
way, but he was chiefly occupied in observing the amateur, whose
movements he followed with an admiration a little shaded by
incredulity. He stood like the rustic spectator of an exhibition of
legerdemain, his applause restrained by the displeasure of feeling
himself the subject of an illusion.

But over the boys Harry's ascendancy was already complete: not only
did their bush-scythes keep time with his, but their voices, when they
answered him, and even when they spoke to each other, were more gently
modulated,--their very laugh had caught something of the refinement of
his. When afterwards in my talks with him he unfolded, among his plans
for the future, a favorite one of leading a colony to some yet
unsettled region, I felt, remembering this scene, that he was the man
for it.

Hans was won over before we left him. When we arrived, he had searched
my face with a look which, at the same time that it asked my opinion
of the stranger, gave me to understand that he himself was not one to
be dazzled by outward show. As we were going, his eye caught mine
again: he gave me a nod of satisfaction, which said that he had at
last made up his mind, and that it was one with my own. Perhaps he had
been aided in coming to a decision by the care with which Harry
delivered up to him the tools he had been using, and by the frank
pleasure with which the volunteer woodman received the words of
approbation which the veteran could not withhold.

I cannot write you the whole of last Monday's journal to-night. I came
in late. The weather is fine again, and I took a long day in the field
to make up for lost time.



                                             TUESDAY, April 9, 1844.


We were on our way from the thicket to the marshes.

The Doctor had a successful morning. The tin case was always opening
and closing for some new treasure. Noon found him in high good-humor.
I did not propose to go home for dinner. It had been arranged with
Tabitha that we should take it on the little knoll known in our level
region as Prospect Hill. We found two baskets in the shade of its two
trees. Harry and I unpacked them, the Doctor superintending and
signifying coöperation by now and then putting his thumb and finger to
the edge of a dish or plate on its way to the turfy table. Harry
filled our bottle from the cool spring that bubbles up at the foot of
the mound. There was a log under one of the trees, affording seats for
three, but we left it to the Doctor, and took our places on the
ground, fronting him, on either side of the outspread banquet.

We talked of plans for the coming week. I told over our few objects of
modest interest, and the names of such of our neighbors as could lay
claim to the honor of a visit from Dr. Borrow, or could in any degree
appreciate his society. The nearest of these was Westlake.

"We have been at Westlake's," said the Doctor; "we passed a day and
night with him. He pressed us to stay longer, and I was very well
amused there; but Harry looked so plainly his eagerness to be on, and
his fear lest I should allow myself to be persuaded, that I put your
hospitable neighbor off with a promise to give him another day, if we
had time, after we had been here. Harry has all along wanted to secure
the visit here as soon as possible, for fear something or other should
interfere with it. I believe, if I had proposed it, he would even have
put off going to the Harveys, old friends as they are. You must know
that you have been his load-star from the first."

Very much pleased, yet surprised, I looked at Harry. His color
deepened a little as he answered, "I have heard Selden speak of you;
but it was after we met Mr. Shaler that I had so great a desire to
know you."

Here the Doctor took up the word again:--

"We met Shaler in a great forlorn tavern at Mantonville, quite by
chance. We hadn't been in the house half an hour before Harry and he
found each other out. I had just had time to give some orders
up-stairs for making my room a little habitable,--for we were going to
pass a day or two there,--and came down to look about me below. There
I find Harry walking up and down the breezy entry with a stately
stranger, engaged in earnest and intimate conversation. Presently he
comes to ask me if it would be agreeable to me to have our seats at
the table taken near Mr. Charles Shaler's, who, it seemed, was by two
days more at home than we were. Of course it was agreeable to me in
that populous No Man's Land to sit near any one who had a name to be
called by. And the name was not a new one. I had never seen Charles
Shaler,--Colonel Shaler, as he is called,--of Metapora; but I had
heard a great deal of him, for he is own cousin to the Harveys. I felt
sure that this was the man. His appearance agreed perfectly with the
description given me, and then Harry's foregathering with him so
instinctively was a proof in itself. I found him very agreeable that
day at dinner, though, and continued to find him so, except when he
mounted his hobby; then he was insupportable. There's no arguing with
enthusiasts. They are lifted up into a sphere entirely above that of
reason. And when they have persuaded themselves that the matter they
have run wild upon is a religious one, they're wrapped in such a
panoply of self-righteousness that there's no hitting them anywhere.
You may _demonstrate_ to such a man as Shaler the absurdity, the
impracticability, of his schemes: he seems to think he's done his
part in laying them before you; he doesn't even show you the attention
to be ruffled by your refutation, but listens with a complacent
politeness that is half-way to an affront. However, I had my little
occupations, and he and Harry used to found Utopias together to their
own complete satisfaction, whatever good the world may derive from
their visions.--Does Shaler ever come here now?"

"From time to time he appears, unlocks the old house, and walks
through the empty rooms."

"I hear that his plantation is going to ruin."

"Yes; it is a melancholy sight."

"We passed by it on our way here from Westlake's. But we saw only the
fine trees on the border. We did not enter. Why doesn't he sell it,
let it, have it occupied by some one who might get a support from it?
Or does he carry his respect for liberty so far that he thinks it a
sin for a man to compel the earth to supply his needs?"

"He is, as you say, an enthusiast. He regards the culture of the earth
as a religious work, and thinks it sacrilege to carry it on in the
frantic pursuit of exorbitant gain, watering the innocent soil with
tears and the painful sweat of unrewarded labor. But he has not given
up the hope of returning."

"What! does he repent his rashness already?"

"No; but he loves his native State, and believes in it."

"Nobody interferes with Harvey; nobody objects to his reforms," said
the Doctor, after a little silence.

"Because they lead to nothing," answered Harry.

"They have led to giving him a splendid income, and to giving his
people as much comfort as they can appreciate, and as much instruction
as they can profit by. Harvey is really a religious man. He regards
his relation to his slaves as a providential one, and does not believe
he has a right to break it off violently, as Shaler has done."

I had all along tried, in these discussions, to maintain an impartial
tone, confining myself to a simple statement of facts, and leaving the
controversy to the Doctor and Harry; but I had been gradually losing
my coolness, and found myself more and more drawn to take a side. The
repetition of this reflection upon Shaler was more than I could bear.

"There is certainly," I said, "a wide difference between Shaler's view
of the relation of the master to his laborers and Harvey's. Shaler
believed that these dependent beings were a charge intrusted to him by
their Maker and his. As unto him more had been given than unto them,
of him, he knew, more would be required. Harvey supposes that these
inferior creatures have been given to him for his use. His part is to
supply them with sustenance, and to show them so much of kindness and
indulgence as is consistent with keeping them in the condition to
which they have been called; theirs is to serve him with all their
soul and all their strength, to render him an unqualified obedience,
to subordinate even the most sacred ties of nature to their attachment
to him. Here is, indeed, no danger to slavery. Ameliorations, under
such conditions, fortify instead of undermining it. The sight of an
apparent well-being in this state pacifies uneasy consciences in the
master-class; while the slave, subjugated by ideas instilled from
infancy, not less than by the inexorable material force which incloses
him, finds even his own conscience enlisted in his oppressor's
service, steeled and armed against himself."

"You wrong Frank Harvey, if you suppose he allows his slaves a mere
animal support; he has them taught what is needful for them to know."

"He has them taught just so much as shall increase their usefulness to
him, without giving them a dangerous self-reliance."

"Precisely, so far as secular knowledge is concerned. And it is
possible he may be right in view of their interests as well as of his
own. But he allows them religious instruction to any extent,--takes
care that they have it."

"The religious instruction allowed by Harvey, and by other humane
slaveholders who maintain the lawfulness of slavery, inculcates the
service of the earthly master as the fulfilment of the practical
service of God on earth. For the rest, the slaves are allowed to look
forward to another world, to which this life is a sorrowful
passage,--whose toils, pains, and privations, however unnecessary and
resultless, are, if only passively accepted, to be compensated by
proportionate enjoyments."

"This constitutes, then, the whole of the much talked-of religion of
your negro Christians?"

"Of too many; but the promise, 'Ask, and ye shall receive,' was made
to them as to all. Even to the slave-cabin has been sent the Comforter
who teacheth all things. But we were speaking not so much of the
religion of the slaves as of the religious instruction given or
allowed them by their masters. It is necessarily circumscribed, as I
have told you."

"What was the creed inculcated upon Colonel Shaler's protégés?"

"They were taught that life, even earthly life, is a sacred and
precious gift, for which they were to show themselves grateful by
keeping it pure and noble and by filling it with useful work. They
were taught that duty to God consists not in mere acquiescence, but in
active obedience. They were taught that there are earthly duties
which no human being can lay down; that on the relation of husband and
wife, of parent and child, all other human relations are founded. In
short, Shaler recognized men in his slaves. He attributed to them the
natural rights of men, and the responsibilities of civilized and
Christian men."

"And his neighbors unreasonably took umbrage! Mind, I am no upholder
of slavery. I am merely speaking of what is, not of what ought to be.
A slaveholder, meaning to remain one, can yield nothing in principle,
let him be as indulgent as he will in practice. What becomes of his
title in the slave-family, if the slave-father has one that he is
religiously bound to maintain and the rest of the world to respect?
The master is the owner no longer. The property has died a natural
death."

So slavery dies before Christianity without formal sentence.

"But," the Doctor began, in a different tone, passing lightly from a
train of argument which might have led him where he had not meant to
go, "I should never have taken Shaler to be the lowly-minded man you
represent him. I cannot imagine his people addressing him with the
familiarity that even Harvey permits; still less can I think of him as
treating them with the good-natured roughness of your neighbor
Westlake."

"I have never seen him followed about his place by a crowd of begging
children, nor throwing down coppers or sugar-plums to be scrambled and
squabbled for."

"Nor tweaking their ears, I suppose," broke in the Doctor, laughing,
"nor pulling their hair to make them squeal and rub their heads, and
grin gratefully under the flattering pain of master's condescension. I
have witnessed these little urbanities. I have not met with a case of
the hailing with sugar-plums; but I have known Westlake pelt his
people with some pretty heavy oaths, which were as acceptable, to
judge by the bobbings and duckings and mowings with which they were
received. He is very fond of his people, he tells me, and especially
of a distinguished old crone who was his nurse, and who is to be
gratified with a majestic funeral. She was impartially graced with his
emphatic compliments, and did her utmost to make an adequate return in
'nods and becks and wreathèd smiles.' So I suppose it was understood
that he was expressing himself in the accepted terms of patrician
endearment. Probably Shaler's affection for his wards was not so
demonstrative?"

"There was in his manner to them a considerate kindness,--not
familiar, yet intimate; in theirs to him an affectionate reverence. He
was well fitted to be the chief of a primitive people."

"He would have been sure of election in the days when being taller by
the head and shoulders than the common crowd was a qualification."

"He had the qualification of the ordained as well as that of the
popular leader: 'A comely person, and _the Lord is with him_.' This
last is the mark of the true rulers by divine right,--of the men who
seem framed to be the conductors of higher influences. The less finely
organized

      "'Know them, as soon as seen, to be their lords,
      And reverence the secret God in them.'"

Harry's beautiful face was wonderfully illuminated. Strange, this
unconscious consciousness of the elect!

"The relation of master and slave," I went on,--for the Doctor did not
offer to speak,--"is, in Shaler's opinion, a most perverted and
unnatural one; but he believes in that of protector and protected. The
love of power, the instinct of dominion, is strong in him. Perhaps it
must be so in those who are to be called to its exercise. 'I know thy
pride,' David's elder brother said to him, when the boy left the
charge of his few sheep to offer himself as the champion of a nation.
But Shaler's ambition was directed by the precept, 'Let him who would
be greatest among you be your servant';--whether deliberately, or by
the spontaneous flow of his large, generous nature, I do not know.
Whatever superiority he possessed, whether of position, education, or
natural endowment, he employed for the advantage of the people under
his care. All the proceeds of the estate were spent upon it. The land
was brought into a high state of cultivation. Its productiveness was
not only maintained, but increased. Nor was beauty neglected. Groves
were planted, marshes drained, ponds formed. The old cabins gave place
to new and pretty cottages. The owners and builders were encouraged to
employ their own invention on them; thus there was great variety in
the architecture. Vines planted about them, by favor of our kind
climate, soon draped them luxuriantly, harmonizing the whole, and
giving even to eccentricities of form a beauty of their own. While he
took care that ability and energy should enjoy their just return of
prosperity, the inferior, whether in body, mind, or soul, were not
Pariahs. As Shaler believed the exercise of beneficent power to be the
greatest privilege accorded to mortals, he made it one of the chief
rewards of exertion."

"Was the privilege appreciated?" asked the Doctor.

"The slave of a tyrannical master is too often the most brutal of
oppressors; but disinterestedness and tenderness have a sympathetic
force, no less, surely, than rapacity and cruelty. Besides, with a
race in which sense of honor is so leading a characteristic as in the
African, the glory of being the doer and the giver, the shame of being
the mere idle recipient, are very potent. Shaler was not too wise and
good for dealing with ordinary human nature; he was considerate of
innocent weaknesses, even of those with which his nature least enabled
him to sympathize. He found, for example, that his people did not like
to see the 'great house' on their estate surpassed in furniture and
decoration by the mansions of neighboring planters. He respected their
simple pride. He understood that his house was their palace, their
state-house,--that their wish to embellish it was, in fact, a form of
public spirit. He indulged them in what was no indulgence to himself."

"Harvey has rather the advantage of him there: he can please himself
and his people at the same time. How long have you known the Harvey
plantation,--Land's End, as Judge Harvey called it, when he first came
to settle here?"



                                          WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1844.


"How long have you known the Harvey plantation?" Dr. Borrow had just
asked me.

"Ten years," I answered. "I was there for the first time about three
years after Mr. Frank Harvey came back from Europe."

"I was there nearly twenty-three years ago. Frank and I had just left
Harvard. We were both going to finish our studies abroad. We were to
sail together. Frank must go home for a visit first, and asked me to
go with him. I saw slavery then for the first time. I had heard enough
about it before. We had just been through the Missouri storm. I did
not find it, as it showed itself on Judge Harvey's place, 'the sum of
all villanies'; though, perhaps, looking back, I may think it was the
sum of all absurdities. I did not reason or moralize about it then. I
was hardly eighteen, and took things as they came. But to judge of
what has been done on that plantation, you should have seen it as I
saw it in '21. Sans Souci would have been the right name for it. Not
that I liked it the less. I made none of these wise observations then.
On the contrary, I was fresh from the study of dead antiquity, and was
charmed to find that it wasn't dead at all. It must be admitted,
there is a certain dignity in the leisurely ease of primitive peoples,
past and present. They seem to think that what they are doing is just
as important as what they may be going to do. We moderns and civilized
talk a good deal about immortality; but those simple folks have a more
vital sense of it: they seem to be conscious that there will be time
enough for all they shall ever have to do in it. Old Judge Harvey was
a sort of pristine man,--about as easy and indolent as the negroes
themselves."

"He was, indeed, of the old type. Formerly, I believe, planters--at
least the well-born and well-reputed--were content, if their estates
yielded them the means of living generously and hospitably, without
display or excessive luxury. They took life easily, and let their
people do the same. I have heard that Judge Harvey moved off here,
from one of the older Slave States, when the money-making mania came
in, hoping to keep up for himself and his people the primitive régime
they had grown up under. I believe he was no advocate of slavery."

"The only forcible thing about him was his dislike of it. He had the
greatest compassion for the slave of any man I ever saw, and with the
best reason, for he was one himself. He was as much the property of
his worshippers as the Grand Lama. He always entertained the
intention of emancipating himself. But there were legal forms to be
gone through with. To encounter them required an immense moral force.
His hundred tyrants were, of course, all as happy as clams, and had as
little thought of a change of domicile. So there was nothing to stir
him up, and there was never any more reason for acting to-day than
there had been yesterday. I must do him the justice, however, to say
that he made provision for his son's living in freedom, in case he
should choose it. In spite of the loose way in which the estate was
managed, it yielded, as of its own free will, a pretty fair income.
The old man spent little, and so put by really a respectable sum, half
of which was to be employed in securing an independence to his son,
and the other half in compensating his natural proprietors for the
loss of his valuable services. Shaler was not original: the scheme he
carried out in the end was old Judge Harvey's exactly,--if, indeed, it
was his, and not his daughter's. I always suspected that it originated
in the head of that little girl. You know Shaler and she were own
cousins. The abolition vein, they say, came down from a grandmother.
At any rate, Judge Harvey's plan, as he detailed it to me, was to
colonize his blacks in a Free State, each with a pretty little sum in
his pocket for a nest egg. He had taken into his confidence---- No,
there was no confidence about it; the Judge was as liberal of his
thoughts as of everything else; there was not an urchin on the place
that might not have known what was planning, for the fatigue of
listening; but the gentle flow of the Judge's words was heard as the
notes of the birds and the frogs were,--with a little more respect,
perhaps, but with no more inquiry after meaning. He had taken, not as
the confidant, then, but as the partner of his day-dreams, a man who
governed his estate for him,--as far as it was governed,--one of the
blackest negroes I ever saw, and one of the cleverest, by name
Jasper."

"Jasper!" exclaimed Harry.

"He has fallen from his high estate,--a Belisarius, only not
quite blind. It is really almost touching to see him feebly fussing
round doing little odd jobs of work about the grounds where he
was once monarch of all he surveyed. At the time I speak of
he was in his glory. It was worth while to see him holding
audience,--according or discarding petitions,--deciding between
litigating parties,--pronouncing sentence on offenders, or bestowing public
commendation on the performer of some praiseworthy act. He carried on
the farm in a loose, Oriental sort of way,--letting the people eat,
drink, and be merry, in the first place, and work as much as they
found good for them, in the second. With all this, he made the estate
do more than pay for itself. It was he who carried the surplus up to
Danesville to be invested. He was like the eldest servant in Abraham's
house, who ruled over all that he had. Frank treated him with as much
respect as, I dare say, Isaac did Eliezer. And I ought to mention that
Jasper kept his master's son very handsomely supplied,--paid off his
college debts too, without a wry look, though it must have come hard
to subtract anything from the hoard. Our Jasper missed it in not
having their schemes carried into effect when he might. He could have
prevailed, as he did in regard to some other matters, by getting his
master embarked in the preliminaries, and then persuading him that
'returning were as tedious as go o'er.' But possibly Jasper himself,
having got the habit of power, did not like to lay it down; or perhaps
he thought he must always have the store yet a little larger, seeing
what Frank's wants were likely to be. And then it probably never
occurred to him that a daughter could die before her father. At any
rate, it was decided that the Judge should arrange the matter by will,
things remaining as they were during his life. He never made a will,
any more than he ever did anything else he meant to do. Did you know
him?"

"I remember him only as a pale, exhausted old man, drawn about in a
garden-chair by Jasper, who was almost as sad and humble-looking then
as he is now."

"It was already over with his reign and his projects. All was at an
end when Constance died. Her father broke down at once and forever.
She was his very soul. When I was there she was only thirteen, but she
was art and part in all her father's plans,--if, indeed, they were not
hers. If she had lived, they would have been carried out;--though, as
far as that is concerned, I believe things are better as they are. But
her brother was as much her subject as her father was. There was a
force about that gentle, generous creature! It was a force like that
of sunshine,--it subdued by delighting. You did not know Constance
Harvey?"

"I have seen her at Colonel Shaler's."

"She recognized what her father did not,--the necessity of some
preparation for freedom. The law against letters did not exist then, I
believe; I remember them, the great and little, painted on boards and
put up round a pretty arbor she called her school-house. I don't know
whether her pupils ever mastered them or not; but what certainly did
prosper was the class for singing, and that for recitation. I had not
seen much of men and things then, and had not learned to distinguish
the desirable and the practicable. Even I came under the illusion of
the hour, and dreamed liberty, equality, and perfectibility with the
best. Not that Constance talked about these fine things, but she had
an innate faith in them of the sort that makes mole-hills of
mountains. Even now, looking back on that diligent, confident child, I
seem to feel the 'almost thou persuadest me.' Poor Constance! She
died, at twenty-two, of overwork. She wore herself out in efforts to
bring her poor barbarians up to the standard her imagination had set
for them."

Constance Harvey had a spirit strong enough to have sustained a
slighter frame than hers through all the fatigues necessary to the
attainment of a great end. She died, not of her work, but of its
frustration. She had all power with her father, except to overcome his
inertness. To this, as years went on, other hindrances were added. Her
brother married a fashionable woman and lived in Paris. His demands
forbade the increase of the reserved fund, and soon began to encroach
upon it. She urged her brother's return. He replied, that the delicacy
of his wife's health made the climate of France necessary to her. His
expenses increased, instead of lessening. Constance saw, coming nearer
and nearer, a danger far more terrible to her than mere pecuniary
embarrassment. She saw that her father must either exercise a courage
that she had little hope of, or break his faith with Jasper,--with
the faithful people who had worked for them, or rather, as she viewed
it, with them, for the accomplishment of a common object. One half of
the fund she regarded as a deposit,--as a sacred trust. Until her
brother's claims had exhausted the portion always intended to be his,
she combated her anxieties, and kept up hope and effort. Through her
genius and energy the income of the estate was increased, the expenses
diminished, and yet the comforts of the work-people not curtailed.
Jasper seconded her bravely. But the hour of dishonor came at
last,--came hopeless, irretrievable. She struggled on a little while
for her poor father's sake, and Jasper exerted himself strenuously for
hers, stimulating the people to renewed industry by his warm appeals.
Before, he had roused them with the hope of freedom and independent
wealth; now, he urged them to rescue from ruin the generous master who
had meant them so much good. But the demands from Paris increased as
the means of supplying them diminished. Debt came, and in its train
all the varied anguish which debt involves, where human souls are a
marketable commodity. Let Dr. Borrow give you the outside of this
story, now that you have the key to it.

"Frank and I were not much together after we got to Paris. Our worlds
were different. Frank was going from ball to ball and from
watering-place to watering-place after Flora Westlake, until they
were married, and then they followed the same round together. His
father wrote to them to come home and live with him, so Frank told me,
and I believe that was what he had expected to do; but Madame Harvey
naturally preferred Paris to the World's End; so there they
stayed,--Frank always meaning to go home the next year, for eight
years. Their establishment, by the way, did Jasper great credit. Then
he heard of his sister's death: they could not go home then; it would
be too sad. But soon followed news of his father's illness: that
started them. On the voyage to New York, he met with this Lenox, liked
him, and engaged him for the place he has filled so satisfactorily. He
judged wisely: Frank has an excellent head for organizing, but no
faculty for administration. Once at home, he devoted himself to his
plantation as his sister had done. I believe her example has had a
great influence with him. But he has respected her practice more than
her theories. He is content to take his people as they are, and to
make them useful to themselves and to him. His father lived a few
years, but did not meddle with anything. Frank has shown an ability
and an energy that nobody expected of a man of leisure and of pleasure
like him. Except a short visit to Europe, two summers ago, here he has
been steady at his post for twelve years through. His life here is
not an hilarious one, for a man of his tastes; but, if doing one's
duty is a reason for being happy, Frank Harvey has a right to be so.
You think he looks sad, Harry. He does,--and older than his age; but I
am afraid there is a nearer cause than you have found for it."

The Doctor sat silent for a few moments with contracted brows; then,
throwing off his vexation with an effort, began again,--

"Frederic is expected home in a week or two. Perhaps we shall fall in
with him somewhere on our road. I should like to see you together and
hear you have a talk about slavery. He is as great a fanatic on one
side as you are on the other."

"He was very far from upholding slavery when I knew him. At school he
used to be indignant with Northern boys who defended it. He used to
tell me terrible things he had himself known. The first thing I ever
heard of Fred made me like him. A New-York boy, who made the passage
to France with him, told me that there was on board the steamer a
little mulatto whom some of the other boys teased and laughed at. Fred
took his part, used to walk up and down the deck with him, and, when
they landed, went up with him to the school he was going to in Havre."

"You were not on board?"

"No."

"Lucky for the mulatto, and for Fred Harvey, too, if he values your
good opinion,--and he values everybody's. If you had taken the boy up,
Fred would have put him down."

"I think not, then. I have heard that he has changed since I knew
him."

"He has changed, if he ever admitted anything against slavery. When
you see him, you can serve up to him some of his own stories."

"I would not do that; but, if he introduces the subject, I shall say
what I think of slavery as plainly as ever I did."

"He certainly will introduce it. And he would not be at all
embarrassed, if you were to cast up his old self to him. He would
admit freely that in his green age he entertained crude opinions which
time and experience have modified. You must be prepared to be
overwhelmed with his learning, though. He is a great political
economist,--as they all are, for that matter, down here. He almost
stifled me with his citations, the last time I was in his company.
When he was in Boston, about eight months ago, I asked him to dine. He
exerted himself so powerfully to prove to me that slavery is the most
satisfactory condition for ordinary human nature, and to persuade me
in general of the wisdom, humanity, and Christian tendencies of
'Southern institutions,' that I determined not to invite him too
often, for fear he should make an abolitionist of me.

"However, I gave half the blame to Shaler. His conduct was really a
reflection upon his cousin Harvey, who had been something of a
celebrity. The Harvey plantation was one of the sights of the State.
Fred knew that his father's humanity made a part of his own prestige
in Northern society. His filial piety took alarm. If Shaler's style of
benevolence became the fashion, Harvey's would be obsolete. He must
either follow the lead of another, and so take a secondary place, or
count as one behind the times. Fred appreciated the position: it was a
question of condemning or being condemned; of course there was no
question. But all has gone to heart's wish. Shaler has passed out of
mind, and Harvey's is still the model plantation."

"I should be glad to have nothing to find fault with in Fred but his
dogmatism and his pedantry," the Doctor began again, lowering his
voice. "After you left Paris, Harry, he fell in with intimates not so
safe. He gives his father anxiety,--has, I very much fear, even
embarrassed him by his extravagance."

Harry looked pained, but made no reply. The Doctor expected one, but
having waited for it a moment in vain, went back to the dinner which
had left so unfavorable an impression. He gave some examples of
Frederic's strain of argument, rather shallow, certainly, and, for so
young a man, rather cold-blooded.

"I thought," Harry exclaimed at last, with emotion, "that I had always
hated slavery as much as I could hate it; but, when I see what it has
done to men whom I like,--whom I want to like,--when I see what it has
done"----

"When you see what it has done to women?" asked the Doctor, as Harry
hesitated to finish his sentence. "Ah, I understand. You are thinking
of that garden scene."

The Doctor turned from Harry and addressed himself to me, taking up
his narrative tone.

