The See Of Peter…

The See Of Peter

Not unto hirelings, Prince of Shepherds, leave This distant flock. The wolf, long kept at bay, No longer in sheep’s clothing seeks its prey, Nor prowls at midnight round the fold’s low eave, Its weak, unwary victim to deceive; But rampant in the flock at noon of day, Careering leaps, to scatter, mangle, slay, While from afar the banished shepherds grieve. How long must sycophants wax blandly wise, And meek‐faced aspirants rebuke the cries Of outraged faith! On Peter, “Feed my sheep, My young lambs feed,” the charge benignant lies, And we whose vigils cheat the night of sleep, On Peter, still, calm eyes expectant keep.

Atlantic Drift—Gathered In The Steerage.

By An Emigrant.

To most of the sons and daughters of Columbia the few days they pass in returning from the Old Country represent but a period of wearisome delay—an interval sometimes nauseous and always irksome between the pleasures of travel and those of their own fireside, passed perhaps in recollection of the pleasures of Paris, the classic grandeurs of the Eternal City, or the picturesque beauties of Switzerland and the Rhine; not unfrequently, perhaps, by our belles, whose elegance and social value have received their last gilding in the grand tour of Europe, in anticipation of the effect of their costumes at Newport or Saratoga, or of their adventures and experiences in the great circle of their country friends. All that wealth and skill can do is lavished on the accommodations of ocean steamers, and nothing is spared to make the traveller independent of the caprice or ill‐temper of the watery god; and nowadays a passage from the Mersey to our Empire City is to the ordinary passenger almost as comfortable and quite as devoid of unusual interest as a sojourn of so many days at the St. Nicholas or the Fifth Avenue. There is, however, another class of voyagers whose hard‐earned savings form the staple of the receipts of the owners of these splendid vessels; they usually belong to a sphere where literature hardly penetrates and whence come few who wield a ready pen; hence perhaps the general ignorance that seems to prevail as to their treatment and accommodation. The cabin passenger sees them only in squalid groups, encumbering the decks of the great ship, beyond the middle enclosure reserved to the saloon; and if he dives into the close and half‐lit steerage, a very brief glance round its dim precincts satisfies his curiosity. Believing, however, that many of our adopted countrymen will feel some interest in knowing how the great army of emigrants who flock in hundreds of thousands to our shores fare on their ocean transit, one of us lifts a voice from the steerage to relate some of the realities of life in an emigrant ship. Naught have we extenuated or aught set down in malice, and, such as it is, our little narrative is a true history of personal and actual experience.

To the reader it matters little what ill‐fortune cast from his quiet anchorage a London clerk who had already seen three decades, and whose life had hitherto run in the tranquil groove of uniform official duty, sufficiently well remunerated to furnish the comforts of a middle‐class English home. Unable to regain a similar position in his native land, he goes to seek his fortune in the West, and, thither wending, finds himself in the steerage of one of our principal ocean steamers. Candor requires this avowal, for those interested in the great liners think they dispose of the numerous complaints as to their treatment of their emigrant passengers, by retorting that they provide for the working‐classes, and not for clerks out of place or penniless gentlemen. Hence what is here stated as to their discomfort deals not with the writer’s own feelings, but speaks of what he saw endured by others, and he gives voice not merely to his own opinions, but to the sentiments of the mechanics, artisans, and farm laborers who were his fellow‐voyagers.

Every emigrant has to provide himself with bedding, plate, basin, drinking and water can, and a knife and fork. Our first experience of emigrant life consisted in the purchase of these articles at a Liverpool slop‐shop; some ten shillings covered the entire outlay, except for the blanket, the most indispensable of all; for this purpose, the dealer persuaded us to buy a horse‐rug, which he solemnly assured us was worth double the money across the Atlantic: as a copy of the Times would give about as much warmth and shelter as the common covering sold with the bed, we invested in it. An addition to our comfort it certainly has been in the bunk, and in the long nights in the emigrant trains, and it still remains our property; no market have we been able to discover for the article, and we conclude that a certain spice of Americanism had communicated itself to the mercantile mind of the seller. Many of the inmates of our steerage dispensed with all or most of these domestic utensils. One gentleman’s luggage, whose world‐ wide travels we may hereafter refer to, consisted of a limited brown‐paper parcel; in his subsequent oceanic career his Irish suavity usually procured him the loan of one of the tins of an acquaintance; that failing, he borrowed any neighboring utensil whose owner was not for the moment at hand; or, driven to his last resource, abjured coffee or soup and ate his portion of meat on a piece of brown paper. Some had but one vessel which served indifferently for a drinking‐can, soup‐basin, plate, tea‐cup, or wash hand‐basin, while a few comfort‐loving people, more frequently, however, in the after or family steerage than in our bachelor quarters, carried heavy loads of comfortable bedding and neatly‐arranged baskets of table‐ware.

Nearly all this apparatus of bedding and tin‐ware is thrown overboard or given to the crew when the vessel arrives at its destination; only the frugal Germans carefully preserve their vessels, and, shaking out its straw or moss contents, preserve the ticking of the bed either as a wrapping for their baggage or some ulterior purpose. It certainly seems strange that an expenditure of from two to three hundred pounds should be incurred by every ship‐load of emigrants for articles of such brief utility. Could not this outlay be converted to the benefit of the ship‐ owners by the permanent provision of requisites of this description at a moderate charge?

The great landing stage at Liverpool on the morning of our embarkation was crowded with some two thousand persons—the passengers of three mail steamers, their friends, and the swarm of porters, carters, and pedlers in attendance on them. Everything was confusion; here mothers seeking a stray little one, there the husband anxiously gathering together his motley property of boxes, bedding, cans, baskets, and packages of every description, as they were roughly tossed out of the cart from some boarding‐house. The boxes had to be placed in one tender, the passengers and lighter luggage in another; porters drove greedy bargains with females helplessly encumbered with immovable boxes. Women with baskets full of articles for sale—combs and brushes, knives, scissors, and soap—pushed their way here and there. To single men, careful of small change, it was a problem how to move the box or trunk in one direction and yet secure the safety of the other articles while doing so. We despaired of solving the problem, and trusted to the honesty of a badge porter, who undertook for sixpence to place our box on the luggage tender; afterwards, nervous as to the actual presence there of our little all, we spent two weary hours in watching the baggage discharged into the hold. A thousand trunks and chests of every conceivable size, shape, color, and dimensions passed down the hatchway before us—handsome American boxes, ribbed and gay with bright nails; immense iron‐bound chests of unpainted deal, containing the whole household goods of some Swedish or Norwegian family, directed in quaint letters to some far‐off town in Minnesota or Wisconsin; flimsy papered trunks, with sides already creaking and gaping, threatening to disgorge their finery before they touch the ground in Castle Garden; and German packs of strong ticking or canvas about the size of a small haystack—and, with a sigh of relief, we at last saw our property shot with a crash into the hold. Nearly two long hours did we spend on the open stage under a drizzling rain, that soaked the beds and blankets before the tenders moored alongside; then all made for the gangways, tugging their luggage with them; produced their tickets as they passed on, and pushed, tumbled, and scrambled pell‐mell on board; a similar scene was enacted at the steamer’s side; and when at last we reached her spacious decks we felt like soldiers passed unscathed through some hard‐fought field; not all unscathed, however; a considerable number of missing tins, blankets, and even beds attested the severity of the struggle and gave zest to the satisfaction of the more fortunate.

Arrived at last on our floating home for the coming fortnight, we pushed our way into the steerages to find our berths and enter into possession: and here let us try to describe. The steamer was a magnificent vessel, advertised to be of 3,700 tons, and celebrated for the luxury of her saloon accommodation and her almost unrivalled speed—qualities, as experience taught us, attained somewhat at the expense of the comfort of her emigrant passengers. Right aft the forecastle or forward part of the deck was roofed over with what sailors call a whale‐back, to the entrance of the forward steerage; a small deck house, with doors on each side, and on one side a small closet with a half door and a few racks for clothes served as a deck bar; behind it, that is, towards the stern, was the forward fresh water pump; walking still sternwards, we next encounter another small house containing the wash‐house for the forward steerage, entered from below, and two or three cabins for some of the officers or petty officers opening on the deck; on one side of this was a hot water tap; a few feet further is the main deck house, extending about half the length of the ship; in the street‐like passages between its sides and the bulwarks—open iron railings in our vessel—are the doors to the galleys, boilers, engine‐rooms, officers’ berths, and saloon, which, unlike most other steamships, is in this situated amidships; from the saloon a handsome double staircase led on to the deck above, which, however, like the tops of all the other deck houses, was tabooed ground to the emigrants. At the end of the main deck house was the entrance to the forward or sternmost steerage, and at the side of it the after fresh water pump; still further aft another deck house contained the wash‐house belonging to this steerage, and, as in case of the forward steerage, entered from below, and one or two officers’ berths, and provided outside with a second hot water tap; still further, the stern deck house contained the wheel house, with the engine for working the rudder, the butcher’s shop, ice and meat house, and vegetable storehouse; and between its semicircular end and the bulwark round the stern ran a low gallery, always considered among us as the most desirable place to settle for the day. We were free to ramble or squat ourselves on the deck where we listed, except the extreme forecastle forward of the entrance to the sailors’ cabin; there an incautious intruder paid his footing with the penalty of a bottle or two of beer to the nearest sailor who could catch him. Under the whaleback, also, either by custom or some rule of the ship, was forbidden ground to children or the fair sex, and always the chosen resort of old hands who liked to smoke a quiet pipe sheltered from the wind, chat with those of the crew who were off duty, and be comfortably near the deck bar.

Enter the forward or bachelors’ steerage—the after one being reserved to married couples and single women; leaving the bright day, we can hardly distinguish the objects in the dim light, and feel our way down the first flight of steps; this brings us on the main deck; here it is not open to the sides of the ship, along which run the berths of the saloon passengers. Entered from the saloons at the fore part, where they terminate by the hospital, two neat rooms, each with three or four bunks with bedding, wash‐basins, etc., similar to those of a saloon berth, and in one of which, in the absence of patients, our two stewards sleep; and at the other or after end a narrow flight of steps leads up to the wash‐ house on deck. The main deck is lighted only by the stairs and the hatchway; when the wooden grating covering the latter is in its place, it is dim; when it is covered with tarpaulin to prevent the entrance of the rain or spray, too dark to see. We have still another flight of steps to descend to reach the cavernous abyss of the steerage itself, which is situated between‐decks; when our eyes grow accustomed to the obscurity, we see a central open space about ten feet wide, running from end to end; in this are three narrow wooden tables with benches, two lengthwise and one crosswise, each capable of seating about twenty people; on each side are the bunks, reaching to the roof, entered by narrow streets or passages leading off on either hand, and again benches in the central space all round the outer side of the bunks.

Each street of bunks contained twenty upper and lower rows of five each, on either hand; the inmates therefore, lay side by side, parallel with the ship’s length, with their feet to their own street, and their heads adjoining those of their neighbors in the adjoining street. The bunks themselves consisted simply of shelves of unpainted boards, with an opening of about an inch between each, and were about six feet and a half wide, and divided into the spaces for each bunk, and fenced at the foot by upright boards about a foot high; in short, an emigrant’s bunk means a slightly fenced off space of hard board rather more than six feet by two. The lower row are about two feet from the ground; the upper about three feet above the lower, and the same distance from the roof. They are not attached to the side of the ship, but to a framework a few inches from it, the interstices of which served to stow hats or tins. Inside this coffinlike area of the bunks you stow bed, bedding, cans, and all smaller impedimenta, while such boxes as found their way down are pushed under the lower berths, piled in corners of the central space, or serve in the streets as seats or footsteps to the upper berths. In our steamer the bunks seemed to have been just put up; they were free from vermin, the timbers had nothing dirtier about them than sawdust; indeed, as we believe, the number of steerage passengers who cross eastwards is much less than in the other direction, the greater part of the boards are often knocked down on the ship’s arrival in New York, and the steerage filled with cargo, and then re‐erected when she is again prepared for the westward trip. The berths next to the central space were the most in request, on account of their being nearer the fresh air, and the lower range everywhere objected to; but nearly all the tickets had a number affixed, and no liberty of choice was permitted. Ours was in the upper berth in one corner, and consequently very far removed from any ventilation; as a slight compensation, being next to the side of the ship, we could look through the little window over the surging water, with which it was almost level and frequently covered. The gaps between the planks were very annoying, as small articles readily fell through them, and if they fell beneath the lower range it was too dark and the space too narrow to readily recover them. From about nine till twelve every day the steerage was closed, all the inmates sent on deck, and the floor brushed and laid down with fresh sawdust; this process, we think, was confined to the central space and the streets, and did not extend to the spaces underneath the bunks; and it was daily inspected or supposed to be inspected by one of the doctors, of whom there were two on board.

The wash‐house to the forward steerage was of decent size, with tiled floor, and contained eight closet pans, five wash hand‐basins, each with a tap of cold water and one with a hot water tap, and four sinks, also with salt water taps: putting aside the absence of any privacy, the arrangements were suitable, and the fittings generally clean; but, as in so many other instances, the carelessness or inattention of the crew made the admirable equipments of the ship almost useless. Except early in the morning there was rarely any water in the taps, and in the hot water cistern, which also supplied the hot‐water tap outside, often none for two or three days: the engineer, the steward told us, would not waste the steam by putting his cistern into communication with the boilers; and then often, when turned on, the tap poured out so much more hot steam than water that one was likely rather to get scalded hands than a full can.

The after‐steerage was similar in character to that of the single men, but much larger, occupying both the main and between‐decks; the married men and women slept on one side, the single women on the other; their privacy being supposed to be secured by a canvas curtain let down at night the whole length of the cabin. In the other lines, we believe the men and women, married or single, are quite separated, but ours put it forward as one of their attractions that husbands and wives are berthed together; as this simply means that their bunks are allotted side by side, the wife is really no more berthed with her own husband than with the spouse of her next neighbor. Many of the more respectable women complained much of being misled by the announcement, and of their being unable to undress to rest during the whole of the voyage, as they might have done if a cabin had been really and exclusively reserved for children and females. To the after steerage two wash‐houses were attached, one for the women with closed private closets, and one for the men similar to ours.

The routine of one day’s life may serve for all. As the mornings were generally damp and chilly, like most in our steerage we slept till towards eight o’clock, and did not rise till breakfast was announced; as dressing consisted in knocking off the rugs and donning coat, waistcoat, and boots, it was not a long process; then we scramble down into our street, seize our can and wait; in our corner we are too far removed from the tables—which would not seat half the number the cabin contains—to try to obtain seats at them; so we sit in the bunks on the chests in our street, or stand till the steward comes round to the entrance, and sings out, “Who is for coffee?” Each holds out or passes on his can, and he ladles into it about a pint of a boiling hot decoction, sweetened but without milk, and bearing a distant but still recognizable relationship to the article one had hitherto known under the name. A few minutes afterwards he comes round with the fresh bread, and over its distribution there were always much squabbling and bad language, partly because the bakers disliked the trouble of baking more than the strictly necessary quantity, and were given to restricting both the number and size of the loaves, and partly because many could neither eat the waxy potatoes nor hard sea‐biscuits; so that all sorts of tricks were resorted to to secure additional loaves for their dinner or tea. Of all the articles of diet the warm fresh bread every morning was decidedly the favorite, and any shortcoming in its supply more resented than any other infliction; both in size and quality the loaves varied very much according to the caprice of the bakers, but they were generally good. Great pyramids of butter were placed in tins on the tables; most of the men would not eat it on account of its tallow‐like flavor; for our own part, on obtaining our coffee and bread, we cut the latter open, put a lump of butter to melt inside, and pressed it together to distribute it equally as it melted, and then proceeded on deck, and under the influence of the keen sea air rarely failed to eat with a good appetite this not very luxurious fare in some quiet corner out of the wind. After breakfast, warmed with the steaming coffee, we obtained a can full of fresh water from the pump, produced the toilet requisites from our satchel, and in one corner of our street performed our ablutions; we always took as near an approach to a sponge‐bath as circumstances permitted, and found the practice more refreshing even than sleep. Though the steward never interfered with me, it was, however, we believe, against the rules to wash elsewhere than in the wash‐house, or to use fresh water for the purpose. The first day or two we had to wash in the wash‐house before breakfast, but the crowd there for various purposes was so great and there was so little convenience for putting down the different articles that we gave it up; and after breakfast there was rarely water for the purpose.

The decks always presented a more crowded and busy appearance in the forenoon than in any other period of the day; the steerages were empty, and all their inmates perforce on deck, huddled here and there, wherever the deck houses offer shelter from the winds, in compact groups three or four deep. The German and Scandinavian mothers perform the ablutions of their numerous families deliberately and in public—an amusing, if to some disgusting, process; first, the white‐headed urchin is held between his mother’s or perhaps his eldest sister’s knees, and his poll carefully and methodically examined with the fingers—not a comb, and any strangers summarily executed. Then he is taken to the scuppers by the side of the ship, his head held over a tin of hot water and lathered till he is red in the face and his eyes full of soap; then washed and taken back again, his head combed down into smoothness, and released for the day with a weight off his mind, the process being varied in the case of a little girl by the plaiting of her long flaxen locks into ribbon‐adorned tails. The majority, however, treated their abode on shipboard as a time when the ordinary rules of civilized life were temporarily suspended, and eschewed washing, shaving, and all the vanities of dress until they again felt themselves on terra firma.

Dinner took place at twelve; we mustered as for breakfast, but with a more careful marshalling of cans, for two, if not three, were necessary, and a sharp watch was requisite to prevent some hungry but tireless prowler from summarily appropriating the nearest ware; first came the soup, dealt out as the coffee at breakfast—a hot compound with a faint reminiscence of gravy and mutton bones, some grains of barley, and fragments of celery and cabbage; sometimes, instead, a thick mixture of ground peas; such as it was, with plenty of salt which one of our street usually fetched from the table for the general benefit, it was the most reliable part of the dinner; it was always drinkable, and many came down to obtain it who would taste no other article provided by the ship beyond the soup and bread. Next came the meat, cut up into chunks in an immense tin, and shovelled out by the steward with a saucer on to the tin plates. Sometimes it was eatable; say, perhaps, on five out of the ten days a hungry stomach and a stern will could manage it; and once or twice we had fresh beef as good, allowing for the roughness with which it was served, as any one could desire; the salt junk and salt fish, however—and the latter, in deference to the feelings of the Catholic passengers, always appeared on Friday—were vile; the junk could not be cut with a knife, and had to be torn into shreds along the grain, while the fish in taste and smell was simply abominable.

