Grapes And Thorns. Chapter XIV—Uprooting Thorns…

Grapes And Thorns. Chapter XIV—Uprooting Thorns

By The Author Of “The House Of Yorke.”

“You are happy, then!” F. Chevreuse said to Mr. Schöninger the next evening when they were talking together.

His companion repeated the word with a doubting inflection. “I have always associated the idea of happiness with excitement,” he said; “and I am too calm for that. I should say that I am deeply satisfied.”

Mr. Schöninger had been rehearsing in the church the music for the next day, and F. Chevreuse had sat in the sanctuary listening, marking with what will and effect the leader accomplished his work. He showed small regard, indeed, for the vanity or the personal dignity of the singers he was training, but the success was admirable. If the men and women around him had been organ‐pipes or keys, he could scarcely have treated them with less ceremony. When the rehearsal was over, he dismissed them without a word, except the command to be promptly in their places the next morning. Knowing the touchiness of singers in general, and the peculiar touchiness of some of his own choir, the priest fully expected to see some manifestation of resentment among them; but they seemed merely surprised and a little awe‐struck, and, after a momentary hesitation, withdrew in silence, leaving the organist alone in the loft, with the soft gloaming painting the air about him, as he closed the instrument with tender care, and drew the curtain about it.

While waiting for him to come down, the priest perceived for the first time a lady dressed in deep mourning, who knelt near the door, and who quietly followed the singers from the church. Miss Pembroke had the habit of visiting the Blessed Sacrament at this hour; and she was, moreover, making a Novena, which she had begun the night before, with a special intention. In that Novena her dear Sisters at the convent had joined, only Sister Cecilia knowing what the intention was.

Mr. Schöninger went into the house with F. Chevreuse, and stood with him at an open window looking out in that exquisite hour when day and night meet in mid‐air, the sunset not yet relinquishing all its rose and gold, the night drawing only her tenderest film of purple across the sky, and crushing back her trembling stars like glimmering tears crushed between dark‐fringed eyelids.

The two men looked out, both unconsciously pleased because the evening was beautiful and spring in its freshness, and consciously thinking of other things.

“They are all taking their places again,” Mr. Schöninger said, after looking upward a moment in silence. “My patriarchs and prophets! I hated to see them discrowned, and growing dim, and fading away into myths. Now they burn out again with a greater splendor than ever. The church of the fulfilment has never shown such men as my prophetic church. The glory of the later ritual is theirs. When the church which sees would express her emotion, she borrows the song of the men who foresaw. They were a grand race. I would like to build a church, and dedicate it to King David, and have a stone statue of him playing on his harp over against the altar.”

F. Chevreuse smiled, but said nothing. He was watching with intense interest the development of this new Christian, who took his religion as he might have taken a crown. Mr. Schöninger had an odd way of performing what in any one else would have been acts of humility with a proud unconsciousness, or an unconscious pride that was a little puzzling. Of what is commonly called piety he showed not a sign; yet he did without hesitation or apparent effort what ordinary piety shrinks from. One might say that he possessed a sublime common sense, which, perceiving the relative importance of God and man, worshipped God as a matter of course, taking no thought whether man were pleased or not. Certainly, had any religious persecution threatened him, he would have taken it as a piece of astonishing impertinence.

F. Chevreuse had only just checked in himself an intention to compliment the convert on what he took to be the bravery of his profession of faith the evening before, finding that Mr. Schöninger had been as disregardful of the crowd who had listened to him as if they had been wooden posts; and he refrained also from referring to the cool “Oh! come to think of it, I do not eat meat to‐day,” with which he had that day, at the hotel table, sent his plate away in the face of a score of staring people, who, however, did not venture to smile.

If any one had exhorted him not to be ashamed of God, he would probably have asked simply, Do you think I am a fool?

Their conversation approached this topic after a while.

“One thing that has always astonished me is the mean spirit so many Christians have,” Mr. Schöninger said. “Their religion seems to degrade rather than ennoble their character. They make such grand, heroic talk because they overcome some contemptible temptation which a pagan should be ashamed to yield to, and seem to regard themselves as constant proofs of special divine interposition because they are not habitual liars, thieves, and robbers. They delight, apparently, in calling themselves miserable and worthless, which is a shame to them and a contradiction of God. If they had been so worthless, the Almighty would not have taken so great pains to be reconciled to them.”