"You know we ought to have been here three days earlier. The delay was
owing to that Orpheus escapade I told you of. It took us back to
Omocqua, and, once there, we determined to give a day or two to
Egerton, which we had missed before. The cave was no great affair,
after those we had seen; and the wonderful flowers that grow there
turned out a humbug, as I knew they would. However, Egerton proved to
be something of a place, and who should be there but my friend Harvey
himself, to whose plantation we were bound. He had his carriage, and
proposed to take us down there with him. We accepted, excusing to
ourselves the breach of our rule, in consideration of the gratuitous
tramp we had taken between Omocqua and Tenpinville. We didn't start
until afternoon, so it was rather late when we arrived. However,
Madame received us charmingly, and we had a pleasant hour or two
talking over the old times at Paris and Dieppe. Nobody else appeared
that evening, and I didn't inquire after anybody: I knew Fred was
away, and the other children _were_ children when I last heard of
them.

"I had a room that looked on the garden. Harry was in early in the
morning,--not too early for me. I was already some time dressed, had
unscrewed my press, and was beginning to release my flowers, prizes of
the day before. Harry knew better than to interrupt me, and I sat
working away comfortably and leisurely while he stood at the open
window. Without, not far off, an old man was dressing a border. The
click, click, of his strokes, not very rapid and not very strong, made
a pleasant accompaniment to the other pleasant sounds,--such as those
of the birds, of the insects, and of a little unseen human swarm whose
hum rose and fell at intervals. Suddenly, notes before which
everything else seemed stilled to listen,--those of a clear, rich
voice,--a woman's voice. It chanted a morning hymn. Every word was
distinctly heard. The precision and purity of the tones told of
careful training, and the simplicity of the delivery showed either
high breeding or a fine artistic sense. Was the charm received through
the ear to be heightened or dissolved by the eye? To judge whether
there was anything worth getting up for, I looked at Harry. He had an
expression--awe-struck shall I call it? Yes, but with a soft,
delightful awe. I took my place beside him where he stood looking down
into the garden, as James of Scotland looked down from the Tower, upon
the fair vision flitting among the flowers, and wondered what name
could be sweet enough to call it by,--only Harry was not wondering. It
was I. 'Margarita!' he said, under his breath, and quickly, to prevent
my question. And Margarita it ought to have been! All in white, soft
white; fresh and cool as if a sea-shell had just opened to give her
passage; her face of that lovely pallor which makes Northern roses
seem rude. What two years could do, if this were little Maggie Harvey!
The song was broken off abruptly, just when, recounting the blessings
of the season, it had come to the opening flowers. The theme was
continued, but the tone was changed. The poor old man, in spite of an
immense pair of iron spectacles, with half a glass remaining in one of
the eye-holes, had failed to distinguish a plant of price from the
plebeian crowd that had shot up about it. There it lay on the ignoble
heap, its wilted flowers witnessing against him! Behold our Maggie a
Megæra! If half the promises she made the old offender were
fulfilled, he never sinned again. But I don't believe they were:--

      "'Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
      Much fruit beneath them is not often found.'

Jasper trembled under hers, though. Yet he still had thought for the
honor of the family: he lifted his eyes meaningly to our window; she
turned, perceived us; and you should have seen the shame on--Harry's
face!"



                                           THURSDAY, April 11, 1844.


Going home, we made a long circuit. We passed near Piney's plantation.
The slaves were in the field. We stopped to look at them. They all
seemed to work mechanically,--seemed all of the same low type. We
could not have discerned any differences of character or capacity
among them. But the overseer, who stood by, whip in hand, evidently
distinguished shades of industry or reluctance.

"You see nothing of that at Harvey's," said the Doctor, as we walked
on again. "You see nothing like it there," he repeated, as Harry did
not reply.

"The force is there, whether we see it or not," said Harry. "Dr.
Falter told us that his negroes never thought of running away.
Presently we saw the bloodhounds."

"He said that the dogs were never used."

"That their being there was enough."

"Dr. Falter is not an inhuman man, Harry."

"No, indeed. He is only not a free man."

"You mean to say these precautions are a necessity of his position. It
is true; and there is his justification. He has a good heart; he would
rather be served through love than fear. As things are, he must base
his authority on both."

"Is it not terrible, when law and opinion, which should restrain from
tyranny, compel to it?"

"Let us talk of something else."

The Doctor himself led the way to a new topic. He stopped to admire
the great plain which surrounded us. As we walked on again, he spoke
of our magnificent prairies, of the pampas of South America, of the
landes of Gascony, of the pusztas of Hungary, all of which he had
seen, and of which he discriminated for us the characteristic
features. He spoke of the love which the inhabitant of these immense
extents feels for them,--equal to that with which the dweller on the
coast, or the mountaineer, regards his home; a love, the intensity of
which is due to the emotions of sublimity which they, like the ocean
and grand highland scenery, excite, and debarred from which, he whose
life they have exalted pines with a nameless want. The Doctor passed
to the Campagna of Rome, where Harry was at home,--and I, too, through
imagination. Our conversation left its record on the scene we were
passing through. The Doctor, illustrating his descriptions, pointed
out now this, now that feature of our own landscape. The name he
associated with it rested there. Fidenæ, Antemnæ, have thus made
themselves homes on beautiful undulations of our Campagna, never to be
dislodged for me.

The Doctor left us presently, as he was in the habit of doing on our
walks, and went on a little before. Harry and I continued to talk of
Italy,--of all that it has given to the world of example and of
warning. We talked of its ancient fertility and beauty, and of the
causes of its decline. We talked of its earlier and later republican
days; of its betrayal by the selfish ambition and covetousness of
unworthy sons; of the introduction of masses of foreign slaves; of the
consequent degradation of labor, once so honorable there; of the
absorption of landed property in a few hands; of the gradual reduction
of freemen to a condition hopeless as that of slaves; of the
conversion of men of high race--and who should have been capable, by
natural endowment, of what humanity has shown of best and
greatest--into parasites, hireling bravoes, and shameless mendicants;
of the revival of its primitive heroism in its early Christians; of
its many and strenuous efforts after renovation; of the successes it
attained only to be thrown back into ruin by its misleaders and
misrulers. Harry has as warm hopes for Italy as I have, and his nearer
knowledge of her people has not rendered his faith in them less
confident than mine. We talked of the value of traditions, and
especially of those which a people cherishes in regard to its own
origin and early history. I found that Harry had interested himself
very much in the ancient history of Italy, and in the questions
concerning the origin of its different races. In the morning I had
seen the poetical side of his mind, and had received an impression of
his general culture. I now became aware of the thoroughness and
exactness of his special studies.

We came to Blanty's farm. The Doctor stopped at the gate and we
rejoined him there. Blanty was standing before his door, in conference
with a tall, strong, self-reliant-looking black man,--a slave, but a
slave as he might have been in Africa: the respectful and respected
aid, companion, adviser of his master. Blanty, seeing us, came down to
the gate and asked us to go in. We had not time; but we had a little
talk where we were. Blanty and I discussed the future of our crops. He
was well content with the season and its prospects. He had seen Dr.
Borrow and Harry on Sunday. A single interview at a common friend's
makes intimate acquaintance out here. Blanty was quite unreserved, and
praised himself and everything belonging to him as frankly as ever
Ulysses did. He is a grand good fellow. Dr. Borrow's eye rested on the
black man, who remained where his master had left him, in an attitude
for a statue,--so firm was his stand, so easy, so unconscious.

"He would make a good Othello," said the Doctor to Blanty.

"Yes, it is Othello. Mr. Colvil has told you about him?"

"Where did he get his name?" asked the Doctor.

"My mother gave it to him. He will not let himself be called out of
it. He never knows himself by it, if it is shortened. He is a native
African, though all of his life that he can remember he has passed
here. His mother brought him away in her arms. They were carried to
Cuba first, and re-shipped. He is more of a man than I am," continued
Blanty, who is enough of a man to risk admitting a superior. "If I had
his head and his tongue, I would have been in Congress before this."

"Can he read?" asked the Doctor.

"Can and does."

"But how does that agree with your law?"

"He's thirty years old," answered Blanty. "The law hadn't taken hold
of reading and writing when he had his bringing up. My mother gave him
as careful teaching as she did her own boys, and he got more out of
it. 'Search the Scriptures,' she said, was a plain command; and how
could a man search the Scriptures, if he couldn't read? But he works
as well. Things here look famously, as you say; I see it myself. It's
more to his praise than mine. He has done well by me; I should like
to do well by him. My farm's larger than I want. I might give him a
piece, as you have your German; but I can't, you know. It's hard, in a
free country, that a man can't do as he would with his own. I don't
want to send him off, and he doesn't want to go. I married late; if I
should be taken away, I should leave my children young. I'd as soon
leave them to his care as to a brother's. I've talked it over with
him; he knows how I feel. And then, he's married his wife on Piney's
plantation. Foolish; but I didn't tell him so. I knew marriage was a
thing a man hadn't his choice in. I sometimes think it was a
providence for the easing of my mind."

"You are a young man, Mr. Blanty," said the Doctor.

"I am forty-five."

"You have thirty good years before you, at least."

"I hope so, and in thirty years a great deal may happen. I mean right,
and I hope God will bring things out right for me somehow."

After we left Blanty's, we walked on in silence for a time. Then the
Doctor spoke abruptly,--in answer to himself, probably, for neither
Harry nor I had said anything:--

"What then? What then? Here is an instance of a slave capable of
taking care of himself,--that is to say, of a man out of place. There
are cases of as great hardship elsewhere. Are we not constantly
hearing, even with us, of men who have never found their place? A
Southern planter would feel himself very much out of place anywhere
but where he is,--and very much out of place where he is, in changed
relations with his people. Blanty is no example. Blanty has half a
dozen slaves perhaps at most, with whom he works himself. He might
change them into day-laborers and hardly know the difference. But
Harvey, Westlake, Falter,--because they are provided for too well, as
you seem to think,--will you dispossess them altogether? Why all
sympathy for the black? Have not the whites a right to a share,--our
own brothers by blood?"

"Yes, to a large share," Harry answered. "But we are made to feel most
for those who have fewest to feel for them; we offer our help first to
the helpless. And would not Mr. Harvey be happier, if there were no
whip or stocks on his plantation, seen or unseen? Would not Dr. Falter
be happier, if his bloodhounds were kept only as curiosities? I wish
them both happier,--and I wish Blanty happier, who seems all the more
like a brother to me, since he can see one in Othello."

"Let Blanty talk, who has a claim. If he can find men enough in his
own State who agree with him, they may be able to do something. We
have no part in the matter."

"We take a part, when we give our sympathy to the maintainers of
slavery, and withhold it from such as Shaler, our truest
brothers,--from such as Blanty, and thousands like him, whom it might
strengthen and embolden."

"Harry, you are a Northerner. You belong to a State where you need not
know that there is such a thing as slavery, if you don't inquire after
it. Take your lot where it has been given to you, and be thankful."

"I am neither a Northerner nor a Southerner: I am an American. If
Massachusetts is dearer to me than all other States, it is only as our
little farm at Rockwood is dearer to me than all other farms: I do not
wish the rain to fall upon it or the sun to shine upon it more than
upon others. When we met an Alabamian or a Georgian abroad, was he not
our countryman? Did we not feel ourselves good Kentucks, walking
through beautiful Kentucky?"

"How is it, Harry, that you, who love your country so passionately,
who take such pride in her institutions, such delight in her
prosperity, will yet fix your eyes on her one blemish, will insist on
suffering pain she hardly feels? There is enough to do. Leave slavery
where it is."

"It will not remain where it is."

"The principles on which our national institutions are founded, if
they have the vital force you attribute to them, will prevail. Let
patience have its perfect work."

"Sloth is not patience."

"The world is full of evils. You have not found that out yet, but you
will. You have spied this one, and, young Red-Cross Knight, you must
forthwith meet the monster in mortal combat. Every country has its
household foe, its bosom viper, its vampire, its incubus. We are
blessed in comparison with others; but we are not celestial yet. We
are on the same earth with Europe, if we are on the other side of it.
We have our mortal portion; but, young and strong, our country can
bear its incumbrance more easily than the rest."

"She can throw it off more easily."

"Leave her to outgrow it. Let her ignore, forget it."

"Prometheus could as soon forget his vulture!"

"We will talk of something else."

We talked of something else for about half a mile, and then the
Doctor, turning to Harry, said,--

"There is enough to do; and you, of all persons, have laid out enough,
without embarking in a crusade against slavery. Write your histories;
show the world that it has known nothing about itself up to this time;
set up your model farm; aid by word and example to restore to the
culture of the ground its ancient dignity; carry out, or try to carry
out, any or all of the projects with which your young brain is
teeming; but do not throw yourself into an utterly thankless work. I
laugh, but I am in earnest. I do hope something from you, Harry. Do
not disappoint us all!"

"It is the work of our time. I cannot refuse myself to it."

"Who calls you to it? Who made you arbiter here? From whom have you
your warrant?"

Harry did not answer. I spoke for him:--

      "'From that supernal Judge who stirs good thoughts
      In every breast of strong authority,
      To look into the blots and stains of right.'"

Harry turned to me with a look, grateful, earnest, nobly humble: he
longed to believe an oracle in these words, yet hardly dared.

"I do not know yet whether I am called to it," he said, after a few
moments of grave silence; "but I stand ready. I do not know yet what I
am worth. It must be years before I am prepared to be useful, if I can
be. But when the time comes, if it is found that I have anything to
give, I shall give it to that cause."

He spoke solemnly and with a depth of resolution which showed him
moved by no new or transient impulse. The Doctor's lips were
compressed, as if he forbade himself to answer. He walked away and
looked at some flowers, or seemed to look at them, and then strolled
along slowly by himself. We observed the same pace with him, but did
not attempt to join him.

When we came near the grove, Doctor Borrow took his way toward it, and
we followed him. He sat down on a bench; I took my place beside him,
and Harry his, as usual, on the grass near us. The Doctor, refreshed
by the little interval of solitude, was ready to talk again.

"Do not make me out an advocate of slavery. I am not fonder of it than
you are, Harry. It has brought trouble enough upon us, and will bring
us worse still."

"It can never bring upon us anything worse than itself."

"When you have disposed of slavery, what are you going to do with the
slaves?"

"Slavery disposed of, there are no slaves. The men I would leave where
they are, to till the ground as they till it now, only better. There
has never been a time or a place in which men did not work for their
family, their community, their State. The black man will work for his
family, as soon as he has one,--for his community, as soon as he is a
member of one,--for the State, as soon as we admit him to a share in
it."

"You will not dare to say of these poor beings that they are capable
of self-government?"

"Which of us would dare to say it of himself?" replied Harry,
reverently; "and yet God trusts us."

"If He intends for them what He has bestowed on us, He will grant it
to them."

"Through us, I hope."

"In His own time.

      "'Never the heavenly fruits untimely fall:
      And woe to him who plucks with impious haste!'

Remember the words of your favorite Iphigenia:--

      "'As the king's hand is known by lavish largess,--
      Little to him what is to thousands wealth,--
      So in the sparing gift and long-delayed
      We see the careful bounty of the gods.'"

"Those are the words of a Pagan priestess," Harry answered. "The hand
of our God is not known by its parsimony. He does not force on us what
we will not accept, but His bounty is limited only by our trust in it.
Ask large enough!" he exclaimed, springing up, and standing before
us,--

      "'Ask large enough! and He, besought,
      Will grant thy full demand!'"

"Who says that?" asked the Doctor.

"The greatest religious poet of the old time, translated by the
greatest of the new,--David, by Milton."

It was I who answered,--for Harry, absorbed in his own thoughts, had
not heard the question.

"You uphold him!" cried the Doctor, almost accusingly.

He rose presently and walked off for home. Harry and I followed, but
at a little distance, for he had the air of wishing to be alone.

I found that Harry's interest in the question of slavery was not new.
In Europe, it had pained him deeply to see the injury done to the
cause of freedom by our tolerance of this vestige of barbarism,--in
truth, a legacy from the arbitrary systems we have rejected, but
declared by the enemies of the people to be the necessary concomitant
of republican institutions. He has studied, as few have, the history
of slavery in the United States, and its working, political and
social. It has not escaped him, that, though limited in its material
domain, it has not been so in its moral empire: North, as well as
South, our true development has been impeded. His great love for his
country, his delight in what it has already attained, his happy hopes
for its future, only quicken his sight to the dangers which threaten
it from this single quarter. He sees that not only the national
harmony is threatened by it, but the national virtue;--for a habit of
accepting inconsistencies and silencing scruples must infallibly
impair that native rectitude of judgment and sincerity of conscience
through which the voice of the people is the voice of God. It is this
perception, not less than the strong call the suffering of the weak
makes upon every manly heart, that has brought Harry Dudley to the
conviction that the obliteration of slavery is the work of our time.

We talked of the slave; of his future, which depends not more on what
we do for him than on what he is able to do for himself. We spoke of
the self-complacent delusion cherished among us, that he brought his
faults with him from Africa, and has gained his virtues here; of the
apprehension consequent on this error, that what is original will
cleave to him, while that which has been imposed is liable to fall
from him with his chain.

We talked of the mysterious charm possessed by the name of Africa,
while its wonders and wealth were only divined and still unproved. We
talked of Henry the Navigator; of the great designs so long brooded in
his brain; of the sudden moment of resolution, followed up by a
quarter of a century of patience; of the final success which was to
have such results to the world,--in the African slave-trade, which he,
of Christian princes, was the first to practise,--in the discovery of
America by Columbus, to whose enterprises those of Henry immediately
led.

If we could suppose that man ever, indeed, anticipated the decrees of
Providence, or obtained by importunity a grant of the yet immature
fruits of destiny, it might seem to have been when Henry of Portugal
overcame the defences of the shrouded world, and opened new theatres
to the insane covetousness of Western Europe. We cannot suppose it.
Doubtless mankind needed the terrible lesson; and, happily, though the
number of the victims has been immense, that of the criminals has been
more limited.

The history of early Portuguese adventure--this strange history, full
of the admirable and the terrible, attractive at the same time and
hateful--owes nothing of its romance or its horror to the fancy of the
poet or of the people. It does not come to us gathered up from
tradition, to be cavilled at and perhaps rejected,--nor woven into
ballad and legend. It has been preserved by sober and exact
chroniclers. The earliest and most ample of its recorders, called to
his task by the King of Portugal, was historiographer of the kingdom
and keeper of its archives. Long a member of the household of Prince
Henry, and the intimate acquaintance of his captains, he heard the
story of each voyage from the lips of those who conducted it.

He makes us present at Henry's consultations before the fitting out of
an expedition,--at his interviews with his returning adventurers. He
gives us the report of the obstacles they met with, and the
encouragements. We follow the long disappointment of the sandy coast;
gain from the deck of the caravel the first glimpse of the green land,
with its soft meadows, quietly feeding cattle, and inviting shade. We
receive the first kindly welcome of the wondering inhabitants, and
meet their later defiance.

These earliest witnesses to the character of the black man are among
the most sincere. They were not tempted to deny to him the qualities
they found in him. They had no doubt of the validity of the principle,
that the stronger and wiser are called upon to make property of the
faculties and possessions of the weaker and simpler; they were as
sincerely persuaded that the privileges of superiority were with
themselves. They believed in the duty and glory of extirpating
heathenism, and with it the heathen, if need were. They acted under
the command of "their lord Infant," to whose bounty and favor their
past and their future were bound by every tie of gratitude and
expectation. They had no occasion, then, to malign their victims in
order to justify themselves. They did not call in question the
patriotism of the people whom they intended to dispossess, nor its
right to defend a country well worth defending. This people was odious
to them for its supposed worship of "the Demon," and for its use of
weapons of defence strange to the invaders, and therefore unlawful.
But, even while grieving for the losses and smarting under the shame
of an incredible defeat, they admitted and admired the courage by
which they suffered. If they seized and carried away the children left
on the river-side in barbarian security, with as little remorse as any
marauders that came after them, they made themselves no illusions in
regard to the feelings of the father, who, discovering his loss,
rushed down to the beach in a vain attempt at rescue, "without any
fear, through the fury of his paternal love." They made no scruple of
employing guile, when it served better than force,--the civilized and
the Christian are thus privileged in their dealings with the man of
Nature and the Pagan,--but their report does justice to the loyalty of
primitive society. Nor does their chronicler feel any call to make
himself their advocate. Glorying in their exploits, he is not ashamed
of their motives. He does, indeed, bestow higher praise on those with
whom desire of honor is the more prevailing incentive; but he has no
fear of detaching any sympathies by avowing that their courage was
fired and fortified by the promise and the view of gain.

I related to Harry some scenes from this narrative. He asked me to
write it out, and hereafter to continue it, by gathering from other
early witnesses what indications are to be found of the original
qualities of the black races; of their condition and civilization, and
of the character of their institutions, before they had been
demoralized and disorganized by foreign violence and cunning. I had
already sketched to him my views on this subject. His historical
studies, his knowledge of the laws and customs of primitive peoples,
enabled him to draw at once, from the facts I stated, the inferences
to which I would have led him, and to see titles to respect where more
superficial minds might have found only matter for a condescending, or
perhaps a disdainful, curiosity.

Harry's request came to confirm an intention whose execution I had
continually put off to a more convenient season. I gave him my promise
gladly, and determined to begin while he was still with me, that I
might have the pleasure of reading over at least the first pages with
him. Dr. Borrow likes to spend two hours or so after breakfast in
arranging and labelling his pressed flowers; Harry is pleased to have
some active work in his day. It was agreed between us that he should
give that time to helping Karl and Fritz, and that I should take it
for writing. I resolved within myself, though, that I would not wait
for the morning. Dr. Borrow was not in talking vein that evening. We
broke up early. As soon as I found myself in my room, I took out my
portfolio and began. It happened to me, however,--as it has often
happened to me,--that what I wrote was not what I had meant to write.



                                             FRIDAY, April 12, 1844.


I was to tell the story of the Finding of Guinea. But let us leave the
land of mystery and promise still lying in shadow, until we have first
informed ourselves a little concerning the world with which the
Portuguese explorers are to bring it into relation,--the civilized and
Christian world, which is about to rush into the opened road,
proposing, in exchange for dominion and gold, to share with its
intended tributaries its own moral and spiritual wealth, and to endow
them with the fruits of its social and political wisdom.

We must be content to receive our accounts of Africa from Europeans:
let us try to look at Europe with the eyes of an African.

Let us suppose that the Moorish traders, whose golden legends drew the
eyes of Europe southward, have excited in a Ialof or Fulah prince a
desire to see the wonders of the North. Or rather, let the traveller
be a Mandingo; for that people is as remarkable for good judgment as
for truthfulness, and our observer of Christian manners must be one
who will not easily commit injustice. We will give him about a
three-years' tour,--more time than most travellers allow themselves
for forming an opinion of a quarter of the globe. It is the year 1415
schemes of African expedition are germinating in the brains of the
Portuguese Infants. The Mandingo has heard of Portugal from the Moors,
and of the young prince who has questioned them of Africa with so keen
an interest. Portugal, then, attracts him first. We may take it for
granted that the representative of Africa is well received. We may
suppose him to be entertained with the superb hospitality that Bemoy,
the Ialof prince, actually met with at the Portuguese court something
more than half a century later. All its magnificence is displayed for
his admiration; and its most delightful entertainments, such as
bull-baiting, feats of dogs, tricks of buffoons, and the like, are put
in requisition for him as for Bemoy.

The Mandingo traveller is, of course, very welcome to Prince Henry, as
a living evidence of the existence of the hidden world he has dreamed
of. The reports he receives of its resources, from so competent a
witness, confirm his hopes and inflame his zeal. He expresses to the
stranger his strong desire to see these interesting regions brought
into communication with Europe, and discloses those projects of
maritime adventure whose execution afterwards gained him the surname
of the Navigator. The manners and conversation of Henry are very
acceptable to his foreign guest, who is especially won by his
disinterestedness: for this prince, and his young brother Ferdinand,
not less ardent than himself, have the good of Africa as much at heart
as that of their own country. They wish, so they tell him, to aid its
advance in science and the arts; above all, they wish to carry there a
religion which has been revealed to them, and which cannot but prove
an inestimable blessing.

The Mandingo is surprised, and at first a little disturbed, by this
last announcement; for the account he has heard of the religions of
Europe is not such as to make him desire to see any of them
transported to Africa. But he learns that he has been grossly
misinformed: it is not true, as the Moors have reported, that the
Europeans are ignorant of a Supreme Being and worship only idols: they
do, indeed, pay homage to the images of tutelary divinities, whom they
call saints; but they are perfectly aware that these are subordinate
beings. The Africans themselves might, on the same evidence, be
accused, by a superficial traveller, of a like deplorable ignorance.
Neither is it true that many of the states of Europe worship an Evil
Demon who delights in carnage and is propitiated by massacre. On the
contrary, the Christian religion, which prevails in the greater part
of Europe, teaches especially love to God and love to man; it is
opposed to every form of violence, forbidding even retaliation, and
requiring its followers to love not only friends and strangers, but
even enemies. This account he receives from a good priest, who is
appointed to give him instruction. He is greatly moved by the
exposition of this sublime doctrine. Far from dreading, he now
ardently desires to see the influences of the religion of Christendom
extended to Africa. He has arrived at a favorable time for studying
its precepts; for Portugal is at peace with itself and its neighbors:
an unusual state of things, however, and not likely to last, as the
stranger cannot but soon perceive,--for preparations unmistakably
warlike are going on about him. He observes that the people are
agitated by various apprehensions; he hears them murmur at their
increased burdens, and at the prospect of having their sons taken from
them to die in a foreign land. All this is very puzzling to our
traveller. How reconcile it with the religion he was on the point of
embracing? At the court he sees elation and mystery on the faces of
the younger men; in those of the elder, grave concern. The people, he
finds, are as ignorant as himself of the object of the military
preparations: some saying that a new war with Castile is impending;
others, that the king is about to aid the Father at Rome against the
Father at Avignon. He is more and more perplexed; but, mindful of the
reserve and delicacy becoming a stranger, he is sparing of questions,
and waits for time and a wider experience to enlighten him.