The potatoes were one of our standing grievances; as there were but two stewards to assist some hundred and sixty people, they had to form a course of themselves, or the meat got cold while waiting for them; and instead of being boiled, they were steamed by some hasty process into the taste and consistency of a tallow candle. To the natives of the Emerald Isle, accustomed to consider their potato the pièce de resistance of their humble fare, this misusage of their favorite food was particularly aggravating, and their complaints were loud and endless. Boiled rice was generally served after the potatoes with coarse sugar or treacle; as long as the latter lasted it was palatable, but the sweetening generally bore the same relation to the rice as did Falstaff’s bread to his sack, and our ingenuity had to be taxed to procure a double or treble allowance of the sugar by changing places while the serving took place or holding the plate over the shoulders of the steward who carried it. On Sundays plum duff, a heavy pudding pretty liberally supplied with raisins, was dealt out, and to stomachs accustomed to steerage fare seemed something faintly approaching the luxuries of the table appropriate to the day. The tea, which took place at five, may be dismissed in two words: taste it had none, and its smell was beastly; however, it was always boiling hot, and in the cold, damp evenings anything warming was grateful. With it we had biscuits and butter.

Without a detailed notice of that indispensable and omnipresent article the sea‐biscuit, any account of our food would be incomplete; a barrel of them always stood at the head of the staircase on the main deck, and any one could help himself as often and as liberally as he thought proper; they formed our sole fare at tea, and our dernier ressort, when the dinner was, as it usually was every other day, altogether uneatable. More fortunate than most of our fellow‐passengers, we could combine recreation and humble fare by gnawing at their hard sides. Of wooden consistency they certainly were; to make any impression on their hard edges it was necessary first to break them with a smart blow of the fist, put a piece between two sound molars, shut your eyes, hold fast to one of the stanchions of the bulwarks, and bring your jaws together with a determined and persevering grind! The result, to our taste, was not unsatisfactory; they were perfectly sweet, and when once pulverized not ill tasted; and on several occasions, when we found the other provisions inedible, two or three biscuits, washed down with a bottle of porter, served us for a tolerable meal. Few, however, shared our liking or would touch them, except at the last extremity, and by those whose teeth were not in first‐ rate order they were unassailable. As a souvenir, we pocketed a couple on leaving the ship, and as we munched them on the following night on the platform of the emigrant car jolting along the side of the broad and mist‐ clad Hudson, hoped that Dame Fortune would never reduce us in the Far West to more unpalatable fare.

On the whole, it was possible to subsist on the ship’s provisions, particularly when the transit was regarded in a purgatorial or penitential sense; and that statement, too, must be qualified by the admission of the necessity of malt liquor: without two or three bottles of beer or porter a day, we could not have survived; they served as a tonic, which made greasy meat digestible, and biscuits possible to swallow; few, however, lived entirely on the steerage fare, nor must it be supposed that the grumblers or discontented were generally those who had, as it is termed, seen better days. Men of that class were slow to complain, because ignorant of what they ought to tolerate or endure in their altered circumstances. It was the well‐to‐do artisans or workingmen who showed the greatest disgust and were the bitterest in their complaints. Many families were provided with well‐filled baskets of good bread, ham, and bottles of preserves, and had their own store of tea and sugar, for which they obtained hot water from the galley; while others bought the whole of their food.

Buying, begging, and stealing food was one of the most interesting and to some the most engrossing of occupations; it required a little money, a deal of diplomacy, and very hardened feelings, and was accomplished in very various ways. At the commencement of the voyage, little cliques were formed of four or five people, who made up a purse of two or three pounds for one of the cabin stewards, who in return sold to or stole for them a regular supply of cabin provisions; we were asked to join a little party of this sort, but declined; nor did we observe much of their subsequent fortune, except that they professed to have plenty of good food, and seemed to spend most of their time in watching for the opportunity when their steward could safely convey it to them; others peeled potatoes or apples and carried water for the galleys, and got fed in return; some reduced it to a system, bought meat from the butchers, and got it cooked in the galley, or, for a consideration, got liberty to go in at an idle time and cooked it themselves; the ordinary way, however, was to buy a bottle of beer at our deck‐bar, hand it in to one of the cooks with a tin, and ask him to give you something, the best time being immediately after breakfast, when the hot scouse or Irish stew—far better food than any provided for us—was served out for the sailors’ breakfast, or after the saloon dinner; you then slunk about the galley door, cursed for being in their way by all the cooks except the recipient of the beer, until that gentleman saw the head cook or chief steward out of the way, filled the tin with anything at hand—generally scouse in the morning, cold beef and chicken in the evening—shoved it under your coat, and told you to clear out instantly. One’s feelings suffered much in this process; but a few days of steerage fare blunt the sensibilities and whet the animal appetite to an extent that requires to be experienced to be appreciated.

Another want that is keenly felt in consequence of the salt food and dry biscuit is that of something green or succulent. One craves an apple or an orange or lemon; and so well aware were the experienced travellers among us of this want that fresh fruit generally occupied a large space in their well‐stuffed baskets. We had only the slender resource of pulling pieces of celery through the grating of the vegetable store, peeling them and eating them as an addendum to the coffee and bread of our breakfast. Unfortunately either the demand for that cool vegetable was unexpectedly great in the saloon, or we emigrants were too successful in extracting it through the bars of the always open store; for before the voyage was half over the supply was exhausted, we then had raw carrots and onions from the same source, but the result was not satisfactory.

Many of the passengers who had no money suffered much from their inability to cope with our daily fate. One young man of about twenty‐two or three years of age particularly attracted our attention. Short and slight, of perfectly gentlemanly manners and quiet address, he had little of the typical American about him, though as we afterwards learned from himself he belonged to a Western family engaged in commerce and of considerable means. Some strange star must have presided over his birth, for he had the rarest of all dispositions in the New World, a dislike to traffic and money‐making, and an unconquerable yearning for a life of literary labor. He was returning westward after residing in Dresden and Florence, full of enthusiasm for Goethe and Schiller, Tasso and Dante, and proudly conscious of a vocation himself as a dramatic poet. He had shot, he said, in the lakes of Minnesota, hunted in the Adirondacks, become familiar with the most beautiful and intellectual of the European capitals, and now felt that his endowment for his career was enriched by the novel experiences of the steerage of an emigrant ship. Fine conceptions, except perhaps among saints or hermits, do not thrive on an empty stomach.

Our poet looked daily more pallid and spiritless. He listened uninterestedly to everything except prospects of better fare or prophecies of the speedy diminution of the irksome voyage. One night one of the cooks in the emigrant galley gave us a tin crammed to overflowing with fragments of meat and fowl, and, additionally armed with a bottle of porter and a biscuit, we had settled in a quiet leeward corner to make a hearty supper, when we thought of the famishing poet. We found him tending a little singing‐bird he was taking out with him, and invited him to share our meal; and the enjoyment with which he ate the broken meat—a biscuit serving for a plate, and a clasp‐knife for an instrument—was quite refreshing. We took alternate pulls at the porter, and felt pleased with ourselves and the world. His inner man refreshed, our poet became another person. The charm of his conversation well repaid our little sacrifice, and we talked art and literature, music and the drama, until the loneliness of the deck, the chill night breeze, and the bright moon mounted high in the star‐spangled heaven warned us of the approach of midnight. A few hours after we had landed in New York, we met our poet in Broadway, in all the elegance of clean raiment, and happily conscious of a well‐lined purse. Though our rough garb assorted ill with his gentility, he insisted on our drinking glasses together to the memory of our meeting. As we drank, he expatiated on the advantages of a varied experience of the many‐sided life of our poor humanity. Nevertheless, we opine, to cross the Atlantic in the steerage of an emigrant ship with an empty pocket, is one of those phases of existence which he will never voluntarily again investigate. Another instance of suffering was that of an Englishman—a quiet‐visaged, silent man, past middle age, whose velveteen coat and corduroy trowsers bespoke him a ploughman or gamekeeper from some Old World country neighborhood. He had with him his little daughter, a fair‐ haired, sweet‐faced little girl of about twelve, genteelly dressed. Neither he nor his child could eat the ship’s food, and the little girl used to sit all day quietly pining by her father’s side. They met, however, worse fortune on shore. Bound to some town in Ohio, he was apparently ignorant that a long journey separated it from their landing‐ place, and landed in Castle Garden penniless. Too shy or too proud to beg, the man and his little girl starved for a day, until some fellow‐passenger accidentally found out their condition and supplied them with food.

No account of a sea voyage would be faithful without noticing the dread malady, the sufferings of which form the traveller’s introduction to the domain of Neptune; but it is a life over which we must perforce draw a veil. To the voyager who has a comfortable berth, every convenience that wealth can produce, attentive stewards, and the command of each luxury that his fancy or fears can suggest, the horrors of sea‐sickness are sufficiently nauseous. What they are in the steerage of an emigrant ship, where your pangs are intensified by the maladies and filth, the groans and curses, of some scores of other victims, can be better imagined than described; it is too disgusting. For the first two or three days, to eye, ear, and nose our steerage was insufferable; there was no remedy but to avoid it as much as possible, and either abandon the meals altogether, or rush down, snatch a hasty portion of whatever came nearest to hand, and beat a hasty retreat to the fresh air of the deck before your rising gorge added you to the ranks of the inconsolable.

But this rough initiation had its practical advantage. Many of the younger passengers of the better class at the commencement of their voyage endeavored to keep up appearances in spite of all difficulties, and to present themselves on deck fresh from a careful toilette and in all the neatness of clean linen and well‐arranged dress; but, when they had once succumbed to the qualms of the malady, their vanity went overboard. Languid and weary, they crowded on deck, unwashed and uncombed, muffled in a waterproof, or huddled in twos and threes in a corner in the warm folds of a blanket or horse‐rug; and as their spirits revived they thought no more of struggling against adverse circumstances, and were content to “peg along” (pardon, kind reader, the expression) until their feminine instincts revived at the welcome sight of the wished‐for land.

To Be Concluded In Our Next Number.

A Daughter Of S. Dominic.

If she had been condemned to have her life written, and been given the choice of a name under which to appear before the world, this would probably have been the one she would have taken. But who could have persuaded the humble child of the grand S. Dominic that such a fate was in store for her, or induced her humility to accept it? Well, it matters little to her now whether men speak of her or for her, she is alike beyond the reach of their hollow praise and their jealous criticism. But to us it matters much. The teaching of such a life as Amélie Lautard’s is too precious to be lost; it is a lesson to be sought out and hearkened to, for it is full of beauty, and light, and encouragement to those whom she has left behind.

Amélie was born at Marseilles on the 12th of April, 1807. Her father was a medical man, eminent in his profession, an honorable man, and a good Christian. She lost her mother at the age of seventeen. Early in life she met with an accident which injured her spine so seriously as to render her by degrees quite humpbacked; the progress of the deformity was slow and very gradual, but even when it had grown to its worst it never looked grotesque or repulsive, nor did it, strange to say, take away from the singular dignity of her appearance or from the grace of her movements. In person she was tall and dark, not handsome, though her features had so much charm and expression that most people considered her so. Her intelligence was of a very high order, and pre‐eminently endowed with that delightful and untranslatable gift called esprit. From her earliest childhood she began to develop an angelic spirit of piety and a sensitiveness to the sufferings of others that is generally the outgrowth of maturer years. The sufferings of the poor claimed her pity especially, but not exclusively. The range of her sympathies was wide enough to embrace every kind and degree of sorrow that came within her knowledge. This characteristic of her charity, as rare as it is attractive, may be considered as the keynote of her life, and explains, humanly speaking, the extraordinary influence she exercised over all classes indiscriminately.

After her mother’s death Amélie became the chief delight and interest of her father, and she repaid his tenderness by the most absolute devotion. Offers of marriage were not wanting for the accomplished and spirituelle young lady, but Amélie turned a deaf ear to them all; filial duty as much as filial love had wedded her to her father, and she declared her intention never to separate from him, or let any other love and duty come between those she had vowed unreservedly to him. It was probably at this period of her life that she bound herself exclusively to the service of God by a vow of perpetual virginity.

During many years Dr. Lautard’s health was such as to require constant and unremitting care. Amélie nursed him with the tenderest affection, never allowing her devotions or her work amongst the poor to interfere with her first duty to him. He expired in her arms, blessing her and declaring that she had been the model of filial piety, the joy and solace of his widowhood. Amélie generously made the sacrifice of this one great affection to God, she drank the chalice with a broken heart, but with an unmurmuring spirit, and entered bravely on the new life that was before her. Hers was to be the mission of an apostle, and she must go forth to it unshackled by even the holiest and purest of natural ties. She had long been a member of the Third Order of S. Dominic, to whom from her childhood she had had a great devotion. To her previous vow of virginity she now added a vow of poverty, which, in the midst of abundance, she observed rigorously to the end of her life. Dr. Lautard, knowing her propensities, and suspecting rightly that, if her fortune were left completely in her own power, she would despoil herself of everything and leave herself without the means of subsistence, tied it up in annuities which could not be alienated. But while binding herself henceforth to the practice of the most rigid austerities, Amélie did not break off from her accustomed intercourse with her friends. She continued to receive them as hitherto in her father’s house. Dr. Lautard used to say that hospitality was a virtue which it behooved Christians living in the world to exercise towards each other, and he imbued Amélie with the same idea. Mindful of his precepts and example, she went on inviting her friends, and enjoyed having them with her, and surrounding them with attentions and seeing them well and hospitably served; at table she endeavored to disguise her own abstinence under a semblance of eating, or would sometimes apologize on the plea of her health, which had always been extremely delicate, for not setting them a good example.