“You are regarding the dignity of man, not that of God,” remarked the priest quietly. Then, seeing that his companion did not understand his meaning, added: “These expressions of humility and abasement come with sincerity only from those souls which, gazing heavenward, have seen so much of the glory of God that they shrink to nothingness in comparison. It is by looking at him that they grow small in their own eyes, and their little faults, if you would call them so, become so mountainous in appearance. There is, indeed, an immense dignity in man, but he loses in contemplating it; for there is sure to grow up in his soul as immense a pride and egotism. We are quite safe when we leave our honors to the guardianship of the God who gave them, and occupy our minds in caring for his honor, which was once so fatally lost sight of that all mankind were smitten with a curse. We are a fallen race. Adam and Eve could once walk with heads erect in the face of heaven, but no human being since.”

Seeing his pupil frown, F. Chevreuse added more lightly: “But I do not think it worth while to make the devil of too much consequence. Our Lord said, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ Now, most people would be afraid to have the devil behind them. They would be continually peeping over their shoulder to see what he was about. His great strength is in our misconception of him. I don’t suppose any man ever yielded to him and consented to offend God but he was astonished afterward to see how easily he might have conquered, and how small was the bribe for which he had sacrificed so much.”

“The devil, too,” said Mr. Schöninger with an odd little smile. “Must I accept him?”

“No; you must reject him,” retorted the priest.

And then came question after question. How did the church explain this? What was the meaning of that? F. Chevreuse found his philosophy and theology somewhat tested by this searching questioner, who, without doubting, wished that all things should be made plain to him.

“I always had a tender feeling for Christ,” he said, “and sometimes a slight questioning if he might not be the Messias; but only last night were the needed links supplied which made my fragmentary acquiescences a single conviction. But though satisfied with Christ, I am not satisfied with religion as I see it. There are too many trumpery glozes and comments and complications. I like common sense in religion, and without it religion has no dignity in my eyes. Nothing, not even his humility and love, was more conspicuous in the character of Jesus Christ than his common sense and consistency. How honest he was! I say it with all reverence and adoration. How free he was from evasion and policy, and that prudence which is founded on an infinite number of small lies! He always detected a fallacy, and exposed it; and he was constantly appealing to the reason and good sense of his followers. When he propounded a mystery, it was not a mystery because it was involved and obscure, but because it was so great that we could not see all the parts of it. His mysteries hang like suns in space. How little there is in common between his transparent nobleness and the petty tricks of, I must say, the majority of Christians, their weights and measures for the offences they may dare against him, and those which are over the permitted guilt, their excuses, their compromises! Why, sir, there never was a time when I did not think, there never will be a time when I shall not believe, that the greatest foes to the Christian church are Christians themselves.”

“You are quite right,” F. Chevreuse answered with an air of sorrow and mortification. “There is a vast difference between Christ and Christians. He is God, and we are men. And it is the thought of this difference which makes us walk with that downcast face which so offended you a few minutes ago. Do not come to too many decisions at once. Wait, and learn by experience. Here in your reach now is all the splendor of faith, a free gift for you to work out your life by. Your privileges are peculiar. You have had no sacrament to misuse; and when you are baptized, you will stand as new and sinless a man as Adam was at his creation. In that instant, if your intention is pure, you will possess heaven in your soul. It does not often fall to the lot of a man to be sure of such happiness. Let us see how you will use the privilege. Show us, if you will, the ideal Christian, and we will be glad to see and imitate him. But beware of pride!”

“My dear friend!” exclaimed Mr. Schöninger, “I did not mean to be presuming nor to wound you. I am sure you do not wish me to say it, but to me you, at least, are perfect.”

F. Chevreuse laughed slightly. “Only wait and see,” he said. “And now a score or two of penitents are waiting to confess, and F. O’Donovan is wondering if I am going to let him stay in the confessional till midnight. I must leave you. Why do you not go up and see Mrs. Ferrier? She has been anxiously inquiring for you to‐day, and complaining a little. Go and make the good soul happy. Miss Pembroke will be glad to see you too, I am sure. She has gone to live with Mrs. Ferrier. They do not receive company; but send your name in, and you will be welcome.”

“I had forgotten them both!” Mr. Schöninger said with some compunction. “I will go at once.”

F. Chevreuse soon found that he had been mistaken in two of his assertions; F. O’Donovan was not in the confessional, and Miss Pembroke was not at that moment in Mrs. Ferrier’s house. Both had gone to the convent, one called there, the other hastening to follow when she knew his errand.

Little Anita was dying, killed by her first vision of the wickedness and agony of the world. She had heard of sin as one living far inland hears of the ocean, which he has never seen; and now the bitter waves of that wide, salt sea she believed so far away and alien had rolled in about her. It touched her feet and her garments, and left its poisonous rime there; it caught and strangled before her eyes those she had trusted and been near to; it tossed its sacrilegious foam on to the very altar of God. Her soul trembled within her, and she turned her face away from life, and hid it in the bosom of her Lord.