In the mean time, he turns his attention to what seems to concern
himself more nearly. He believes that Henry, whom he perceives to be
as resolute as adventurous, will one day carry out his schemes of
maritime enterprise, and that he will thus exercise an influence on
the destinies of Africa. Will this influence be exerted for good or
evil? He sets himself to study the character of the young prince more
carefully, makes diligent inquiry concerning his deportment in
childhood, and tries to collect information in regard to his
lineage,--for this is a point much considered among the Mandingos. He
is so fortunate as to make the acquaintance of an ancient nobleman,
versed in the history and traditions of the country, as well as in
those of the royal court, and fond of telling what he knows, when he
has a safe opportunity,--for he is a man of experience, and does not
make either the past or the future a topic of conversation with his
brother-courtiers. To him the African addresses his questions, and not
in vain. The old man knew the present king when he was only Grand
Master of the Order of Avis, and the Infant Henry has grown up under
his very eyes. All that the traveller learns in regard to Henry
himself is satisfactory; and he finds that King John, his father, is
regarded as a just and wise sovereign. But, on nearer inquiry, he
discovers that this great king is, in fact, a usurper; for, in
Portugal, the successor to the crown must be the son of his father's
principal wife, and King John had not this advantage. He learns, with
yet more regret, that this sovereign is of a family in which filial
impiety is hereditary. The first of the dynasty, King Alphonso, made
war against his own mother, and imprisoned her in a fortress, where
she died, having first, as the Mandingo heard with horror, bestowed
her malediction on her son and his line. She foretold that he should
be great, but not happy; that his posterity should live in domestic
strife and unnatural hatred; that success should only bring them
sorrow, and even their just enterprises should turn to evil.

The African asks anxiously whether the religion of the Christians had
already been revealed in the time of Alphonso. His venerable friend
replies that it had, and that Alphonso, by his great piety displayed
in the building of monasteries and in the slaughter of Moors,--for he
did not spare even the tender infants,--averted from himself some of
the effects of the curse. But though he obtained the crown of Portugal
and was permitted to triumph over the infidels, yet it was remarked
that his life was disturbed and unhappy, and that he met with strange
disasters in the midst of his successes. The curse seemed to deepen
with time. His grandson, the second Alphonso, set aside his father's
will, and seized on the inheritance of his sisters; a third Alphonso,
son to this second one, deprived his elder brother of his throne; the
fourth Alphonso rebelled against his father, and was rebelled against,
in his turn, by his son Peter, whose wife he had murdered, and who, in
revenge, ravaged the country that was to be his own inheritance. When
he came to the throne, Peter caused the men who had been the
instruments of his father's crime to be put to death by horrible and
lingering tortures, which he himself superintended. This Peter,
surnamed the Severe, was father to the reigning king, entitled John
the Great.

The Mandingo, hearing this history of the royal house of Portugal, is
made to feel that he is indeed in a country of barbarians: a fact
which the pomp of their court, and the account he has heard of their
religion, had almost made him forget. The old courtier becomes more
and more communicative, as he sees the surprise and interest his
narrative excites, and ventures at last, in strict confidence, to
reveal that King John himself, before attaining to the crown, gave
evidence of the qualities that marked his house. He assassinated with
his own hand a man whom he considered his enemy, after inviting him to
an amicable conference; he spread devastation and horror through the
kingdom on his way to the throne, which, when he seized it, had
several other claimants. One of these was, like himself, a son of
Peter the Severe, and had the superiority of a legal birth; but he,
having murdered his wife, went on foreign travel, and happening, when
the throne of Portugal was left vacant, to be in the dominions of the
husband of his niece,--another of the claimants,--was seized and
thrown into prison. In this state of the family-affairs, John, the
Grand Master of Avis, saw a chance for himself. He consented to act,
until the true heir should be decided on, as Protector of the kingdom,
and in this capacity opened the prisons, offering pardon to all who
would enter his service. He thus formed a devoted little army, which
he provided for by giving it license to plunder the enemies of order,
among whom, it seemed, were dignitaries of Church and State, and holy
recluse women: at least, their estates were ravaged, themselves
murdered, and their dead bodies dragged through the streets in terror
to others. There was no lack of recruits; the reformed convicts found
the path of duty as congenial as that of crime, and all the ruined
spendthrifts and vagabonds of the country were content to link their
fortunes to those of the Protector. No corner of the kingdom was left
unschooled by summary executions. In fine, the adherents of the Grand
Master played their part so well, that the people, tired of the
interregnum, begged him to make an end of it and set the crown on his
own head. He complied, and the country had the relief of being ravaged
by the armies of his Castilian competitor and of supporting his own
forces in a more regular manner.

But all this is now over; the kingdom has enjoyed an interval of
peace, and begins to look with pride on the prince who won it so
adroitly and governs it so firmly. The curse which hung over the royal
line seems to have been baffled, or, at least, suspended, by his
irregular accession. He has held his usurped sceptre with a fortunate
as well as a vigorous hand. His five sons are dutiful, united, and of
princely endowments.

The Mandingo then inquires about the descent of Henry on the maternal
side, and learns that his mother is a sister of the late king of
England, a great and wise sovereign, whose son Henry, the fifth of the
name, now reigns in his stead. He must see the island-kingdom governed
by Prince Henry's cousin and namesake. But he postpones this
visit,--for he hears that in a certain city of the mainland the most
illustrious persons of Europe are assembled to hold a solemn council,
whose decrees are to have force in all Christian states. Even the
Supreme Pontiff himself is to be there, the head of the Christian
world, superior to all potentates. The African will not lose such an
opportunity of studying the manners and institutions of Europe. He
hastens to Constance, where the concourse and the magnificence surpass
his expectations. He inquires earnestly if he may be permitted to see
the Great Pontiff, and learns, to his surprise, that three sacred
personages claim this title, to the great confusion and misery of
Christendom, which has already shed torrents of blood in these holy
quarrels and sees new wars in preparation. Nor is this the worst that
is to be dreaded. The power of the rightful Pontiff extends into the
future life; and as each of the claimants threatens the followers of
his rivals with terrible and unending punishment in the next world,
the uncertainty is truly fearful. One of the pretenders is compelled
by the council to renounce his claims, and is instantly thrown into
prison, that he may have no opportunity of resuming them. A second
withdraws his pretensions by deputy; and it is understood that the
council intends to require a similar resignation of the third, that
the anxiety of the world may be put to rest by the election of a
fourth, whose rights and powers shall be unquestionable. There seems,
however, no prospect of a speedy solution of these difficulties; and
our traveller, having seen all the great personages of the assembly,
with their equipages and attendants, begins to weary of the noise and
bustle. But he hears that a ceremony of a very particular kind is
about to take place, and stays to witness it; for he will neglect no
opportunity of improvement. He is present, therefore, at the burning
of John Huss, which he understands to be a great propitiatory
sacrifice. When he hears, the following year, that a holocaust of the
same kind has again been offered in the same place, he, of course,
feels justified in recording it as an annual celebration. He notes as
a remarkable circumstance, that the victim, on both occasions, is
taken from the same nation; but he cannot learn that any law
prescribes this selection, or that the efficacy of the sacrifice would
be affected by a different choice. Another circumstance which seems to
him noteworthy is, that, whereas, under their old religions, the
people of these countries offered up, in preference, malefactors
reserved for the purpose, or captives taken in war, the Europeans of
this newer faith, on the contrary, select men without spot or blemish,
and possessed of all the gifts and acquirements held in highest honor
among them. He hears vaunted, on all sides, the virtue and learning of
Huss, and, above all, his extraordinary eloquence,--for this gift is
held in as much esteem in Europe as in Africa. He hears the same
encomiums pronounced on the second victim, Jerome of Prague, and
learns, at the same time, that the possession of these powers renders
his doom the more necessary. He can but infer that the great, though
mistaken, piety of the Christians makes them conceive that only what
they have of best is worthy to be devoted to so sacred a purpose. But
these reflections were made a year later. We must go back to the
summer of 1415.



                                           SATURDAY, April 13, 1844.


It is in the month of August that our African traveller arrives in
England. The king is just setting off on a hostile expedition against
a country whose inhabitants, though Christian, like the English, are
held by them in detestation and contempt. Just before going, the king
is obliged to cut off the head of one of his cousins. The cause of
this severity is thus explained:--The late king, cousin to his own
predecessor, dethroned and killed him; and it being a rule in England
that what has been done once is to be done again, the present king
lives in great fear of cousins. He finds the people considerate of
these royal exigencies. He hears praises bestowed on the clemency of
the young Henry, who remits,--so it is reported,--in the case of his
kinsman, a grievous part of the punishment which the law awards to
treason, only suffering the sentence to be executed in full on a man
of inferior rank condemned with him as his accomplice.

Notwithstanding the disturbed state of the times, the stranger is well
received, and is questioned with avidity. He is gratified to find that
his country is a subject of interest to the English as well as to the
Portuguese. They seem, indeed, to be fully aware that Africa is the
most favored portion of the globe. They are never tired of asking
about its perpetual summer, its marvellous fertility, its
inexhaustible mines. Even the common soldiers in Henry's army "speak
of Africa and golden joys." He finds that some of the learned maintain
that continent to have been the first home of man, and believe that
the terrestrial Paradise lies somewhere hidden among its mountains.
When he becomes a little more familiar with his hosts, however, he
finds that they entertain some notions not altogether so flattering.
They are curious about a certain people of Africa who live in the
caves of the earth, whose meat is the flesh of serpents, and who have
no proper human speech, but only a grinning and chattering; they ask
him whether his travels in his own country have extended as far as the
land of the Blemmyes, a people without heads, who have their eyes and
mouth set in their breasts. He answers, a little stiffly, that he has
no knowledge of any such people. When they go on to inquire whether he
ever ventured into the region inhabited by the Anthropophagi,
explaining at the same time what peculiarities are intimated by that
name, his indignation almost gets the better of him, and he denies,
with some vehemence, that such wretches hold any portion of his native
soil. His English friends assure him that it is nevertheless very
certain that such a people live in the neighborhood of the Mountains
of the Moon. When he finds that he cannot otherwise persuade them out
of this injurious opinion, he ventures, though with as much delicacy
as possible, to tell them, that, while on the mainland of Europe, he
heard stories equally wonderful and equally absurd of their own
island. In especial, he heard a Frenchman assert that the eating of
human flesh was practised in some part of the dominions of the English
king. He assures his English friends that he refused to credit this
story, as well as some other particulars in regard to their island,
which seemed to him too monstrous for belief, though they were given
to him on the authority of a Greek traveller of high reputation, who
had not long before visited England in company with the Emperor of the
East, and who had enjoyed extraordinary opportunities for studying the
manners of the most polite society of the kingdom. The Mandingo is
here interrupted by his English hosts, who make haste to assure him
that the Greeks are everywhere known to be great liars; that the same
may be said of Frenchmen; and that, indeed, there is no nation of
Europe, except their own, whose word is at all to be relied upon. The
Mandingo refrains from passing so severe a judgment on the travellers
who brought back such rash reports of his own country, but he permits
himself to suppose that they did not themselves visit the regions
whose manners they described, but received with too little examination
stories prevalent in other, perhaps hostile, countries; for he is
obliged to confess, with regret, that Africa is not, any more than
Europe, always at peace within itself. For himself, he protests, that,
even if his natural caution did not prevent him from accepting too
readily the statements of the enemies of England, he should have been
guarded from this error by the favorable accounts he had heard from
Henry of Portugal, by whom he had been warned against believing the
stories current among the common Portuguese, who held their English
allies in ungrateful abhorrence, and regarded their visits in the same
light as those of the plague or of famine. His English friends approve
the African's candor; but he can perceive, that, so far as his own
country is concerned, they remain of their first opinion. They
politely turn the conversation, however, from the men of Africa to its
animals,--asking, in particular, about that strange creature, shaped
like a pig, but having a horse's mane, whose shadow, falling on a dog,
takes from him the power of barking, and which, lurking near a
sheepfold until it learns the shepherd's name, calls him by it, and,
when he comes, devours him. The African does not deny that an animal
possessed of these endowments may somewhere exist, but he is not
acquainted with it; neither has he met with the wonderful stone, said
to be found in the same creature's eye, which, being placed under a
man's tongue, causes him to foretell future events. This ignorance of
the natural history of his country does not raise his reputation with
the English.

They give him, on their part, every opportunity of forming a correct
judgment of their own country,--not concealing or extenuating things
liable to be found fault with by a stranger. Indeed, he cannot enough
admire the contented and cheerful character of this people, who find
advantages where others would have seen deficiencies or evils, and
account by latent virtues for disagreeable appearances on the surface.
They congratulate themselves that their sun never oppresses them with
its rays,--that their soil has not that superabundant fertility which
is only a temptation to laziness. They tell him, with pride, that it
is necessary, in travelling in their country, to go in strong parties
and well armed: for such is the high spirit and great heart of their
people, that they cannot bear to see another have more than
themselves; and such is their courage, that what they desire they
seize, unless the odds are plainly too great against them. One special
subject of gratulation among the English he finds to be the possession
of a king whose passion is military glory; inasmuch as the foreign
wars in which he engages the country have the double advantage of
keeping up a warlike spirit in the nation, and of clearing off the
idle hands, which might become too formidable, if their natural
increase were permitted. The Mandingo, seeing so much land in the
island left to itself, cannot help thinking that the hands might find
employment at home. But he suppresses this reflection, and, turning
the conversation upon agriculture, inquires how so energetic a people
as the English can be contented with so scanty a return from their
land; for he has remarked that the meagreness of their crops is not
wholly due to the poverty of the soil, but likewise, and in great
measure, to very imperfect tillage. Many reasons are given for this
neglect of their land, all more or less creditable to the English
people, but not very satisfactory to the mind of the stranger. At
last, however, one is brought forward which he at once accepts as
sufficient: namely, the insecurity of possession. It seems that
property in England often changes owners in the most unexpected
manner; so that a common man, who has hired land for cultivation of
its noble proprietor, is liable to be suddenly ejected, and to lose
all the fruits of his industry, to say nothing of the risk he runs of
laying down his life with his lease. For it appears that the nobles of
the country are equally remarkable for courage with the other idle
persons, and display it in the same manner. If they think themselves
strong enough to add their neighbor's estate to their own, they
will--so one of the Mandingo's English friends tells him--"make
forcible entry and put out the possessor of the same, and also take
his goods and chattels, so that he is utterly disinherited and
undone."

The African dismisses his surprise on the subject of agriculture, and
gives his attention to the cities, expecting to see the national
industry turned to arts which might offer a more certain reward. He
finds that the most skilful artisans are foreigners. It occurs to him,
seeing the great demand for weapons of all sorts among the English,
and their love of golden ornaments, that some of the skilful cutlers
and ingenious goldsmiths of his own country might find encouragement.
But he gives up this hope, when he sees the hatred borne to the
foreign artisans by the natives, who need their skill, but grudge them
the profit they draw from it. It is not an unheard-of thing for a
foreign artisan or merchant, who has begun to be a little prosperous,
to have his house pulled down about his ears. And well for him, if he
escape with this! Besides, the jealousy of the people obliges the
kings to be always making regulations for the injury of these
foreigners; thus the laws are perpetually changing, so that by the
time the unlucky men have adapted themselves to one set they find
they are living under another. The restrictions and heavy exactions of
the law are not enough: foreign artisans and traders are further
subjected to the capricious extortions of the collectors. The Mandingo
congratulates himself on the more liberal policy of his own country,
and on the great respect paid there to the professors of useful arts,
whose persons are inviolable even in time of war; above all, he
reflects with satisfaction on the sacredness of the common law there,
which, having been handed down through centuries, is known to all and
admits of no dispute,--whereas, under this system of written
enactments, continually varied, a man may spend his life in learning
the rules he is to live by, and after all, perhaps, become a
law-breaker before he knows it.

Notwithstanding some drawbacks, the African enjoys his visit to the
English highly, and finds much to praise and admire among them. He
does not neglect to note that they have the choicest wool in the
world. This possession, he finds, has endowed them with a branch of
manufacture which may be regarded as national. Their woollen cloths
are not very fine, it is true, but they are much prized, both in
England and in foreign countries, for their strength and durability.

He is much impressed by the religious architecture of the Christians.
Before their sacred edifices, he feels his soul lifted into a sublime
tranquillity, as in the presence of the grandest objects in Nature. He
is much moved at recognizing in the rich stone carving a resemblance
to the ornamental cane-work of African houses. This reminds him of
what he once heard said by a learned Arab,--that Africa was the first
home of the arts, as of man himself, and that they had gone forth from
their too indulgent mother to be perfected in sterner regions, where
invention is quickened by necessity. He cannot but bow before the
wisdom of the superintending Providence which has caused the rigors of
climate and the poverty of soil so to act on the mind of man, that,
where Nature is less great and exuberant, his own works are the more
transcendent, so that his spiritual part may never lack the food it
draws from the view of sublime and genial objects.

He admires less the arrangements of private dwellings. He finds that
in England, as in Africa, the habitations of families in easy
circumstances consist of several houses; but, instead of being all
placed on the ground at a little distance from each other, the square
in which they stand surrounded by a pretty palisade, as is the case in
Africa, they are here piled one upon another, sometimes to a
considerable height, so that it is necessary to mount by long flights
of uneasy steps; and then, in the cities, houses occupied by different
families often adjoin each other, having a partition-wall in common,
and their doors opening on a common way, so that it would seem the
people living in them can have no proper notion of home or of domestic
retirement. He finds that the houses of the common people in the
country are not of more durable material than African houses. Those of
the great are very commonly of stone, and, unless ruined by violence,
are capable of serving for centuries. The African does not think this
an advantage, as in the case of the temples; for these damp stone
houses, so long used as human abodes, become unwholesome; and what is
even worse, when evil deeds have been committed in them,--and this is
too often the case with the houses of the powerful,--the contagion of
guilt hangs round the walls, and the same crime is repeated in
after-generations.

The African learns, while in England, what was the real aim of the
warlike preparations he saw going on in Portugal. He hears of the
taking of Ceuta,--an event which excites almost as much interest in
England as in Portugal; for the English are supposed to have had a
great part in this success. He hears, however, the chief merit
ascribed to a beneficent being who bears the title of "The Lady of
Mercy." It seems, the besiegers landed on a day especially consecrated
to her; and to her kind interposition is referred the taking of the
city and the terrible slaughter of the Moors who defended it. The
African asks how favors of this kind can be made consistent with the
character ascribed to this divinity, and is answered, that her mercies
are for those who reverence her,--that the unbelieving Moors have no
claim on her grace. He is pained; for the lovely qualities he has
heard attributed to this gracious being had drawn his heart to her as
to one well fitted to be a dispenser of the bounties of Heaven. But it
does not appear that she is consistent even in the protection of
Christians; for he hears it mentioned as an auspicious augury, that
the English king effected his landing in the Christian kingdom of
France on the eve of her chosen day; and later, when the Battle of
Agincourt fills England with rejoicing, he hears the circumstance
again referred to, and the Merciful Lady invoked as a benefactress.

He is daily more and more perplexed in regard to the religion of the
Christians. He obtains instruction of an English priest, and finds he
has made no mistake as to its tenets: it is understood to teach
universal love and ready forgiveness in England as in Portugal. Yet he
observes that nothing is considered more shameful among Christians
than to pardon an injury; even the smallest affront is to be atoned by
blood; and so far from the estimation in which a man is held depending
on the good he has done, he is the greatest man who has slain the
greatest number of his fellow-creatures.

As he stands one day before a cathedral, marvelling how people so
selfish and narrow in their religious views could imagine this grand
temple, which seems, indeed, raised to the Universal Father, his
attention is drawn to a man of noble aspect, who is observing him with
a look so kind and pitiful that he is emboldened to give the
confidence which it seems to invite.

"I cannot understand the religion of the Christians!"

"The time will come when they will understand it better themselves.
They are now like little children, who do, indeed, reverence the words
of their father, but have not yet understanding to comprehend and
follow them."

The Mandingo has no time to thank his new instructor. A party of
ruffians, who have been for some moments watching the venerable man,
now seize upon him, put irons on his hands and feet, and drag him
away, amid the shouts and cries of the people, who crowd round, some
insulting the prisoner, others bemoaning his fate, others asking his
blessing as he passes. The wondering traveller can get no other reply
to his questions than, "A Lollard! a Lollard!" uttered in different
tones of disgust or compassion.

He learns, upon inquiry, that the Lollards are people who hold
opinions disagreeable to the king and to the great generally. For they
pretend to understand the doctrines of the Christian religion after a
manner of their own; and it is thought this interpretation, if
disseminated among the common people, would cause serious
inconvenience to their superiors. In order to prevent the spread of
these dangerous doctrines, open and notorious professors of them are
shut up in prison. Yet, notwithstanding the severities which await the
adherents of this sect, such is the hard-heartedness of its leaders,
that, when they can manage to elude justice for a time, they use
unceasing efforts to persuade others to their ruin. There are among
them some men of eloquence, and their success in making converts has
been so great that the prisons are filled with men of the better
condition, who look for no other release than death; while, in the
dungeons below them, people of the common sort are heaped upon each
other, perishing miserably of fevers engendered by damp and hunger.

In spite of this unfavorable account of the Lollards, the African is
glad when he hears that the only one of them he knows anything about
has escaped from prison,--for the second or third time, it seems.

The words of the fugitive have sunk deep into the heart of the
Mandingo. But the distant hope, that the Christians may in time grow
up to their religion, cannot revive the delight which, when he first
became acquainted with its doctrines, he felt in the thought that this
divine revelation was to be carried to Africa. What teachers are those
who themselves know not what they teach! His heart is heavy, when he
sees how the Christians triumph over the fall of Ceuta. Their foot
once set on African soil, their imagination embraces the whole
continent. He sees the eyes of the narrators and the listeners
alternately gleam and darken with cupidity and envy over the story of
the successful assault, and of the immense booty won by the victors,
who "seem to have gathered in a single city the spoil of the
universe." He is not reassured by the admiration bestowed on the craft
of the Portuguese, who contrived to keep their intended prey lulled in
a false security until they were ready to fall upon it. They sent out
two galleys, splendidly equipped and decorated, to convey a pretended
embassy to another place. The envoys, according to private
instructions, stopped on the way at Ceuta, as if for rest and
refreshment, and, while receiving its hospitality, found opportunity
to examine its defences and spy out its weak points. The King of
Portugal himself, arriving near the devoted place with the fleet that
brought its ruin, deigned to accept civilities and kind offices from
the Infidels, in order the better to conceal his designs until the
moment came for disclosing them with effect. The Mandingo recalls with
less pleasure than heretofore the kind words of the Infant Henry and
his brother. When he hears that the terrible first Alphonso of
Portugal has made himself visible in a church at Coimbra, urging his
descendants to follow up their successes, he shudders with foreboding.

We will not follow our explorer through all his voyages and
experiences. They are numerous and wide. He carries his investigations
even to the far North, where Eric of Pomerania wears the triple crown,
placed on his head by the great Margaret. His wife is Philippa of
England, niece and namesake of the mother of Henry of Portugal. It is,
in part, interest in the family of that prince, his first intimate
acquaintance in Europe, which leads the African on this distant
journey. But he soon finds that neither pleasure nor profit is to be
had in the dominions of Eric, an untamed savage, who beats his wife
and ruins his subjects. The great men who rule under him are as bad as
himself. Some of them have been noted sea-robbers; even the prelates
are not ashamed to increase their revenues by the proceeds of piracy.
The traveller gives but a glance to the miseries of Sweden, where the
people are perishing under Eric's officials, who extort tribute from
them by the most frightful tortures, and where women, yoked together,
are drawing loaded carts, like oxen.

He returns to England, where he finds preparations making for a solemn
sacrifice. He hears, not without emotion, that the victim selected for
this occasion is the stately man who once stood with him in front of
the great cathedral. He visits the place chosen for the celebration,
and sees the pile of wood prepared to feed the fire, over which the
victim is to be suspended by an iron chain. He cannot bring himself to
witness the sacrifice, but he afterwards hears that it was performed
with great pomp in the presence of many illustrious persons. The king
himself, it seems, once superintended a similar ceremony in the
lifetime of his father, by whom this species of sacrifice had been
reinstituted after a very long disuse. It is customary to choose the
victim from among the Lollards, as it is thought that the chance of
serving on these occasions will contribute to deter people from
adopting, or at least from proclaiming, the unsafe opinions of that
sect.

The African traveller's last visit is to France. He made an earlier
attempt to see that country, but, finding it ravaged by invasion and
by civil war, deferred his design to a quieter time. Such a time does
not arrive; but he cannot leave one of the most important countries of
Europe unseen. On landing in France, he finds the condition of things
even worse than he had anticipated. But he resolves to penetrate to
Paris, in spite of the dangers of the road. He passes through
desolated regions, where only the smoke rising from black heaps gives
sign of former villages, and where the remaining trees, serving as
gibbets, still bear the trophies of the reciprocal justice which the
nobles and gentlemen of the country have been executing on each other.

It is on this journey through France that the Mandingo learns to be
truly grateful for having been born in a civilized country. The
unfortunate land in which he now finds himself has at its head a young
prince who has robbed his own mother and sent her to prison. Such
impious guilt cannot, the African feels, fail to draw down the
vengeance of Heaven. Accordingly, when he reaches the capital, he
finds the inhabitants engaged in an indiscriminate slaughter of their
friends and neighbors. It almost seems to a stranger that the city is
built on red clay, so soaked are the principal streets with blood.
The traveller meets no one sane enough to give an explanation of this
state of things. Nor does he require one. It is plain that this people
is afflicted with a judicial madness, sent upon it for the crimes of
its chiefs. He finds his way to a street where the work seems
completed. All is quiet here, except where some wretch still struggles
with his last agony, or where one not yet wounded to death is dragging
himself stealthily along the ground towards some covert where he may
perhaps live through to a safer time. The stranger stoops
compassionately to a child that lies on its dead father; but, as he
raises it, he feels that the heaviness is not that of sleep, and lays
it back on the breast where it belongs. In a neighboring quarter the
work is still at its highest. Where he stands, he hears the yell of
fury, the sharp cry of terror, the burst of discordant laughter, rise
above the clang of weapons and the clamor of threatening and
remonstrance; while, under all, the roar of a great city in movement
deepens with curse and prayer and groan. And now a woman rushes from a
side-street, looks wildly round for refuge, then runs, shrieking, on,
until, stumbling over the dead bodies in her way, she is overtaken and
silenced forever.

He has made his way out of France, and is planning new journeys, when
he receives, through some travelling merchants, a peremptory summons
from his father, who has heard such accounts of the barbarous state of
Europe that he regrets having given him leave to go out on this
dangerous exploring expedition.

Our Mandingo did not meet the tragic fate of Bemoy, to whom the
friendship of the whites proved fatal. He returned in safety to his
country.