Some rigid persons, unable to reconcile this frank and genial sociability with the crucifying life of penance and prayer and unremitting service of the poor and the sick which Amélie led, ventured to remonstrate with her on the subject. She replied with unruffled humility that it was a pleasure to her to continue to cultivate the friendships contracted for her and bequeathed to her by her father, and that she felt satisfied there was nothing wrong in her doing so, and that it did neither her nor them any harm; on the contrary, hospitality was often a means to her of doing good; a worldly man or woman who would fly from her if she approached them with a sermon, accepted an invitation to dinner without fear or arrière‐ pensée, thus enabling her to bring them under desirable influences in a way that awoke no suspicion and roused no antagonism, and often led to the most salutary results; a friendly dinner was, moreover, not unfrequently an opportunity of bringing people together and reconciling those who were at variance; in fact, Amélie pleaded so convincingly the cause of Christian hospitality as it was practised in the Rue Grignan, that the critics withdrew thoroughly converted and rather ashamed of their censoriousness. This thirst for doing good was, moreover, so unobtrusive and so free from anything like an assumption of superiority, that it was impossible to resent it; the tact and simplicity that accompanied all her efforts to benefit others prevented their ever being looked upon as indiscreet or meddling. She had a way of rousing your sympathies in a charitable scheme, or your indignation against some act of injustice or cruelty, and drawing you into assisting in the one or redressing the other without your suspecting that she had laid a trap for you; never preaching, never dictating, she had that rare grace, whose absence so often foils the most praiseworthy intentions, of doing good without being disagreeable. Her conversation was so sympathetic, and, owing to her mind being so abundantly stored by reading under her father’s direction, could be, when the opportunity occurred, so brilliant, that the most distinguished men delighted in it, and flocked to the Rue Grignan, counting it a privilege to be invited to its unpretending hospitalities. Amongst the many illustrious men who admired Amélie’s esprit and virtues and who courted her co‐operation in their apostolic labors, one of the most prominent was the Père Lacordaire. The history of their first work in common deserves special record, not only because of its being associated with “the cowled orator of France,” but because it is peculiarly identified with the history of Provence, that land so dear to us all as the birthplace and cradle of the devotion to S. Joseph. “Beautiful Provence! It rose up in the west from your delightful land like the cloud of delicate almond blossoms that seems to float and shine between heaven and earth over your fields in spring. It rose from a confraternity in the white city of Avignon, and was cradled by the swift Rhone, that river of martyr‐ memories, that runs by Lyons, Orange, Vienne, and Arles, and flows into the same sea that laves the shores of Palestine. The land which the contemplative Magdalen had consecrated by her hermit life, and where the songs of Martha’s school of virgins had been heard praising God, and where Lazarus had worn a mitre instead of a grave‐cloth, it was there that he who was so marvellously Mary and Martha combined first received the glory of his devotion.” We all know the passage by heart, but we quote it not so much for its sweetness as because it so appropriately introduces the story of the work in question, viz., the restoration of the pilgrimage of Ste. Baume, a pilgrimage once so celebrated throughout Christendom, but of late years fallen into neglect and almost total oblivion. Tradition tells us the story of its origin, its growth, its glories, and its decay. Its origin dates from a little bark that eighteen centuries ago came floating down the sunny waters of the Nile and rode into the blue Mediterranean, freighted with a legacy from Palestine to France, bearing in its frail embrace none other than the family who had their dwelling on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and whose names have come down to us with the halo of that simple and unrivalled title, “Friends of Jesus of Nazareth.” Villagers and the simple folk of the place welcomed the exiles more kindly, let us hope, than Bethlehem had welcomed the Virgin Mother and reputed father of their Friend some five‐and‐thirty years before; at any rate, Lazarus and his sisters remained in Provence. The people gathered round the dead man whom Jesus had wept over and raised to life, and hearkened to his teaching; he planted the cross upon their soil, and sowed the seeds of the Gospel in their hearts, and in return they thanked him as the Jews had thanked his Master, by putting him to death. Lazarus opened the first page of the martyrology of France. Martha on her side withdrew to Avignon, where, on the ruins of a pagan temple situated on the Rocher des Doms, she built a Christian church, and dwelt there in the midst of a school of virgins, teaching the Gospel. She died at an advanced age, venerated as a saint, and renowned as much for her sublime gift of eloquence and her bountiful hospitality as for the austere sanctity of her life. We are not told how far, if at all, Magdalen shared the apostleship of her brother in Marseilles; the only trace of her that remains in that city is an altar in the vaults of the Abbey of S. Victor. These vaults are like catacombs, and the most ancient monument of Christian faith that Marseilles possesses. The legend says that Magdalen, immediately on landing on the shores of Provence, took up her abode upon the rocky heights of Ste. Baume and lived there for thirty years, her life divided between agony and ecstasy, between tears that had never ceased to flow since that day when at Simon’s house she broke the alabaster vase over the feet of Jesus, and heard from his lips those words that have been the strength and the hope of sinners ever since: much had been forgiven her because she had loved much, and kept long vigils that were but a continuation of her faithful watch under the cross and at the door of the sepulchre. It seems strange, when we think of it, that she should have left the country where Jesus had lived and died, the home at Magdala that he had hallowed so often by his presence, and whose friendly hospitality had often been a rest and a comfort to him in his weary journeys round Jerusalem; that she should, above all, have torn herself from the companionship, or at least the neighborhood, of his Mother and the disciple whom he loved; for surely the one remaining solace of her purified passionate heart must have been to speak of her brother’s Friend and her own dear Saviour with those who had known and loved him best, to revisit the places he had frequented, the site of his miracles and his sufferings, and that hill of solemn and stupendous memories where she and they had stood together in a common agony of woe, hushing their breaths to catch the last throb of his sacred heart. But perhaps this voluntary exile from those beloved associations was the last sacrifice, the crowning act of renunciation, that Jesus asked of her before he bade her farewell? Perhaps he expressed a wish that she and Lazarus should be in a humble way to the West what Mary and S. John were to be to the East, and that they should forsake the land and the friends of their youth and go forth bearing the good news of his Gospel to France? He had raised her once to the rank of an apostle that morning after the resurrection, when he gave her a message to the disciples and bade her go and tell them and Peter that he was risen, and before ascending to his Father he may have told her once more to go and be the harbinger of his resurrection to disciples who knew him not and were yet dwelling in darkness. We shall one day know, please God, what her motive was, but meantime we may reverently conjecture that there was some such understanding between Our Lord and Magdalen which induced her to leave the country that was so full of the fragrance of his divine humanity, and where his Immaculate Mother still lingered in childless desolation. Magdalen came to Provence, and withdrew to a wild and barren spot, upon a mountain called, in memory no doubt of her first interview with Jesus, Ste. Baume; it rises above a valley that runs towards the Alps from the busy city of Marseilles. Here she dwelt in solitude, communing only with her Saviour, and shut away from cruel men who had crucified him. Many and beautiful are the legends grouped by the simple piety of the inhabitants around the lonely watcher of Ste. Baume; they tell you still in reverent and awestricken tones how seven times a day the saint was rapt into ecstasy, and carried from her cave in the mountain side to the summit of the mountain, and held there suspended between heaven and earth by angels, but seeing more of heaven than of earth, and hearing the music of the angelic choirs. The peasants show you, even in these unmystical days of ours, the precise spot of an abrupt sally of the mountain where the angels used to come every day at their appointed hours to commune with the penitent and lift her off the earth. For thirty years she lived here in penance and expectation, then the term of her exile closed, the day came when she was to be set free from the bondage of the flesh, and admitted once and for ever into the presence of her risen Lord. Perhaps Jesus himself whispered the glad tidings to her in prayer; or perhaps it was only the angels who were charged with the message; but anyhow, tradition tells us—and who dreams of doubting it?—that Magdalen knew by divine inspiration when the hour of her death was at hand, and that she was filled with a great longing to receive the body and blood of her Redeemer before entering his presence as her Judge. S. Maximin, who had been the companion of Lazarus and shared his labors and his pilgrimage, dwelt in the narrow plain which forms the base of the three adjoining mountains, Ste. Baume, St. Aurelian, and Ste. Victoire—Ste. Victoire under whose shadow Marius fought and defeated the Teutons and the Cimbrians. The dying penitent was unable to traverse herself the distance that separated her own wild solitude from the hermitage of S. Maximin, so the kindly angels came and performed a last office of love for the friend of their King, and bore her across the hills and the floods and the valleys to the oratory of the saint: he too had been warned, and was ready waiting for her. He heard her confession, pronounced again the words of pardon that had been spoken first to her contrite soul by Jesus himself, and gave her the holy communion. Then she died, and S. Maximin laid her in an alabaster tomb that stood ready prepared for her in his oratory. The piety of the faithful surrounded the tomb with enthusiastic reverence and devotion; pilgrims flocked from all parts of the world to venerate the remains of the queen of penitents, and to visit the grotto where she had lived and the oratory where she died. Cassian, the monk, who was himself a native of Marseilles, after graduating in the school of the Egyptian anchorites, returned to his native city, and raised the Abbey of S. Victor over the crypt where Lazarus slept. Ste. Baume and St. Maximin soon drew him with irresistible attraction; he founded two noble monasteries there, and he and his monks kept vigilant guard for a thousand years, from the IVth to the XIIIth century, over the ground where Magdalen had wept, and over the tomb where she rested. At the beginning of the VIIIth century, the Saracens invaded the fair land of Provence, and for nearly three hundred years it was a prey to their devastating fury. During this long period of invasion, the Cassianites, terrified lest the precious remains of Magdalen should be discovered by the enemy and desecrated, thought best to remove them from the place where they were known to be to one of greater secrecy and safety. They took the body, therefore, out of its famous alabaster tomb and laid it in the tomb of S. Sidonius, having previously translated elsewhere the relics of the holy bishop. With a view to future verification, the monks placed on the coffin an inscription testifying to the two translations, and narrating the manner of their accomplishment and the circumstances which led to it. The entrance to the crypt itself was then walled up with plaster, and overlaid further with a quantity of rubbish. But six centuries were to roll over the arid heights of St. Maximin before the entrance was to be broken open and the written testimony of the Cassianites invoked. When the wars of the Saracens were over, and men began to breathe in peace, and turn their thoughts once more to the worship of God and the veneration of his saints, the fact of the translation of the body of Magdalen from its original resting‐place to the sarcophagus of S. Sidonius had faded from their recollection; it was only repeated in a vague sort of way that the illustrious penitent had been removed to a place of safety, which was supposed to be at a distance; some local coincidences pointed to the Abbey of Vezelay as the spot which had been privileged to receive and shelter her. By degrees this belief took root in the public mind, and the stream of pilgrims began to flow once more and with renewed enthusiasm towards the venerable old Abbey of Burgundy; crusaders met there to invoke before starting for the defence of the Holy Sepulchre the protection of her whom the evangelists had handed down to us as the heroine of the Sepulchre; kings and prelates, warriors and poets, sinners and saints, flocked to the supposed tomb of Magdalen, “till,” in the words of a chronicler of the time, “it seemed as if all France were running to Vezelay.” God is slow to tell his secrets. It was not until the close of the XIIIth century that the illusion, which had evoked so much piety and so many manifestations of faith from Christendom, was dispelled, and the truth revealed. This is how it happened. We will translate from the Père Lacordaire, whose Sainte Marie Madeleine has supplied us almost exclusively with the foregoing details:

“S. Louis had a nephew born of his brother, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and Count of Provence. This nephew, who was likewise called Charles, and who on the death of his father became king of Sicily and the county of Provence, under the title of Charles II., had for S. Magdalen a tenderness which he inherited from his race, and which, though common to all the chivalry of France, attained in him the highest degree of ardor and sincerity. While he was still Prince of Salerno, God inspired him with a great desire to solve the mystery which for six centuries had hung over the grave of her whom he loved for the sake of Jesus Christ. He set out therefore to St. Maximin without any display, and accompanied only by a few gentlemen of his suite, and having interrogated the monks and the elders of the place, he caused the trenches of the old basilica of Cassian to be opened. On the 9th of December, 1279, after many efforts which up to that time had been fruitless, he stript himself of his chlamyde, took a pickaxe, and began to dig vigorously into the ground with the rest of the workmen. Presently they struck upon a tombstone. It was that of S. Sidonius, to the right of the crypt. The prince ordered the slab to be raised, and it was no sooner done than the perfume which exhaled from it announced to the beholders that the grace of God was nigh. He bent down for a moment, then caused the sepulchre to be closed, sealed it with his seal, and at once convoked the bishops of Provence to assist at the public recognition of the relics. Nine days later, on the 18th of December, in the presence of the archbishops of Arles and of Aix, and of many other prelates and gentlemen, the prince broke the seals which he had prefixed to the sarcophagus. The sarcophagus was opened, and the hand of the prince, in removing the dust which covered the bones, encountered something which, as soon as he touched it, broke with age in his fingers. It was a piece of cork from which fell a leaf of parchment covered with writing that was still legible. It bore what follows: ‘L’an de la Nativitè du Seigneur 710, le sixième jour du mois de Décembre, sous le règne d’Eudes, très pieux Roi des français, au temps des ravages de la perfide nation des Sarrasins, le corps de la très chère et venerable Marie Madeleine a été très secrètement et pendant la nuit transféré de son sépulchre d’albâtre dans celui‐ci, qui est de marbre et d’où l’on a retiré le corps de Sidoine, afin qu’il y soit plus caché et à l’abri de la dite perfide nation.’(223) A deed setting forth this inscription and the manner of its discovery was drawn up by the prince, the archbishops, and bishops present, and Charles in great joy, after placing his seals again upon the tomb, summoned for the fifth of May of the following year an assembly of prelates, counts, barons, knights, and magistrates of Provence and the neighboring counties to assist at the solemn translation of the relics which he had been instrumental in raising from the obscurity of a long series of ages.”

The news of the event was hailed with a shout of joy by all Christendom; kings and prelates vied with each other in doing honor to the new‐found treasure; gold and precious stones poured in in quantities to adorn the shrine which was destined to replace the alabaster tomb of S. Maximin. “When the appointed day arrived,” continues the Père Lacordaire, “the Prince of Salerno, in the presence of a vast and illustrious assembly, opened for the third time the monument which he had sealed, and of which the seals were certified to be intact. The skull of the saint was whole except for the lower jaw‐bone, which was wanting;(224) the tongue subsisted, dried up, but adhering to the palate; the limbs presented only bones stripped of the flesh; but a sweet perfume exhaled from the remains that were now restored to light and to the piety of souls.... The fact had already been made known of a sign altogether divine having been seen upon the forehead of Magdalen. This was a particle of soft, transparent flesh on the left temple, to the right, consequently, of the spectator; all those who beheld it, inspired at the same moment by a unanimous act of faith, cried out that it was there, on that very spot, that Jesus must have touched Magdalen when he said to her after the resurrection, Noli me tangere! There was no proof of the fact, but what else could they think who beheld on that brow so palpable a trace of life which had triumphantly resisted thirteen centuries of the grave? Chance has no meaning for the Christian; and when he beholds Nature superseded in her laws, he ascends instinctively to the Supreme Cause—the Cause that never acts without a motive, and whose motives reveal themselves to hearts that do not reject the light.... Five centuries after this first translation, the noli me tangere, as that instinct of faith had irrevocably named it, subsisted still in the same place and with the same characters; the fact was authenticated by a deputation of the Cour des Comptes of Aix. It was not until the year 1780, on the eve of an epoch that was to spare no memory and no relic, that the miraculous particle detached itself from the skull; and even then the medical men who were called in by the highest authority in the county certified that the noli me tangere had adhered to the forehead by the force of a vital principle which had survived there.”

The piety of Charles of Anjou raised a stately temple to the penitent of Bethany on the site of the oratory of S. Maximin. Boniface VIII., who had beheld with his own eyes the miraculous presence of the noli me tangere, endowed the basilica munificently, and authorized the king to transfer the custody of the relics from the Order of Cassianites, who had formerly held it, to that of the Sons of S. Dominic, since become renowned through the world under the name of Frères prêcheurs. A great number of popes visited the shrine, and every king of France held it a duty and a privilege to come to S. Maximin and Ste. Baume, and invoke the aid and protection of the saint; up to Louis XIV., hardly a sovereign neglected this public tribute of respect and devotion to her; but with the Grand Monarque the procession of royal pilgrims came to an end. The red tide of revolution arose, and waged war against men’s faith, and destroyed its most touching manifestations and its noblest monuments. It broke, however, harmless, at the foot of S. Maximin. Not a stone of the grand old pile was touched, not an altar profaned, not even a picture stolen from the mouldy and unguarded walls; the most precious part of its treasure, the relics of Magdalen, which had been carefully concealed, were found intact, and duly authenticated as before. Ste. Baume was less fortunate; the storm that respected the tomb showed no mercy to the grotto which had witnessed Magdalen’s ecstatic communings with her Lord; the hospital, the convent, and the church adjoining it were completely destroyed; nothing remained but a barren rock and a portion of the neighboring forest. In 1822, a partial restoration was effected; the vast and massive monastery was replaced by a temporary building of the lightest and cheapest materials, little better than a lath and plaster shed, to keep the monks under cover; the grotto itself, once so sumptuously adorned by the piety of pilgrims, was left in a state of nakedness and neglect, its costly lamps once abundantly fed with aromatic oils were gone, their lights extinguished, like the faith that had kindled them. The church was rebuilt in the same superficial style as the convent, and solemnly reconsecrated in the presence of forty thousand souls assembled in the forest and down in the plain. But the material temple, great or small, is more easily rebuilt than the spiritual one; the temple of stone was raised up again, but where was the temple of the spirit which had animated it? Where was the architect who would rebuild this, who would collect the scattered fragments, and breathe upon the dead bones, and make them live, and bind them as of yore into a body of devout and simple‐hearted worshippers? Many, remembering the bygone glories of Ste. Baume, wished that a prophet would arise and work this wonder in Provence. Perhaps the wish took the form of a prayer in some loving hearts, and so brought about its accomplishment. The valiant‐hearted son of S. Dominic, the Père Lacordaire, was to be the prophet of their desires. He rose up and upbraided the people of Provence for their ingratitude to the memory of their illustrious patroness, and for their decayed faith, and exhorted them to stir up the dead embers of a devotion that had formerly been the edification and joy of Christendom to repair and beautify the deserted grotto of Mary Magdalen, and rekindle its lamps, and restore the pilgrimage of Ste. Baume in its ancient fervor. The work was one that appealed strongly to the sympathies of the Marseillese; but this was not enough to ensure its success. In order to make the sympathy effectual, the Père Lacordaire needed a helpmate who would go about amongst the people and put their good‐will into a practical form for him—some one who would second his exertions by docile and zealous and intelligent co‐operation. He looked around him, and his choice fell upon Amélie. He knew her, and thought she was of all others the person best suited to his purpose. It was no easy or pleasant task the setting on foot of a movement such as this; the preliminaries were sure to be full of difficulties, often of the sort that make self‐love wince and smart; there was plenty of ridicule in store, a goodly harvest of sneers and snubs to be garnered at the outset, rude opposition to be endured from those who had no faith at all, and chilling indifference from those who looked upon anything like a return to the forms and symbols of the middle ages as poetic enthusiasm not practicable in the XIXth century. It was just the kind of work to put the daughter of S. Dominic to. She did not disappoint the Père Lacordaire; but responded as promptly to the call as his own fiery spirit could have wished. It was in Amélie’s house that the eloquent Dominican inaugurated the œuvre of S. Baume, and told the story of the great penitent’s life and death. From the salon in the Rue Grignan the burning words of the orator went forth to all Provence and stirred many hearts. A committee was soon formed for raising the necessary funds towards the restoration of the grotto as a preliminary to the reopening of the pilgrimage. The Père Lacordaire, as if the more prominently to record the services Amélie had rendered in the work so far, and to associate her name with its progress, desired that the meetings should be held at her house; and so they were, and continued to be regularly until she left Marseilles for Rome. She lived to see their joint labors crowned with success; the grotto assumed gradually something of its ancient beauty; an inn was built on the plain at the foot of the mountain for the accommodation of travellers who came from a distance, pilgrims were once more seen toiling in great numbers up the steep paths of the forest leading to the grotto, and filling the glade with the sound of canticles, and the feast of S. Magdalen, the 22d of July, was again celebrated with something of the pomp and fervor of olden times.

But events of this stirring and, so to speak, romantic interest were rare in Amélie’s life. Her path lay rather along the valleys than upon the heights above. The doors of the Rue Grignan were often open indeed to the wise and learned, and occasionally to the great ones of the earth; but the visits of these were few and far between compared to those of the poor and humble, who besieged it at all hours of the day and night. The poor looked upon it as a centre of their own, where they had a right to come at all times and seasons and make themselves at home. They did this at last so completely that Amélie was sometimes obliged to slip out by a back door in order to escape from their precious but pitiless importunity. But no importuning, however persistent or unseasonable, could ruffle her unalterable sweetness, or surprise her into a sharp answer or an abrupt ungraciousness of manner. Hers was the charity that is not easily provoked: it made her stern to self, but long‐suffering towards others, slow to see evil, softly forbearing to the weaknesses of all.

This home work was only an episode in her everyday labors. There was not a mission, or a hospital, or a refuge, or a good work of any sort in the town, that she had not to do with in one way or another. Just as we often hear it said of a woman of the world, “She is of every fête,” so it used to be said in Marseilles of Amélie, “She is of every charity.” One of the most venerable fathers of the Society of Jesus declared that it was chiefly to her zeal and intelligent exertions that the Jesuits owed the establishment of their mission at Marseilles. The Père de Magdalon looked upon her as his right hand; he enlisted her co‐operation in all his undertakings, and he used to say that it was to her he owed in a great measure the success of the Maison de Retraite of S. Barthélémy, the last work of his apostolate, and which he lived to see blessed with such abundant fruits. The Filles de la Charité were long the special objects of her liberality and devoted exertions; then came the Sisters of Hope, whose services to the sick are so praiseworthy, and whose presence amongst them was hailed so gratefully by the Marseillese. When the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres were in any difficulty, they looked to Amélie to help them out of it, and they speak with effusion still of the many proofs of generosity they received from her, and of her unfailing readiness to assist them whenever they appealed to her. She seemed to hire herself out as a beast of burden to do the work and the bidding of every one who wanted her. When there was a question of establishing the Frères Prêcheurs at Marseilles, she multiplied herself tenfold. No obstacles could deter her in the service of the sons of her beloved S. Dominic; she found a house for them, and paid all the expenses of their installation. But whatever the work was that came under her hand, she did it, and as promptly and earnestly as if it were the one of all others she most delighted in; there was no exclusiveness, no narrowing of her sympathies to an idée fixe either in piety or in charity; those who had the privilege of being her fellow‐laborers for many years declare they never once knew her charity to flag or fail to answer a fresh demand upon it; the supply was inexhaustible, and seemed to increase in proportion as it spent itself. Her health was wretched and kept her in almost constant physical pain; yet her activity was extraordinary, and, considering the chronic sufferings she had to contend with for the greater part of her life, the amount of work she contrived to get through may be regarded as little short of miraculous. She rose habitually at five, spent several hours in prayer, and assisted at the Holy Sacrifice before beginning the active duties of the day. These lay wherever there were sick to be tended, and sorrowing ones to be comforted, and sinners to be converted. She was a member of the Congregation of S. Elizabeth for visiting the hospitals, and gave a good deal of time to this work, for which she had a particular devotion. Her gentleness and singularly attractive manner fitted her especially for dealing with aching bodies and sorrowing hearts, and it was not a very rare thing to see Amélie succeed in melting the heart of some obdurate sinner with whom the entreaties and repeated efforts of the chaplain and the nuns had failed. The same sympathetic responsiveness that she threw into so many different good works marked her intercourse with individuals; those whom she was tending or consoling or advising always felt that for the time being they were the chief object of interest to her in life, and that she was giving her whole heart to them. She made this impression perhaps more especially on the poor, to whom the sympathy of those above them has such a charm and such a gift of consolation. An amusing instance of it occurred once in the case of an old woman whom Amélie had been nursing for some time; she put so much goodwill into all she did, and performed the offices of a sick‐nurse so affectionately, that the poor old soul believed she had inspired her with some unaccountable personal attachment; she returned it enthusiastically, and was never tired testifying her gratitude and love. One day, however, Amélie arrived in the poor little garret—tidy and clean, thanks to her—but, instead of being welcomed with the usual smiles and embraces, the old woman set her face like a flint, and preserved a sullen silence. For some time she obstinately refused to say what was amiss with her, but finally, shamed by the coaxing and evident distress of her nurse, she confessed that the day before she had had a bitter disappointment. “I thought,” she said, “that you loved me, but I find I was under a delusion; you don’t care a straw for me; they tell me you do for every sick body in the town just what you have been doing for me.” It was with great difficulty that Amélie was able to console her and obtain her forgiveness for being so universal in her charity.