“O my God! my God!” she prayed. “Forgive me! but I cannot live.”

There was no physical malady; but the heart, which, like a busy shuttle, tosses to and fro its rosy threads, weaving soul and body together, faltered, and let slip link after link. The invisible folded wings detached themselves, trembling; the spiritual hands left the bodily hands cold, and stretched out into eternity, trembling, always trembling; the whole soul, still full of the fear and agony of the world, shrank outward.

The Sisters knelt about her, cruelly grieved. Was this delicate saint to be torn away from them thus, leaving them no consolation but the memory of her blameless life? Was she to go down to the grave without a sign of victory? Were they to keep for ever this last vision of her, prostrate in the shadow of that low portal?

And even while they prayed, just giving up hope, as the slight form grew cold and rigid, all at once it shone out like a marble statue on which a sudden sunbeam falls. The eyes flashed wide open, the shining soul stood tiptoe in them an instant, then parted softly.

It is not for us to follow, even in fancy, the flight of that innocent soul, nor to witness the tears of mingled sorrow and joy which the Sisters shed over their young companion, nor to listen to the prayers they said, nor the sacred communings they held together.

Our business is with earth, with Honora Pembroke, driving homeward soberly through the still evening.

“Drive slowly,” she said to the footman—not John now. “There is no haste.” And she added to herself: “I want a chance to think.”

There was, indeed, little chance to think in her new home; for good Mrs. Ferrier, who did her thinking with her tongue, could not conceive any need for solitude, and was constantly breaking in upon the few moments of retirement her young friend allowed herself to ask if she had “got through,” if she were ill, if she would please to come down, or if she objected to company. And then would come the recapitulation of her trials, her fears for her daughter, and lamentations without end. That Miss Pembroke herself might be sad and troubled, and stand in need of cheering and sympathy, did not seem to enter her mind.

So thus early in their intercourse the young woman was fain to seize every excuse for a moment of solitude. Whether she would have taken advantage of this had she known that a visitor awaited her return is doubtful.

The drive was not interminable, however, and it was still early in the evening when she reached the house and entered. She stopped at sound of a voice in the drawing‐room. It was Mrs. Ferrier who spoke, but her words were quite sufficient to tell whom she spoke to.

“I shall never, never get over your having been treated so—never!”

“Madam,” said Mr. Schöninger with a decision which scarcely covered his displeasure, “I request as a favor that you will never again mention this subject to me. I am sorry for your trouble in the matter, and grateful for the kindness you have shown me; but you must see that it is something of which I do not wish to be reminded.”

Miss Pembroke’s impulse was to go immediately up‐stairs. A kind of terror seized her at the thought of meeting him. What if he should know that she was making a Novena, and what it was for!

She stopped one moment, irresolute, then went into the bright drawing‐room where the two sat. Mrs. Ferrier uttered a little exclamation, not having heard her come; but Mr. Schöninger had heard the carriage, the door, even the step that paused at sound of their voices, and half divined that he had come near not seeing Miss Pembroke that night.

She gave him her hand with dignified and earnest friendliness. “I cannot tell you how happy you made us all last night,” she said. “You are welcome.”

He found something haughty in her mode of address, like that of a queen speaking to a subject, and looked at her intently to discern its meaning, if possible.

Alarmed at his searching expression, she turned abruptly away from him with unmistakable haughtiness this time. But no sooner had she done so than, smitten by a swift recollection of the folly and injustice of the act, she returned with a glance and gesture so full of mute, impulsive penitence that it more than atoned; it explained.

The proud surprise in his face melted to a quiet smile. He resumed his seat by Mrs. Ferrier, and began to talk with her, taking no further notice of Honora for a few minutes. But when he saw her sitting silent and pale, her momentary trouble forgotten in the recollection of the solemn scenes which she had witnessed in the last few days, he spoke to her.

“I hope you will take some interest in my choir,” he said; “for I wish to improve it very much. The material is bad, the greater part of it. Those persons seem to have been selected who had loud, blatant voices and a firm belief that they were excellent singers. They make noise enough, and are not afraid; but they are vulgar singers. I want a choir of boys in addition to them. You must know some good voices among the children.”

She brightened. It was a pleasant surprise to hear something in common life spoken of, and to have one who knew all assume that all was not lost.

“I know a good many such voices,” she said; “and I should be glad to help you. Could not I make the selection, and teach them the first lessons? It would be small work for you.”

“If you would be so good,” he replied, quite as if he had expected the offer.