The house of the renowned traveller became a centre of attraction. The
first question asked by his guests was, invariably, whether, in his
long residence among the Christians, he had learned to prefer their
manners to those of his own people. He was happy to be able to assure
them that this was not the case. He had met in Europe, he said, some
admirable men, and he thought the people there, in general, quite as
intelligent as those of his own country, but far less amiable; they
were, perhaps, even more energetic, especially the Portuguese and
English; but he was obliged to add, that their energies were not as
constantly employed in the service of mankind as their professions
gave reason to expect. What he had found very displeasing in the
manners of the Europeans was their disregard of cleanliness. Their
negligence in this respect was a thing inconceivable to an African who
had not lived among them.

He was much embarrassed, when called upon to speak of the religion of
the Europeans and their mode of professing it. His audience was
indignant at the hypocrisy of the Christians. But he was of opinion
that their enthusiasm for their creed and their zeal for its
propagation were undoubtedly genuine. Why, then, did they allow it no
influence on their conduct? He could only conclude that they knew it
to be too good for them, and that, though they found it, for this
reason, of no use at all to themselves, they were perfectly sincere in
thinking it an excellent religion for other people.

The result of his observations on the Christian nations was, that
their genius especially displayed itself in the art of war, in which
they had already attained to great eminence, and yet were intent on
new inventions. Indeed, he gave it as his unqualified opinion, that
the European had a great natural superiority over the African in
everything which concerns the science of destruction.

The Mandingo had news, from time to time, through the travelling
merchants, of what was going on in the North. He heard, in this way,
of the captivity and miserable end of the Infant Ferdinand, of the
accession of a fifth Alphonso, and of the revival of the bloody
dissensions of the royal house of Portugal. He waited long for tidings
of Henry's expeditions, although the year of his own return from
Europe was the same in which John Gonçalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz set
off on the search for Guinea. But the looked-for news came at last, to
bring with it a revival of his old foreboding.

       *       *       *       *       *

You must allow that I have been tender of Europe. I might have
introduced our traveller to it at a worse moment. Instead of going to
England in the time of a chivalrous, popular prince, like Henry the
Fifth, he might have seen it under Richard the Third; or I might have
taken him there to assist at the decapitation of some of the eighth
Henry's wives, or at a goodly number of the meaner executions, which
went on, they say, at the rate of one to every five hours through that
king's extended reign. Instead of making him report that human
burnt-offerings, though not unknown in England, were infrequent, and
that only a single victim was immolated on each occasion, I might have
let him collect his statistics on this subject in the time of the
bloody Mary. I am not sure that he could have seen France to much less
advantage than in the days of the Bourgignon and Armagnac factions;
but perhaps he would not have formed a very different judgment, if,
going there a century and a half later, he had happened on the
Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

The African traveller sometimes a little misapprehended what he saw,
no doubt; but he noted nothing in malice. If he did not see our
English ancestors precisely with their own eyes or with ours, at least
he did not fall into the monstrous mistakes of the Greek historian
Chalcondyles, of whose statements in regard to English manners Gibbon
says,--"His credulity and injustice may teach an important lesson: to
distrust accounts of foreign and remote nations, and to suspend our
belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of Nature and the
character of man."



                                     SUNDAY MORNING, April 14, 1844.


Yesterday was the day my journal should have gone; and my delay has
not the usual excuse, for here was already a heavy budget. It is my
love of completeness which has detained it. Next Saturday I can send
you, together with the account of Harry's arrival and visit here, that
of our leave-taking at Omocqua. You will thus have this little episode
in my life entire.

The solicitude we had felt beforehand about Dr. Borrow's entertainment
was thrown away. He has his particularities certainly, but we soon
learned to accommodate ourselves to them. Harry, with perfect
simplicity and directness, all along as on the first day, kept us
informed of the Doctor's tastes and warned us of his antipathies, so
that we had no difficulty in providing for his general comfort. As to
his little humors and asperities, we accepted them, in the same way
that Harry does, as belonging to the man, and never thought of asking
ourselves whether we should like him better without them. One thing I
will say for the Doctor: if, when he feels annoyance, he makes no
secret of it, on the other hand, you can be sure that he is pleased
when he appears to be,--and this is a great satisfaction. He is not
inconsiderate of the weaknesses of others, either. I do not know how
he divined that I disliked his blue glasses, but after the second day
they disappeared. He said our pure air enabled him to do without them.
Then the umbrella,--it attended us on the Saturday's walk. I supposed
it was to be our inevitable companion. But on Sunday it came only as
far as the door; here the Doctor stopped, held it up before him,
considered, doubted, and set it down inside. Harry carried it
up-stairs in the evening. I expected to see it come down again the
next morning,--but it had no part in our pleasant Monday rambles. I
had not said a word against the umbrella.

The engagement I made with Harry that Monday afternoon had Dr.
Borrow's concurrence. He even expressed a willingness to assist at our
readings. The order of our day was this:--In the early morning we had
our walk,--Harry and I. Coming back, we always went round by Keith's
Pine. We were sure to find the Doctor seated on the bench, which had
been left there since the last Sunday, microscope in hand and
flower-press beside him. Then all to the house, where we arrived with
an exactitude which caused the Doctor, whose first glance on entering
was at the clock, to seat himself at the table in a glow of
self-approval sufficient to warm all present into a little innocent
elation. After breakfast we separated,--Harry walking off to take my
place with Karl and Fritz, the Doctor going to his flowers, and I to
my writing. We all met again at an appointed time and place for an
excursion together. We carried our dinner with us; or, if we were not
going very far, had it left at some pleasant spot, where we found it
on our way home. After dinner I read, and then we had an hour or so of
discussion and criticism.

I have given you the readings of two days. I shall try to copy the
rest for you in the course of the week. Copying is work; I cannot do
any this morning; and then I have still other things remaining to me
from those days which I have not yet shared with you.

On Tuesday, the ninth, the first day of the new arrangement, Harry
went away as soon as breakfast was over. The Doctor rose, as if going
to his room, hesitated, and sat down again. I saw that he had
something to say to me, and waited. My thoughts went back to the
conversation of the afternoon before. Had I really displeased him? He
spoke seriously, but very kindly.

"Harry has no need of incitement in the direction of"----

He stopped, as if for a word which should be true at once to his pride
and his disapprobation. He did not find it, and began over again:--

"It is the office of friendship to restrain even from generous error.
It is possible to err on the side of too great disinterestedness. A
man such as Harry will be, while living for himself,--living nobly and
wisely as he must live,--is living for others; he has no need to
become a crusader."

"Harry will be what he was meant to be; you would not have him force
himself to become anything else?"

"No, I would not," the Doctor answered confidently, yet with a little
sadness in his voice. "It almost seems," he added, a moment after,
"that the qualities which fit a man for a higher sphere are
incompatible with his success in this."

"Not, perhaps, with what Harry would call success."

"I am ambitious for him; I own it. And so are you, though you do not
own it. You want to see him recognized for what he is."

Certainly it is natural to wish that others should love what we love,
should admire what we admire. Our desire of sympathy, our regard for
justice, both ask it. But we must have trust.

      "Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
      Nor in the glistering foil
      Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies;
      But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
      And perfect witness of all-judging Jove."

I could not answer the Doctor immediately. "Whatever course Harry may
take," I said at last, "his power will make itself felt. He will
disappoint neither of us."

"He has never given me a disappointment yet; though I prepare myself
for one, whenever he begins anything new. We have no right to expect
everything of one; but, whatever he is doing, it seems as if that was
what he was most meant to do."

"It is in part his simple-mindedness, his freedom from the disturbing
influence of self-love, which gives him this security of success in
what he undertakes. You have said that Harry was one to take his own
path. I will trust him to find it and hold to it."

"I must come to that," answered the Doctor, whose anxiety had
gradually dissipated itself. "I don't know why I should hope to guide
him now, if I could not when he was seven years old. On the infantile
scale his characteristics were then just what they are now, and one of
them certainly always was to have a way of his own.

      "'The hero's blood is not to be controlled;
      In childhood even 'tis manly masterful.'

"And yet he was always so tender of others' feelings, so ready to give
up his pleasure for theirs, you might almost have thought him of too
yielding a nature, unless you had seen him tried on some point where
he found it worth while to be resolved."

The Doctor sat silent a little while, held by pleasant thoughts, and
then began again:--

"There comes back to me now an earlier recollection of him than any I
have given you. I witnessed once a contest of will between him and a
person who was put over the nursery for a time in the absence of its
regular head, and who was not thoroughly versed in the laws and
customs of the realm she was to administer. Harry could not have been
much more than two, I think, for he had hardly yet English enough for
his little needs. He was inflexible on his side; the poor woman at
first positive and then plaintive. She had recourse to the usually
unfailing appeal,--'But, Harry, do you not want me to love you?' He
held back the tears that were pressing to his eyes,--'I want all the
peoples to love me.' But he did not give way, for he was in the right.

"Candor, however, obliges me to add that he did not always give way
when he was in the wrong. Oh, I _was_ in the right sometimes."--The
Doctor laughed good-humoredly in answer to my involuntary smile.--"You
may believe it, for Harry has admitted it himself later. Our debates
were not always fruitless. I have known him come to me, three months,
six months, after a discussion in which we had taken opposite sides,
and say,--'I see now that you knew better about that than I did. I was
mistaken.' On the other hand, some of his little sayings have worked
on me with time, if not to the modification of my opinions, at least
to that of my conduct, and sometimes in a way surprising to myself.
For the rest, I liked to have him hold his ground well, and was just
as content, when he did make a concession, that it was made out of
deference, not to me, but to truth.

"I don't know whose opinion was authority with him. He did not respect
even the wisdom of the world's ages as condensed in its proverbs, but
coolly subjected them to the test of his uncompromising reason. I
remember somebody's citing to him one day, 'A penny saved is a penny
earned.' He considered it, and then rejected it decisively, proposing
as a substitute,--'A penny spent is a penny saved.' I suppose that
little word of his has spent me many a penny I might have saved,--but
I don't know that I am the poorer.

"Another of his childish sayings passed into a by-word in the
household. He was filling with apples for her grandchildren the tin
kettle of an old family pensioner, whose eyes counted the rich, red
spoil, as it rolled in. 'Enough!' says the conscientious gardener, who
is looking on. 'Enough!' echoes the modest beneficiary. '_Enough is
not enough!_' gives sentence the little autocrat, and heaps the
measure. I thought of this as he was walking beside me, grave and
silent, over Harvey's well-ordered plantation. 'The child is father of
the man.'"

The time was past when the Doctor had scruples in talking of Harry or
I in asking. He forgot his flowers, and I my writing. Nothing more
interesting to me than real stories of childhood. As a means of
instruction, it seems to me the study of the early years of the human
being has been strangely neglected by the wise. I listened well, then,
whenever, after one of his contemplative pauses, the Doctor began
again with a new "I remember."

"I remember being in the garden with him once when a barefooted boy
came in and asked for shoes. Harry ran off, and presently reappeared
with a fine, shining pair, evidently taken on his own judgment. A
woman, who had been looking from the window, came hurrying out, and
arrived in time to see the shoes walking out of the gate on strange
feet. 'Why, Harry, those were perfectly good shoes!' 'I should not
have given them to him, if they had not been good,' the child
answered, tranquilly. The poor woman was posed. As for me, I ignored
the whole affair, that I might not be obliged to commit myself. But I
thought internally that we should not have had the saying, 'Cold as
charity,' current in our Christian world, if all its neighborly love
had been of the type of Harry's.

"You are not to suppose that Harry and I were always at variance. Our
skirmishing was our amusement. He was teachable, very teachable,--and
more and more as he grew older. Some of the happiest hours I have to
look back upon were passed with him by my side, his reverent and
earnest look showing how devoutly, with what serious joy, his young
soul welcomed its first conscious perceptions of the laws of Nature,
the sacred truths of Science."


                                                   BY THE RIVERSIDE.

The morning called me out imperatively. It is almost like that Sunday
morning on which I took my first early walk with Harry. I fell into
the same path we followed then. This path led us to the Dohuta. We
walked slowly along its fringed bank, as I have been walking along it
now, and stopped here where the river makes a little bend round a just
perceptible rising graced by three ilex-trees. We found ourselves here
more than once afterwards. We never thought beforehand what way we
should take; we could not go amiss, where we went together.

The river holds its calm flow as when Harry was beside it with me.
Here are the trees whose vigorous growth he praised, their thorny
foliage glittering in the new sunlight as it glittered then. These
associates of that pleasant time, renewing their impressions, awaken
more and more vividly those of the dearer companionship.

It is strange the faithfulness with which the seemingly indifferent
objects about us keep for us the record of hours that they have
witnessed, rendering up our own past to us in a completeness in which
our memory would not have reproduced it but for the suggestions of
these unchosen confidants. Without displacing the familiar scene,
distant and far other landscapes rise before me, visions that Harry
Dudley called up for me here; to all the clear, fresh sounds of the
early morning join themselves again our asking and replying voices.

I knew at once when a place had a particular interest for Harry, by
the tone in which he pronounced the name. Fiesole was always a
beautiful word for me, but how beautiful now that I must hear in it
his affectionate accent! Volterra has a charm which it does not owe to
its dim antiquity, or owes to it as revivified by him. His strong
sympathy, embracing the remoter and the near, makes the past as actual
to him as the present, and both alike poetic.

Harry's researches have not been carried on as a pastime, or even as a
pursuit, but as a true study, a part of his preparation for a
serviceable life. It is the history of humanity that he explores, and
he reads it more willingly in its achievements than in its failures.
The remains of the early art of Etruria, its grand works of utility,
give evidence of the immemorial existence of a true civilization upon
that favored soil, the Italy of Italy.

Among the retributions of time--as just in its compensations as in its
revenges--there is hardly one more remarkable than this which is
rendering justice to the old Etruscans, awakening the world to a long
unacknowledged debt. Their annals have been destroyed, their
literature has perished, their very language has passed away; but
their life wrote itself on the country for whose health, fertility,
and beauty they invented and labored,--wrote itself in characters so
strong that the wear of the long ages has not effaced them. This
original civilization has never been expelled from the scene of its
ancient reign. Through all changes, under all oppressions, amid all
violences, it has held itself in life,--has found means to assert and
reassert its beneficent rights. Its very enemies have owed to it that
they have been able to blend with their false glory some share of a
more honorable fame. In its early seats it has never left itself long
without a witness; but still some new gift to the world, in letters,
in art, or in science, has given proof of its yet unexhausted
resources.

As freedom is older than despotism, so civilization is older than
barbarism. Man, made in the image of God, was made loving, loyal,
beneficently creative.

No country except his own is nearer to Harry's heart than Italy,--not
even France, though it is almost a second home to him; but perhaps
there cannot be that passion in our love for the prosperous. For me,
too, Italy has always stood alone;--sacred in her triple royalty of
beauty, genius, and sorrow.

Harry has ties of his own to Italy, and of those which endear most
closely. It was the scene of his first great grief,--as yet his only
one. The firm, devout expression which his face took, whenever he
spoke of his brother, showed that the early departure of the friend
with whom he had hoped to walk hand in hand through life had not
saddened or discouraged him,--had only left with him a sense of double
obligation.

Harry does not speak of himself uninvited; but he was ready to do so,
as simply and frankly as of anything else, when I drew him to it. He
has his day-dreams like other young men, and found a true youthful
delight in sharing them. I could not but observe that into his plans
for the future--apart from the little home, vaguely, yet tenderly
sketched, for which a place was supposed in them--his own advantage
entered only inasmuch as they provided him a sphere of beneficent
activity.

The one great duty of our time may oblige him to postpone all designs
which have not its fulfilment for their immediate object. But only to
postpone, I will hope. For why should we suppose that the struggle
with slavery is to last through the life of the present generation?
May we not believe that the time may come, even in our day, when we
shall only have to build and to plant, no longer to overthrow and
uproot?

       *       *       *       *       *

Karl and Fritz have found me out here. They came to propose to me that
we should have our service this morning in the open air, at the same
place where we had it Sunday before last. They had already been at the
house, and had obtained my mother's assent. Karl was the spokesman, as
usual; but he stopped at the end of every sentence and looked for his
brother's concurrence.

I have remarked a change in Karl lately. He has the advantage of
Fritz, not only in years, but in capacity and energy. He has always
been a good brother; but his superiority has been fully taken for
granted between them, and all its rights asserted and admitted without
a struggle. Within a short time, however, his character has matured
rapidly. He has shown greater consideration for Fritz, and in general
more sympathy with what is weaker or softer or humbler than himself. I
had observed a greater thoughtfulness in him before Harry Dudley's
visit here. But that short intercourse has extended his view in many
directions. The entire absence of assumption, where there was so
incontestable a superiority, could not but affect him profoundly. And
then Harry, although Karl's strength and cleverness made him a very
satisfactory work-fellow, took a great interest in Fritz, in whom he
discovered fine perceptions. He tried to draw him out of his reserve,
and to give him pleasure by making him feel he could contribute to
that of others. Some latent talents, which the shy boy had cultivated
unnoticed, brought him into a new importance. He knows the habits of
all our birds, and has a marvellous familiarity with insects. His
observations on their modes of life had been so exact, that Doctor
Borrow, in questioning him, had almost a tone of deference. He was
able to render signal service to the Doctor, too, by discovering for
him, from description, tiny plants hard to find when out of bloom.
Hans, who is fondest of the son that never rivalled him, exulted
greatly in this sudden distinction. Karl took a generous pleasure in
it; and, under the double influence of increased respect from without
and enhanced self-esteem, Fritz's diffident powers are warming out
wonderfully.

The boys thanked me very gratefully, as if I had done them a real
favor, when I gave my consent to their plan; though I do not know why
they should not suppose it as agreeable to me as to themselves.


                                                            EVENING.

When I went home to breakfast this morning, I found the chairs already
gone, except the great arm-chair. Nobody was expected to-day of
sufficient dignity to occupy it. I was unwilling to draw it up to the
table for myself. I believe I should have taken my breakfast standing,
if it had not been that this would have called for explanation. How
little I thought, when the Doctor first took his place among us, that
a time would come when I should not wish to have his seat filled by
any one else! I did not know how much I cared for him, until after he
was gone; I do not think I knew it fully until this morning, when I
came in and saw that solitary, empty chair. Then it came over me with
a pang that he would never lay down the law to me from it
again,--never would lean towards me sideways over its arm, to tell me,
with moderated tone and softened look, little childish stories of his
foster-son.

Karl stayed behind to-day, instead of Tabitha, to warn those who
arrived of the place of meeting. He came in with the Lintons, who were
late,--the fault of their poor old mule, or rather his misfortune. He
fell down, and so broke and otherwise deranged his ingenious harness
that the family were obliged to re-manufacture it on the road.

My mother did a courageous thing this morning. When the Hanthams came,
she addressed them by name, and, calling the daughter up to her, took
her hand and said some kind words to her. I thought they would be
thrown away on her, but they were not. Her look to-day had in it less
of purpose and more of sympathy. The Blantys were not here. I cannot
understand why, in such fine weather. We missed them very much. But
all the rest of those who are most to be desired came. We had a happy
and united little assemblage.

I read Jeremy Taylor's second sermon on the "Return of Prayers." I am
sure that we all heard and felt together, and were left with softened
and more trustful hearts; yet doubtless each took away his own
peculiar lesson or solace, according to his separate need. What has
remained with me is a quickened sense of the Divine munificence, which
so often grants us more and better than we pray for. "We beg for a
removal of a present sadness, and God gives us that which makes us
able to bear twenty sadnesses."

After the services were over, Franket came up and handed me a
letter,--a most unexpected and a most welcome one. If I had not seen
Harry's writing before, I think I should have known his strong, frank
hand. I held the letter up before my mother, and her face brightened
with recognition. Harry writes in fine spirits. The Doctor has been
very successful. And they met Shaler again. "Perhaps he will be one of
us on the nineteenth." That is good news indeed. Altogether this has
been a very happy Sunday.

Davis Barton stayed with us until four o'clock, and then I rode part
of the way home with him. This boy is becoming of importance to me; he
is bringing a new interest into my life. This morning, after I had
read Harry's letter aloud, and after my mother had read it over again
to herself, I gave it to him to read. His eyes sparkled, and he cast
up to me a quick glance of gratitude; for he felt, as I meant he
should, that this was a mode of admitting him to full fellowship. I
saw, as he walked off before us to the house, that he was a little
taller already with the sense of it. Just before we arrived, however,
he was overtaken by a sudden humiliation. Looking round at me, who,
with Fritz, was carrying my mother's couch, the poor child espied Karl
and Tabitha following, both loaded with chairs. He stood for an
instant thoroughly shame-stricken, and then darted by us without
lifting his eyes. He made so many and such rapid journeys, that he
brought back more chairs than anybody, after all. When dinner was
over, I gave Davis some engravings to look at, meaning to spend an
hour in writing to you. I had taken out my portfolio, but had not yet
begun to write, when I found him standing beside me, looking up at me
with a pretty, blushing smile, which asked me to ask him what he
wanted. He wanted me to teach him.--"What do you want to
learn?"--"Whatever I ought to know."--Whatever I am able to teach,
then, I will teach him, and perhaps more; for, in thinking out what he
ought to know, I shall discover what I ought to know myself. It was
soon settled. He is to come over three times a week, very early in the
morning. I shall give him an hour before breakfast, and another in the
course of the day. I shall have an opportunity of testing some of the
theories I have talked over with Harry. Davis has a good mother, and
has been pretty well taught, and, what is more important, very well
trained, up to this time. I am looking forward to a busier and more
useful summer than I have known for a long while.



                                             MONDAY, April 15, 1844.


"When are we going to see the Shaler plantation?" the Doctor asked me
abruptly one morning at breakfast. "We passed it by on our way here,
knowing that we should have more pleasure in going over it with you."

I had been over it only once since Shaler left it, and that once was
with himself on one of his rare visits. Franket's house is near the
great gates. It was a porter's lodge in the old time, and is now a
sort of post-office,--Franket having added to his other avocations the
charge of going once a week to Tenpinville with letters intrusted to
him, and bringing back those he is empowered to receive. When I go
there to ask for letters or to leave them, no old associations are
roused, for I did not use the main entrance formerly. I had a key to a
little gate which opens on a bridle-path through the oak-wood. I
entered the grounds through this gate when I was last there with
Shaler, and I had pleased myself with the thought, that, when I
entered them by it again, it would be again with him, on that happy
return to which he is always looking forward.

But it seemed no violation of my compact with myself to unlock this
gate for Harry, to walk with him through these grounds sacred to him
as to me; for I knew that in his thought, as in mine, these untenanted
lands were not so much deserted as dedicated. It was right that these
places should know him. And what pleasure hereafter to talk of him as
having been there,--to point out to Shaler the trees he had
distinguished, the views that had delighted him! But I wished this
visit to be the last we should make together. My delay in proposing it
had, perhaps, made Harry attribute to me a secret reluctance. After
the first eager expression of his desire to see the early home of his
friend and mine, when we talked of Shaler together that pleasant
afternoon on Prospect Hill, he did not mention the subject again. The
Doctor did not second him then; but I knew he felt as much curiosity
as Harry did interest, before his impatience broke bounds as I have
told you.

"Let us go on Thursday, if you will," I answered.

Harry understood me.--"The right day!"

"Any day is the right one for me," said the Doctor, who would have
named an earlier one, perhaps, if I had asked him to choose.

On Thursday, then, the last day but one of their visit here, I was
their guide over "The Farms."

Two brothers settled at Metapora side by side. Their two plantations
were carried on as one, under the direction of the younger brother,
Colonel Shaler, the father of my friend. The brothers talked together
of "The Farms"; their people took up the name; it gradually became the
accepted one in the neighborhood, and has maintained itself, although
the two places, having both been inherited by Charles Shaler, are now
really one estate.

I opened the little gate for the Doctor and Harry to pass in, and
followed them along the wood-path. All was the same as formerly;
unkindly the same, it seemed.

"You have not been missed," said the Doctor, entering into my feeling,
though not quite sympathizing with it. "You have not been missed, and
you are not recognized. The birds are not jubilant because you have
come back. The wood was as resonant before your key turned in the
lock." He stopped and looked about him at the grand old oaks. "The man
who grew up under these trees, and calls them his, may well long for
them, but they will wait very patiently for his return. We could not
spare trees and birds, but they can do without us well enough. Strange
the place of man on his earth! Everything is necessary to him, and he
is necessary to nothing."

Shaler had left the key of his house with me. There could be no
indiscretion in introducing such guests into it. We went first into
the dining-room. Everything was as it used to be, except that the
family portraits had been taken away. The cords to which they had been
attached still hung from the hooks, ready to receive them again. The
large oval table kept its place in the middle of the room. What
pleasant hours I had had in that room, at that table!

Colonel Shaler was our first friend in this part of the world. My
father and he were distantly related, and had had a week's
acquaintance at the house of a common friend when my father was a very
young man and the Colonel a middle-aged one. On the third day after
our arrival here, my father somewhat nervously put into my hand a note
which had taken some time to write, and asked me to find the way with
it to Colonel Shaler's plantation, which lay somewhere within ten
miles of us in a southeasterly direction. As I was to go on horseback,
I liked the adventure very much, and undertook it heartily. I was
first made conscious that it had a shady side, when I found myself in
the hall of the great, strange house, waiting to be ushered into the
presence of its master.

"Hallo!" exclaimed a voice beside and far above me, as I stood with
eyes fixed on the ground, expecting that serious moment of entrance.
"You are Ned Colvil's son!" And my hand was lost in a capacious
clasp, well proportioned to the heart it spoke for. I looked up to see
a massive head, shaggy with crisp curls of grizzled hair, and to meet
quick, bright blue eyes, that told of an active spirit animating the
heavy frame. The Colonel did not expect me to speak. "We are to be
neighbors! Good news! Your horse cannot go back at once, and I cannot
wait. You must take another for to-day, and we will send yours home to
you to-morrow."

Colonel Shaler's stout gray was soon led round, and presently
followed, for me, a light-made, graceful black, the prettiest horse I
had ever yet mounted. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it must be his
son's, and visions of friendship already floated before me.

"One of Charles's," said the Colonel; "he is out on the other. I wish
he was here to go with us, but we cannot wait."

I did not keep the Doctor and Harry long in the house. It was the
plantation they wanted to see. We spent several hours in walking over
it. I tried to do justice, not only to the plans and works of my
friend, but to his father's schemes of agricultural improvement, and
also to the very different labors of his uncle, Dr. George Shaler,
who, utterly abstracted from matters of immediate utility, took the
beautiful and the future under his affectionate protection. Through
his vigilance and pertinacity, trees were felled, spared, and
planted, with a judgment rare anywhere, singular here. If he gave into
some follies, such as grottos, mimic ruins, and surprises, after the
Italian fashion, even these are becoming respectable through time.
They are very innocent monuments; for their construction gave as much
delight to those who labored as to him who planned, and the completed
work was not less their pride than his. His artificial mounds, which,
while they were piling, were the jest of the wider neighborhood,--as
the good old man himself has often told me,--now, covered with thrifty
trees, skilfully set, are a legacy which it was, perhaps, worth the
devotion of his modest, earnest life to bequeath.