But though her creed dealt in no exclusions, there were two classes of her fellow‐creatures who above the rest had a decided attraction for Amélie: these were prisoners and soldiers. She yearned towards the former with the true spirit of him who loved the publicans and sinners, who gave the first‐fruits of his death to one of them on Calvary, and who prayed for them all with his last breath, saying: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” The wonders that Amélie worked in the gloomy cells of the Fort St. Nicholas, the sudden and admirable returns to God that she obtained from the condemned, are not to be counted; not by men, at least. Day after day she was to be found in the midst of them, teaching old men their catechism, comforting and exhorting all, preparing them for death, washing and dressing their sores, combing their hair, performing cheerfully and affectionately the most disgusting offices. Her labors in behalf of the troops are perhaps the most remarkable part of her life. She had for many years been very zealous in her endeavors to promote religious instruction amongst the soldiers, but her mission in this direction dates chiefly from the Crimean war. During this brilliant campaign, which brought so much glory and cost so much blood to the Allied armies, the thought of the sufferings of the soldiers in the trenches and on the battle‐fields filled Amélie’s heart to the momentary exclusion of all other interests and preoccupations. Her whole time was spent working for them, and begging and praying for them. She inspired all who came near her with something of her own ardor and tenderness in the cause. She set up societies among her friends for making clothes and lint for the sufferers, and for collecting money to procure all that could comfort and alleviate them. Her efforts were crowned with abundant success. Now, as on many other occasions, money flowed in to her from all sides, sometimes from strangers at a distance, for the fame of her charity had spread much further than the humble daughter of S. Dominic herself suspected, and many benevolent people who wished to give, and knew not how to apply their offerings, sent them to her, satisfied that they would be well and wisely employed. The way in which large sums of money sometimes dropped into her lap, as it were from the sky, at some opportune moment when she was in dire want of it for some case of distress, led many of her humble protégés to believe that it came to her miraculously. But, while mindful of their bodies, Amélie’s first solicitude was for the souls of the brave fellows who were going out to face death in the service of their country; while working so hard to procure all that could heal and solace their temporal sufferings, she was laboring still more assiduously in behalf of their spiritual interests. Nor did her efforts confine themselves exclusively to the soldiers, they extended to the officers as well, and much more difficult she often found them to manage than the rough‐and‐ ready men under their command. Many a droll story is still told at Marseilles of the tricks by which they sometimes evaded her attempts to catch them in her zealous toils and make them remember that they had another enemy to fight and to conquer besides the soldiers of Holy Russia. Once two young officers of good family and fortune, whose lives were not the most edifying to the community, were pointed out to Amélie by one of their brother officers, a fervent Catholic, as fitting subjects for her zeal. He undertook to bring them to the Rue Grignan under the pretence of introducing them to an old and charming friend of his, if Amélie would promise to try and convert them. She promised of course to try, and the two scapegraces made their appearance, never suspecting that a trap had been laid for them. The conversation dwelt upon the great topic of the day, the war, Amélie carefully avoiding the most distant allusion to the spiritual condition of her visitors. The young men were charmed with her affability and esprit, and, when she asked them to return with their friend in a few days and dine with her, they accepted her invitation with delight. During dinner their hostess alluded to the numerous pilgrimages that were being performed every day to Notre Dame de Garde; few of the soldiers or sailors started for the Crimea from Marseilles without climbing up the hill to salute Our Lady and ask her blessing on their arms. The young men confessed that they had never made the pilgrimage and evinced little admiration for their more devout comrades; Amélie seemed surprised, but not at all scandalized, at the frank admission, and proposed that they should both make the pilgrimage next morning and hear Mass there with her at eight o’clock. They assented with ready courtesy, inwardly treating the expedition as a harmless joke, and took leave of their hostess, very much delighted with her, and not much terrified by the salutary projects that might be lurking in her breast with regard to the morrow. They were at the bottom of the hill punctually at half‐past seven, and toiled up to the church, where they expected to see Amélie already on the lookout for them. But they looked round the church and saw no sight of her. Taking for granted that she was not there, and that something had interfered to prevent her keeping the appointment, they took themselves off with the comfortable feeling of having done their duty, and behaved like gentlemen, and come safe out of it. The morning was raw and cold, and they were both tired after the long pull uphill, so on their way down they turned into a little dairy where hungry pilgrims were comforting themselves with cups of coffee. There was a good fire in the place, and they sat down to enjoy it, and dawdled a good while over their hot coffee, wondering what kind trick of Fortune had prevented the enemy from appearing in the field; when lo! looking up suddenly, they beheld the truant peering in at them through the window. The pair started as if they had seen a ghost. But Amélie knew human nature too well to press her advantage at such a moment; she smiled, shook her finger threateningly, and went her way down the hill, leaving the two young men less triumphant than she had found them, and very anxious to clear themselves of having broken their word to a lady, and eager to redeem it a second time if Amélie desired. She did desire it, and it was not long before one of the two blessed her for having done so. He was ordered off with his regiment soon after, and before setting sail ascended once more to the shrine of Notre Dame de Garde in a different spirit and with a very different purpose.

Her intercourse with the troops during this period gave Amélie an insight into the deplorable ignorance in matters of faith that existed in the majority of them, and the absence of all religious instruction in the army; it filled her with surprise and grief, and she determined to set to work and bring about a change in both.

Reforms are proverbially difficult, and in any branch of the public service pre‐eminently so. But difficulties only stimulate strong hearts to more strenuous efforts. Amélie was, owing to her high intelligence, her well‐known virtue, and her widespread relations, better calculated than most people perhaps to succeed in the undertaking; besides, whatever the obstacles were, she never reckoned with human means when God’s work was to be done; she called him to the rescue, and left the issue in his hands. It would be impossible to recount all she did and suffered in this most arduous undertaking, the journeys she took, the petitions she drew up, the letters she wrote, the disappointments and antagonism that attended it in the beginning, and the physical and moral fatigue that it involved all through. The frequent and successive journeys of eighteen hours to Paris and the same back would have been a serious trial of strength to a strong person; but to Amélie, whose health was extremely delicate, and who hardly ever knew the sensation of being without pain, most frequently acute and intense pain, the wear and tear of those journeys in the sultry heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter alike must have been terrible. But she made small account of her body, she drove it on like a beast of burden, goading it with the ardor of her spirit, and never gave in to its lamentations until it positively refused to go on. Her own shortcomings were, however, the lightest portion of her difficulties. She had obstacles to overcome on every side, especially in quarters where it was most essential for her to find approval and assistance. Silvio Pellico said it was easier to traverse a battle‐field than the antechamber of a king, and the same may be said most likely of the antechamber of a minister. At least Amélie found it so. Many a brave spirit might well have given up in despair before the contemptuous rudeness and petty opposition of small functionaries, and the inaccessible coldness of great ones, and the disheartening predictions of well‐wishers who had gone through similar experiences, and knew what it was to want anything, even in the natural course of things, done at the War Office; but Amélie’s courage never flagged for a moment. By degrees her perseverance began to meet with some signs of success. It was known that one military man in high repute supported her views, and was doing his best to enable her to carry them out; this converted others. Several who had in the first instance treated her project as impracticable, or unnecessary, or simply absurd, one after another came over to her; it was not always because she convinced them, but she won them; they might resist her arguments, but it was impossible to come often in contact with her without feeling the contagion of her earnestness and sincerity of purpose. Her labors were finally crowned with abundant success. She obtained all the concessions she asked, and every facility for carrying them out and improving the spiritual condition of the soldiers. One of her chief anxieties had been for the condemned prisoners in the Fort St. Nicholas. She obtained permission for one of the dungeons to be turned into a chapel there, and it was henceforth her delight to go there on the great feasts and decorate the altar, and make it gay with lights and flowers for the captives. A chaplain was appointed to the fort, and he was allowed every facility for the exercise of his ministry.

The little enfants de troupe whose youth recommended them to Amélie’s solicitude were provided with the needful means of religious instruction by the establishment of a school, over which she herself presided from time to time, cheering on the pupils by good advice, and occasional presents to the most industrious and deserving. General de Courtigis, who commanded the garrison for many years at Marseilles, and left behind him a memory respected by all good men, had been from the first a staunch ally of Amélie’s in her endeavors to introduce a Christian spirit amongst both the officers and men. At her suggestion he organized a military Mass every Sunday at the Church of S. Charles, and there a great number of men, with the general at their head, assisted regularly at the Holy Sacrifice. It was a great treat to Amélie, whenever she could find time, to go and assist at it with them. She enjoyed the martial appearance and reverent bearing of the soldiers with a sort of motherly pride, and the sharp word of command, and the clanking of the bayonets when they presented arms at the solemn moment of consecration, used to send a thrill of emotion through her frame that often melted her to tears.

“Oh!” she was heard once to exclaim, on coming out of S. Charles’, “what a grand and consoling spectacle it is, to see our soldiers publicly worshipping God! One feels that they must be invincible in battle when they set out with the blessing of God on their arms.”

The troops, on their side, repaid her interest in them by the most enthusiastic affection. They used to call her notre mère amongst themselves, and it delighted Amélie to hear a grizzly old veteran address her by this familiar name. Sometimes the brave fellows’ gratitude expressed itself in a way that was rather trying to their adopted mother. A regiment which had been quartered at Marseilles, and received many proofs of zeal and kindness from Amélie during its stay there, happened to hear, when passing through Lyons some years later, that she was stopping there. They started off at once in full force, and gave her a military serenade under her windows. Amélie, of course, showed herself at the window, and acknowledged the honor, but this did not satisfy the soldiers: nothing would do them but she should come out and shake hands with every man in the regiment.

Much as Amélie shrank from public notice or praise, her humility could not prevent her extraordinary exertions in behalf of the troops, and the success which had attended them, from shining out before men. The nature of the undertaking had necessarily brought her in contact with the most influential military men of the day, both at Marseilles and in Paris. These gentlemen had ample opportunity to appreciate her character and judge of the value of her services; and though so many had opposed her in the beginning, when they saw her labors triumphant, success raised her so highly in their estimation that they thought it would be becoming to offer a public tribute of their esteem and gratitude by decorating her with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Accordingly, a letter was despatched one day from the War Office, informing the quiet, unpretending friend of the poor soldier that the government, to testify their approval of her conduct, invested her with the most honorable mark of distinction it was in their power to bestow. Amélie received the announcement at first as a joke. The idea of her going about the world with the Cross or the red ribbon fastened to her black gown, and being greeted with the military salute and presented arms to whenever the symbol caught the eye of a soldier or a sentry, while she threaded her way through the busy streets of Marseilles, struck her as so altogether comical that she could only laugh at it. But neither the authorities nor her friends saw any laughing matter in it; the latter combated her refusal so strongly that Amélie was perplexed; she knew not how to reconcile her deference to their wishes with what appeared to her little short of an act of treason to Christian humility and common sense; they argued that, by accepting the Cross, she would excite a good feeling in the minds of many towards the government, a result which in those turbulent and antagonistic times was always desirable, and, in the next place, it would invest her with a half‐official position in certain circumstances that she might find very useful to others in her relations with minor functionaries. This last consideration had some weight with Amélie; she turned it to account, though not in the way her friends desired. She wrote to the minister, declining gratefully an honor which she did not feel qualified to accept, but requested that he would reward what he was pleased to call her services by granting her a droit de grace. This would entitle her to present petitions for a commutation of sentence in case of military prisoners, and even on certain specified occasions to commute the sentence herself. The privilege was granted at once, and, if ever virtue had a sweet reward in this world, it was when Amélie exercised it for the first time in favor of one of the captives of Fort St. Nicholas. Her friends rejoiced with her, and almost forgave her for refusing the sterile honor of the Cross of the Legion of Honor. They never knew, so carefully did her humility keep its secret, that the government, when granting her the droit de grace, exacted as a condition that she should submit to become a member of the Legion of Honor. It was years after that a friend, who had heard something in high quarters which aroused his suspicions, and who was intimate enough with Amélie to take the liberty of catechising her on the subject, asked point‐blank if she was decorated, and under promise of secrecy learned the truth.

To Be Concluded In Our Next.

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The Progressionists

From The German Of Conrad Von Bolanden.

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IX. Progress Grows Jolly. Concluded

In passing near the tables Gerlach overheard conversations which revealed to him unmistakably the communistic aspirations and tendencies prevailing among the lower orders, their fiendish hatred of religion and the clergy, their corruption and appalling ignorance. On every hand he perceived symptoms of an alarmingly unhealthy condition of society. He heard blasphemies uttered against the Divinity which almost caused his blood to run cold; sacred things were scoffed at in terms so coarse and with an animus so plainly satanical that his hair rose on his head. It was clear to him that the firmest supports, the only true foundations of the social order, were tottering—rotted away by an incurable corruption.

In Gerlach’s life, also, as in that of many other men, there had been a period of mental struggle and of doubt. He, too, had at one time found himself face to face with questions the solution of which involved the whole aim of his existence. During this period of mental unrest, he had thought and studied much about faith and science, but not with a silly parade of superficial scepticism. He had resolutely engaged in the soul struggle, and had tried to end it for once and all. Supported by a good early training and a disposition naturally noble, instructed and guided by books of solid learning, he had come out from that crisis stronger in faith and more correct in his views of human science. The scenes which he was witnessing reminded him vividly of that turning‐point in his life; they were to him an additional proof that man’s dignity disappears as soon as he refuses to follow the divine guidance of religion. Grave in mood, he returned to the table around which were gathered the chieftains. The marks of respect shown to the millionaire were numerous and flattering. Even the bluff Sand exerted himself unusually in paying his respects to the wealthy landholder, and Erdblatt, whose embarrassed financial condition enabled him beyond them all to appreciate the worth of money, filled a glass with his own hand, and reached it to Mr. Conrad with the deference of an accomplished butler. Gerlach was pleased to speak in terms of praise of the nut‐brown beverage, which greatly tickled Belladonna, the fat brewer. Naturally enough, the conversation turned upon the subject of the celebration.

“I confess I am not quite clear respecting the purpose of your city in the matter of schools,” said Mr. Conrad. “How do you intend to arrange the school system?”

“In such a way as to make it accord with the requirements of the times and the progressive spirit of civilization,” answered Hans Shund. “An end must be put to priest rule in the schools. The establishment of common schools will be a decided step towards this object. For a while, of course, the priests will be allowed to visit the schools at specified times, but their influence and control in school matters will be greatly restricted. Education will be withdrawn from the church’s supervision, and after a few years we hope to reach the point when the school‐rooms will be closed altogether against the priests. There is not a man of culture but will agree that children should not be required to learn things which are out of date, and the import of which must only excite smiles of compassion.”

“Whom do you intend to put in the place of the clergy?” inquired Mr. Conrad.

“We intend to impart useful information and a moral sense in harmony with the spirit of the age,” replied Hans Shund.

“It seems to me the elementary branches have been very competently taught heretofore in our schools, consequently I do not see the need of a change on this head,” said Gerlach. “But you have not understood my question. I mean, who are to fill the office of instructors in morals and in religion?”

The chieftains looked puzzled, for such a question they had not expected to hear from the wealthiest man of the country.

“You see, Mr. Gerlach,” said Sand bluntly, “religion must be done away with entirely. We haven’t any use for such trash. Children ought to spend their time in learning something more sensible than the catechism.”

“I am not disposed to believe that what you have just uttered is a correct expression of the general opinion of this community on the subject of the school question,” returned the millionaire with some warmth. “It is impossible to bring up youth morally without religion. You are a housebuilder, Mr. Sand. What would you think of the man who would expect you to build him a house without a foundation—a castle in the air?”

“Why, I would regard him as nothing less than a fool,” cried Sand.

“The case is identically the same with moral education. Morality is an edifice which a man must spend his life in laboring at. Religion is the groundwork of this edifice. Moral training without religion is an impossibility. It would be just as possible to build a house in the air, as to train up a child morally without a religious belief, without being convinced of the existence of a holy and just God.”

“Facts prove the contrary,” maintained Hans Shund. “Millions of persons are moral who have no religious belief.”

“That’s an egregious mistake, sir,” opposed the landholder. “The repudiation of a Supreme Being and the violent extinction of the idea of the Divinity in the breast are of themselves grave offences against moral conscience. I grant you that, in the eyes of the public, thousands of men pass for moral who have no faith in religion. But public opinion is anything but a criterion of certainty when the moral worth of a man is to be determined. A man’s interior is a region which cannot be viewed by the eye of the public. You know yourselves that there are men who pass for honorable, moral, pure men, whose private habits are exceedingly filthy and corrupt.”

Hans Shund’s color turned a palish yellow; the eyes of the chieftains sank.