And so, without more words, Miss Pembroke was installed as Mr. Schöninger’s musical assistant. It was a timely employment and interest in her changed life, and exerted a softening influence on his. He gradually relinquished the designs he had meditated, and looked on his sufferings in a more impartial light. Whatever prejudice had existed, he could not doubt, when he examined the subject calmly, that he had been condemned on a reasonable array of circumstantial evidence, and that, without prejudice, any other man would have been condemned on the same evidence. Besides, even had there been a chance of success in the attempt, he could not have received as much in legal reparation as was voluntarily given him by the public. The city was, in a manner, at his feet. The highest officials, both in private and in their public capacity, tendered to him their respect, their regrets, and offers of any assistance he might need. People felt that they could not do too much for him. It was quite true, as Mrs. Ferrier said to him: “Now is the time for you to break the law, if you want to. You could do anything, and no one would find fault with you for it.”

For the real criminal, who shall say how it happened that he was not brought to justice? There was certainly an immense activity in searching where he was not. The law put on its most piercing spectacles, then shut its eyes and looked in every direction. The spectacles saw nothing. If they were on the point of having a glimpse, they were instantly turned in another direction. We have all seen such justice when wealth and influence are on the side of the culprit. Letters came from Annette to her mother with only the smallest circumlocution, and answers were sent to them with the most transparent diplomacy in the world.

“When my poor Gerald heard of his mother’s death,” Annette wrote, “I thought for a while that he would die. He lay for hours almost insensible, and only revived from one swoon to fall into another. But he soon recovered from the first shock, and is, I think, glad to know that her sufferings were so short. But he says nothing, and I do not talk to him. I wait to see what God will do with his soul. He is like a frail building that has been overthrown so thoroughly that not one stone remains upon another, and is being built up again in a different shape. I can perceive a strength in the new foundations of his life which I had not believed him capable of. Indeed, he is not humanly capable of them. But this is the city of miracles, and ours is a miraculous faith. As I have told you, he says nothing. His life is almost an absolute silence, and, I might say, blindness to earthly things. I never see him looking at any beautiful or sublime object except the crucifix. Even I seem to be only a voice to him. He begins lately to show a disposition to be active, which is to me a sign that his mind is becoming settled.”

Annette did not think it best to describe the nature of the activity that her husband was showing, well knowing that it would have made Mrs. Ferrier believe herself to be, in addition to her other afflictions, the mother‐ in‐law of a maniac. For the work he did, here and there, wherever it could be quietly done without attracting attention, was menial. She had seen him help the poor man unload his cart of stones, or take the spade from his hands to labor in his stead, and he was constantly performing menial labors in the house. All this was done, not with any appearance of being an eccentric gentleman, but as one of the poor. For day by day his dress had been growing rude and his whole aspect changed. The sun had burnt his fair skin and faded his unshorn beard, and, by means best known to himself, his delicate hands had become dark and rough. Looking at the firm, silent lips and downcast eyes, Annette could scarcely doubt that the man she had called her husband was gradually and purposely effacing all the beauty and daintiness of which he had been so proud. He never went out with her, and if by chance they were likely to encounter in the street, he avoided the meeting. No one, except the people of the house where they lived, suspected that there was any acquaintance or connection between this dainty signora and this man, who grew every day less and less to be distinguished from the common laborer.

But in humbling himself Lawrence Gerald had not been unmindful of the one earthly duty remaining to him. “Are you willing to give me up entirely, Annette?” he asked her one day.

She answered with a brief affirmative. “Follow wherever God leads you,” she said; “and do not stop an instant to think of me.”

He was used to depending on her, and to being sure that she meant what she said, and could perform her promises. Yet he wished to make certain. “You have to go out alone, and have no protection but that of servants,” he said.

“I do not need any other protection; I am quite safe here,” she replied.

“You cannot marry again,” he went on.

“I have no wish to!”

Perhaps there could not have been a stronger proof of the purification which Annette Gerald’s character had undergone than the fact that this reply was made without a tinge of bitterness or regret. She spoke with gentle sincerity—that was all. As an absorbing affection had made her consent to be taken without love, so now a pity and charity yet more engrossing enabled her to find herself discarded without anger.

“Follow God, and think no more of me,” she said. “I remain here. Go when and where you will.”

It was the first time they had spoken together for several days, and was more by accident, apparently, than of their seeking. Passing through the room where Annette was, Lawrence had seen her trying to open a window that resisted her slight hands, and had opened it for her. Then the sweet clangor of the Ave Maria breaking out from all the towers at once, they had paused side by side a moment.

Perhaps he had wished to speak, and seized this opportunity.