Charles Shaler has piously spared all his uncle's works,--respecting
the whimsical, as well as cherishing the excellent.

We went last to the quarters of the work-people. A few of the cabins
were left standing. Most of them had been carried off piecemeal,
probably to build or repair the cabins of other plantations. Those
that remained seemed to have been protected by the strength and beauty
of the vines in which they were embowered. I was glad to find still
unmolested one which had an interest for me. It had been the home of
an old man who used to be very kind to me. I lifted the latch and was
opening the door, when I became aware of a movement inside, as of
some one hastily and stealthily putting himself out of sight. If this
was so, the purpose was instantly changed; for a firm step came
forward, and the door was pulled open by a strong hand. I stepped back
out of the little porch, and addressed some words to the Doctor, to
make known that I was not alone; but the man followed me out, and
saluted me and my companions respectfully and frankly. I offered him
my hand, for he was an old acquaintance.

"Senator, why are you here?"

"Because I ought to be here."

"There is danger."

He did not reply, but the kindling of his look showed that he saw in
danger only a challenge to his powers. He saluted us again, and
walking away, with a slow, even step, disappeared in a thicket which
shrouded one of Dr. George's favorite grottos.

"The true Othello, after all!" exclaimed the Doctor, when we turned to
each other again, after watching until we were sure that we had seen
the last of this apparition. "Of royal siege, assuredly!"

"He claims to be, or rather it is claimed for him," I answered. "His
mother was a native African, a king's daughter, those who came with
her said; and she bore, by all accounts, the stamp of primitive
royalty as clearly impressed as her son does. Her title was never
questioned either in the cabin or at the great house. She was a slave
on the Westlake plantation,--but only for a few weeks, as I have
heard."

"Did you ever see her?" the Doctor asked.

"No, she died long ago; but her story is still told on the plantation
and in the neighborhood. Old Westlake bought her with four others, all
native Africans, at Perara. The rest throve and made themselves at
home. She, stately and still, endured until she had received her son
into the world, and then, having consigned him to a foster-mother of
her choice, passed tranquilly out of it. During her short abode on the
plantation, she was an object of general homage, and when she died,
the purple descended to her son."

"And the son has his story?" said the Doctor.

"A short one."

The Doctor and Harry both turned to me with expectation. They knew the
Westlake plantation and its master; but you do not. If Senator's story
has not the interest for you that it had for them, that must be the
reason.

The prestige of rank was the only inheritance of the little foreign
orphan. The very name his mother gave him, and which she impressed, by
frequent, though faint repetition, upon those about her, was lost in
the surprise of her sudden departure. The good souls to whom it had
been committed strove faithfully to recover it. They were sure it was
no proper Christian name, but a title of dignity; and, comparing their
recollections of the sound, and their intuitions of the meaning,
agreed among themselves that its nearest equivalent must be "Senator."

Senator was born on Christmas day; and this was regarded as all the
greater distinction that it had been enjoyed before him by the young
master,--the then heir and now owner, our present Westlake.

As he grew up, he took, as of course, and held, the place assigned to
him in advance. At the age of sixteen he was already in authority over
men, and exercised it with an ease and acceptance which proved that he
was obeyed as instinctively as he commanded.

I do not know a prouder man than Westlake, or one more saturated with
the prejudice of race. But he is not exempt from the laws which govern
human intercourse. He came under the spell of Senator's cool
self-reliance and unhesitating will. The petted slave did not directly
or palpably misuse his power; yet his demeanor occasioned a secret
dissatisfaction. He gave to his master's interests the whole force of
his remarkable abilities, but it was not clear that he duly
appreciated the indulgence which permitted him to exercise them
untrammelled. He had never undergone punishment,--had hardly even met
rebuke; but it was more than suspected that he attributed his
immunities to his own merits. Westlake valued him for his high spirit
as much as for his capacity; but should not Senator be very sensible
to such magnanimity? This spirit had never been broken by fear; ought
it not all the more to bend itself in love and gratitude?

Poor Westlake is very fond of gratitude. He enjoys it even from the
most worthless and neglected of his slaves,--enjoys it even when it is
prospective and conditional, and when he has the best reasons for
knowing that the implied stipulations are not to be fulfilled. To
Senator's gratitude he felt he had so entire a claim that he could not
but believe in its existence. He tried to see in its very silence only
a proof of its depth. But, if not necessary to his own feelings, some
outward expression was important to his dignity in the eyes of others.
He exerted himself, therefore, by gracious observations made in the
presence of guests or before the assembled people on holidays, to
afford Senator an opportunity at once of testifying to his master's
liberality and of displaying the eloquence which was one of the chief
glories of the plantation. These condescending efforts, constantly
baffled by the self-possessed barbarian, were perpetually renewed.

One Christmas morning the common flood of adulation had been poured
out more profusely than usual, and Westlake had quaffed it with more
than usual satisfaction. His outlay for the festival had been truly
liberal, and he felt that the quality of the entertainment guarantied
that of the thanks. Besides the general benevolence of the
dinner,--already arranged on long, low tables set about the lawn, to
be enjoyed in anticipation by their devouring eyes,--special gifts
were bestowed on the most deserving or the most favored. Senator was
greatly distinguished, but took his assigned portion in silence; and
Westlake felt, through every tingling nerve, that the attentive crowd
had seen, as he had, that it was received as a tribute rather than as
a favor. He had hitherto covered his defeats with the jolly laugh that
seemed meant at once to apologize for his servant's eccentricity and
to forgive it. But now he had made too sure of triumph; surprise and
pain hurried him out of himself.

"What is it now?" he cried, fiercely, raising his clenched fist
against the impassive offender.

"I have not spoken, Master."

"Speak, then! It is time. I have done more for you than for all the
rest, and not a word!"

"We have done more for you than you for us all. What you give us we
first give you."

It was as if a thunderbolt had fallen. The assembly scattered like a
flock of frightened sheep.

I had this from Westlake himself. He came straight over to me. Not
that Westlake and I are friends. There had never been any intimacy
between us. There never has been any, unless for those few hours that
day.

Senator had been secured. His sentence had been announced. It was
banishment. Those who were nearest the master's confidence had leave
to add the terrible name--New Orleans.

Senator had neither mother nor wife. He was nineteen, the age of
enterprise and confidence. Perhaps, after all, it was the master on
whom the doom would fall most heavily, I thought, while Westlake was
making his recital. He was almost pale; his heavy features were
sharpened; his firm, round cheeks were flaccid and sunken; his voice
was hoarse and tremulous. Surely, that birthday might count for ten.

"I cannot overlook it," he groaned out. "You know that yourself,
Colvil. I cannot forgive it. It would be against my duty, and---- Any
way, I cannot. But--you may think it strange--but I am not angry. I
was, but I am not now. I cannot bear to know him locked up there in
the corn-barn, shackled and chained, and thinking all the time that
it is I who have done it to him!"

Westlake had not seen the man since his imprisonment, and had come
over to ask me to be present at the first interview. I declined
positively.

"I do not believe," I said, "that he is to be reasoned out of his
opinions. Certainly he will not be reasoned out of them by me. If
anything could persuade a nature like his to submission, it would be
the indulgent course you have till now pursued with him. If that has
failed, no means within your reach will succeed."

"You do not understand me. I do not want you to reason with him, or to
persuade him to anything. I only ask you to be witness to what I am
going to say to him, that he may believe me,--that he may not himself
thwart me in my plans."

"In what plans?"

"Plans that you will agree to, and that you will help me in, I
hope,--but which I cannot trust to any one but you, nor to you except
to have your help. If you will come with me, you shall know them; if
not, I must take my chance, and he must take his."

I did not put much faith in Westlake's plans; but the thought of
Senator chained and caged drew me to his prison. There might be
nothing for me to do there; but, since I was called, I would go.

By the time my horse was saddled, Westlake had recovered his voice,
and, in part, his color. This birthday would not count for more than
five. He plucked up still more on the road; but when we came within a
mile of his place, his trouble began to work on him again. He would
have lengthened that last mile, but could not much. His horse snuffed
home, and mine a near hospitality. Our entrance sustained the master's
dignity handsomely. There was no misgiving or relenting to be
construed out of that spirited trot.

We went together to the corn-barn. Senator was extended on the floor
at the farther end of the room. He lifted his head when we entered,
and then, as if compelled by an instinctive courtesy, rose to his
fettered feet. I saw at once that there had been no more harshness
than was needful for security; it even seemed that this had not been
very anxiously provided for. The slender shackles would be no more
than withes of the Philistines to such a Samson. A chain, indeed,
fastened to a strong staple in the floor, passed to a ring in an iron
belt about his waist; but it was long enough to allow him considerable
liberty of movement. His hands were free. Perhaps Westlake had half
expected to find the room empty. He stopped, a little startled, when
he heard the first clank of the chain, and watched his prisoner as he
slowly lifted himself from the ground and rose to his full height.
Then, recollecting himself, he went forward. One ignorant of what had
gone before might have mistaken between the culprit and the judge.

"Senator," Westlake began, in a voice whose faltering he could not
control, "I have been a kind master to you."

No answer.

"You allow that?"

Senator was inflexible.

"I would never have sent you away of my own free will. This is your
doing, not mine. You cannot _want_ to go!" This in indignant
surprise,--for something like a smile had relaxed the features of the
imperious slave.

Senator spoke.

"This is my home, as it is yours. I was born here, as you were. This
land is dear to me as it is to you; dearer,--for I have given my labor
to it, and you never have. In return, I have had a support, and the
exercise of my strength and my skill. This has been enough for me
until now. But I am a man. I look round and see how other men live. I
want somebody else to do for: not you, but somebody that could not do
without me."

"Things might have gone differently," Westlake began, recovering his
self-complacency, as visions, doubtless, of the fine wedding he would
have given Senator, of the fine names he would have bestowed upon his
children, rose before his fancy. "Things might have gone differently,
if you had been"----

"If I had been what I am not," answered Senator, becoming impatient as
Westlake relapsed into pomposity. "It is enough, Master. We have done
with each other, and we both know it. Let me go."

"I will let you go,"--Westlake spoke now with real dignity,--"but not
as you think. If I would have you remember what I have been to you, it
is for your own sake, not for mine. I am used to ingratitude; I do not
complain of yours. I have never sold a servant left me by my father,
and I do not mean to begin with you. You shall not drive me to it. You
are to go, and forever, but by your own road. I will set you on it
myself. Is there any one in the neighborhood you can trust? We shall
need help."

A doubtful smile passed over Senator's face.

"There is no one, then? Think! no one?"

"I am not so unhappy. There are those whom I trust."

"Then I will trust them. Tell me who they are and where they are. And
quick! This news will be everywhere soon. To-morrow morning the
neighbors will be coming in. What is done must be done to-night.
Senator, do not ruin yourself! I mean right by you. Here is Mr.
Colvil to witness to what I say. Is this mad obstinacy only? or do you
_dare_ not to trust yourself to me?"

"I do not trust to you those who trust me."

"Do you suppose I would give up those whose aid I have asked?"

"You would know where to find them when they give aid you have not
asked."

"Colvil, speak to him! If he goes off by himself, I cannot hide it
long. The country will be roused. I shall have to hunt him down
myself. My honor will be at stake. I shall have to do it!"

The obdurate slave studied his master's features with curiosity
mingled with triumph.

"Help me, Colvil! Help him! Tell him to listen to my plan and join in
it! The useful time is passing!"

"Senator," I said at last, being so adjured, "your master means you
well. He is not free to set you free,--you know it. You have done work
for him,--good and faithful work; but never yet have you done him a
pleasure, and he has intended you a good many. This is your last
chance. Gratify him for once!"

Senator looked again, and saw, through the intent and wistful eyes,
the poor, imploring soul within, which, hurried unconsenting towards
crime, clung desperately to his rescue as its own. He comprehended
that here was no tyrant, but a wretched victim of tyranny. A laugh,
deep, reluctant, uncontrollable, no mirth in it, yet a certain bitter
irony, and Senator had recovered his natural bearing, self-possessed
and authoritative; he spoke in his own voice of composed decision.

"What is the plan, Master?"

Westlake told it eagerly. He was to save his authority with his people
and his reputation with his neighbors by selling the rebellious
servant,--that is to say, by pretending to sell him. Senator was to
entitle himself to a commutation of his sentence into simple
banishment by lending himself to the pious fraud and acting his part
in it becomingly. Westlake had been so long accustomed to smooth his
path of life by open subterfuges and falsehoods whose only guilt was
in intention, that he had formed a very high opinion of his own
address, and a very low one of the penetration of the rest of the
world. As he proceeded with the details of his plot, childishly
ingenious and childishly transparent, Senator listened, at first with
attention, then with impatience, and at last not at all. When Westlake
stopped to take breath, he interposed.

"Now hear me. Order the long wagon out, with the roans. Have me
handcuffed and fastened down in it. Tell those whom you trust that you
are taking me to Goosefield."

"To Goosefield?"

"To Dick Norman."

"Dick Norman! He help you! He is not an ----?"

Westlake could not bring himself to associate the word abolitionist
with a man who had dined with him three days before.

"He is a slave-trader."

The blood, which had rushed furiously to the proud planter's cheeks,
left them with a sudden revulsion. To be taken in by a disguised
fanatic might happen to any man too honorable to be suspicious. He
could have forgiven himself. But to have held a slave-trader by the
hand! to have asked him to his table! Westlake knew that Senator never
said anything that had to be taken back.

Richard Norman was a man of name and birth from old Virginia. Of easy
fortune, so it was reported, still unmarried, he spent a great part of
the year in travelling; and especially found pleasure in renewing old
family ties with Virginian emigrants or their children in newer
States. When he favored our neighborhood, he had his quarters at
Goosefield, where he always took the same apartments in the house of a
man, also Virginian by birth, who was said to be an old retainer of
his family. Norman's father had been the fathers' friend of most of
our principal planters. He was welcome in almost every household for
the sake of these old memories, and apparently for his own. He was
well-looking, well-mannered, possessed of various information, ready
with amusing anecdote. And yet all the time it was perfectly known to
every slave on every plantation where he visited what Mr. Richard
Norman was. It was perfectly known to every planter except Westlake,
and possibly Harvey. I do not remember to have heard of him at
Harvey's. Those who never sold their servants, those who never
separated families, those who never parted very young children from
their mothers, found Norman a resource in those cases of necessity
which exempt from law.

The slaves talked of him among themselves familiarly, though
fearfully. He was the central figure of many a dark history; the house
at Goosefield was known to them as Dick Norman's Den. The masters held
their knowledge separately, each bound to consider himself its sole
depository. If, arriving at the house of a friend, soon after a
visitation of Richard Norman, one missed a familiar hand at his
bridle, a kind old face at the door, curiosity was discreet; it would
have been very ill manners to ask whether it was Death or Goosefield.

"Dick Norman starts at midnight. He has been ready these three days.
He only waited to eat his Christmas dinner at old Rasey's."

Westlake had pondered and understood. "Where shall I really take you?"
he asked, despondingly.

"Leave me anywhere six or eight miles from here, and I will do for
myself."

"Colvil, you will ride along beside?"

"No."

I find in myself such an inaptitude for simulation or artifice of any
kind, that I do not believe it was intended I should serve my
fellow-men by those means.

"No," repeated Senator,--"not if we are going to Goosefield."

"It is true," assented Westlake, sadly; "nobody would believe you were
going with me there!"

I rode off without taking leave of Senator. I felt sure of seeing him
again. I thought I knew where the aid he would seek was to be found.
Mine was just the half-way house to it. He would not be afraid of
compromising me, for his master himself had called me to be witness to
their compact. Senator would have the deciding voice, as usual; and
Westlake would be guided by him now the more readily that he himself
would tend in the direction of his only confidant. When I had put up
my horse, I went into the house only for a few moments to tell my
mother what I had seen and what I was expecting.

I walked up and down between the gate and the brook that evening,--I
could not tell how long. I had time to become anxious,--time to invent
disasters,--time to imagine encounters Westlake might have had on the
way, with officious advisers, with self-proposed companions. I was
disappointed more than once by distant wheels, which came nearer and
nearer only to pass on, and farther and farther away, on the road
which, crossing ours, winds round behind our place to Winker's Hollow.
At last I caught sound of an approach which did not leave me an
instant in uncertainty. This time, beyond mistake, it was the swift,
steady tramp of Westlake's roans. As they entered our sandy lane,
their pace slackened to a slow trot, and then to a walk. Westlake was
on the lookout for me. I went into the middle of the road. He saw me;
I heard him utter an exclamation of relief.

Senator, who had been stretched out on the bottom of the wagon, sat up
when the horses stopped, took the manacles from his wrists and threw
them down on the straw. With his master's help, he soon disencumbered
himself of his fetters, and sprang lightly to the ground. Westlake
followed, and the two stood there in the starlight confronting each
other for the last time.

The face of the banished man was inscrutable. His master's worked
painfully. This boy, born on his own twenty-first birthday, had been
assigned to him, not only by his father's gift, but also, so it
seemed, by destiny itself. He had had property in him; he had had
pride in him; he had looked for a life-long devotion from him. And
now, in one moment, all was to be over between them forever. The scene
could not be prolonged. There was danger in every instant of delay.

"Westlake, he must go."

"He must go," Westlake repeated, but hesitatingly. And then, with a
sudden impulse, he put out his hand to his forgiven, even if
unrepentant, servant.

The movement was not met.

"No, Master; I will not wrong you by thanking you. This is not my
debt." Senator raised towards heaven the coveted hand. "It is His who
always pays."



                                            TUESDAY, April 16, 1844.


You can always tell what view of certain questions Harry Dudley will
take. You have only to suppose them divested of all that prejudice or
narrow interest may have encumbered them with, and look at them in the
light of pure reason. One of the charms of your intercourse with Dr.
Borrow is that it is full of surprises.

"I have a weakness for Westlake, I own it," said the Doctor, when we
were seated at the tea-table after our return from The Two Farms. "If
you had known him when he was young, as I did, Colvil! Such an easy,
soft-hearted, dependent fellow! You couldn't respect him very greatly,
perhaps; but like him you must! His son Reginald you ought to like. I
do. And--what you will think more to the purpose--so does Harry."

Harry enforced this with a look.

Reginald Westlake is a handsome boy, rather sullen-looking, but with a
face capable of beaming out into a beautiful smile. He is always
distant in his manners to me, I do not know whether through shyness or
dislike.

"He will make a man," Doctor Borrow went on; "if I am any judge of
men, he will make a man."

The Doctor was interrupted by the brisk trot of a horse coming up the
road. The rider did not stop at the gate; he cleared it. In another
moment Westlake's jolly red face was looking down on us through the
window. I might have found this arrival untimely; but turning to Harry
to know how he took it, I saw in his eyes the "merry sparkle" the
Doctor had told of, and divined that there was entertainment in a
colloquy between the classmates.

Westlake made a sign with his hand that he was going to take his horse
to the stable. I went out to him, Harry following. I welcomed him as
cordially as I could, but his manner was reserved at first. We had not
met in a way to be obliged to shake hands since Shaler went away.
Westlake knew that I was greatly dissatisfied with him at that time.
Not more so, though, than he was with himself, poor fellow! He was
evidently sincerely glad to see Harry again, and Harry greeted both
him and his horse very kindly. Westlake is always well-mounted, and
deserves to be: he loves his horses both well and wisely. It is
something to be thoroughly faithful in any one relation of life, and
here Westlake is faultless. The horse he rode that afternoon--one
raised and trained by himself--bore witness in high spirit and gentle
temper to a tutor who had known how to respect a fiery and
affectionate nature. We all three gave our cares to the handsome
creature, and this common interest put me quite in charity with my
unexpected guest before we went into the house.

"This is a way to treat an old friend!" cried Westlake, as he gave his
hand to the Doctor, who had come down the door-steps to meet him. "I
cannot get two whole days from you, and then you come here and stay on
as if you meant to live here!"

Tabitha watched my mother's reception of the new-comer, and, seeing it
was hospitable, placed another chair at the table with alacrity. She
knew he was out of favor here, but had never thought very hardly of
him herself. Her race often judges us in our relations with itself
more mildly than we can judge each other. In its strange simplicity,
it seems to attribute to itself the part of the superior, and pities
where it should resent.

"You cannot make it up to me, Borrow," Westlake went on, as soon as we
had taken our places, "except by going right back with me to-night, or
coming over to me to-morrow morning, and giving me as many days as you
have given Colvil. Next week is the very time for you to be with us. I
want you to see us at a gala season: next week is the great marrying
and christening time of the year. It usually comes in June; but this
year we have it two months earlier, on account of Dr. Baskow's
engagements. My little Fanny is to give all the names. She has a fine
imagination."

"Westlake, I would do all but the impossible to show my sense of your
kindness. For the rest, my appreciation of little Miss Fanny's
inventive powers could not be heightened."

"Does that mean no? Borrow, I shall think in earnest that you have
done me a wrong in giving so much time away from me, if these are
really your last days in our parts."

"We will make it up to you. I will tell you how we will make it up to
you. Come to us,--come to Massachusetts: I will give you there a week
of my time for every day we have taken from you here. Come to us in
June: that is the month in which New England is most itself. Come and
renew old associations."

"You will never see me again, if you wait to see me there."

"What now? You used to like it."

"I am not so sure that I used to like it, when I think back upon it.
At any rate, if you want to see _me_, you must see me in my own place.
I am not myself anywhere else. Equality, Borrow, equality is a very
good thing for people who have never known anything better: may be a
very good thing for people who can work themselves up out of it. But
for a man who has grown up in the enjoyment of those privileges
inappreciable by the vulgar, but which by the noble of every age have
been regarded as the most real and the most valuable,--for such a man
to sit, one at a long table, feeling himself nobody, and knowing all
the time he has a right to be somebody! You can talk very easily about
equality. You have never suffered from it. You have your learning
and---- Well, you know how to talk. I have no learning, and I can't
talk, except to particular friends. A man cannot ticket himself with
his claims to estimation. Even Paris has too much equality for me.
Flora liked it; she had her beauty and her toilet. But I! how I longed
to be back here among my own simple, humble people! As soon as she was
married, I made off home. In my own place, among my own people, I am,
I might almost say, like a god, if I were not afraid of shocking you.
And is not their fate in my hands? My frown is their night, my smile
is their sunshine. The very ratification of their prayers to a Higher
Power is intrusted to my discretion. Homage, Borrow, homage is the
sweetest draught ever brought to mortal lips!"

"The homage of equals I suppose may be," said Dr. Borrow, modestly.

"You do not understand. How should you? Our modes of thinking and
feeling are not to be comprehended by one brought up in a society so
differently constituted. We avow ourselves an aristocracy."

"You do well: something of the inherent meaning of a word will always
make itself felt. _Aristocracy!_ It is vain to try to dispossess it of
its own. The world will not be disenchanted of the beautiful word.
Cover yourselves with its prestige. It will stand you in good stead
with outsiders. But, between ourselves, Westlake, how is it behind the
scenes? Can you look each other in the face and pronounce it? Or have
you really persuaded yourselves down here that you are governed by
your best men?"

"We do not use the word so pedantically down here. By an aristocracy
we mean a community of gentlemen."

"And, pronouncing it so emphatically, you of course use the word
gentleman in the sense it had when it had a sense. You bear in mind
what the gentleman was pledged to, when to be called one was still a
distinction. 'To eschew sloth,' 'to detest all pride and
haughtiness,'--these were among his obligations: doubtless they are of
those most strictly observed in your community. He was required 'to be
true and just in word and dealing'; 'to be of an open and liberal
mind.' You find these conditions fulfilled in Rasey, your leading
man."

"Our leading man?"

"Certainly, your leading man. Whose lead did you follow, when you
joined in worrying Charles Shaler out of your community of gentlemen?"

Westlake shrank. He was conscious that he had been going down hill
ever since Shaler left the neighborhood. The hold that Rasey took of
him then the crafty old man has never let go.

When Westlake's plantation came into his possession by the death of
his father, he undertook to carry it on himself, and has been supposed
to do so ever since. It was carried on well from the time that Senator
was old enough to take charge; but with his disappearance disappeared
all the credit and all the comfort his good management had secured to
his master. Westlake needed some one to lean on, and Rasey was ready
to take advantage of this necessity. His ascendancy was not
established all at once. It is only during the last year that it has
been perfected. In the beginning, he gave just a touch of advice and
withdrew; showed himself again at discreet intervals, gradually
shortened; but, all the time, was casting about his victim the singly
almost impalpable threads of his deadly thraldom, until they had
formed a coil which forbade even an effort after freedom. Westlake had
put no overseer between himself and his people; but he had, without
well knowing how it came about, set a very hard one over both. He
found the indulgences on his plantation diminished, the tasks more
rigidly enforced, the holidays fewer. The punishments, which were
before sometimes capriciously severe, but more often threatened and
remitted, he was now expected to carry out with the inflexibility of
fate. He has found himself reduced to plotting with his servants
against himself,--to aiding them in breaking or evading his own laws;
reduced--worst humiliation of all--to ordering, under the sharp eye
and sharp voice of his officious neighbor, the infliction of
chastisement for neglect which he himself had authorized or connived
at.

All came of that unhappy Christmas I have told you of. If Westlake
could only have been silent, the simple plot devised by Senator would
have worked perfectly. All the neighborhood would have respected a
secret that was its own. But Westlake could not be silent; he was too
uneasy. It was not long before the culprit's escape and his master's
part in it were more than surmised. In view of the effect of such a
transaction on the servile imagination, Westlake's weakness was
ignored by common consent; but it was not the less incumbent upon him
to reinstate himself in opinion on the first opportunity. The
opportunity was offered by the storm then brewing against Shaler.

Westlake's sufferings are, happily for him, intermittent. Rasey is
away from the neighborhood one month out of every three, looking after
the estates of yet more unlucky vassals,--his through debt, and not
from simple weakness. During these intervals, Westlake takes his ease
with his people, as thoughtless as they of consequences no more within
his ability to avert than theirs. He has lately had an unusual
respite. Rasey has been confined to the house by an illness,--the
first of his life.