“Besides, gentleman, it would be labor lost to try to educate youth independently of religion. Man is by his very nature a religious being. It is useless to attempt to educate the young without a knowledge of God and of revealed religion; to be able to do so you would previously have to pluck out of their own breasts the sense of right and wrong, and out of their souls the idea of God, which are innate in both. Were the attempt made, however, believe me, gentlemen, the yearning after God, alive in the human breast, would soon impel the generation brought up independently of religion to seek after false gods. For this very reason we know of no people in history that did not recognize and worship some divinity, were it but a tree or a stone, that served them for an object of adoration. In my opinion, it would be far more indicative of genuine progress to adhere to the God of Christians, who is incontestably holy, just, omnipotent, and kind, whilst to return to the sacred oaks of ancient Germany or to adopt the fetichism of uncivilized tribes would be a most monstrous reaction, the most degrading barbarism.”

The chieftains looked nonplussed. Earnest thinking and investigation upon subjects pertaining to religion were not customary among the disciples of progress. They looked upon religion as something so common and trivial that anybody was free to argue upon and condemn it with a few flippant or smart sayings. But the millionaire was now disclosing views so new and vast, that their weak vision was completely dazzled, and their steps upon the unknown domain became unsteady.

Mr. Seicht, observing the embarrassment of the leaders, felt it his duty to hasten to their relief. His polemical weapons were drawn from the armory of bureaucracy.

“The progressive development of humanity,” said Mr. Seicht, “has revealed an admirable substitute for all religious ideas. A state well organized can exist splendidly without any religion. Nay, I do not hesitate to maintain that religion is a drawback to the development of the modern state, and that, therefore, the state should have nothing whatever to do with religion. An invisible world should not exert an influence upon a state—the wants of the times are the only rule to be consulted.”

“What do you understand by a state, sir?” asked the millionaire.

“A state,” replied the official, “is a union of men whose public life is regulated by laws which every individual is bound to observe.”

“You speak of laws; upon what basis are these laws founded?”

“Upon the basis of humanity, morality, liberty, and right,” answered the official glibly.

“And what do you consider moral and just?”

“Whatever accords with the civilization of the age.”

A faint smile passed over the severe features of Mr. Conrad.

“I was watching the procession,” spoke he. “I have seen the religious feelings of a large number of citizens publicly ridiculed and grossly insulted. Was that moral? Was it just? You are determined to oust God and religion from the schools; yet there are thousands in the country who desire and endeavor to secure a religious education for their children. Is it moral and just to utterly disregard the wishes of these thousands? Does it accord with a profession of humanity and freedom to put constraint on the consciences of fellow‐citizens?”

“The persons of whom you speak are a minority in the state, and the minority is obliged to yield to the will of the majority,” answered Seicht.

“It follows, then, that the basis of morality and justice is superior numbers?”

“Yes, it is! In a state, it appertains to the majority to determine and regulate everything.”

“Gentlemen,” spoke Gerlach with great seriousness, “as I was a moment ago strolling over this place, I overheard language at several tables, which was unmistakably communistic. Laborers and factorymen were maintaining that wealth is unequally distributed; that, whilst a small number are immensely rich, a much greater number are poor and destitute; that progress will have to advance to a point when an equal division of property must be made. Now, the poor and the laboring population are in the majority. Should they vote for a partition, should they demand from us what hitherto we have regarded as exclusively our own, we, gentlemen, will in consistency be forced to accept the decree of the majority as perfectly moral and just—will we not?”

There was profound silence.

“I, for my part, should most emphatically protest against such a ruling of the majority,” declared Greifmann.

“Your protest would be contrary to morals and equity; for, according to Mr. Seicht, only what the majority wills is moral and just,” returned the landowner. “And, in mentioning partition of property, I hinted at a red monster which is not any longer a mere goblin, but a thing of real flesh and bone. We are on the verge of a fearful social revolution which threatens to break up society. If there is no holy and just God; if he has not revealed himself, and man is not obliged to submit to his will; if the only basis of right and of morals is the wish of the majority, this terrible social revolution must be moral and just, for the majority wills it and carries it out.”

“Of course, there must be a limit,” said the official feebly.

“The demands of the majority must be reasonable.”

“What do you understand by reasonable, sir?”

“I call reasonable whatever accords with the sense of right, with sound thinking, with moral ideas.”

“Sense of right—moral ideas? I beg you to observe that these notions differ vastly from the sole authority of numbers. You have trespassed upon God’s kingdom in giving your explanation, for ideas are supersensible; they are the thought of God himself. And the sense of right was not implanted in the human breast by the word of a majority; it was placed there by the Creator of man.”

The official was driven to the wall. The chieftains thoughtfully stared at their beer‐pots.

“It is clear that the will of the majority alone cannot be accepted as the basis of a state,” said Schwefel.

“The life of society cannot be put at the mercy of the rude and fickle masses. There must be a moral order, willed and regulated by a supreme ruler, and binding upon every man. This is plain.”

“I agree with you, sir,” said the millionaire. “Let us continue building on Christian principles. As everybody knows, our civilization has sprung from Christianity. If we tear down the altars and destroy the seats from which lessons of Christian morality are taught, confusion must inevitably follow. And I, gentlemen, have too exalted an opinion of the German nation, of its earnest and religious spirit, to believe that it can be ever induced to fall away completely from God and his holy law. Infidelity is an unhealthy tendency of our times; it is a pernicious superstition which sound sense and noble feeling will ultimately triumph over. We will do well to continue advancing in science, art, refinement, and industry, in true liberty and the right understanding of truth; we will thus be making real progress, such progress as I am proud to call myself a partisan of.”

The chieftains maintained silence. Some nodded assent. Hans Shund gave an angry bite to his pipe‐stem, and puffed a heavy cloud of smoke across the table.

“I have confidence in the enlightenment and good sense of our people,” said he. “You have called modern progress ‘a pernicious superstition and an unhealthy tendency of the times,’ Mr. Gerlach,” turning towards the millionaire with a bow. “I regret this view of yours.”

“Which I have substantiated and proved,” interrupted Gerlach.

“True, sir! Your proofs have been striking, and I do not feel myself competent to refute them. But I can point you to something more powerful than argument. Look at this scene; see these happy people meeting and enjoying one another’s society in most admirable harmony and order. Is not this spectacle a beautiful illustration and vindication of the moral spirit of progress?”

“These people are jubilant from the effect of beer, why shouldn’t they be? But, sir, a profound observer does not ‘suffer himself to be deceived by mere appearances.’ ”

An uproar and commotion at a distance interrupted the millionaire. At the same instant a policeman approached out of breath.

“Your honor, the factorymen and the laborers are attacking one another!”

“What are you raising such alarm for,” said Hans Shund gruffly. “It is only a small squabble, such as will occur everywhere in a crowd.”

“I ask your honor’s pardon: it is not a small squabble, it is a bloody battle.”

“Well, part the wranglers.”

“We cannot manage them; there are too many of them. Shall I apply for military?”

“Hell and thunder—military!” cried Hans Shund, getting on his feet. “Are you in your senses?”

“Several men have already been carried off badly wounded,” reported the policeman further. “You have no idea how serious the affray is, and it is getting more and more so; the friends of both sides are rushing in to aid their own party. The police force is not a match for them.”

Women, screaming and in tears, were rushing in every direction. The bands had ceased playing, and noise and confusion resounded from the scene of action. Louise ran to take her brother’s arm in consternation. The wives and daughters of the chieftains huddled round their natural protectors.

“Hurry away and report this at the military post,” was Seicht’s order to the policeman. “The feud is getting alarming. One moment!”

Tearing a leaf from a memorandum book, he wrote a short note, which he sent by the messenger.

“Off to the post—be expeditious!”

Louise hastened with her brother and Gerlach senior to their carriage, and her feeling of security returned only when the noise of the combat had died away in the distance.

The next day the town papers contained the following notice: “The beautiful celebration of yesterday, which, on account of its object, will be long remembered by the citizens of this community, was unfortunately interrupted by a serious conflict between the laborers and factorymen. A great many were wounded during the mêlée, of whom five have since died, and it required the interference of an armed force to separate the combatants.”

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X. Brown Bread And Bonnyclabber

Seraphin had not gone to the celebration. He remained at home on the plea of not feeling well. He was stretched upon a sofa, and his soul was engaged in a desperate conflict. What it was impossible for himself to look upon, had been viewed by his father with composure: the burlesque procession, the public derision of holy practices, the mockery of the Redeemer of the world, in whose place had been put a broken bottle on the symbol of salvation. He himself had been stunned by the spectacle; and his father? Was it his father? Again, his father had accompanied the brother and sister to the infamous celebration. Was not this a direct confirmation of his own suspicions? His father had become a fearful enigma to his soul! And what if, upon his return from the festival, the father were to come and insist upon the marriage with Louise, declaring her advanced notions to be an insufficient ground for renouncing a pet project? A wild storm was convulsing his interior. He could not bear it longer, he was driven forth. Snatching his straw hat, he rushed from the house, ran through the alleys and streets, out of the town, onward and still onward. The August sun was burning, and its heat, reflected from the road, was doubly intense. The perspiration was rolling in large drops down the glowing face of the young man, whom torturing thoughts still kept goading on. Holt’s whitewashed dwelling became visible on the summit of a knoll, and gleamed a friendly welcome as he came near it—a welcome which seemed opportune for one who hardly knew whither he was hastening. The walnut‐tree which could be seen from afar was casting an inviting shade over the table and bench that seemed to be confidingly leaning against its stem. A flock of chickens were taking a sand‐bath under the table, flapping their wings, ruffling their feathers, and wallowing in the dust. Seated on the sunny hillock, the cottage appeared quiet, almost lonesome but for a ringing sound which came from the adjoining field and was made by the sickle passing through the corn. A broad‐brimmed straw hat with a blue band could be noticed from the road moving on over the fallen grain, and presently Mechtild’s slender form rose into view as she pushed actively onward over the harvest field. Hasty steps resounded from the road. She raised her head, and her countenance first indicated surprise, then embarrassment. Whom did her eyes behold rushing wildly by, like a fugitive, but the generous rescuer of her family from the clutches of the usurer Shund. His hat was in his hand, his auburn locks were hanging down over his forehead, his face was aglow, his whole being seemed to be absorbed in a mad pursuit. To her quick eye his features revealed deep trouble and violent excitement. She was frightened, and the sickle fell from her hand. Not a day passed on which she would not think of this benefactor. Perhaps there was not a being on earth whom she admired and revered as much as she did him. All the pure and elevated sentiments of an innocent and blooming girl united to form a halo of affection round the head of Seraphin. At evening prayer when her father said, “Let us pray for our benefactor Seraphin,” her soul sent up a fervent petition to God, and she declared with joy that she was willing to sacrifice all for him. But behold this noble object of her admiration and affection suddenly presented before her in a state that excited the greatest uneasiness. With his head sunk and his eyes directed straight before him, he would have rushed past without noticing the sympathizing girl, when a greeting clear and sweet as the tone of a bell caused him to look up. He beheld Mechtild with her beautiful eyes fixed upon him in an expression of anxiety.

“Good‐morning, Mr. Seraphin,” she said again.

“Good‐morning,” he returned mechanically, and staring about vaguely. His bewilderment soon passed, however, and his gaze was riveted by the apparition.

She was standing on the other side of the ditch. The fear of some unknown calamity had given to her beautiful face an expression of tender solicitude, and whilst a smile struggled for possession of her lips her look indicated painful anxiety. Mechtild’s appearance soon directed the young man’s attention to his own excited manner. The dark shadow disappeared from his brow, he wiped the perspiration from his face, and began to feel the effect of his walk under the glowing heat of midsummer.

“Ah! why, here is the neat little white house, your pretty country home, Mechtild,” he said pleasantly. “If you had not been so kind as to wish me good‐morning, I should actually have passed by in an unpardonable fit of distraction.”

“I was almost afraid to say good‐morning, Mr. Seraphin, but—” She faltered and looked confused.

“But—what? You didn’t think anything was wrong?”

“No! But you were in such a hurry and looked so troubled, I got frightened,” she confessed with amiable uprightness. “I was afraid something had happened you.”

“I am thankful for your sympathy. Nothing has happened me, nor, I trust, will,” he replied, with a scarcely perceptible degree of defiance in his tone. “This is a charming situation. Corn‐fields on all sides, trees laden with fruit, the skirt of the woods in the background—and then this magnificent view! With your permission, I will take a moment’s rest in the shade of yon splendid walnut‐tree planted by your great‐grandfather.”

She joyfully nodded assent and stepped over the ditch. She shoved back the bolt of the gate. Together they entered the yard, which a hedge separated from the road. The cock crew a welcome to the stranger, and led his household from the sand‐bath into the sunshine near the barn.

“This is a cool, inviting little spot,” said the millionaire, as he pointed to the shade of the walnut‐tree. “No doubt you often sit here and read?”

“Yes, Mr. Seraphin; but the dirty chickens have scattered dust all over the bench and table. Wait a minute, you’ll get your clothes dusty.”

She hurried into the house. His eyes followed her receding form, his ears kept listening for her departing steps, he heard the opening and closing of doors: presently she reappeared, dusted the bench and table with a brush, and spread a white cloth over the table. Seraphin looked on with a smile.

“I do not wish to be troublesome, Mechtild!”

“It is no trouble, Mr. Seraphin! Sit down, now, and rest yourself. I am so sorry father and mother are not at home. They will be ever so glad to hear that you have honored us with a visit.”

“Is nobody at home?”

“Father is in town, and mother is at work with the children in the harvest field.”

“Are you not afraid to stay here by yourself?”

“What should I be afraid of? There are no ghosts in daytime,” she said with a bewitching archness; “and as for thieves, they never expect to find anything worth having at our house.”

She was standing on the other side of the table, looking at him with a beautiful smile.

“Won’t you have a seat on this bench?” said he, making room for her. “You need rest more than I do. You have been working, and I am merely an idle stroller. Do take a seat, Mechtild.”

“Thank you, Mr. Seraphin—I could not think of doing so! It would not be becoming,” she answered with some confusion.

“Why not becoming?”

“Because you are a gentleman, and I am only a poor girl.”

“Your objection on the score of propriety is not worth anything. Oblige me by doing what I ask of you.”

“I will do so, Mr. Seraphin, since you insist upon it, but after a while. I would like to offer you some refreshments beforehand, if you will allow me.”

“With pleasure,” he said, nodding assent.

A second time she hurried away to the house, whilst he kept listening to her footsteps. The extraordinary neatness and cleanliness which could be seen everywhere about the little homestead did not escape his observation. On all sides he fancied he saw the work of Mechtild. The purity of her spirit, which beamed so mildly from her eyes and was revealed in the beauty of her countenance and the grace of her person, seemed embodied in the very odor of roses wafted over from the neighboring flower garden. He was unconscious of the rapid growth within his bosom of a deep and tender feeling. This feeling was casting a warm glow, like softest sunshine, over all that he beheld. Not even the chickens looked to him like other fowls of their kind; they were ennobled by the reflection that they were objects of Mechtild’s care, that she fed them, that when they were still piping little pullets she had held them in her lap and caressed them. He abandoned himself completely to this sentiment; it carried him on like a smooth current; and he could not tell, did not suspect even, why so wonderful a reaction had in so short a time taken place in his interior. Beholding himself seated under the walnut‐tree surrounded only by evidences of honorable poverty and rural thrift, and yet feeling a degree of happiness and peace he had never known before, he fancied he was performing a part in some fairy tale which he was dreaming with his eyes open. And now the fairy appeared at the door having on a snowy‐white apron, and carrying a shallow basket from which could be seen, protruding above the rest of its contents, a milk jar. She set before him a pewter plate, bright as silver. Then she took out the jar and a cup, next she laid a knife and spoon for him, and finished her hospitable service with a huge loaf of bread.

“Don’t get dismayed at the bread, Mr. Seraphin! I am sorry I cannot set something better before you. But it is well baked and will not hurt you!”

“You baked it yourself, did you not?”

“Yes, Mr. Seraphin!”

He attacked the loaf resolutely. From the dimensions of the slice which he cut off, it was plain that both his appetite and his confidence in her skill were satisfactory. She raised the jar of bonnyclabber, which lurched out in jerks upon his plate, whilst he kept gayly stirring it with the spoon. Then she dipped a spoonful of rich cream out of the cup and poured it into the refreshing contents of the plate.

“Let me know when you want me to stop, Mr. Seraphin.” Mechtild poured spoonful after spoonful; he sat immovable, seemingly observing the spoon, but in reality watching her soft plump fingers, then her well‐shaped hand, next her exquisitely turned arm, and, when finally he raised his eyes to her face, they were met by a mischievous smile. The cup was empty, and all the cream was in his plate.

“May I go and fetch some more?” she asked.

“No, Mechtild, no! Why, this is a regular yellow sea!”

“You wouldn’t cry ‘enough!’ ”

“I forgot about it,” he replied, somewhat confused. “To atone for my forgetfulness, I will eat it all.”

“I hope you will relish it, Mr. Seraphin!”

“Thank you! Where is your plate?”

“I had my dinner before you came.”

“Well, then, at any rate you must not continue standing. Won’t you share this seat with me?”

She seated herself upon the bench, took off her hat, smoothed down her apron, and appeared happy at seeing him eating heartily.

“Don’t you find that dish refreshing, Mr. Seraphin?”

“You have done me a real act of charity,” he replied. “This bread is excellent. Who taught you how to make bread?”

“I learned from mother; but there isn’t much art in making that sort of bread, Mr. Seraphin. The food which people in the country eat does not require artistic preparation. It only needs good, pure material, so that it may give strength to labor.”

“I suppose you attend to the kitchen altogether, do you not?”

“Yes, Mr. Seraphin. That’s not very difficult, our meals are of the plainest kind. We have meat once a week, on Sundays. When the work is unusually hard, as in harvest time, we have meat oftener. We raise our own meat and cure it.”

“You have assumed household cares at quite an early age, Mechtild.”

“Early? I am seventeen now, and am the oldest. Mother has a great deal of trouble with the small ones, so the housework falls chiefly to my share. It does not require any great exertion, however, to do it. Plain and saving is our motto. Mother specially recommends four things: industry, cleanliness, order, and economy. She advises me not to neglect any one of these points when once I will have a household of my own.”

“Do you think you will soon set up a separate household?” asked he with some hesitation.

“Not for some time to come, Mr. Seraphin, yet it must be done one day. If my own inclination were consulted, I would prefer never to leave home. I should like things to continue as they are. But a separation must come. Death will pay us a visit as it has done to others, father and mother will pass away, and the course of events will sever us from one another.”