I do not know how far Dr. Borrow is aware of Westlake's humiliations;
and Westlake, I think, does not know. When he was able to speak again,
he sheltered himself under a question.

"Do you know Rasey?"

"He is owner of the plantation which lies south of yours and Shaler's,
larger than both together."

"His plantation;--but do you know _him_?"

"Root and branch. But who does not know him, that knows anybody here?
In the next generation his history may be lost in his fortune, but it
is extant yet. His father was overseer on a Georgia plantation, from
which he sucked the marrow: his employer's grandchildren are crackers
and clay-eaters; his are--of your community."

"Not exactly."

"Strike out all who do not yet belong to it, and all who have ceased
to have a full claim to belong to it, and what have you left?"

"Do you know old Rasey personally? Have you ever seen him?"

"I have seen him."

"Lately? I hear that a great change has come over him. He has lost his
elder son."

"You might say his only one. He turned the other out of doors years
ago, and has had no word of him since. The old man has a daughter; but
her husband has challenged him to shoot at sight. He has lost his
partner and heir, and, in the course of Nature, cannot himself hold on
many years longer. If a way could be found of taking property over to
the other side, he might be consoled. The old Gauls used to manage it:
they made loans on condition of repayment in the other world; but I
doubt whether Rasey's faith is of force to let him find comfort in
such a transaction.

"I had to see him about a matter of business which had been intrusted
to me. I went there the day I left you. If I had known how it was with
him, I should have tried to find a deputy. It is an awful sight, a man
who never had compassion needing it, a man who never felt sympathy
claiming and repelling it in one.

"When I entered the room, where he was sitting alone, he looked up at
me with a glare like a tiger-cat's. He was tamed for the moment by the
mention of my errand, which was simply to make him a payment. He
counted the money carefully, locked it up, and gave me a receipt. Then
he began to talk to me, or rather to himself before me. I could
acquiesce in all he said. I knew what Giles Rasey was, and understood
that the loss of such a son, to such a father, was irreparable.

"'Another self! another self!' he repeated, until I hardly knew
whether to pity him more for having had a son so like himself, or for
having him no longer. It was an injustice that he felt himself
suffering,--a bitter injustice. He had counted on this son as his
successor, and the miscalculation was one with which he was not
chargeable. 'Not thirty-five! I am past sixty, and a young man yet! My
father lived to be ninety!'

"His rage against this wrong which had been done him was aggravated by
another which he had done himself, a weakness into which he had been
led by his son,--the only one, probably, in which they had ever been
partners. The son had a slave whose ability made him valuable, whose
probity made him invaluable.

"'I gave him to Giles myself,' said the old man. 'He was such as you
don't find one of in a thousand; no, not in ten thousand. I could have
had any money for him, if money could have bought him. It couldn't. I
gave him to Giles.'

"Giles, on the death-bed where he found himself with very little
warning, exacted of his father a promise that this man should be made
free.

"'What could I refuse him then?' asked old Rasey.

"The man in whose behalf the promise was made, and who was present
when it was made, took it in earnest.

"'A fellow whom we had trusted!' cried the old man. 'A fellow in whose
attachment we had believed! We have let him carry away and pay large
sums of money for us; have even let him go into Free States to pay
them, and he always came back faithfully! You may know these people a
life long and not learn them out! A fellow whom we had trusted!'

"The fellow bade good-day as soon as the funeral services were over.
His master was sufficiently himself to surmise his purpose and to make
an attempt to baffle it. But the intended freedman was too agile for
him; he disappeared without even claiming his manumission-papers.
Imagine Rasey's outraged feelings! It was like the Prince of Hell in
the old legend, complaining of the uncivil alacrity with which Lazarus
obeyed the summons to the upper air:--'He was not to be held, but,
giving himself a shake, with every sign of malice, immediately he went
away.'"

"So Rasey has lost Syphax! he has lost Syphax!" repeated Westlake,
thoughtfully. "Rasey is not a good master, but he was good to him. It
was hard, even for Rasey."

"Rasey has lost Syphax, and Syphax has found him," said the Doctor,
dryly.

"You do not understand. You see in the rupture of these ties only a
loss of service to the master. We feel it to be something more."

"The human heart is framed sensible to kindness; that you should have
an attachment for the man who devotes his life to yours without return
has nothing miraculous for me. I can believe that even Rasey is
capable of feeling the loss of what has been useful to him."

"No, you do not understand the relation between us and this
affectionate subject race."

"Frankly, I do not. I cannot enter into it on either side. If I were
even as full of the milk of human kindness as we are bound to suppose
these soft-tempered foreigners to be, it seems to me I should still
like to choose my beneficiaries; and, in your place, I should have
quite another taste in benefactors. When I indue myself in imagination
with a black skin, and try to think and feel conformably, I find my
innate narrowness too much for me; I cannot disguise from myself that
I should prefer to lavish my benefits on my own flesh and blood.
Resuming my personality, I can as little divest myself in fancy of my
pride of race. If I must accept a state of dependence, I would take
the bounty of a white man, hard and scanty though it might be, rather
than receive luxurious daily bread at the hands of blacks."

"Borrow, you always had the knack of making a fellow feel
uncomfortable. I would rather talk with Dudley than with you. I do not
see that you are any better friend to our institutions than he is."

"A friend to slavery? Distrust the man not born and bred to it who
calls himself one!

"I suppose I am as much of a pro-slavery man as you will easily find
in New England,--for an unambitious, private man, I mean. Slavery does
not mean for me power or place. What does slavery mean for me when I
oppose its opponents? It means you, Westlake, my old schoolmate,--you
and your wife and children. It means Harvey and his wife and children.
I have the weakness to care more for you than for your slaves. I
cannot resolve to see you deprived of comforts and luxuries that use
has made necessary to you, that they may rise to wants they have no
sense of as yet. As to your duties to your humble neighbors, and the
way you fulfil them, that account is kept between you and your Maker.
He has not made me a judge or a ruler over you."

Westlake's deep red deepened. "I leave religious matters to those
whose charge it is. I have been instructed to hold the place which has
been awarded me, without asking why I have been made to differ from
others. And the teaching which is good enough for me is, I suppose,
good enough for my servants. As for the rest, we know that our people
are as well off as the same class in any part of the world, not
excepting New England."

"I dare say such a class would be no better off there than here. But
come and learn for yourself how it is there."

"I could not learn there how to live here. And I do not pretend that
we can understand you better than you can us. But, Borrow, you are
hard to suit. You twit us with our waste and improvidence, and yet you
are not better pleased with Rasey, who follows gain like a
New-Englander."

"Rasey follows gain from the blind impulse of covetousness. The
New-Englander's zeal is according to knowledge. Rasey's greed is the
inherited hunger of a precarious race. The New-Englander thrives
because he has always thriven. He has in his veins 'the custom of
prosperity.'

"Fuller tells us, that, in his time, 'a strict inquiry after the
ancient gentry of England' would have found 'most of them in the class
moderately mounted above the common level'; the more ambitious having
suffered ruin in the national turmoils, while these even-minded men,
'through God's blessing on their moderation, have continued in their
condition.' It was from this old stock that the planters of New
England were chiefly derived, mingled with them some strong scions of
loftier trees."

"Do we not know that there is no such thing as birth in New England?
There, even if a man had ancestry, he would not dare to think himself
the better for it."

"Disabuse yourself; the New-Englander is perfectly human in this
respect, and only a very little wiser than the rest of the world. But
he disapproves waste, even of so cheap a thing as words: he does not
speak of his blood, because his blood speaks for itself.

"Rasey thinks whatever is held by others to be so much withheld from
him. To make what is theirs his is all his aim. He has no conception
of a creative wealth, of a diffusive prosperity. To live and make live
is an aristocratic maxim. Rasey, and such as he, grudge almost the
subsistence of their human tools. With the New-Englander, parsimony is
not economy. The aristocratic household law is a liberal one, and it
is his. He lives up to his income as conscientiously as within it.
Rasey and his like think what is theirs, enjoyed by another,
wasted;--they think it wasted, enjoyed by themselves. The
New-Englander's rule of personal indulgence is the same with that
given to the Persian prince Ghilan by his father, the wise Kyekyawus,
who, warning him against squandering, adds, 'It is not squandering to
spend for anything which can be of real use to thee either in this
world or the next.'

"Together with the inherited habit of property, the well-descended
have and transmit an inherited knowledge of the laws which govern its
acquisition and its maintenance: laws older than legislation; as old
as property itself; as old as man; a part of his primitive wisdom;
always and everywhere the common lore of the established and endowed.
If Rasey had inherited or imbibed this knowledge, perhaps he would
have been more cautious. 'Beware of unjust gains,' says an Eastern
sage, an ancient member of our Aryan race; 'for it is the nature of
such, not only to take flight themselves, but to bear off all the rest
with them.' 'Do not think,' it is set down in the book of Kabus, a
compendium of Persian practical wisdom, 'Do not think even a good use
of what has been ill acquired can make it thine. It will assuredly
leave thee, and only thy sin will remain to thee.'

"The well-born would not dare to amass a fortune by such means as
Rasey uses; amassed, they would not expose it to such hazards. 'The
same word in the Greek'--I am citing now an English worthy, the
contemporary of our New-England fathers--'The same word in the
Greek--[Greek: ios]--means both rust and poison; and a strong poison
is made of the rust of metals; but none more venomous than the rust of
the laborer's wages detained in his employer's purse: it will infect
and corrode a whole estate.'

"A man's descent is written on his life yet more plainly than on his
features. In New England you shall see a youth come up from the
country to the metropolis of his State with all his worldly goods upon
his back. Twenty years later you shall find him as much at ease in the
position he has retaken rather than gained, as he was in the
farm-house where he was born, or on the dusty road he trudged over to
the scene of his fortunes. His house is elegant, not fine; it is
furnished with paintings not bought on the advice of the
picture-dealer, with a library not ordered complete from the
bookseller. He is simple in his personal habits, laborious still,
severe to himself, lenient and liberal to those who depend upon him,
munificent in his public benefactions, in his kindly and modest
patronage. If he enters public life, it is not because he wants a
place there, but because there is a place that wants him. He takes it
to work, and not to shine; lays it down when he can, or when he must;
and takes hold of the nearest duty, great or small as may be, with
the same zeal and conscience. Such a man is called a self-made man. He
is what ages of culture and highest discipline have made him,--ages of
responsibility and thought for others.

"Stealthy winning and sterile hoarding are the marks of a degraded and
outlawed caste. When these tendencies show themselves in a member of
an honest race, they have come down from some forgotten interloper.
The Raseys are the true representatives of the transported wretches
who, and whose progeny, have been a dead weight upon the States
originally afflicted with them, and upon those into which they have
wandered out. In their native debasement, they furnish material for
usurpation to work upon and with; raised here and there into fitful
eminence, they infect the class they intrude upon with meannesses not
its own.

"Thomas Dudley, writing to England from New England in its earliest
days, when, as he frankly owns, it offered 'little to be enjoyed and
much to be endured,' is explicit as to the class of men he and his
colleagues would have join them. He invites only godly men of
substance. Such, he says, 'cannot dispose of themselves and their
estates more to God's glory.' Those who would 'come to plant for
worldly ends' he dissuades altogether; for 'the poorer sort' it was
'not time yet.' As for reckless adventurers and the destitute idle,
who sought the New World for gold or an indolent subsistence, when
these, 'seeing no other means than by their labor to feed themselves,'
went back discouraged, or off to find some more indulgent plantation,
the colony felt itself 'lightened, not weakened.'

"The chief distinctive mark of high race is the quality the Romans
called _fortitudo_,--a word of larger meaning than we commonly intend
by ours derived from it: that strength of soul, namely, which gives
way as little before work as before danger or under suffering. A Roman
has defined this Roman fortitude as the quality which enables a man
fearlessly to obey the highest law, whether by enduring or by
achieving.

"Another mark of high race is its trust in itself. The early heads of
New England did not try to secure a position to their children. They
knew that blood finds its level just as certainly as water does.
Degenerate sons they disowned in advance.

"Westlake, you ought to know New England better. Even if your memory
did not prompt you to do it justice, there ought to be a voice to
answer for it in your heart. But I find ancestry is very soon lost in
the mists of antiquity down here. You come early into the advantages
of a mythical background. Must I teach you your own descent?"

"I thank you. I am acquainted with it. My great-grandfather was an
Englishman,--a man of some consideration, as I have been informed. He
went over to Massachusetts; but my grandfather left it, as soon as he
was of age, for a newer State, where he could enjoy greater freedom."

"Your great-grandfather came from England to New England, as you say.
He fixed himself in that part of our Massachusetts town of Ipswich
which used to go by the name of 'The Hamlet.' What he was before he
came out I do not know; but I suppose he brought credentials, for he
married his wife from a family both old and old-fashioned. Your
grandfather, Simeon Symonds Westlake, at seventeen found the Hamlet
too narrow for him, and the paternal, or perhaps the maternal, rule
too strict. He walked over into New Hampshire one morning, without
mentioning that he was not to be back for dinner. New Hampshire did
not suit him: he went to Rhode Island; then tried New York for a year
or so: it did not answer. His father died, and Simeon made experiment
of life at home again, but only again to give it up in disgust.
Finally he emigrated to Georgia, taking with him a little money and a
great deal of courage; invested both in a small farm which was soon a
large plantation; added a yet larger by marriage; died, a great
landholder and a great slaveholder.

"Simeon--I must call him by that name, historical for me, although I
know that the first initial disappeared from his signature after his
marriage--Simeon left two sons, Reginald and Edwin. He had the
ambition of founding a dynasty; so left his whole estate to the elder,
yet with certain restrictions and conditions, which, doubtless, he had
good reasons for imposing, and which the intended heir lost no time in
justifying. By some law of inheritance which statutes cannot supersede
nor wills annul, this son of a father in whom no worst enemy could
have detected a trace of the Puritan, was born in liberal Georgia, in
the last half of the enlightened eighteenth century, as arrogant a
bigot and as flaming a fanatic as if he had come over in the
Mayflower. He refused his father's bequest, on the ground that God has
given man dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the
air, and over the cattle,--but none over his fellow-man, except such
as he may win through affection or earn by service. He went back to
New England, where he belonged. I knew a son of his, a respectable
mason. You need not blush for him, though he was your own cousin and
worked with his hands. He was never conscious of any cause for shame,
himself, unless it were the sin of his slaveholding grandfather; and
that did not weigh on him, for he believed the entail of the curse cut
off with that of the rest of the inheritance.

"If I have grieved the shade of Simeon by pronouncing that rejected
name, I will soothe it again by stating that this name has not been
perpetuated by his New-England descendants. That branch of his house
has already a third Reginald, about a year younger than yours. He is
now a Freshman in college. You may hear of him some day."

"He is in college? That is well. He has, then, recovered, or will
recover, the rank of a gentleman?"

"No need of that, if he ever had a claim to it. You, who know so much
about birth, should know that its rights are ineffaceable. This was
well understood by those whom it concerned, in the time of our first
ancestors. We have it on high heraldic authority of two hundred years
ago, that a gentleman has a right so to be styled in legal
proceedings, 'although he be a husbandman.' 'For, although a gentleman
go to the plough and common labor for a maintenance, yet he is a
gentleman.' The New-England founders had no fear of derogating in
taking hold of anything that needed to be done; had no fear that their
children could derogate in following any calling for which their
tastes and their abilities qualified them. Carrying to it the ideas,
feelings, and manners of the gentle class, they could ennoble the
humblest occupation; it could not lower them.

"It is out of this respect that good blood has for itself, that the
true New-Englander, whatever his station, is not ashamed of a humbler
relative. You are amazed down here at the hardihood of a Northern man
who speaks coolly of a cousin of his who is a blacksmith, it may be,
or a small farmer; and you bless yourselves inwardly for your greater
refinement. But you are English, you say, not New-English.

"When I was in Perara, dining with one of the great folks there, I
happened to inquire after a cousin of his, an unlucky fellow, who,
after trying his fortune in half the cities of the Union, had had the
indiscretion to settle down in a very humble business, within a
stone's throw of his wealthy namesake. I had known him formerly, and
could not think of leaving Perara without calling on him. To my
surprise, my question threw the family into visible confusion. They
gave me his address, indeed, but in a way as if they excused
themselves for knowing it. This may be English, but it is not
Old-English.

"In the Old England which we may call ours,--for it was before, and
not long before, she founded the New,--a laboring man came to the Earl
of Huntingdon, Lieutenant of Leicestershire, to pray for the discharge
of his only son, the staff of his age, who had been 'pressed into the
wars.' The Earl inquires the name of his petitioner. The old man
hesitates, fearing to be presumptuous, for his family name is the same
with that of the nobleman he addresses; but being urged, he takes
courage to pronounce it. 'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl then, 'my
kinsman, your son, shall not be pressed.' This 'modesty in the poor
man and courtesy in the great man' were found in that day 'conformable
to the gentle blood in both.' Those who know New England know that
this absence of assumption and of presumption, this modest kindliness
and this dignified reserve, are characteristic there, testifying to
the sources from which it derives.

"I am a cosmopolite. I could never see why I should think the better
or the worse of a place, for my happening to draw my first breath
there. I am of the company of the truth-seekers. A fact, though it
were an ugly one, is of more worth to me than a thousand pleasantest
fancies. But a fact is not the less one for being agreeable: the
extension of a fine race is an agreeable fact to a naturalist.

"The earlier emigrations to New England were emphatically aristocratic
emigrations. Their aim was to found precisely what you claim to show
here. Their aim was to found a community of gentlemen,--a community,
that is to say, religious, just, generous, courteous. They proposed
equality, but equality on a high plane. Their work has been hindered
by its very success. The claimants for adoption have crowded in faster
than full provision could be made for them. They cannot instantly be
assimilated. Their voices sometimes rise above those of the true
children. But New England is there, strong and tranquil. Her heart has
room for all that ask a place in it. She welcomes these orphans to it
motherly, and will make them all thoroughly her own with time.

"Come to us, Westlake. I have planned out a tour for you."

And Dr. Borrow, tracing the route he had marked out for his friend,
sketched the country it led through, comparing what came before us
with reminiscences of other travels. No contrasts here of misery with
splendor rebuke a thoughtless admiration. Nowhere the picturesqueness
of ruin and squalor; everywhere the lovely, living beauty of
healthfulness, dignity, and order.

With what a swell of feeling does the distant New-Englander listen to
accounts of family life in the old home! How dear every detail, making
that real again which had come to be like a sweet, shadowy dream!

Dr. Borrow led us through the beautiful street of a New-England
village, under the Gothic arches of its religious elms. He did not
fear to throw open for us the willing door. He showed us the simple,
heartsome interior, with its orderly ease, its unambitious
hospitality, its refined enjoyments. Other travellers have drawn for
us other pictures. They have told us of a pomp and state which have
reconciled us to our rudeness. But Dr. Borrow sketched the New-England
home, such as we know it by tradition, such as it still exists among
those who are content to live as their fathers lived before them.

"Hold on, Borrow!" cried Westlake; "you don't suppose you are going to
persuade me that there is neither poverty nor overwork in New England!
I have heard, and I think I have seen, that there are hard lives lived
there,--harder than those of our slaves, of my slaves, for
example;--and that not by foreigners, who, you may say, are not up to
the mark yet, but by Americans born and bred."

"There are very hard lives lived there. The human lot is checkered
there as everywhere. Death sometimes arrests a man midway in his
course and leads him off, leaving his wife and children to struggle
along the road they never knew was rough before. It happened thus to
your Cousin Reginald. His wife and children were thus left. You are
right. His son, the boy I told you of, is as much a slave as any of
yours: almost as poorly fed, and twice as hardly worked. He lives at
a distance from his college, to have a cheaper room; his meals he
prepares himself;--no great fatigue this, to be sure, for they are
frugal, and he contents himself with two. In what ought to be his
vacation, he delves away at his books harder than ever, and is besides
a hewer of wood and a drawer of water,--all without wages. His only
pay is his mother's pride in him, and the joy of sometimes calling
back the old smiles to her face."

"How did he get to college? How does he stay there, if he has
nothing?"

"He has less than nothing. To go to college, he has incurred
debts,--debts for which he has pledged himself, body and soul. He was
ten when his father died. His sister was sixteen. She assumed the
rights of guardian over him, kept him up to his work at school, sent
him to college when he was fourteen, and maintains him there.

"If his life is a hard one, hers is not easier. Every morning she
walks nearly three miles to the school she teaches, gives her day
there, and walks back in the late afternoon. The evening she passes in
sewing, a book on the table before her. She catches a line as she
draws out her thread, and fixes it in her memory with the setting of
the next stitch. Besides Reginald, there are two other boys to make
and mend for, not yet so mindful of the cost of clothes as he has
learned to be; and she has her own education to carry on, as well as
that of the little community among whom she must hold her place as one
who has nothing left to learn.

"Her mother works at the same table, evenly, continuously, not to
disturb or distract by haste or casual movement, and under a spell of
silence, which only the child whose first subject she is is privileged
to break. It is broken from time to time,--the study being suspended,
though not the needlework. These intervals are filled with little,
happy confidences,--hopes, and dreams, which the two cherish apart and
together, and whose exchange, a hundred times renewed, never loses its
power to refresh and reassure. If you were near enough to hear the
emphatic word in these snatches of conversation, be sure you would
hear 'Reginald.'"

"Do you know them so well?"

"Perhaps I may have spent a summer in the country town where they
live. Perhaps it has been my chance some evening to walk by the
little, old, black house they moved into after their father's death,
from the nice, white, green-blinded one he built for them, and the
astral lamp on the round table may have lighted for me the tableau I
am showing you. Our heroine works and studies late, perhaps; but she
must not the less be up early the next morning, to do the heavier
portion of the house-work before her mother is stirring. If ever you
hear a severe tone in her voice, be sure the mother has been
encroaching upon the daughter's prerogative by rising first, or by
putting her hand to some forbidden toil.--Well, is all this enough?
Not for Anna Westlake. There is a music lesson to be given, before she
sets off for her regular day's work."

"Is her name Anna?"--Westlake had once a sister Anna, whom he
loved.--"Is she pretty?"

"She might have been."

"Fair hair? Blue eyes?"

"Yes; a true Westlake in features and complexion; but somewhat thin
for one of your family, as you may believe."

"Pale, delicate?"

"The winds of heaven have visited her too roughly."

"Graceful?"

"I should not dare to say Yes, seeing that grace is denied to
New-England women; still less do I dare to say No, remembering how I
have seen her taking her small brothers to their school, on the way to
her own, making believe run races with them, to get the little wilful
loiterers over the ground the quicker."

"Borrow, it is a hard life for Anna Westlake,--for my cousin's child."

"You would be a severe taskmaster, if you demanded of a slave such a
day's work as hers. Of a slave! He would be insane who should expect
it of any woman who had not the developed brain, the steady nerves,
the abounding vitality of the born aristocrat.

"But how is Reginald ever going to pay his debt to this sister? Do you
think she will be satisfied with anything short of seeing him
President? Who knows but she looks for more yet? The Puritan stamp is
as strong on her as on her grandfather. Who knows but she looks to see
him one of the lights of the world,--one of the benefactors of his
race,--a discoverer in science,--a reformer? Here are responsibilities
for a boy to set out under!"

"For the boys, let them rough it; I have nothing to say. But, Borrow,
when you go back, tell Anna Westlake there is a home for her here,
whenever she is ready to come and take it."

"I will tell her, if you will, that her cousins here wish to have news
of her, and are ready to love her and hers. But propose to her a life
of dependence! You must get a bolder man to do that errand."

"It should not be a life of dependence. She may surely do for her own
kindred what she does for a pack of village children. She should be an
elder sister to my girls. Why, Borrow, I should like to have her here.
I don't put it in the form of a favor to her. Her being here would be
a great pleasure and a great good to my little Fanny."

"And her own brothers?"

"She should be able to do for them all she does now."

"All she does now! Do you know what that is?"

"She should be able to do more than she does now. Reginald should live
as he ought."

"He shall have three good meals a day, and cooked for him: is that it?
And the two little boys?"

"They should be as much better off as he. I do not forget that I have
the whole inheritance, which might have been divided."

"Yes, the means for their material bread might be supplied by another;
but it is from her own soul that she feeds theirs. And then, homage,
Westlake,--homage, that sweetest draught! Do you suppose it is least
sweet when most deserved?"

"I have nothing, then, to offer which could tempt her?" asked
Westlake, a little crestfallen.

"You have nothing to offer, the world has nothing to offer, which
could tempt her to resign her little empire;--little now, but which
she sees widening out in futurity through her three brothers' work and
their children's."

"I knew," said Westlake, after he had sat for a few moments in
dissatisfied silence, "I knew I had once an uncle who went off to
parts unknown; but it never occurred to me that he might have
descendants to whom I might owe duties. Have they not claims upon me?"

"No more than you on them. Their ancestor made his choice, as yours
made his. They have the portion of goods that falleth to them. They
are quite as content with their share as you are with yours. Moreover,
each party is free to complete his inheritance without prejudice to
the other. They can recover the worldly wealth they gave up, if they
choose to turn their endeavors in that direction; and nothing forbids
to your children the energy and self-denial which are their birthright
as much as that of their cousins.

"New England never gives up her own. A son of hers may think he has
separated himself forever from her and from her principles, but she
reclaims him in his children or in his children's children.

"You have forgotten your tie to the old home. The conditions of your
life forbid you to remember it. But your heart formerly rebelled
against these conditions. It has never ceased to protest. Reginald's
protests already, and will some day protest to purpose."

"You think so!" cried Westlake; then, checking himself, "I am glad,
at least, that you think so; it proves that you like him. I was
afraid"----

"You are right. I do not like him as he is, but only as he is to be. I
saw what you feared I did, and marked it. I saw him knock down the boy
whom he had condescended to make his playmate in default of better,
for taking too much in earnest the accorded equality. But I saw, too,
that his own breast was sorer with the blow than the one it hit. That
is not always a cruel discipline which teaches a man early what he is
capable of, whether in good or evil. When your Reginald comes to the
responsible age, his conscience will hand in the account of his
minority. Looking, then, on this item and on others like it, he will
ask himself, 'Am I a dog that I have done these things?' and he will
become a man, and a good one.

"We see farcical pretensions enough down here, where men are daily
new-created from the mud. There is Milsom. He does not own even the
name he wears. His father borrowed it for a time, and, having worn it
out, left it with this son, decamping under shelter of a new one. The
son, abandoned to his wits at twelve years old, relieved his father
from the charge of inhumanity by proving them sufficient. His first
exploit was the betraying of a fugitive who had shared a crust with
him. This success revealed to him his proper road to fortune. He
passed through the regular degrees of slave-catcher and slave-trader,
to the proud altitude of slave-holder; then, moving out of the reach
of old associations, proclaims himself a gentleman by descent as well
as by desert. His sons take it on his word; in all simplicity believe
themselves an integral part of time-honored aristocracy, and think it
beneath them to do anything but mischief.

"Your claims I neither blame nor make light of. I know what their
foundation is better than you do yourself. Only dismiss illusions, and
accept realities, which do not yield to them even in charm to the
imagination. When you know the ground under your feet, you will stand
more quietly as well as more firmly. You will understand then that the
silence of the New-Englander in regard to his extraction is not
indifference, but security. Nowhere is the memory of ancestry so
sacredly cherished as in New England, nowhere so humbly. What are we
in presence of those majestic memories? We may lead our happy humdrum
lives; may fulfil creditably our easy duties; we may plant and build
and legislate for those who come after us; but it will still be to
these great primitive figures that our descendants will look back; it
will still be the debt owed there that will pledge the living
generation to posterity.

"John Westlake, your first paternal ancestor in New England had
nothing in common with the Puritan leaders. You are well informed
there. He came over to seek his fortune. They came to prepare the
destinies of a nation. He had nothing to do with them, except in being
one of those they worked for. He came when the country was ready for
him. His motive was a reasonable one. I shall not impugn it; but it
tells of the roturier. The founding of states is an aristocratic
tendency. He was a respectable ancestor. I have more than one such of
my own. I owe to them the sedate mind which permits me to give myself
to my own affairs, without feeling any responsibility about those of
the world. But these are not the men who ennoble their descendants in
perpetuity. If your breast knows the secret suggestions of lineage,
these promptings are not from John Westlake. You must go back to our
heroic age to find yours."

"I should be very glad to find myself in an heroic age," said
Westlake, with a slight laugh, followed by a heavy sigh. "I feel as if
I might have something to do there. But this thought never yet took me
back to the Puritans: the battle-field is the hero's place, as I
imagine the hero. They, I have understood, were especially men of
peace. Is it not one of their first titles to honor?"

"The office of the hero is to create, to organize, to endow;--works of
peace which incidentally require him to suppress its disturbers. The
heroes have always been men of peace--its winners and maintainers for
those who can only enjoy it--from Hercules down, that first great
overthrower of oppressions and founder of colonies.

"To the age I call on you to date from--that of the imagining and
founding a new England, a renovated world--belongs the brightest and
dearest of English heroic names: the name whose associations of valor
and tenderness, of high-heartedness and humility are as fresh now as
when the love of the noble first canonized it. It is not without good
reason that the name of Philip Sidney is a household word throughout
New England, held in traditional affection and reverence. He was one
of the first to project a new state beyond the seas, in which the
simplicity and loyalty of primitive manners were to be restored, and
the true Christian Church revived. He turned from these hopes only
because he felt that he owed himself to Europe as long as an effort
for the vindication of human rights upon its soil was possible. It was
not love of war that led him to his fate in the Netherlands. He was
not to be misled by false glory. In his Defence of Poesy he makes it a
reproach to History, that 'the name of rebel Cæsar, after a thousand
six hundred years, still stands in highest honor.' The peace-loving
Burleigh, when the expedition in which Sidney fell was setting forth,
wrote,--deprecating the reproach of lukewarmness,--that he 'should
hold himself a man accursed, if he did not work for it with all the
powers of his heart, seeing that its ends were the glory of God and
the preservation of England in perpetual tranquillity.'

"'Nec gladio nec arcu' was the motto of Thomas Dudley, Harry's first
ancestor in this country. He was a man of peace. But he offered his
life to the same cause for which Philip Sidney laid down his,--drawing
the sword for it in France, as Sidney had done ten years before in
Flanders. He was reserved to aid in carrying out the other more
effectual work which Sidney had designed, but from which his early
death withdrew him.

"I am not telling you of Harry's ancestor for Harry's sake. You have
your own part in all this, Westlake. When Reginald and Harry met and
loved each other, blood spoke to blood.

"How many descendants do you suppose there are now from Governor
Thomas Dudley's forty grandchildren? Hardly a family of long standing
in New England but counts him among its ancestors; hardly a State of
our Union into which some of that choice blood has not been carried,
with other as precious.

"New England is not limited to that little northeastern corner. Our
older country, 'that sceptred isle, that earth of majesty,' did not
send forth the happiest of its 'happy breed of men' to found a world
no wider than its own: wherever the descendants of those great
pioneers set up their home, they plant a new New England.

"Do you know how their regenerate Transatlantic country presented
itself to its early projectors? The most sanguine of us do not paint
its future more brightly now than it was imaged in 1583.

"A Hungarian poet, on a visit to England, enjoyed the intimacy of
Hakluyt, and, through him introduced to the society of such men as Sir
Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Philip Sidney, was initiated into the hopes
and projects of the nobler England of the day. He has celebrated these
in a poem addressed to Sir Humphrey Gilbert. The return of the Golden
Age promised in ancient prophecy is, he believes, impossible in
Europe, sunk below the iron one. He sees it, in vision, revive upon
the soil of the New World, under the auspices of men who, true
colonizers, renounce home and country, and dare the vast, vague
dangers of sea and wilderness, not for gain or for glory, but 'for the
peace and welfare of mankind.'

      "'Oh, were it mine to join the chosen band,
      Predestined planters of the promised land,
      My happy part for after-time to trace
      The earliest annals of a new-born race!
      There Earth, with Man at amity once more,
      To willing toil shall yield her willing store.
      There Law with Equity shall know no strife;
      Justice and Mercy no divided life.
      Not there to birth shall merit bend; not there
      Riches o'ermaster freedom. Tyrant care
      Shall lay no burden on man's opening years,
      Nor bow his whitening head with timeless fears;
      But--every season in its order blest--
      Youth shall enjoy its hope, and age its rest!'

"Our poet was in earnest. He did not write the annals of the country
that his hero did not found; but he shared his grave under the waves
of the Atlantic. Their hope outlived them. Visions like theirs are not
for you and me, Westlake. They are for young men,--for the men who
never grow old. We may admit that such have their place in the world.
Man must strive for something greatly beyond what he can attain, to
effect anything. He cannot strive for what he has not faith in. Those
men who live in aspirations that transcend this sphere believe that
all human hearts can be tuned to the same pitch with theirs. We know
better, but let us not for that contemn their efforts. I am no
visionary. I have no inward evidence of things not seen; but I am
capable of believing what is proved. I believe in work,--that none is
lost, but that, whether for good or ill, every exertion of power and
patience tells. I believe in race, and I believe in progress for a
race with which belief in progress is a tradition, and which
inherits, besides, the strength, the courage, and the persistence
which make faith prophetic.

"Your institutions, Westlake, are to yield the ground to other forms.
They are contrary to the inborn principles of the race that leads on
this continent. We at the North, who tolerate them, tolerate them
because we know they are ephemeral. It is a consciousness of their
transitoriness that enables you yourselves to put up with them."

"Not so fast! If they are not rooted, they are taking root. They have
a stronger hold with every year. If any of us felt in the way you
suppose, we should have to keep our thoughts to ourselves."

"So you all keep your thoughts to yourselves for fear of each other.
What a lightening of hearts, when you once come to an understanding! I
wish it soon for your own sakes; but a few years in the life of a
people are of small account. I am willing to wait for the fulness of
time. The end is sure."

"It all looks very simple to you, I dare say."

"I do not undervalue your difficulties. The greatest is this miserable
population that has crept over your borders from the older Slave
States: progeny of outcasts and of reckless adventurers, they never
had a country and have never found one. Without aims or hopes, they
ask of their worthless life only its own continuance. Ignorant that
they can never know anything worse than to remain what they are,
dreading change more than those who may have something to lose by it,
they uphold the system that dooms them to immobility, shameful
Atlantes of the dismal structure."

"You will not wonder that we are ready to renounce the theories of
equality put forth by the men you would have us look to as founders.
We make laws to keep our black servants from getting instruction. Do
you think we could legislate the class you speak of into receiving
it?"

"Westlake, they are here. They are among you, and will be of you, or
you of them."

"We must take our precautions. We intend to do so. The dividing line
must be more strongly marked. They must have their level prescribed to
them, and be held to it."

"The more you confirm their degradation, the more you prepare your
own. The vile and abject, for being helpless, are not harmless. Unapt
for honest service, but ready tools of evil, they corrupt the class
whose parasites they are, tempting the strong and generous to tyranny
and scorn."

"You know them!"

"They are known of old. The world has never wanted such.

      'The wretches will not be dragged out to sunlight.
      They man their very dungeons for their masters,
      Lest godlike Liberty, the common foe,
      Should enter in, and they be judged hereafter
      Accomplices of freedom!'

"But ten righteous men are enough to redeem a state. No State of ours
but has men enough, greatly more than enough, to save and to exalt it,
whose descent pledges them to integrity and entitles them to
authority. Only let them know themselves, and stand by themselves and
by each other.

                  'Nought shall make us rue,
      If England to itself do rest but true.'

And it will. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to
the third and fourth generation, but their virtues are a perpetual
inheritance.

"I should not talk as I have been talking out of the family."--The
Doctor fell into his familiar tone.--"I take in Colvil, because I
know, if we had time to trace it up, we should not go back far without
coming upon common ancestors. Our pedigrees all run one into another.
When I see a New-England man, I almost take for granted a cousin. I
found one out not many days' journey from here, by opening the old
family Bible, which made an important part of the furniture of his
 log-house, and running over the names of his grandmothers. I am so
well informed in regard to your great-grandfather, because his story
is a part of my own family history. It is through your mother that
you are related to Harry. Perhaps, if she had lived long enough for
you to remember her, you would not have forgotten New England."

"My mother was an orphan young, and had neither brother nor sister. I
have never seen any member of her family. They tell me that Reginald
looks like her."

"Where is Reginald? Why did he not come with you?"

"I asked him to come. He said that Dudley and he had agreed on a time
of meeting. He is not very communicative with me; but they seem to
understand each other."

       *       *       *       *       *

The parting of the classmates was very kindly. Westlake led his horse
as far as the end of our road,--the Doctor, Harry, and I accompanying.
When he had mounted, he still delayed. I thought that he looked worn
and weary. With his old friend, he had been his old, easy self; but
now that his face was turned towards home, it seemed that he felt its
vexations and cares confronting him again. The Doctor probably does
not know as much of Westlake's position as is known in the
neighborhood; he saw in this sadness only that of the separation from
himself, and was more gratified than pained by it.

"We shall not see each other again, Borrow," said Westlake, stretching
down his hand for a last clasp of his friend's.

"Yes, we shall. Why not, if we both wish it? Say good-bye for me to
the little Fanny," the Doctor added, gayly.

Westlake brightened with the one pleasant thought connected with his
home, and, under its influence, set forward.

The Doctor stood looking after him with a friendly, contented air. He
was pleased with himself for having spoken his mind out, and with
Westlake for having heard it. But when he turned and met Harry's
happy, affectionate look, his face clouded. He passed us and walked on
fast. When we came into the house, he was seated in the arm-chair,
looking straight before him. Harry went and stood beside him, waiting
for him to give sign that all was right between them again by opening
a new conversation.

The Doctor did not hold out long. "I have told, or as good as told, my
old friend," he began, with rather a sour smile, "that he is suffering
himself to be infected by the meannesses of those below him; and now I
am almost ready to tell myself that my grave years are giving into the
fanaticisms of boyhood. But I stand where I did, Harry. I stand
precisely where I did. I have always told you that I hate slavery as
much as you do. The only difference between us is, that I am not for
justice though the heavens fall."

"Justice, and the heavens will _not_ fall," Harry answered, firmly,
but with a tender deference in look and tone.

"And you make too much account of a name," the Doctor went on. "What
does it signify that men are called slaves and slaveholders, if, in
their mutual relations, they observe the laws of justice and kindness?
You will not deny that this is possible? I object to slavery, as it
exists, because it too often places almost absolute power in
unqualified hands. But you are too sweeping. Good men are good
masters. I should count Harvey among such. Colvil has given you a
portrait you will accept in Shaler, who was as good a man when he was
a slaveholder as he is now. Cicero, a slaveholder,--and Roman
slaveholders have not the best repute,--writing upon justice, does not
put the slave beyond its pale; he recognizes his humanity and its
rights. Will you suppose that we have not American slaveholders as
Christian as Cicero?"

"Cicero has said that to see a wrong done without protesting is to
commit one."

"We will not dispute to-night, Harry. I am not altogether insensible
to the interests of the world, but I have some regard for yours.
Perhaps I should take less thought for them, if there were hope that
you would take any. At any rate, we will not dispute to-night."

Harry, at least, was in no mood for disputing. He was very happy. He
had a gayety of manner I had hardly seen in him. The Doctor soon fell
into tune with it, and reconciled himself to the pleasure he had
caused.



                                          WEDNESDAY, April 17, 1844.


The Friday came. We had made our last evening a long one, but we were
up early on the last morning. Harry and I had our walk together.
Coming back, we found the Doctor under Keith's Pine, busy making up
his dried grasses and flowers into little compact packages. We sat
down there with him as usual. I read aloud. My reading gave us matter
of discussion on the way home.

After breakfast, Hans, Karl, and Fritz came up to the house. Good
Friday we always keep alone with our own family; but these three are
of it, though they are lodged under a different roof. I read part of a
sermon of South's:--"For the transgression of my people was he
stricken."

How real seemed to me, that morning, the sacred story! I had hitherto
contemplated the Christ in his divine being, looking up to him from a
reverent distance. Now he seemed suddenly brought near to me in his
human nature. I felt that our earth had, indeed, once owned him. And
then how vivid the sense of loss and waste,--a beautiful and
beneficent life cut short by violence! "Dying, not like a lamp that
for want of oil can burn no longer, but like a torch in its full flame
blown out by the breath of a north wind!"

Everything that I read with Harry, or that I talk over with him, has
new meaning for me, or a new force.

Why are we so careful to avoid pain? If it was a necessary part of the
highest mortal experience, how can we ask that it may be left out from
ours? And yet, on every new occasion, we strive to put from us the
offered cross. Even while we say, "Thy will be done!" an inward hope
entreats that will to be merciful. Such remonstrances with myself rose
in me as I read. They did not prevent me from feeling a thrill of
dread as this warning passed over my lips:--"Who shall say how soon
God may draw us from our easy speculations and theories of suffering,
to the practical experience of it? Who can tell how soon we may be
called to the fiery trial?" I turned involuntarily to Harry. He, too,
had heard a summons in these words. I read in his eyes the answer that
came from his steady breast,--"My Father, I am here!" I felt my spirit
lifted with the closing words,--"If we suffer with him, we shall also
reign with him"; but there was no change in Harry's clear, prepared
look. I have never known a faith so implicit as his. He does not ask
after threats or promises; he only listens for commands.

When the services were over, Hans came forward to say good-bye to the
Doctor and Harry. He took a hand of each, and stood looking from one
to the other.

"We cannot spare you, Harry Dudley. We shall miss you, Doctor. Harry,
when you are ready to set up your farm, come and take a look round you
here again. We are good people, and love you. There will be land near
in the market before long. Sooner should you have it than old Rasey.
Think of it; we can talk things over, evenings."

"You shall have your turn," he said to his boys, who were waiting, one
on either side of him. "I am an old man, and leave-taking comes hard.
Youth has many chances more."

He gave his benediction, repeated a little rhyming German couplet,--a
charm, perhaps, for a good journey,--and then turned away sturdily,
went slowly out of the door and down the steps, leaving Karl and Fritz
to say their words of farewell. Karl spoke for both. What Fritz had in
his heart to say he could not utter, for the tears would have come
with it.

At a quarter before twelve Harry brought down the russet
knapsack,--brought down the little flower-press,--brought down the
long umbrella.

He transferred from the over-full knapsack to his own some packages of
flowers. The flower-press would not enter either knapsack. The Doctor
had it strapped on outside his. I watched these little arrangements,
glad of the time they took. Harry helped the Doctor on with his pack.
I would have done the same for Harry, but he was too quick for me. I
adjusted the strap from which the green tin case hung, that I might do
something for him.

Doctor Borrow took a serious leave of my mother,--for this, at least,
was a final one. But Harry would not have it so. The tears were
gathering in her eyes. "You will see us again," he said, confidently.

The Doctor shook his head. "You have made us too happy here for us not
to wish that it might be so."

But my mother accepted Harry's assurance.

They looked round for Tabitha. She appeared from my mother's room, the
door of which had been a little open. Both thanked her cordially for
her kind cares. She gave them her good wishes, affectionately and
solemnly, and disappeared again.

"I shall not bid you good-bye," said the Doctor, yet taking my hand.

"Only till the nineteenth," said Harry, clasping it as soon as the
Doctor relinquished it. "Till the eighteenth," I mean; "till the
eighteenth," he repeated, urgently.

"Till the eighteenth," I answered.

The Doctor mounted the blue spectacles. This was the last act of
preparation. The minute-hand was close upon the appointed moment.

At the first stroke of twelve, they were on their way. I followed,
slowly, as if the reluctance of my steps could hold back theirs. The
gate closed behind them. The Doctor took at once his travelling gait
and trudged straight on; but Harry turned and gave a glance to the
house, to the barn, to the little patch of flowers,--to all the
objects with which the week had made him familiar. Then his look fell
upon me, who was waiting for it. He searched my face intently for an
instant, and then, with a smile which made light of all but happy
presentiments, waved me adieu, and hastened on to overtake the Doctor.

I was glad it was not a working-day,--glad that I could go in and sit
down by my mother, to talk over with her, or, silent, to think over
with her, the scenes which had animated our little room, and which
were still to animate it. Harry's parting look stayed with me. I felt
all my gain, and had no more sense of loss. Can we ever really lose
what we have ever really possessed?


                                                            EVENING.

I have been over to Blanty's. I should have gone yesterday, but it
rained heavily from early morning until after dark. Such days I
consider yours. I had been anxious about Blanty since Sunday, and not
altogether without reason. He has had a threatening of fever. I hope
it will prove a false alarm. I found him sitting at his door, already
better,--but still a good deal cast down, for he was never ill in his
life before. He had been wishing for me, and would have sent to me, if
I had not gone. He could hardly let me come away, but pressed me to
stay one hour longer, one half hour, one quarter. But I had some
things to attend to at home, and, as he did not really need me, I bade
him good-bye resolutely, promising to go to him again next Monday. I
cannot well go sooner.

If I had stayed, I should have missed a visit from Frederic Harvey.
When I came within sight of our gate, on the way back, a horseman was
waiting at it, looking up the road, as if watching for me. He darted
forward, on my appearance,--stopped short, when close beside
me,--dismounted, and greeted me with a warmth which I blamed myself
for finding it hard to return. He did not blame me, apparently.
Perhaps he ascribes the want he may feel in my manner to New-England
reserve; or perhaps he feels no want. He is so assured of the value of
his regard, that he takes full reciprocity for granted. The docile
horse, at a sign, turned and walked along beside us to the gate,
followed us along the path to the house, and took his quiet stand
before the door when we went in.

Frederic Harvey, having paid his respects to my mother, seated himself
in the great arm-chair, which now seems to be always claiming the
Doctor, and which this new, slender occupant filled very inadequately.

"I stayed in New York three weeks too long," he exclaimed, after
looking about him a little--for traces of Harry, it seemed. "Time goes
so fast there! But I thought, from one of my sister's letters, that
Dudley was to go back to World's End after he left you. Is he changed?
Oh, but you cannot tell. You never knew him till now. I need not have
asked, at any rate. He is not one to change. While I knew him, he was
only more himself with every year."

"It is two years since you met, is it not?"

"Yes; but what are two years to men who were children together? We
shall take things up just where we laid them down. Ours is the older
friendship. I shall always have the advantage of you there. But you
and he must have got along very well together. Your notions agree with
his better than mine do. It does not matter. Friendship goes by fate,
I believe. He may hold what opinions he likes, for me; and so may
you."

"I believe that on some important subjects my opinions differ very
much from yours."--I am determined to stand square with Frederic
Harvey.

"In regard to our institutions, you mean? I know, that, spoken or
unspoken, hatred of them is carried in the heart of every
New-Englander. It is sometimes suppressed through politeness or from
interest, but I never saw a Northerner who was good for anything, in
whom it did not break out on the first provocation. I like as well to
have it fairly understood in the outset. I have had a letter from
Harry in answer to one of mine. It is explicit on this point."

I had no doubt it was very explicit. Frederic's eye meeting mine, he
caught my thought, and we had a good laugh together, which made us
better friends.

"The Northerners are brought up in their set of prejudices, as we in
ours. I can judge of the force of theirs by that of my own. I only
wish there was the same unanimity among us. We are a house divided
against itself."

And Frederic's face darkened,--perhaps with the recollection of the
rupture of old ties in Shaler's case,--or rather, as it seemed, with
the rankling of some later, nearer pain. He turned quickly away from
the intrusive thought, whatever it was. He does not like the
unpleasant side of things.

"At any rate, because Harry Dudley and I are to be adverse, it does
not follow that we are to be estranged. I cannot forget our
school-days,--our walks on the boulevards and the quays,--our rides in
the Bois,--our journeys together, when we were like brothers. I was
never so happy as in those days, when I had not a care or a duty in
the world."

He had the air, with his twenty-one years, of a weary
man-of-the-world. There was no affectation in it. Unless report have
done him injustice, the last two years have put a gulf between him and
that time.

I reminded him of the conversation between him and his sister, in
which they spoke of Harry Dudley before I knew who Harry Dudley was.
He remembered it, and returned very readily to the subject of it. He
related many incidents of the tour in Brittany, and spoke warmly of
the pleasure of travelling with a companion who is alive to everything
of interest in every sort. He said his travels in Germany, and even in
Italy, had hardly left with him so lively and enduring impressions as
this little journey into Brittany; for there he had gone to the heart
of things.

"I must see him again. We must meet once more as we used to meet. We
must have one good clasp of the hand; we must, at least, say a kind
good-bye to the old friendship. If, hereafter, we find ourselves
opposed in public life, I shall deal him the worst I can, but with
openness and loyalty like his own, and doing him more justice in my
heart, perhaps, than he will do me."

Frederic Harvey inquired anxiously where Harry was to be found, and I
was obliged to tell him of our intended meeting. I was afraid he would
propose to go with me. He was on the point of doing so, but refrained,
seeing that I was not expecting such a suggestion.

We could easily have arranged to meet at Quickster, which is about the
same distance from him that it is from me. But a ride of twenty miles,
most of them slow ones, beside a man with whom you are not in full
sympathy, is a trial. I did not feel called upon to undergo it for
him. When he took leave of me, he again seemed about to propose
something, and I felt it was this plan which was so natural; but he
was again withheld, by pride or by delicacy. Either feeling I could
sympathize with, and I was more touched by this reserve than by all
his friendly advances; but I hardened my heart. He mounted his horse.
I saw him go slowly down the path to the road, stoop from the saddle
to open the gate,--pass out. And then I was seized with sudden
compunction. I heard the slow step of his horse, receding as if
reluctantly, and ready to be checked at a hint. I ran to the gate.
Frederic was just turning away, as if he had been looking back,
expecting to see me; but in the same instant he gave an intimation to
his horse, and was out of the reach of my repentance.

"_I liked him._" With Harry these words mean a great deal. Could Harry
ever have liked him, if he had not been worthy to be liked? How sad
his look was, when he spoke of his happy boyish days!--happier than
these only because they were blameless. Was not this regret itself an
earnest of the power of return? He had good blood in him. He is
Charles Shaler's cousin. He has a weak, shallow mother,--a father
whose good qualities and whose faults are overlaid with the same
worldly varnish impartially. He feels the need of other influences,
and clings to Harry. He comes to me instinctively seeking something he
has not in his home. My mother has always judged him more kindly than
I have. If he had been a poor outcast child, I should have felt his
coming to me so frankly and so persistently to be a sign I was to do
something for him. Is there a greater need than that of sympathy and
honest counsel? I have been selfish, but this pain is punishment
enough. I feel a remorse surely out of proportion to my sin. I do not
prevent his going to meet Harry by not asking him to go with me. He is
not one to give up his wish; and in this case there is no reason that
he should. He will arrive; I am sure of it. And I will atone, at
least in part. I will ask him to join me on the ride home.

Old Jasper has told me stories of Frederic Harvey's good-heartedness
in childhood: tells them to me, indeed, every time he sees me. I
remember one in particular, of the pretty little boy in his foreign
dress, and speaking his foreign language, carrying his own breakfast
one morning to the cabin where the old man lay sick; and another of
his taking away part of her load from a feeble woman; and another of
his falling on a driver and wresting from him the whip with which he
was lashing a fainting boy. But Jasper has only these early stories to
tell of him; and what different ones are current now!

In dear old New England the child is father of the man. There the
lovely infancy is the sure promise of the noble maturity. But where
justice is illegal! where mercy is a criminal indulgence! where youth
is disciplined to selfishness, and the man's first duty is to deny
himself his virtues! If the nephew of Augustus had lived, would he
indeed have been Marcellus? _Heu pietas! Heu prisca fides!_--these
might have been mourned, though Octavia had not wept her son.



                                           THURSDAY, April 18, 1844.


It is thirty-five miles to Omocqua by the common road through Metapora
and Tenpinville; but I shall save myself five, going across fields and
through wood-paths, and coming out at Quickster. You left the Omocqua
road there, and took that to Quarleston. I shall stop half an hour at
Quickster to rest my horse and have a little talk with Barton. I mean
to allow myself ample time for the journey, that Brownie may take it
easily and yet bring me to Omocqua in season for a stroll about the
neighborhood with the Doctor and Harry before nightfall. Some miles of
my way are difficult with tree-stumps and brush; a part of it is
sandy; the last third is hilly. I have never been farther on that road
than Ossian, about three miles beyond Quickster; but the country
between Ossian and Omocqua is, I know, very much like that between
Quarleston and Cyclops, which you found so beautiful and so tiresome.

I do not mean that my parting with Harry shall be a sad one. After
that day at Omocqua, I shall not meet his smile,--his hand will not
clasp mine again; but he will leave with me something of himself which
will not go from me. His courage, the energy of his straightforward
will, shall still nerve and brace me, though his cordial voice may
never again convey their influence to my heart. Wherever he is, I
shall know we are thinking, feeling together, and working together;
for I shall surely do what he asks of me: that he thinks it worth
doing is enough.