Her head sank, the brightness of her face became obscured beneath the shadow of these sombre thoughts, and, when she again looked up, there appeared in her eyes so touching and childlike a sadness that he felt pained to the soul. And yet this revelation of tenderness pleased him, for it made known to him a new phase of her amiable nature.

For a long time he continued conversing with the artless girl. Every word she uttered, no matter how trifling, had an interest for him. Besides her charming artlessness, he had frequent occasions to admire the wisdom of her language and her admirable delicacy. The setting sun had already cast a subdued crimson over the hilltops, hours had sped away, the chickens had gone to roost, still he remained riveted to the spot by Mechtild’s grace and loveliness.

“Father is just coming,” she said, pointing down the road. “How glad he will be to find you here!”

His head bent forward, Holt came wearily plodding up the road. His right hand was hidden in the pocket of his pantaloons, and his head was bowed, as if beneath a heavy weight. As Mechtild’s clear voice rang out, he raised his head, caught sight of his high‐hearted benefactor, and smiled in joyful surprise.

“Welcome, Mr. Seraphin; a thousand times welcome!” he cried from the other side of the road. “Why, this is an honor that I had not expected!”

He stood uncovered, holding his cap in the left hand, his right hand was still concealed. Mechtild at once noticed her father’s singular behavior, and her eye watched anxiously for the hidden hand.

“Your daughter has been so kind as to offer refreshments to a weary wanderer,” said Gerlach, “and it has been a great pleasure for me to sit awhile. We have been chatting for several hours under this glorious tree, and may be I am to blame for keeping her from her work.”

Holt’s honest face beamed with satisfaction. He entirely forgot about his secret, he drew his hand out of his pocket, Mechtild turned pale, and a sharp cry escaped her lips.

“For mercy’s sake, father!” And she pointed to the broken chain.

“What are you screaming for, foolish girl? Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Seraphin! this chain has got on my arm in an honorable cause. I will tell you the whole story; I know you will not inform on me.”

Seating himself on the bench, he related the adventures of the day.

The mock procession passed before Mechtild’s imagination with the vividness of reality. The narration transformed her. Her mildness was changed to noble anger. She had heard of the vicar of Christ being insulted, of holy things being scoffed at, of the Redeemer being derided by a horde of wretches. With her arms akimbo, she drew up her lithe and graceful form to its full height, and with flashing eyes looked at her father while he related what had befallen him. Seraphin could not help wondering at the transformation. Such a display of spirit he had not been prepared to witness in a girl so gentle and beautiful. When her father had ended his account, she seized his hand passionately, pressed it warmly between her own hands, and kissed the chain.

“Father, dear father,” she exclaimed in a burst of feeling, “I thank you from my heart for acting as you did! Those wretches were scoffing at our holy religion, but you behaved bravely in defence of the faith. For this they put chains on you, as the heathen did to S. Peter and S. Paul.”

Once more she kissed the chain, then, turning quickly, hastened across the yard to the house.

“Mechtild isn’t like the rest of us,” said Holt, smiling. “There’s a great deal of spirit in her. I have often noticed it. But I am not astonished at her being roused at the mock procession—I was roused myself. I declare, Mr. Seraphin, it is a shame, a crying shame, that persons are permitted to rail at doctrines and things which we revere as holy. One would almost believe Satan himself was in some people, they take so fanatical a delight in scoffing at a religion which is holy and enjoins nothing but what is good.”

“It is incontestable that infidelity hates and opposes God and religion,” replied Gerlach. “The boasted culture of those who find a pleasure in grossly wounding the most sacred feelings of their neighbors, is wicked and stupid.”

Mechtild returned with a file in her hand.

“Right, my child! I was just thinking of the file myself. Here, cut the catches of the lock.”

He laid his arm across the table. A few strokes of the file caused the lock and remnant of chain to fall from his wrist.

“We will keep this as a precious memento,” said she. “Only think, father, that wicked official ordered you to be manacled, and he is the representative of authority. How can one respect or even pray for authorities when they allow religion to be ridiculed?”

“Pray for your enemies,” answered the countryman gravely.

“I will do so because God commands me; but I shall never again be able to respect the official!”

Her anger had fled; she appeared again all light and loveliness. He did not fail to observe a searching look which she directed upon him, but its meaning became clear to him only when, as he was taking leave, she said in a tone of humility: “Pardon my vehemence, Mr. Seraphin! Don’t think me a bad girl.”

“There is nothing to be forgiven, Mechtild. You were indignant against godless wretches, and they who are not indignant against evil cannot themselves be good.”

“We are most heartily thankful for this visit,” spoke Holt. “I need not say that we will consider it a great happiness as often as you will be pleased to come.”

“Good‐night!” returned the young man, and he walked away.

Deeply immersed in his thoughts, Seraphin went back to town. What he was thinking about, his diary does not record. But the excitement under which he had rushed forth was gone—dispelled by the magic of a rural sorceress. He walked on quietly like a man who seems filled with confidence in his own future. The recent painful impressions seemed to his mind to lie far back in the past; their place was taken up by beautiful anticipations which, like the aurora, shed soft and pleasing light upon his path. He halted frequently in a dream‐like reverie to indulge the happiness with which his soul was flooded. The full moon, just peering over the hills, shed around him a mystic brightness that harmonized perfectly with the indefinable contentment of his heart, and seemed to be gazing quizzingly into the countenance of the young man, who almost feared to confess to himself that he had found an invaluable treasure.

As he stopped before the Palais Greifmann, all the bright spirits that had hovered round about him on the way back from the little whitewashed cottage, fled. He awoke from his dream, and, ascending the stairs with a feeling of discomfort, he entered his apartment, where his father sat awaiting him.

“At last,” spoke Mr. Conrad, looking up from a book. “You have kept me waiting a long time, my son.”

“I was in need of a good long walk, father, to get over what I witnessed this morning. The country air has dispelled all those horrible impressions. There is only one thing more required to make me feel perfectly well, dear father, which is that you will not insist on my allying myself to people who are utterly opposed to my way of thinking and feeling.”

“I understand and approve of your request, Seraphin. The impressions made on me, too, are exceedingly disagreeable. The advancement of which this town boasts is stupid, immoral, detestable. How this state of society has come about, is inexplicable to me who live secluded in the country. Society is diseased, fatally diseased. Many of the new views professed are sheer superstition, and their morality is a mere cloak for their corruption and wickedness. All the powers of progress so‐called are actively at work to subvert all the safeguards of society. And what your diary reports of Louise, I have found fully confirmed. Though it cost the sacrifice of a long cherished plan, a son of mine shall never become the husband of a progressionist woman.”

“O father! how deeply do I thank you!” cried the youth, carried away by his feelings.

“I must decline being thanked, for I have not merited it,” spoke Mr. Conrad earnestly. “A father’s duty determines very clearly what my decision upon the matter of your marriage with Louise, ought to be. But I am under obligations to you, my son, which justice compels me to acknowledge. Your discernment and moral sense have prevented a great deal of discord and unhappiness in our family. Continue good and true, my Seraphin!”

He pressed his son to his bosom and imprinted a kiss on his forehead.

“To‐morrow we shall start for home by the first train. Fortunately your prudent behavior makes it easy for us to get away, and the final breaking off of this engagement I will myself arrange with Louise’s father.”

Seraphin Gerlach To The Author.

DEAR SIR: Two years ago, I took the liberty of sending you my diary, with the request that you would be pleased to publish such portions of its contents as might be useful, in the form of a tale illustrative of the times. I made the request because I consider it the duty of a writer who delineates the condition of society, to transmit to posterity a faithful picture of the present social status, and I am vain enough to believe that my jottings will be a modest contribution towards such a tableau.

The meagre account given by the diary of my intercourse with Mechtild, will probably have enabled you to perceive the germ of a pure and true relation likely to develop itself further. I shall add but a few items to complete the account of the diary, knowing that poets, painters, and artists have rigorously determined bounds, and that a twilight cannot be represented when the sun is at the zenith. I am emboldened to use this illustration because your unbounded admiration of pure womanhood is well known to me, and because the brightness of Mechtild’s character, were it further described, would no more be compatible with the sombre colorings in which a true picture of modern progress would have to be exhibited, than the noonday sun with the shadows of evening.

My memoranda concerning Mechtild, which, despite studied soberness, betrayed a considerable degree of admiration, made known to my parents, naturally enough, the secret of my heart. Hence it came that a quiet smile passed over my father’s face every time I commenced to speak of Mechtild. Holt’s manly deed at the mock procession had already gained for him my father’s esteem, and, as I spoke a great deal about Holt’s thoroughness as a cultivator, my father began to look upon him as a very desirable man to employ.

“We want an experienced man on the ‘green farm,’ ” said father, one day. “Offer the situation to Holt, and tell him to come to see me about it. I want to talk with him.”

“Give the good man my compliments,” said mother; “tell him I would be much pleased to become acquainted with Mechtild, who sympathized with you so kindly on that memorable day!”

I wrote without delay. Holt came, and so did Mechtild. But few moments were necessary to enable mother to detect the girl’s fine qualities. Father, too, was delightfully surprised at her modesty, the beauty of her form, and grace of her manner. He visited the farm accompanied by Holt. The cultivator’s extraordinary knowledge, his practical manner of viewing things, and the shrewdness of his counsels in regard to the improvement of worn‐ out land and the cultivation of poor soil, completely charmed my father. A contract containing very favorable conditions for Holt was entered into, and three weeks later the family took charge of the “green farm.”

Upon mother’s suggestion, Mechtild was sent to an educational institution, where she acquired in ten months’ time the learning and culture necessary for associating with cultivated people.

Father and mother had received her on her return like a daughter. This reception was given her not only in consideration of Holt’s skilful and faithful management of business, but also on account of Mechtild’s own splendid womanly character—perhaps, too, partly on account of my unbounded admiration for the rare girl.

“The girl is an ornament to her sex,” lauded my father. “Her polished manner and ease in company do not suffer one to suspect ever so remotely that she at any time plied the reaping‐hook, and came out of a stubblefield to regale a weary wanderer with brown bread and bonny‐clabber. I am quite in harmony with your secret wishes, my dear Seraphin! At the same time, I am of opinion that a step promising so much happiness ought not to be longer deferred. I think, then, you should ask the father for his daughter without delay, so that I may soon have the pleasure of giving you my blessing.”

From my father’s arms, into which I had thrown myself in thankfulness, I hastened away to the “green farm,” where Mechtild with maidenly blushes, and Holt in speechless astonishment, heard and granted my petition.

I am now four months married. I am the blest husband of a wife whose lovely qualities are daily showing themselves to greater advantage. Mechtild presides over Chateau Hallberg like an angel of peace. Towards my father and mother she conducts herself with filial reverence and never‐ceasing delicate attentions. Mother loves her unspeakably, and no access of ill humor in father can withstand her charming smile and prudent mirth. Concerning the banking‐house of Greifmann, I have only sad things to tell. Carl’s father had entered into very considerable speculations which failed and drove him into bankruptcy. Carl saw the blow coming, and saved himself in a disgraceful manner. There was a savings institution connected with the bank in which poor people and servants deposited the savings of their hard labor. Carl appropriated this fund and made off a short time before the failure of the house. Thousands of poor persons were robbed of the little sums which they were saving for old age, by denying themselves many even of the necessaries of life.

The maledictions and curses of these unfortunate people followed across the ocean the thief whose modern culture and progressive humanity did not hinder him from committing a crime which no Christian can be guilty of without losing his claim to the title. Carl, however, still continues to pass for a man of culture and humanity notwithstanding his deed. And why should he not, since without faith in the Deity moral obligations do not exist, and consequently every species of crime is allowable? The old gentleman Greifmann died shortly after his ruin; Louise lost her mind.

My father felt the misfortune of the Greifmanns deeply, without, however, regretting in the smallest degree the wise determination which their godless principles and actions had driven him to. Formerly he could never find time to take part in the elections. But now he is constantly speaking about the duty of every respectable man to oppose the infernal machinations and plans of would‐be progress. He intends at the next election to use all his influence for the election of conscientious deputies, so that the evil may be put an end to which consists in trying to undermine the foundations of society.

Accept, dear sir, the assurance of the esteem with which I have the honor to be

our most obedient servant,

SERAPHIN GERLACH.

CHATEAU HALLBERG, Jan. 4, 1872.

[Two chapters have been omitted in this translation of “The Progressionists.”—ED. C. W.]

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F. James Marquette, S.J

Among the names that have become immortalized in the history of our country, there are few more certainly destined for perpetual fame than those connected with the discovery and exploration of that mighty river which courses so boldly and majestically through this vast continent. Thus it is probable that there never will be a time when even children at school will not be familiar with such names as De Soto, Marquette, and La Salle.

James Marquette was born in the city of Laon, near a small branch of the Oise, in the department of Aisne, France, in the year 1637. His family was the most ancient of that ancient city, and had, during many generations, filled high offices and rendered valuable services to their country, both in civil and military life. We have accounts of eminent services rendered to his sovereign by one of his ancestors as early as 1360. The usefulness and public spirit of the family, we may well suppose, did not expire with the distinguished subject of this memoir; for we find that, in the French army that aided our fathers in the achievement of American Independence, there were no less than three Marquettes who laid down their lives in the cause of liberty. His maternal name was no less distinguished in the annals of the church. On the side of his mother, Rose de la Salle, he was connected with the good and venerable John Baptist de la Salle, founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, so distinguished for their successful services in the cause of popular religious education. It was this pious mother that instilled into her illustrious son that tender and fervid devotion to the Blessed Virgin which so ravished his soul and adorned his whole life. In 1654, when but seventeen years old, he entered the Society of Jesus, in which the time of his novitiate, the terms of teaching and of his own theological studies, consumed twelve years. He had chosen for his model S. Francis Xavier, and in studying his patron’s life, and meditating on his virtues, the young priest conceived a holy longing to enter the field of missionary toil. He was enrolled in the province of Champagne; but, as this had no foreign missions, he caused himself to be transferred to the province of France. His cherished object was soon attained. In 1666, he was sent out to Canada, and arrived at Quebec on the 20th of September of that year.

F. Marquette was at first destined for the Montagnais mission, whose central station was at Tadousal, and on the 10th of October he started for Three Rivers, in order to study the Montagnais language, a key to many neighboring Indian tongues, under that celebrated philologist as well as renowned missionary, F. Gabriel Druilletes. His intervals of leisure were here employed in the offices of the holy ministry. F. Marquette was thus occupied till April, 1668, when his destination was changed, and he received orders to prepare for the mission on Lake Superior, known as the Ottawa mission. He accordingly returned to Quebec, and thence set out for Montreal on the 21st of April, with Brother Le Boesme and two other companions; and from the latter place he embarked on the Ottawa flotilla. He was accompanied by other missionaries on this toilsome and dangerous voyage up the Ottawa, through French River, to and across Lake Huron, and to the Sault St. Mary. This region had long before been dedicated to God by the erection of the cross by Fathers Jogues and Raymbault, and twenty years later, 1660, F. Ménard became the founder of the Ottawa mission; and when F. Marquette arrived in Canada, F. Allouez was then pushing his spiritual conquests beyond any points reached by his zealous predecessors. On the advent of F. Marquette to the shores of Lake Superior, it was found expedient to establish two missions, one of which should be located at the Sault St. Mary, and the other at Green Bay. Erecting his cabin at the foot of the rapids on the American side, F. Marquette opened his mission at the Sault, where he was joined the following year by F. Dablon, Superior of the Ottawa mission. These two zealous missionaries soon gathered a Christian flock around them, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was now offered up in that wild region in “a sanctuary worthy of the faith.” “It is,” says Bancroft, “the oldest settlement begun by Europeans within the present limits of the commonwealth of Michigan.” So rich was the harvest which the enthusiastic and apostolical Marquette saw before him that he writes in one of his letters: “Two thousand souls were ready to embrace the faith, if the missionary were faithful to his task.” Yet knowing the uncertainty of the Indian character, he proceeded cautiously and prudently in his undertakings. Though his ardent hopes were not fully realized, the harvest was not a fruitless one; and Fathers Dablon and Marquette labored on with undaunted courage and undiminished zeal, instructing the people, baptizing such as were in danger of death, and laying the solid foundations of a future Christian commonwealth.

In August of 1669, F. Marquette was transferred from the Sault to Lapointe, to conduct the missions of the Holy Ghost among the Ottawas, and to fill the place recently occupied by F. Allouez, who had gone to Green Bay. After a perilous and exhausting navigation, amid snow and ice, of a month’s duration, he reached Lapointe in safety, and full of ardor for the work before him. A few extracts from the account of this mission, which F. Marquette gave to his superior in his letter of the following year, will be more acceptable to the reader than any synopsis we could prepare from it:

“Divine Providence having destined me to continue the mission of the Holy Ghost begun by Allouez, who had baptized the chiefs of the Kiskakonk, I arrived there on the thirteenth of September, and went to visit the Indians who were in the clearings, which are divided into five towns. The Hurons, to the number of about four or five hundred, almost all baptized, still preserve some little Christianity. A number of the chiefs assembled in council were at first well pleased to see me; but I explained that I did not yet know their language perfectly, and that no other missionary was coming, both because all had gone to the Iroquois, and because F. Allouez, who understood them perfectly, did not wish to return that winter, as they did not love the prayer enough. They acknowledged that it was a just punishment, and during the winter held talks about it, and resolved to amend, as they tell me.

“The nation of the Outaouaks Sinagaux is far from the kingdom of God, and being above all other nations addicted to lewdness, sacrifices, and juggleries. They ridicule the prayer, and will scarcely hear us speak of Christianity. They are proud and undeveloped, and I think that so little can be done with this tribe that I have not baptized healthy infants who seem likely to live, watching only for such as are sick. The Indians of the Kinouché tribe declare openly that it is not yet time. There are, however, two men among them formerly baptized. One, now rather old, is looked upon as a kind of miracle among the Indians, having always refused to marry, persisting in this resolution in spite of all that had been said. He has suffered much, even from his relatives, but he is as little affected by this as by the loss of all the goods which he brought last year from the settlement, not having even enough left to cover him. These are hard trials for Indians, who generally seek only to possess much in this world. The other, a new‐married young man, seems of another nature than the rest. The Indians, extremely attached to their reveries, had resolved that a certain number of young women should prostitute themselves, each to choose such partner as she liked. No one in these cases ever refused, as the lives of men are supposed to depend on it. This young Christian was called; on entering the cabin, he saw the orgies that were about to begin, and, feigning illness, immediately left, and, though they came to call him back, he refused to go. His confession was as prudent as it could be, and I wondered that an Indian could live so innocently, and so nobly profess himself a Christian. His mother and some of his sisters are also good Christians. The Ottawas, extremely superstitious in their feasts and juggleries, seem hardened to the instructions given them, yet they like to have their children baptized. God permitted a woman to die this winter in her sin; her illness had been concealed from me, and I heard it only by the report that she had asked a very improper dance for her cure. I immediately went to a cabin where all the chiefs were at a feast, and some Kiskakonk Christians among them. To these I exposed the impiety of the woman and her medicine men, and gave them proper instructions. I then spoke to all present, and God permitted that an old Ottawa rose to advise granting what I asked, as it made no matter, he said, if the woman did die. An old Christian then rose and told the nation that they must stop the licentiousness of their youth, and not permit Christian girls to take part in such dances. To satisfy the woman, some child’s play was substituted for the dance; but this did not prevent her dying before morning. The dangerous state of a sick man caused the medicine men to proclaim that the devil must be invoked by extraordinary superstitions. The Christians took no part. The actors were these jugglers and the sick man, who was passed over great fires lighted in every cabin. It was said that he did not feel the heat, although his body had been greased with oil for five or six days. Men, women, and children ran through the cabins, asking, as a riddle, to divine their thoughts, and the successful guesser was glad to give the object named. I prevented the abominable lewdness so common at the end of these diabolical rites. I do not think that they will recur, as the sick man died soon after.

“The nation of Kiskakous, which for three years refused to receive the Gospel preached them by F. Allouez, resolved in the fall of 1668 to obey God. This resolution was adopted in full council, and announced to that father, who spent four winter months instructing them. The chiefs of the nation became Christians, and, as F. Allouez was called to another mission, he gave it to my charge to cultivate, and I entered on it in September, 1669.

“All the Christians were then in the fields harvesting their Indian corn; they listened with pleasure when I told them that I came to Lapointe for their sake and that of the Hurons; that they never should be abandoned, but be beloved above all other nations; and that they and the French were one. I had the consolation of seeing their love for the prayer and their pride in being Christians. I baptized the new‐born infants, and instructed the chiefs whom I found well disposed. The head chief having allowed a dog to be hung on a pole near his cabin, which is a kind of sacrifice the Indians make to the sun, I told him that this was wrong, and he went and threw it down.

“Having invited the Kiskakous to come and winter near the chapel, they left all the other tribes, to gather around us so as to be able to pray to God, be instructed, and have their children baptized. They all call themselves Christians; hence in all councils and important affairs I address them, and, when I wish to show them that I really wish what I ask, I need only address them as Christians; they told me even that they obeyed me for that reason. They have taken the upper hand, and control the three other tribes. It is a great consolation to a missionary to see such pliancy in savages, and to live in such peace with the Indians, spending the whole day in instructing them in our mysteries, and teaching them the prayers. Neither the rigor of the winter nor the state of the weather prevents their coming to the chapel; many never let a day pass, and I was thus busily employed from morning till night, preparing some for baptism, some for confession, disabusing others of their reveries. The old men told me that the young men had lost their senses, and that I must stop their excesses. I often spoke to them of their daughters, urging them to prevent their being visited at night. I knew almost all that passed in two tribes near us; but, though others were spoken of, I never heard anything against the Christian women, and when I spoke to the old men about their daughters, they told me that they prayed to God. I often inculcated this, knowing the importunities to which they are constantly exposed, and the courage they need to resist. They have learned to be modest, and the French who have seen them perceive how little they resemble the others from whom they are thus distinguished.

“After Easter, all the Indians dispersed to seek subsistence; they promised me that they would not forget the prayer, and earnestly begged that a father should come in the fall when they assemble again. This will be granted, and, if it please God to send some father, he will take my place, while I, to execute the orders of my father‐superior, will go and begin my Illinois mission.

“The Illinois are thirty days’ journey by land from Lapointe by a difficult road; they lie south‐southwest of it. On the way you pass the nation of the Ketchigamins, who live in more than twenty large cabins; they are inland, and seek to have intercourse with the French, from whom they hope to get axes, knives, and ironware. So much do they fear them that they unbound from the stake two Indian captives, who said, when about to be burned, that the Frenchman had declared that they wished peace all over the world. You pass then to the Miamiwek, and by great deserts reach the Illinois, who are assembled chiefly in two towns containing more than eight or nine thousand souls. These people are well enough disposed to receive Christianity. Since F. Allouez spoke to them at Lapointe to adore one God, they have begun to abandon their false worship; for they adored the sun and thunder. Those seen by me are apparently of good disposition, and they are not night‐ runners, like the other Indians. A man kills his wife if he finds her unfaithful. They are less prodigal in sacrifices, and promise me to embrace Christianity, and do all I require in their country. In this view, the Ottawas gave me a young man recently come from their country, who initiated me to some extent in their language during the leisure given me in the winter by the Indians at Lapointe. I could scarcely understand it, though there is something of the Algonquin in it; yet I hope, by the help of God’s grace, to understand and be understood if God by his goodness leads me to that country.

“No one must hope to escape crosses in our missions, and the best means to live happily is not to fear them, but, in the enjoyment of little crosses, hope for others still greater. The Illinois desire us, like Indians, to share their miseries and suffer all that can be imagined in barbarism. They are lost sheep, to be sought amid woods and thorns, especially when they call so piteously to be rescued from the jaws of the wolf. Such, really, can I call their entreaties to me this winter. They have actually gone this spring to notify the old men to come for me in the fall.

“The Illinois always come by land. They sow maize, which they have in great plenty; they have pumpkins as large as those of France, and plenty of roots and fruit. The chase is very abundant in wild cattle, bears, stags, turkeys, duck, bustard, wild pigeon, and cranes. They leave their towns at certain times every year to go to their hunting‐grounds together, so as to be better able to resist if attacked. They believe that I will spread peace everywhere if I go, and then only the young will go to hunt.

“When the Illinois come to Lapointe, they pass a large river almost a league wide. It runs north and south, and so far that the Illinois, who do not know what canoes are, have never yet heard of its mouth; they only know that there are very great nations below them, some of whom raise two crops of maize a year. East‐southeast of the country is a nation they call Chawawon, which came to visit them last summer. They wear beards, which shows intercourse with Europeans; they had come thirty days across land before reaching their country. This great river can hardly empty in Virginia, and we rather believe its mouth is in California. If the Indians, who promise to make me a canoe, do not fail to keep their word, we shall go into this river as soon as we can, with a Frenchman and this young man given me, who knows some of these languages, and has a readiness for learning others; we shall visit the nations which inhabit it, in order to open the way to so many of our fathers who have long awaited this happiness. This discovery will give us a complete knowledge of the southern or western sea.

“The Illinois are warriors; they make many slaves, whom they sell to the Ottawas for guns, powder, kettles, axes, and knives. They were formerly at war with the Nadouessi, but, having made peace some years since, I confirmed it, to facilitate their coming to Lapointe, where I am going to await them, in order to accompany them to their country.”

Much as he loved his children at Lapointe, and faithfully as he had served them, the voice of his superior had ordered him to this new, vaster, and more laborious field, which to his true Jesuit obedience was a task of love. The Illinois at once become dear to his heart as his future children; he studies their language, loses no opportunity of learning all about their country, its tribes and their customs, sends them presents of pious pictures and the loving messages of a father, welcomes every member of their nation who might visit Lapointe with open arms, and presses him to his heart, and devotes every moment of leisure afforded him from his labors to sedulous preparation for the contemplated mission of the Immaculate Conception. His intelligent mind fully comprehended the vast importance of the undertaking in its relations to the church and the civilized world, and conceived at once the bold and daring project of a thorough exploration of the great river around which so much mystery, intermingled with romantic fables and dim traditions, still hung. It is with equal truth and justice that Bancroft writes: “The purpose of discovering the Mississippi, of which the tales of the natives had published the magnificence, sprang from Marquette himself.”

It has already been stated that F. Marquette had sent some pious pictures to the Illinois, and by the same messenger to the Sioux, whom he expected to be embraced in his intended mission. The messenger who carried the father’s presents also bore his request for protection and a safe‐conduct to such European missionaries as might visit or pass through their country, and a message, “That the black‐gown wished to pass to the country of the Assinipoils and Kilistinons; that he was already among the Outagamis; and that he himself was going in the fall to the Illinois.”

Sad indeed must have been the feelings of the good father, when, early in the winter, the Sioux returned to him the pious pictures he had sent them, in which he saw an ominous forerunner of impending war. The Ottawas and Hurons had by their insolence aroused the indignation of the Sioux, and the latter had seized the tomahawk and prepared for the bloody and revengeful strife. His hopes of reaching the cabins of the Sioux by an overland route now vanished before the approaching storm. The Indians at Lapointe could not withstand the fierce onsets of the Dakotah war‐parties, and first the Ottawas, abandoning their village, launched their canoes upon the lake, and were soon gathered in Ekaentoulon Island. The Hurons remained alone at Lapointe, and F. Marquette remained in the midst of them to minister to their spiritual wants, share their dangers, and uphold their faith and courage. And when they too were forced to depart, the good father, ever true to his spiritual flock, was content to “turn his back on his beloved Illinois to accompany his Hurons in their wanderings and hardships.” The Hurons settled at Mackinaw, a bleak and desolate spot, but the abundance of fish the neighboring waters afforded was certain to secure the fugitives from starvation, while the very desolation of the scene seemed a protection from hostile bands. Scarcely had the Hurons thrown up their cabins on this dreary shore, when a rude sylvan chapel, surmounted by a cross, graced and cheered the scene, and became the cradle of religion at the mission of S. Ignatius. Such was the early origin of Michilimackinac. Beside the enclosure of cabins and chapel arose a palisade fort for defence. For several years F. Marquette labored in this remote and arduous station, cheered only by the consolations which spring from faith and by the bountiful harvests of souls he reaped.

Though longing to proceed on his mission to the Illinois, as all his letters so earnestly manifest, F. Marquette found ample work both for his mind and hands in arranging matters at Lapointe, so that his departure should cause as little damage as possible to that mission, to which he had been so faithful and devoted, and which he was now about to confide to the care of another, and in making the necessary preparations for his departure; for his time seemed now near at hand. The dreary days of winter were enlivened by recounting the projected plans of the coming spring, and in gathering all the information within his reach concerning the Mississippi and the nations inhabiting its banks. Most of the actual knowledge then possessed on the subject was derived from the accounts and relations of the Jesuit missionaries of the Northwest, and from the reports of the Canadian traders among the Indians. His inquiries of the more northern tribes were eagerly answered by startling fables of various hues and contradictory generalities, but nothing definite could be learned from them as to the course of the great river, its direction or outlet, or of the natives along its course. All was conjecture and theory. As early as 1639 the Sieur Nicolet, who was the interpreter of the French colony of New France, had penetrated westward to the furthest grounds of the Algonquins, and had encountered the Winnebagoes, “a people called so because they came from a distant sea, but whom the French erroneously called Puents.” And we learn from F. Vimont that “the Sieur Nicolet, who had penetrated furthest into those distant countries, avers that, had he sailed three days more on a great river which flows from that lake (Green Bay), he would have found the sea.” And although the Indians called the Mississippi itself “the sea,” and the Sieur Nicolet may have fallen into the same error, in either case it seems quite certain that he was the first to reach the waters of that river. In 1641, Fathers Isaac Jogues and Charles Raymbaut carried their missionary labors to the Sault St. Mary, and received distinct accounts of the Sioux, and of the great river on whose banks they lived. In 1658, after F. Garreau had suffered martyrdom on the St. Lawrence on his way to renew the Western missions destroyed by the recent Iroquois war, De Groseilles and another Frenchman penetrated to Lake Superior, and passed the winter on its shores. They visited the Sioux, learned with greater clearness and particularity of the course of the great river on whose banks they stood. Their annalist writes: “It was a beautiful river, large, broad, and deep, which would bear comparison, they say, with the St. Lawrence.” The missionaries of the Saguenay had also “heard of the Winnipegouek, and their bay whence three seas could be reached.” And war parties of the Iroquois told the missionaries of New York of their wars with the Ontoagannha, “whose towns lay on a beautiful river (Ohio), which leads to the great lake, as they called the sea, where they traded with Europeans who pray to God as we (the French) do, and have rosaries and bells to call men to prayer.”(225) F. Ménard, the founder of the Ottawa mission, also heard, in 1660, of the Mississippi and the nations on its banks, and was only prevented from visiting them by meeting with a martyr’s death while prosecuting his work. F. Allouez, his successor, also writes of the great river, “which empties, as far as I can conjecture, into the sea of Virginia,” and was the first to reveal to Europeans its Indian name; for, in speaking of one of its tribes, he says: “They live on a great river called Messipi.” At the time that F. Dablon was appointed Superior of the Ottawa missions, and F. Marquette appointed to establish the intended Illinois mission, and the exploration of the river was about to be undertaken, the latter, as already stated, was for some time engaged in gathering information concerning its course and outlet. Three principal conjectures prevailed at this time: first, that it ran towards the southwest, and entered the Gulf of California; second, that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico; third, that it took a more easterly direction, and discharged itself into the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere on the coast of Virginia. To F. Marquette belonged the glory of solving the problem, and thus of opening the interior of the continent to Christianity and civilization.

The war which was raging in the country rendered it impossible for the missionaries of themselves to undertake the opening of the long‐desired mission of the Illinois, and they had accordingly applied for assistance to the French government to further this great enterprise. F. Marquette, as we have seen from his letters, remained ever ready at a moment’s notice from his superiors to advance into this dangerous field. He was not deterred by a consciousness of his own declining health, already enfeebled by labors and exposures, nor by the hostile character of the nations through whose country he would have to pass, nor by the danger of a cruel death at the hands of the fierce Dakotah. This last only made the prospect more enticing to one whose highest ambition was to win the glorious crown of martyrdom in opening the way for his brother Jesuits to follow in the battle of the faith. The same flotilla that carried his letter to F. Dablon to Quebec in the summer of 1672, on its return conveyed to him the joyous news that the petition of the missionaries had found favor with the government; that the Sieur Jolliet was designated to undertake the exploration of the Mississippi; and that F. Marquette was chosen the missionary of the expedition. It was the Blessed Virgin whom, F. Marquette says, “I had always invoked, since my coming to the Ottawa country, in order to obtain of God the favor of being able to visit the nations on the Mississippi River.” It was on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the same Blessed Virgin Mary that he received the glorious tidings that the realization of his hopes and prayers was at hand. He bestowed upon the great river the name of the Immaculate Conception, which, however, as well as its earlier Spanish name of River of the Holy Ghost, has since yielded to its original Indian appellation.

The exploring party, consisting of “the meek, single‐hearted, unpretending, illustrious Marquette, with Jolliet for his associate, five Frenchmen for his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting their canoes on their backs, and walking across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin,” set out upon their glorious expedition. Mr. J. G. Shea, to whom we are so much indebted for his researches into this interesting part of the history of our country, describes the voyage in the following graphic and eloquent manner:

“In the spring they embarked at Mackinaw in two frail bark canoes; each with his paddle in hand, and full of hope, they soon plied them merrily over the crystal waters of the lake. All was new to Marquette, and he describes as he went along the Menonomies, Green Bay, and Maskoutens, which he reached on the 7th of June, 1673. He had now attained the limit of former discoveries; the new world was before them; they looked back a last adieu to the waters which, great as the distance was, connected them with Quebec and their countrymen; they knelt on the shore to offer, by a new devotion, their lives, their honor, and their undertakings to their beloved Mother, the Virgin Mary Immaculate; then, launching on the broad Wisconsin, sailed slowly down its current, amid its vine‐clad isles and its countless sand‐bars. No sound broke the stillness, no human form appeared, and at last, after sailing seven days, on the 17th of June they happily glided into the great river. Joy that could find no utterance in words filled the grateful heart of Marquette.

“The broad river of the Conception, as he named it, now lay before them, stretching away hundreds of miles to an unknown sea. Soon all was new; mountain and forest had glided away; the islands, with their groves of cottonwood, became more frequent, and moose and deer browzed on the plains; strange animals were seen traversing the river, and monstrous fish appeared in its waters. But they proceeded on their way amid this solitude, frightful by its utter absence of man. Descending still further, they came to the land of the bison, or pisikiou, which, with the turkey, became sole tenants of the wilderness; all other game had disappeared. At last, on the 25th of June, they descried footprints on the shore. They now took heart again, and Jolliet and the missionary, leaving their five men in the canoes, followed a little beaten path to discover who the tribe might be. They travelled on in silence almost to the cabin‐doors, when they halted, and with a loud halloa proclaimed their coming. Three villages lay before them; the first, roused by the cry, poured forth its motley group, which halted at the sight of the new‐comers and the well‐known dress of the missionary. Old men came slowly on, step by measured step, bearing aloft the all‐mysterious calumet. All was silence; they stood at last before the two Europeans, and Marquette asked, ‘Who are you?’ ‘We are Illinois,’ was the answer, which dispelled all anxiety from the explorers, and sent a thrill to the heart of Marquette; the Illinois missionary was at last amid the children of that tribe which he had so long, so tenderly yearned to see.

“After friendly greetings at this town of Pewaria, and the neighboring one of Moing‐wena, they returned to their canoes, escorted by the wondering tribe, who gave their hardy visitants a calumet, the safeguard of the West. With renewed courage and lighter hearts, they sailed in, and, passing a high rock with strange and monstrous forms depicted on its rugged surface, heard in the distance the roaring of a mighty cataract, and soon beheld Pekitanoui, or the Muddy River, as the Algonquins call the Missouri, rushing like some untamed monster into the calm and clear Mississippi, and hurrying in with its muddy waters the trees which it had rooted up in its impetuous course. Already had the missionaries heard of the river running to the western sea, to be reached by the branches of the Mississippi, and Marquette, now better informed, fondly hoped to reach it one day by the Missouri. But now their course lay south, and, passing a dangerous eddy, the demon of the Western Indians, they reached the Waboukigou, or Ohio, the river of the Shawnees, and, still holding on their way, came to the warm land of the cane, and the country which the mosquitoes might call their own. While enveloped in their sails as a shelter from them, they came upon a tribe who invited them to the shore. They were wild wanderers, for they had guns bought of Catholic Europeans at the East.