And Dr. Borrow does not leave me what he found me. It was with a
continual surprise that I learned how much there is of interest and
variety in our uniform neighborhood for a man who knows the meaning of
what he sees. How many things are full of suggestion now that were
mute before! He has given me glimpses of undreamed-of pleasures. A
practical man, following him in his walks, and gathering up the hints
he lets fall, might turn them to great real use.

What a part the Doctor and such as he, disciples and interpreters of
Nature, would have in the world, how warmly they would be welcomed
everywhere, if these were only times in which men could live as they
were meant to live, happy and diligent, cherishing Earth and adorning
her, receiving her daily needful gifts, and from time to time coming
upon precious ones, which she, fond and wise mother, has kept back for
the surprise of some hour of minuter search or bolder divination!

But now, how can we be at ease to enjoy our own lot, however
pleasantly it may have been cast for us, or to occupy ourselves with
material cares or works, even the most worthy and the most rational?

We are taught to pray, "Thy kingdom come," before we ask for our daily
bread.

To pray for what we do not at the same time strive for, is it not an
impiety?

Dr. Borrow says that Harry is out of place in our time. I should
rather say that it is he himself who is here a century, or perhaps
only a half-century, too soon. Our first need now is of men
clear-sighted to moral truths, and intrepid to announce and maintain
them.

It was through the consciousness, not yet lost, of eternal principles,
that primitive poetry made Themis the mother of the gracious
Hours,--those beneficent guardians, bringers of good gifts, promoters
and rewarders of man's happy labor. When Justice returns to make her
reign on earth, with her come back her lovely daughters, and all the
beautiful attendant train.

When that time arrives, the Doctor will have found his place, and
Harry will not have lost his.

Perhaps I shall not come back until Saturday. According to their plan,
Dr. Borrow and Harry are to leave Omocqua again to-morrow afternoon;
but I shall try to persuade them to remain until the next morning.
While they stay, I shall stay. When they go, Brownie and I take our
homeward road. In any case, I will write to you Friday night, and send
off my budget on Saturday without fail.

To-day has not given me anything to tell of it yet, except that it has
opened as it should, fresh and cloudless. In five hours I shall be on
the road.

My paper is blistered and the writing blurred with wet drops. It is
only that some freshly gathered flowers on my table have let fall
their dew upon the page. You, with the trace of mysticism that lurks
in your man of the world's heart, would be drawing unfavorable
auguries. I am too happy to accept any to-day. If fancy will sport
with this accident, let it feign that these morning tears are of
sympathy, but not of compassion; that they fall, not to dim my hopes,
but to hallow them.


                                                            EVENING.

"In five hours I shall be on the road." So I wrote at six o'clock. I
wrote too confidently.

At eleven I had mounted my horse, had sent my last good-bye through
the open window, and had caught the last soft answer from within. I
lingered yet an instant, held by those links of tenderness and
solicitude that bind to home and make the moment of parting for any
unusual absence, even though a pleasant and desired one, a moment of
effort. A heavy, dragging step, which I almost knew before I saw the
lounging figure of Phil Phinn, warned me of a different delay. I
watched his slow approach with a resignation which had still a little
hope in it; but when he at last stood beside me and began his
ingratiating preamble, I felt my sentence confirmed. His woe-begone
face, his quivering voice, announced the suppliant before he reached
the recital of his wrongs; while the utter self-abandonment of his
attitude conveyed renunciation of all cares and responsibilities in
favor of his elected patron. I will not give you the details of the
difficulty of to-day,--an absurd and paltry one, yet capable of
serious consequences to him. I obeyed instinctively the old-fashioned
New-England principle I was brought up in, which requires us to
postpone the desire of the moment to its demands. Sadly I led my horse
to the stable, took off the saddle and put him up. "I cannot be back
until two," I thought, "perhaps not before three. I shall lose our
walk and our sunset; but even if it is as late as four, I will still
go." I ran into the house to say a word of explanation to my mother;
but she had heard and understood. She gave me a look of sympathy, and
I did not wait for more.

I set out resolutely in a direction opposite to that in which my own
road lay. Phil Phinn followed, already raised to complacency, though
not to energy. I outwalked him continually, and was obliged to stop
and wait for him to come up. He plainly thought my haste unseasonable,
and did not disguise that he was incommoded by the sun and the mud. It
was a tedious way, a long five miles for him and for me.

We arrived at last at the house of his adversary, who, having, besides
the advantage of being in a superior position, also that of justice on
his side, could the more easily give way. I should soon have come to
an understanding with him, if my client, while leaving me the whole
responsibility of his case, had not found himself unable to resign its
management: he must lend me the aid of his argumentative and
persuasive gifts. After some hours of wrangling and pleading, the
matter was accommodated, and Phil Phinn, without a care in the world,
or the apprehension of ever having one again, sauntered away toward
his home. I set off for mine, already doubtful of myself, remembering
that I was not the only disappointed one.

When I reached home, it was half-past six o'clock. I felt strongly
impelled to go, even then. My mother did not offer any objection, but
her look showed so plainly the anxiety the thought of a night-ride
caused her, that I gave it up without a word. I could not, indeed,
have arrived at Omocqua before midnight, and Harry would long have
done expecting me.

I am not as well satisfied with myself as I ought to be, having made
such a sacrifice to duty. I begin to ask myself, Was it made to duty?
After all, a little suspense would have done Phil Phinn good,--if
anything can do him good. And are not the claims of friendship
paramount to all other? Harry will be pained by needless anxiety. Can
he believe that I would, without grave cause, lose any of the time we
might yet have together? But a few hours will set all right.



                                             FRIDAY NIGHT, April 19.


I am at home again. I take out the package which has been waiting for
the day at Omocqua. Hoarding is always imprudence. If these letters of
last week had gone on their day, they would have been faithful
messengers. Now they go to tell you of a happiness which already is
not mine,--of hopes and plans that you can never share.

Are these last pages yesterday's? A lifetime is between me and them.
The book I pushed aside to write them lies there open, waiting to be
recalled. Had it an interest for me only yesterday? The flowers on my
table still hold their frail, transient beauty. No longer ago than
when I gathered them, I could take pleasure in flowers!

I sit here and go through the history of these last two days,
retracing every minutest incident. I begin again. I make some one
little circumstance different, and with it all is changed. I pass into
a happy dream; I find myself smiling. And then I remember that I
cannot smile!

I was to write to you to-night. I should have written, if I had not
promised. I must spend these hours with you. Every object here is so
full of pain! Everything is so exactly as it was; and yet nothing can
ever be as it was to me again!

It seemed last evening that I suffered more from my disappointment
than was reasonable. I wished for sleep to shorten the hours of
waiting. But troubled dreams lengthened them instead. I was up at
three; at four I was on the road. I had an hour over fields and
cleared land; then came some miles through the woods. The forest-ride
had not its usual charm. I was still haunted by the failure of
yesterday. I could not bear the thought of being misjudged by Harry,
even for a moment. I longed to be with him and explain. But would he
find me absolved? I was glad to come out into light and cheerfulness
at Quickster. It was six o'clock when I stood before the door of the
Rapid Run. Barton came down to me, drew out his pocket-book, and took
from it a folded paper.

"Here is something of yours."

I opened it and found written in pencil,--"Jackson House, Omocqua."
The sight of that frank handwriting dispelled every doubt.

"When was he here?"

"He came in a little before one yesterday. He asked if you had been
along. I thought not; you would have given me a call. He stayed round
here about an hour, waiting for you. I told him that you might have
struck the road farther down,--at Ossian, perhaps. He took a horse of
me, knowing you would ride."

"He was alone?"

"Yes. He told me Dr. Borrow was at Rentree; was to join him at Omocqua
this morning, though."

In half an hour we were on our way again. I was eager still, but no
longer impatient. There was no uncertainty in my mind now. Harry was
at Omocqua. He was expecting me. As to blaming me, he had never
thought of it. He would have imagined for me some better excuse than I
had to give. Or rather, it had never occurred to him that I could need
excuse. I should find him at the door on the lookout for me. His hand
would be in mine before I could dismount. In the mean while the miles
between us diminished rapidly. My horse enjoyed, as I did, every step
of the happy road. His prompt, elastic tread showed it, and the alert
ears which seemed not watchful against danger, but vigilant to catch
all the sweet and animating sounds that cheered us forward.

Three miles from Quickster we came on the intended town of Ossian. I
stopped a moment. Harry had probably lingered here yesterday, watching
to see me emerge from that dusky wood-path. He had found no one to
speak to. One inhabitant outstayed the rest a year; but he has now
been long gone, and his house is falling in.

Beyond Ossian the road was new to me. For about three miles it is
good. Then the country becomes uneven, and soon after very hilly. It
was slower work here; but Brownie and I took it pleasantly.

"How far is it to Omocqua?" I asked, as he was passing me, a man whom
I had watched painfully descending in his little wagon the hill I was
about to climb.

He drew up at once.

"Omocqua? You are for Omocqua? An hour, or a little more; though I am
a good hour and a half from there. They had something of a fuss down
there last night, perhaps you know."

"What about?"

"Well, a man from Tenpinville met a runaway boy of his who had been
hiding round there. The fellow ran; his master hailed him, and when he
wouldn't stop, out with a pistol and shot him flat."

"What was the man's name?"

"If I heard, I've lost it. I put up just outside the town. If I'd gone
in to hear the talk, I might have got mixed up; and I'd no call."

The hour was a long one. I hardly wished it shorter, yet I tried to
hasten. I urged my horse; but mastery is of the spirit, not of the
hand or will. He had obeyed so well the unconscious impulse! and now,
though he started forward under the spur of an inciting word, he soon
forgot it, and mounted the slow hills and descended them again with
drudging step and listless ears.

What a meeting! what a topic for the nineteenth of April! I imagined
Harry's grief, his shame, his concentrated indignation. I remembered
the flash of his eye, the flush of his cheek, when Dr. Borrow was
telling of the approach of the slave-coffle from which they had
rescued Orphy. And with this a keen apprehension seized me. Would
Harry have been able to repress his remonstrance, his reprobation? The
common man I had just met had not trusted the acquired prudence of
half a century. Could Harry's warm young heart contain itself?

Why was I not there? A warning, a restraining word----. But would
Harry have heard it? Could I have spoken it? Would he not have felt,
must not I have felt with him, that this was one of those moments when
to see wrong done without protesting is to share in it? And then rose
before me the possible scenes:--the beautiful, glowing face, the
noble, passionate words, the tumult, the clamor, the scoff, the
threat, the ---- Oh, no! surely the angels would have had charge
concerning him!

When we reached the summit of the last hill, my horse stopped of
himself, as if to let me receive well into my mind the first lovely
aspect of the town below us, and thus connect a charm with its name
which nearer knowledge should not be able to disturb.

I yielded to the influence of the scene the more easily that it was in
such contrast with my perturbed feelings. We may court and cherish a
fanciful or a superficial grief; but the bitterly tormented mind asks
ease as the tortured body does, and takes eagerly the soothing draught
from any hand. The landscape, still freshened by the night, and
already brilliant with the day, spoke peace and hope. I accepted the
promise. Descending the hill, I thought and reasoned cheerfully. I
smiled that I should have fancied nothing could happen in Omocqua,
when Harry was there, without his having a part in it. This took place
last evening; he had not heard of it yet, perhaps. Or he had heard of
it; but not until it was over, and there was nothing to be done. He
was commonly silent under strong emotion. He would have heard this
story as he had heard others of the sort, with resolved composure,
finding in it new food for his inward purpose.

On the outskirts of the town I came to a little tavern, the one
probably at which my acquaintance of the road had lodged. I had
almost stopped to ask the news, but thought better of it, and was
going on, when a man sitting on a bench under a tree started up and
ran after me, shouting. I stopped, and he came up out of breath.

"You thought we were shut, seeing us so still; but we're all on hand."

I explained, that I was going to the Jackson House, where a friend was
to meet me.

"The Jackson House! That's head-quarters for news, just now. All
right. You looked as if you wanted to stop."

"I thought of stopping for a moment. I heard on the road that there
had been some sort of disturbance in your town yesterday. Is all quiet
now?"

"For aught I know."

"I heard there was a boy shot here yesterday."

"A boy?"

"A runaway."

"One of our waiters brought down such a story last night. They are
sharp after news of their own. I told him 'twas wholesome, if it
turned out so. But this morning it comes that it was the man who was
running him off that was shot. You'll hear all about it at the
Jackson. If you come back this way, stop and give me a word. I can't
leave."

There were a number of men on the piazza of the Jackson House. Most
of them had the air of habitual loungers; a few were evidently
travellers newly arrived. Not a figure that even from a distance I
could take for Harry Dudley. Some trunks and valises were waiting to
be carried in, but I saw nothing familiar. I recognized the landlord
in a man who was leaning against a pillar, smoking. He did not come
forward, or even raise his eyes, when I rode up. I bade him
good-morning, addressing him by name. He came forward a little,--bowed
in answer to my salutation, but did not speak.

"Is Mr. Dudley here?"

Brompton did not reply. He threw out two or three puffs of smoke, then
took the cigar from his lips and flung it from him. He looked serious,
and, I thought, displeased. My misgivings returned. Had Harry incurred
ill-will by some generous imprudence? Had he left the house, perhaps?
Was the landlord afraid of being involved in his guest's discredit?

He spoke at last, with effort.

"Is your name ----?"

"Colvil."

He came down the steps and stood close to me, laying a hand on my
horse's neck and stroking down his mane.

"Mr. Colvil, I don't know that anybody is to blame; but an accident
has happened here. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you of it."

I dismounted. Brompton made several attempts at beginning, but stopped
again.

"You had some trouble in your town yesterday," I said; "can that in
any way concern Mr. Dudley?"

"Are you a near friend of his?"

"Yes."

"A relation?"

"No."

He went on with more assurance.

"Mr. Dudley was here about a month ago. He had a sick boy with him,
whom he left here, in a manner under my care. He was to have taken him
away to-day. He arrived yesterday afternoon and asked me to send for
the boy. I sent for him. Mr. Dudley was expecting you yesterday
afternoon, and walked over to the Jefferson to see if there was any
mistake.

"The boy was his. It was all regular. He had him of Ruffin, who never
does anything unhandsome. I knew all about it. Ruffin was here with a
lot of all sorts he had been picking up round the country. He told me
to keep the boy pretty close while I had him in charge; and I boarded
him outside the town, with an old granny, who didn't know but he was
really in hiding. But it was all right. He was a pet servant, spoiled
till he grew saucy, and his master swapped him off,--but quietly, the
family set so much by the boy. They were to think he'd been enticed
away. But it must happen, that, exactly yesterday afternoon, one of
the sons came riding up to this very house. He left his horse to the
servant he brought with him; then comes up to the door and asks if Mr.
Dudley is here; hears that he has walked out, and so walks out too.
The first thing he meets, just out here on the square, is this boy,
whom he had been fond of, and only over-kind to. The boy checks up,
and then, like a fool, turns and runs. The young man calls to him to
stop,--and then, to stop or he'd shoot. The boy only runs faster.
Dudley was crossing the square, on his way back from the Jefferson,
and came up at the moment. He told Orphy to stand still, and, stepping
right between him and the levelled pistol, called to the other to hold
on. But the man was so mad with rage at seeing his servant flout him
and mind another, that he could not stop his hand. I was standing
where you are now. I saw Dudley come up, with his even step, just as
usual. I heard his voice, clear and cool. I did not look for mischief
until I heard the crack of the pistol,--and there he was on the
ground! I ran down to him. I was going to have him taken into the
house, but he wanted to lie in the open air. We carried him round to
the green behind the barn. There was an army-surgeon here, on his way
West. He did what he could, but said it was only a question of hours.
Dudley knew it. He wanted to keep on till morning, thinking you might
come. He lasted till after daybreak. Will you go to him?"

I followed Brompton into the house, along the entry, across the yard,
through the great barn. A road led from a gate on a side-street to a
shed. Before us, on the other side of the road, was a green field with
one great tree. The grass under the tree was flattened.

"Yes, it was there," said Brompton. "He asked to be laid under that
tree. The sun was just setting over there. When evening came, we
wanted to take him to the house; but no. We let him have his will. It
was natural he should want to see the sky while he could."

Brompton led the way to the shed.

What struggles must have rent that strong young breast before the life
was dislodged from it! How must the spirit which had known this earth
only through innocent joys and sweet affections and lovely hopes,--how
must it have clung to its dear mortal dwelling-place! how mourned its
dividing ties! how claimed its work, unfinished, unbegun! This grief,
this yearning, this reluctance would have left their story on the
cold immovable face. With these, bodily torture would have done its
part to alter and impair! I followed my guide, foreboding that the
dumb anguish in my heart was to be displaced by a fiercer pain.

There was no pain in his presence. In death, as in life, he kept his
own gift of blessing. The holy light still lay on the brow; about the
lips hovered a smile, last ethereal trace of the ascended spirit. My
soul lifted itself to his. I understood the peace that passeth
understanding.

An angry voice brought me back to the world and its discords.

"Do you think you were worth it?"

I looked where Brompton was looking, and saw, seated near, on an
overturned barrel, a figure which could be no other than that of
Orphy. He sat impassive. Brompton's cruel words had not reached him.
His misery was its own shield. His utter wretchedness precluded more.
But he felt my look fixed upon him. He raised his eyes to me for a
moment, then closed them again to shut himself in with his woe. And
now his face quivered all over; his lips parted and closed
rapidly,--not as forming articulate accents, but in the helpless
forlornness that has no language in which to utter plaint or appeal.
And yet on these trembling cheeks, about this inane mouth, still
lingered some of the soft, playful lines I remembered on the pretty,
varying face of little Airy Harvey!

On the way from the house I was conscious that a step followed us,
stopping when we stopped, and going on again when we did; but I had
not given thought to it until now, when I perceived a timid movement
behind me, and felt a light touch laid on my arm. I turned, and met a
pair of mournful, pleading eyes.

"Jasper!"

The old man stretched one trembling hand toward the dead, while the
other clasped my wrist.--"It was not meant! It was not meant!"

"It was not," said Brompton.

"Do not bear anger! _He_ did not."

"He did not," echoed Brompton.

Jasper, searching my face, saw there what changed his look of entreaty
into one of compassion. He stroked my sleeve soothingly with his poor
shrunken fingers.--"And yet there never was anything but love between
you! Oh, think there is a sorer heart than yours this day!"

"Where is he?" I asked, fearing lest that most unhappy one might be
near.

"Gone."--It was Brompton who answered.--"Gone, I believe. He was here
until all was over. He locked himself into a room up-stairs. Dudley
sent for him many times the night through, in the intervals of his
pain. I took the messages to him. But he could neither bear to see the
one he had killed, nor yet to go away, and have no chance of seeing
him again. At daybreak Dudley got up, saying he had strength enough,
and went as far as the barn on his way to the house. There the surgeon
met him and led him back, pledging his word that the man should be
brought, if it was by force. And it was almost by force, but he was
brought. Dudley raised himself a little, when he came up, took his
hand and clasped it close. 'Good-bye, Fred!'--in a pleasant voice, as
if he were ready for a journey and must cheer up the friend he was to
leave behind. And then he sank back, still holding the other's hand,
and looking up at him with his kind eyes, not forgiving, but
loving,--till the eyelids drooped and closed softly, and he passed
into a quiet sleep. When we left him, he was breathing gently. We
thought it was rest."

Jasper went humbly away, secure of his suit. Brompton, too, withdrew
silently.

       *       *       *       *       *

In those first moments I had left below my loss and my grief to follow
the ascended; but now my human heart asked after the human friend.

On the rich, disordered hair were signs of the mortal agony: the soft,
bright curls were loosened and dimmed. The pure forehead could not be
fairer than it was, yet the even, delicately finished eyebrows seemed
more strongly marked. The brown eyelashes showed long and dark over
the white cheek. The same noble serenity; the same gentle strength;
only the resolute lines about the mouth were softened;--nothing now to
resist or to dare!

Dr. Borrow would be here soon. I sat down on a block and waited. Dr.
Borrow! I had thought his love for Harry tinctured with worldliness;
but how honest and hearty it appeared to me now! I had loved in Harry
Dudley what he was to be, what he was to do. Dr. Borrow had loved him
for himself only, simply and sincerely. I remembered the Doctor's
misgivings, his cautions to me. How negligently heard! Then it was
only that he did not yet comprehend the high calling of the boy whom
we equally loved. Now I almost felt as if I had a complicity in his
fate,--as if the Doctor could demand account of me.

That Harry Dudley would give himself to a great cause had been my hope
and faith; that he would spend himself on a chimera had been Doctor
Borrow's dread. But which of us had looked forward to this utter
waste? How reconcile it with Divine Omnipotence? with Supreme Justice?
Was there not here frustration of a master-work? Was there not here a
promise unfulfilled?

Careless footsteps and voices gave notice of the approach of men
brought by curiosity. Seeing me, and judging me not one of themselves,
they stop outside, confer a moment in lower tones, come in singly,
look, and go out again.

Then new voices. A tall, stout man stalked heavily in. "And the boy
was his own, after all," burst from him as he rejoined the others.

"The boy was not his own. He didn't buy him fairly to keep and work
him. It was a sham sale. He meant to free him from the first, and the
boy knew it. He was free by intention and in fact. He had all the
mischief in him of a free negro."

"The man was a New-Englander, and saw it differently," answered the
first voice.

"A man is not a fool because he is a New-Englander," replied the
second. "I am from New England myself."

"I don't see much of the same about you. Are there more there like him
or like you?"

"I tell you he has died as the fool dieth," the other answered
sharply, coming carelessly in as he spoke. He was a mean-looking man,
trimly dressed, in whom I could not but recognize the Yankee
schoolmaster.

As he stooped down over the man he had contemned, some dormant
inheritance of manhood revealed itself in his breast, some lingering
trace of richer blood stirred in his dull veins. He turned away, cast
towards me a humble, deprecating look, and, still bending forward,
went out on tiptoe.

Then, accompanied by a sweeping and a rustling, came a light step, but
a decided, and, I felt, an indifferent one. A woman came in. She took
account with imperious eyes of every object,--of me, of Orphy, of the
coarse bench spread with hay, which served as bier,--and then walked
confidently and coldly forward to the spectacle of death. When she had
sight of the beautiful young face, she uttered a cry, then burst into
passionate sobs, which she silenced as suddenly, turned, shook her
fist at Orphy, and was gone.

"Dr. Borrow is come."

_Come!_ To what a different appointment!

"He asked for you," persisted Brompton, seeing that I did not rise.
"He is in the same room he had when they were here together. He
mistrusted something, or he had heard something; he said no word until
he was there. Then he asked me what he had got to be told, and I told
him."

I made a sign that I would go. Brompton left me with a look which
showed that he knew what a part I had before me.

Dr. Borrow was not a patient man. He was ruffled by a slight
contrariety. This unimagined grief, how was it to be borne? With what
words would he receive me? Would he even spare Harry Dudley himself,
in the reproaches which his love would only make more bitter?

We three were to have met to-day. Was _he_ the one to be wanting? he
who was never wanting? He who had been the life, the joy, of those
dearly remembered hours, was he to be the sorrow, the burden of these?
I went to him again; again earth and its anxieties vanished from me.
No, he would not be wanting to us.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I touched the handle of the door, it was turned from the inside.
Dr. Borrow seized my hand, clasping it, not in greeting, but like one
who clings for succor. He searched my face with ardently questioning
look, as if I might have brought him mercy or reprieve. He saw that I
had not. A spasm passed over his face. His mouth opened to speak, with
voiceless effort. He motioned me to lead where he was to go. We went
down-stairs, and he followed me, as I had followed Brompton, along the
entry, across the yard, through the barn. He glanced towards the tree
and then took his way to the shed. I did not enter with him.

When he came back to me, he was very pale, but his expression was soft
and tender as I had never known it. We went in again together, and
stood there side by side.

Brompton spoke from without. "There is one thing I have not told you,
Dr. Borrow."

The Doctor turned to him patiently.

"There was an inquest held early this morning."

Dr. Borrow lifted his hand to ward off more.

"Let me take my child and go!"

The Doctor looked towards Orphy. Again I had almost wronged him in my
thought. "Come, my lad," he said, kindly; "you and I must take care of
him home."

Orphy left his place of watch. He came and stood close beside the
Doctor, devoting his allegiance; tears gathered in the eyes that the
soul looked through once more; the mouth retook its own pathetic
smile.

I knew that Harry Dudley must lie in Massachusetts ground, but I could
not look my last so soon. Dr. Borrow saw my intention and prevented
it. He took my hand affectionately, yet as holding me from him.

"Do not come. I am better off without you. I must battle this out
alone."

Then, a moment after, as feeling he had amends to make,--

"You have known him a few weeks. Think what I have lost,--the child,
the boy, the man! All my hopes were in him,--I did not myself know how
wholly!"

And beyond this anguish lay other, that he would have put off till its
time, but it pressed forward.

"Colvil, you are going home. You go to be consoled. What am I going
to?"

On the side-street, the swift tread of horses and the roll of rapid
wheels. A wagon stopped before the gate. What a joy Charles Shaler's
coming was to have been to us!

He was prepared. He came forward erect and stern. He saluted us
gravely in passing, went in and stood beside the bier. He remained
gazing intently for a little time,--then, laying his hand lightly on
the sacred forehead, raised his look to heaven. He came out composed
as he had entered.

Shaler spoke apart with Brompton, and returned to us.

"You would leave this place as soon as possible?" he said to Dr.
Borrow.

"Yes."

I had meant to combat the Doctor's desire that I should leave
him,--not for my own sake, but because I thought he would need me; but
I submitted now. Shaler would assume every care, and I saw that Dr.
Borrow yielded himself up implicitly.

       *       *       *       *       *

The moment came. We lifted him reverently, Orphy propping with his
weak hands the arm that had once lent him its strength. We carried
him out into the sunshine he had loved, bright then as if it still
shone for him. The wind ruffled the lifeless hair whose sparkling
curls I had seen it caress so often.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is over. Over with the last meeting, the last parting. Over with
that career in which I was to have lived, oh, how much more than in my
own! That brain cold! What vigorous thought, what generous enterprise
benumbed within it! That heart still, whose beats should have stirred
a nation's! The head for which I had dreamed so pure a glory has sunk
uncrowned. The name dies away in space; not a whisper repeats it.
Harry Dudley has passed from a world which will never know that it
possessed and has lost him.


 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
 STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY
 H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.



      *      *      *      *      *      *



Transcriber's note:

Obvious printer's errors have been corrected.

Inconsistent spellings and use of hyphens have been kept (e.g.,
"door-steps" and "doorsteps").





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Fifteen Days - An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal" ***

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