“Thus, after all had been friendly, and encouraged by this second meeting, they plied their oars anew, and, amid groves of cottonwood on either side, descended to the 33d degree, when, for the first time, a hostile reception was promised by the excited Metchigameas. Too few to resist, their only hope on earth was the mysterious calumet, and in heaven the protection of Mary, to whom they sent up fervent prayers. At last the storm subsided, and they were received in peace; their language formed an obstacle, but an interpreter was found, and after explaining the object of their coming, and announcing the great truths of Christianity, they embarked for Akamsea, a village thirty miles below on the eastern shore.

“Here they were well received, and learned that the mouth of the river was but ten days’ sail from this village; but they heard, too, of nations there trading with Europeans, and of wars between the tribes, and the two explorers spent a night in consultation. The Mississippi, they now saw, emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, between Florida and Tampico, two Spanish points; they might, by proceeding, fall into their hands. Thus far only Marquette traced the map, and he put down the names of other tribes of which they heard. Of these, in the Atotchasi, Matora, and Papihaka, we recognize Arkansas tribes; and the Akoroas and Tanikwas, Pawnees and Omahas, Kansas and Apiches, are well known in after‐days.

“They accordingly set out from Akensea, on the 17th of July, to return. Passing the Missouri again, they entered the Illinois, and, meeting the friendly Kaskaskias at its upper portage, were led by them in a kind of triumph to Lake Michigan; for Marquette had promised to return and instruct them in the faith. Sailing along the lake, they crossed the outer peninsula of Green Bay, and reached the mission of S. Francis Xavier just four months after their departure from it.

“Thus had the missionaries achieved their long‐projected work. The triumph of the age was thus completed in the discovery and exploration of the Mississippi, which threw open to France the richest, most fertile and accessible territory of the New World. Marquette, whose health had been severely tried in this voyage, remained at St. Francis to recruit his strength before resuming his wonted missionary labors; for he sought no laurels, he aspired to no tinsel praise.

“The distance passed over by F. Marquette on this great expedition, in his little bark canoe, was two thousand seven hundred and sixty‐seven miles. The feelings with which he regarded an enterprise having so grave a bearing on the future history and development of mankind may be appreciated from the following closing passage of the ninth section of his Voyages and Discoveries:

“ ‘Had all this voyage caused but the salvation of a single soul, I should deem all my fatigue well repaid. And this I have reason to think; for, when I was returning, I passed by the Indians at Peoria. I was three days announcing the faith in all their cabins, after which, as we were embarking, they brought me to the water’s edge a dying child, which I baptized a little before it expired, by an admirable Providence, for the salvation of that innocent soul.’ ”

F. Marquette prepared a narrative of his voyage down the Mississippi (from which the foregoing quotation is taken), and a map of that river; and on his return transmitted copies to his superior, by the Ottawa flotilla of that year. It is also probable that Frontenac, the Governor of New France, as he had promised, sent a copy of them to the French government. The loss of Jolliet’s narrative and map gave an inestimable value to those of Marquette. Yet the French government did not publish them, probably in consequence of the discontinuance of the publication of the Jesuit Relations about this time; and thus the great interests involved in the discovery were neglected. Fortunately, F. Marquette’s narrative fell into the hands of Thevenot, who had just published a collection of travels, and such was his appreciation of it that he issued a new volume, entitled Recueil de Voyages, in 1681, containing the narrative and map of the Mississippi.(226) Mr. Sparks, in his life of F. Marquette, speaks thus of the narrative:

“It is written in a terse, simple, and unpretending style. The author relates what occurs, and describes what he sees, without embellishment or display. He writes as a scholar and as a man of careful observation and practical sense. There is no tendency to exaggerate, nor any attempt to magnify the difficulties he had to encounter, or the importance of his discovery. In every point of view, this tract is one of the most interesting of those which illustrate the early history of America.”

Having reached Green Bay, the exhausted voyager sank down under the effects of his recent travels and exposures. His disease was so obstinate and protracted that he suffered during the entire winter, though with patience and resignation, and did not recover before the end of the following summer. Having received from his superior the necessary orders for the establishment of the Illinois mission, he started on the 25th of October, 1674, for Kaskaskia. He was accompanied and assisted by two faithful and devoted Frenchmen, and by a number of Pottawattomies and Illinois Indians. They coasted along the mouth of Fox River, and then, advancing up as far as the small bay breaking into the peninsula, they reached the portage leading to the lake. As the canoes proceeded along the lake shore, the missionary walked upon the beach, returning to the canoes whenever the beach was broken by a river or stream; and their provisions were obtained from the abundant yield of the chase. On the 23d of November, the courageous missionary found his malady returning, but pushed on, amid cold and snow, until, on the 4th of December, he reached the Chicago River, which was closed with ice. Here again the unpropitious elements and his own infirmities compelled him to stop and spend the winter. But his time was not idly spent during this detention, for his missionary zeal found occupation in the spiritual care of his Indian companions, whom he instructed as well as he could, and sent them forward on their journey. His faithful Frenchmen remained now alone with him; but at a distance of fifty miles was an Illinois village, where there were two Frenchmen, traders and trappers; and these, hearing of the forlorn condition of the missionary, arranged that one of them should go and visit him. They had prepared a cabin for him, and the Indians, alarmed for his safety, were also anxious to send some of their tribe to convey their father and his effects to their village. Touched by their attentions, he sent them every assurance of his visiting them, intimating, however, the uncertainty of his doing so in the spring, in consequence of his continued illness. These messages only added to the alarm of the Indians, and the sachems assembled and sent a deputation to the black‐gown. The presents they bore were three sacks of corn, dried meat, and pumpkins, and twelve beaver skins. The objects of their visits were, first, to make him a mat to sit on; second, to ask him for powder; third, supply him with food; fourth, to get some merchandise. The good father made answer in characteristic terms, as follows: “First, that I came to instruct them by speaking of the prayer; second, that I would not give them powder, as we endeavor to make peace everywhere, and because I did not wish them to begin a war against the Miamis; third, that we did not fear famine; fourth, that I would encourage the French to bring them merchandise, and that they must make reparation to the traders there for the beads taken from them while the surgeon was with me.” Presenting them with some axes, knives, and trinkets, he dismissed them with a promise to make every effort to visit them in a few days. Bidding their good father to “take heart,” and beseeching him to “stay and die in their country,” the deputation “returned to their winter camps.”

The ensuing winter months, though marked by every bodily suffering and privation, were replete with religious consolation. His whole time was spent in prayer. Admonished by his disease that his last end could not be far off, he offered his remaining days entirely to God. He lost sight of the sufferings of his body in the overflow of heavenly consolations with which his soul was ravished. Still the recollection that he had been appointed missionary of the Illinois, and the duty this seemed to impose upon him of laboring for the conversion of those noble but benighted souls, filled his heart with the desire of visiting them, if it should be the will of God, and the establishment of the Illinois mission became the absorbing thought of his mind and the burden of the prayers which he addressed to the throne of heaven. His sufferings he bore not only with patience, but with joy; if he prayed for their cessation, it was only with the view that he might thus be enabled to encounter the new sufferings, labors, and hardships of his mission, and that he might devote his remaining days to the salvation of his beloved Illinois. To obtain this privilege from heaven, he induced his companions to unite with him in a novena of prayers in honor of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Some time after Christmas, 1675, his Patroness in heaven obtained the desired boon of health for her devoted client; for he soon began to recover from his disease, and, though still feeble, was enabled by the 29th of March, when the snow and ice began to melt, and the inundations compelled them to move, to set out for Kaskaskia, in the Upper Illinois. He arrived at that Illinois town on the 8th of April, but his journal was discontinued from the 6th of April, and we have no record of his movements from that time. He was received by his children as an angel from heaven, for they scarcely supposed he had escaped alive the rigors of the winter. It was Monday in Holy Week, and the good man immediately commenced his work. He visited the chiefs and ancients of the town, and gave them and the crowds who assembled in the cabins he visited the first necessary instructions in the Gospel. So great were the throngs that assembled to hear him preach that the narrow accommodations of the cabins could not hold them. On Maundy Thursday he called a general assembly of the people in the open field, a beautiful prairie near the town, which was decorated after the fashion of the country, and spread with mats and bear skins. He formed a little rustic altar by suspending some pieces of Indian taffety on cords, to which were attached, so as to be seen on all four sides, four large pictures of the Blessed Virgin, under whose invocation the mission was placed. The assembly was immense; composed of five hundred chiefs and ancients seated in a circle around the missionary, and around these stood fifteen hundred young men. Besides these, great numbers of women and children attended. He addressed his congregation with ten words or presents, according to the Indian fashion, associating each word or present, which represented some great truth or mystery, with one of the ten beads on the belt of the prayer which he held in his hand. He explained the object of his visit to them, preached Christ crucified—for it was the eve of Good Friday—and explained to them the principal mysteries of the Christian religion. The Holy Mass was then celebrated for the first time in this new mission. On each of the following days he continued his instructions, and on Easter Sunday he celebrated the great Feast of the Resurrection, offering up Mass for the second time. He took possession of the land in the name of his risen Lord, and bestowed upon the mission the name of the Immaculate Virgin Mary.

His former malady now returned with renewed violence. His strength was wasting away. To remain would accomplish no good for his children, for he was unable to discharge the duties of the missionary, and no alternative was left but to make an effort to reach his former mission, Mackinaw, where he hoped to die in the midst of his fellow‐members of the Society of Jesus. He was the more willing now to seek rest in the bosom of his Redeemer and in the Society of his Blessed Mother in Heaven, because he had performed his promise, the mission of the Illinois had been founded, his words had been lovingly received by his people, the good seed had been sown in their hearts, the Holy Sacrifice had been offered up in their presence and for their salvation, and future missionaries might now advance to cultivate the field and reap the harvest he had prepared. His docile Indians, with the devotion of children, begged him to return to them as soon as his health should permit. He repeatedly promised them that he or some other missionary would come to continue the good work amongst them. The people followed him on his journey, escorted him thirty leagues on his way with great pomp, showing him every mark of friendship and affection, and many contended among themselves for the honor of carrying the scanty baggage he possessed. Taking the way of the St. Joseph’s River and the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, along which he had yet to travel over a hundred leagues through an unknown route, his strength soon began to fail entirely. He could no longer help himself; his two faithful French companions had to lift him in and out of his canoe when they landed at night; and so exhausted had he become under his wasting disease that they had to handle and carry him like a child. In the midst of his sufferings and the hardships of such a journey in his enfeebled health, his characteristic equanimity, joy, and gentleness never for a moment left him. He could even forget his own sufferings to console his companions. He encouraged them to sustain the fatigues of the way, assuring them that God would protect and defend them. His native mirthfulness was even in this extreme crisis conspicuous in his conversations. He now calmly saw the approach of death, and joyfully and heroically welcome it as the reward of his toils and sacrifices. He had some time before prepared a meditation on death, to serve him in these last hours of his life, which he now used with great consolation. He said his office to his last day. His devotions frequently assumed the shape of colloquies with his merciful Lord, with his Holy Mother, with his angel guardian, and with all heaven. He repeatedly pronounced with fervor the sublime words, “I believe that my Redeemer liveth”; and again, “Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of God, remember me.” Perceiving a river on whose banks loomed up a prominent eminence, he ordered his companions to stop, that he might die and be buried there. He pointed out the spot on this eminence in which he desired them to inter his remains. This river, until recent years, bore his name. His companions still desired to press forward, in the hope of reaching Mackinaw; but they were driven back by the wind, and, entering the River Marquette by its former channel, they erected a bark cabin, under which Marquette, like his great model, S. Francis Xavier, was stretched upon the shore, and, like him, sighed only to be dissolved and to be with Christ. So cheerfully did he realize his approaching dissolution that he gave all the necessary directions to his companions touching his burial. He had a week before blessed some water, which he instructed them how to use on the occasion, how to arrange his hands, feet, and head, with what religious ceremonies to bury him, even telling them that they should take his little altar bell, and ring it as they carried him to the grave. On the eve of his death, he told them with a countenance radiant with joy that the morrow would be his last day on earth. Still mindful of his sacred ministry, and anxious to be doing good, he administered the sacrament of penance to his two companions for the last time. He thanked them for their charity to him during this arduous and eventful voyage, begged their pardon for the trouble he had given them, and directed them to ask pardon for him and in his name of all the Fathers and Brothers of the Society of Jesus in the Ottawa country; he also gave them a paper in which he had written all his faults since his last confession, which he begged them to give to his superior, that he might pray the more earnestly for him. He promised not to forget them in heaven. Ever mindful of others in this trying moment, and overflowing with charity for his neighbor, he insisted upon his companions taking some rest, leaving him to commune with heaven, assuring them that his hour was not yet at hand, and that he would call them in due time. This he did; summoning them to his side, just as his agony was approaching. Hastening to him, they fell melting into tears at his feet. He embraced them for the last time, called for the holy water he had blessed and his reliquary, and, taking his crucifix from around his neck, and handing it to one of them, he requested him to hold it up before him, so that he could behold it every moment he had yet to live. Clasping his hands, and fixing his eyes affectionately on the image of his expiring Saviour, he pronounced aloud his profession of faith, and thanked God for the favor he enjoyed in dying a Jesuit, a missionary of the cross, and, above all, in dying in a miserable cabin, amid forests, and destitute of all human consolation and assistance. He then communed secretly for some time with his Creator, but his devotion from time to time found vent in the ejaculations, “Sustinuit anima mea in verba ejus,” and “Mater Dei, memento mei.” These were his last words before he was taken with the agony of death. His companions frequently pronounced the names of Jesus and Mary, as he had previously requested them to do, and, when they saw he was about to expire, they called out “Jesus, Maria,” whereupon he repeated those enrapturing names several times with distinctness, and then suddenly, as if his Saviour and Mother had appeared to him, he raised his eyes above the crucifix, gazing with a countenance lit up with pleasure at those blissful apparitions. He expired as peacefully and gently as a child sinking into its evening slumber.

“Thus he died, the great apostle, Far away in regions West; By the Lake of the Algonquins Peacefully his ashes rest; But his spirit still regards us From his home among the blest.”

The devoted companions of the illustrious missionary, happy, in the midst of their bereavement, in the privilege of witnessing one of the most heroic and saintly deaths recorded in the history of our race, carried out every injunction of their departed father, and added every act that love and veneration could suggest, and that their impoverished condition in the wilderness could afford. They laid out his remains as he had directed, rang the little altar bell as they carried him with profound respect to the mound of earth selected by himself, interred him there, and raised a large cross to mark the sacred spot.

The surviving companions of the deceased now prepared to embark. One of them had been ill for some time, suffering with such depression of spirits and feebleness of body that he could neither eat nor sleep. Just before embarking he knelt at the grave of his saintly friend, and begged him to intercede for him in heaven as he had promised, and, taking some earth from the breast of the departed, and placing it upon his own breast, it is related that he felt his sadness and bodily infirmity immediately depart, and he resumed his voyage in health and gladness. Many are the pious traditions of miraculous results attributed to the sanctity of F. Marquette; many of them are still handed down among the Western missionaries, and some of them have found a place in the pages of serious history.

The remains of the saintly Jesuit were, two years afterwards, disinterred by his own flock, the Kiskakons, while returning from their hunting‐ grounds, placed in a neat box of bark, and reverently carried to their mission. The flotilla of canoes, as it passed along in funeral solemnity, was joined by a party of the Iroquois, and, as they approached Mackinaw, many other canoes, including those of the two missionaries of the place, united in the imposing convoy, and the deep, reverential chant, De Profundis, arose heavenward from the bosom of the lake until the body reached the shore. It was carried in procession with cross, burning tapers, and fragrant incense to the church, where every possible preparation had been made for so interesting and affecting a ceremony; and, after the Requiem service, the precious relics were deposited in a vault prepared for them in the middle of the church, “where he reposes,” says the pious chronicler, “as the guardian angel of our Ottawa missions.” “Ever after,” says Bancroft, “the forest rangers, if in danger on Lake Michigan, would invoke his name. The people of the West will build his monument.”

The following notice of the character of F. Marquette is from the gifted pen of Mr. Shea:

“Such was the edifying and holy death of the illustrious explorer of the Mississippi, on Saturday, the 18th of May, 1675. He was of a cheerful, joyous disposition, playful even in his manner, and universally beloved. His letters show him to us as a man of education, close observation, sound sense, strict integrity, a freedom from exaggeration, and yet a vein of humor which here and there breaks out in spite of all his self‐command.

“But all these qualities are little compared to his zeal as a missionary, to his sanctity as a man. His holiness drew on him in life the veneration of all around him, and the lapse of years has not even now destroyed it in the descendants of those who knew him. In one of his sanctity we naturally find an all‐absorbing devotion to the Mother of the Saviour, with its constant attendants, an angelical love of purity, and a close union of the heart with God. It is, indeed, characteristic with him. The privilege which the Church honors under the title of the Immaculate Conception was the constant object of his thoughts; from his early youth he daily recited the little offices of the Immaculate Conception and fasted every Saturday in her honor. As a missionary, a variety of devotions directed to the same end still show his devotions, and to her he turned in all his trials. When he discovered the great river, when he founded his new mission, he gave it the name of the Conception, and no letter, it is said, ever came from his hand that did not contain the words, ’Blessed Virgin Immaculate’; and the smile that lighted up his dying face induced his poor companions to believe that she had appeared before the eyes of her devoted client.

“Like S. Francis Xavier, whom he especially chose as the model of his missionary career, he labored nine years for the moral and social improvement of nations sunk in paganism and vice, and, as he was alternately with tribes of varied tongues, found it was necessary to acquire knowledge of many American languages: six he certainly spoke with ease; many more he is known to have understood less perfectly. His death, however, was, as he had always desired, more like that of the apostle of the Indies; there is, indeed, a striking resemblance between their last moments; and the wretched cabin, the desert shore, the few destitute companions, the lonely grave, all harmonize in Michigan and Sancian.”

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Prayer Of Custance, The Persecuted Queen Of Alla Of Northumberland

Mother, quod she, and maiden bright, Mary! Soth is that through womanne’s eggement Mankind was lorn, and damned aye to die, For which thy Child was on a cross yrent: Thy blissful eyen saw all his torment; Then is there no comparison between Thy woe and any woe man may sustain. Thou saw’st thy Child yslain before thine eyen, And yet now liveth my little child parfay, Now, lady bright! to whom all woful crien, Thou glory of womanhood, thou faire May, Thou haven of refute, bright star of the day! Rue on my child, that of thy gentleness Ruest on every rueful in distress.

—Chaucer.

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