At her answer he looked at her earnestly, for the first time in months, it seemed to her, and with a look she could not endure without emotion, so far‐away and mournful, yet so searching, was it. It was a gaze like that of one dying, who sees the impassable gulf widening between his eyes and what they rest upon. How many, many glances she had encountered of his!—laughing, critical, impatient, in the old days that now seemed centuries past; superficially kind, penitent, disregardful, careless, but never from the depths of his soul till now. Now she knew at last that his soul had depths, and that, as she stood before him, he was aware of her, and saw her as she was.

“Annette,” he said, almost in a whisper, “words cannot tell my sense of the wrong and insult which I have heaped upon you—on you more than all the rest put together.”

“Do not speak of that,” she said, trying still to be calm.

“Of all the women I have hurt or destroyed, you are the noblest,” he went on, seeming not to have heard her.

She drew her breath in quickly, and stood mute, looking down, and some strong band that had been holding her down—how long she knew not, perhaps for years, perhaps for her whole life—loosened, and she felt herself growing upright. She was like the graceful silver birch that has been bowed over by the snow, flake after flake, till its head touches the ground, when the warm sun begins to melt its burden, and it lifts a little, and feels itself elastic.

In days when Honora Pembroke was his ideal, “noble” was the word he applied to her, and Annette Ferrier always felt herself grow small when she heard him utter it.

“Of all women I have ever known, you are the noblest and most lovely,” he said slowly. “I was blind. Too late I have learned that. And if I had a wish left, it would be that God would reunite us in heaven.”

The snows had melted, and she stood upright at last.

There was a confused whispering in her brain. Since she was loved and honored, why need they part? She could comfort him, be at his side always, and help him to win back peace, if not happiness. They would perform works of charity together, and in humbling herself she would raise him.

She lifted her eyes, and opened her lips to speak some such word, but checked herself on seeing him turn away. His face was no longer calm and sad, but full of anguish. All the enticements of human life had assailed his soul, and were fighting against its one stern tenant, remorse. Silently, and with a feeling of unacknowledged disappointment, she awaited the result, scarcely doubting that he would yield. When had he not yielded? was the bitter question that rose in spite of her, only to be thrust down again under many excuses, as she called to mind his sufferings and his isolation.

He stood near the window, with his face turned to the light, and she watched the struggle without daring to move or to speak. What silent clash of warring passion held him thus rigid she could only guess; what voices sweet and pitiful were pleading, and what voices stern and terrible replying, who can say? It did not need that angels of darkness should be there; the human heart was enough. In that swift review when the soul, anticipating a privilege of eternity, can compress a lifetime into a moment, what visions of all that life might give could have presented themselves!—dusky eves and sunlighted mornings, when the singing of birds, mingled with the prattle of children, and quiet and elegant leisure, and smiling friends, made earthly existence seem like an Elysian dream; ever‐ present affection, with its excuses for every fault, its recognition, prompt and inspiring, of every virtue, its cheering word for the hour of sadness, its loving check, its sympathy, its silent tenderness; the freedom of earth which wealth can give, every portal opening as if by magic, existence a perpetual feast. They crowded upon him mercilessly, and tossed to and fro his grief and remorse as the sea tosses its dead, that are now but faint white outlines, half lost in froth, now cold faces starting clearly out of the thin, green wave.

How many times that soul was lost and won in those few minutes none but the invisible witnesses of the scene could tell.

He moved at length, and Annette stepped nearer with sudden alarm, as she saw him put his hand into his bosom slowly, as if with dread to draw forth what was there. The hand closed on what it sought, and with bitter shrinking, as if it were his heart he was thus uprooting, brought it to light. It was no knife, nor pistol, nor vial of poison, as she had feared, but a folded paper. She had seen it in his hands before, and wondered what he kept with such care.

He opened it and read; and she, leaning nearer, read also, without stopping to consider her right.

This was the breviary Lawrence Gerald carried in his bosom, written largely and clearly, and signed with his name in full:

“I am a gambler, a housebreaker, a thief, a sacrilegious liar, a murderer, and a matricide.”

“O my love! stand firm! stand firm!” the wife tried to say; but the words died in a whisper on her lips, as her heart fainted with pain and delight.

He did stand firm without having heard her admonition. She saw the unsteady lips close again, the gazing eyes droop, the whole face and form compose itself. That brief reminder, written to be a visible witness when the voice of conscience should fail, was more potent than poison or blade or bullet.

“I wish to take a room by myself in another part of the city,” he said. “Are you willing?”

“Certainly!” she replied. “But I would like to know where it is. Not,” she added quickly, “that I would intrude or trouble you in any way. But you cannot expect me to lose all interest in you, and I shall feel better to know where you are, and to go once to see your room and the people you are with.”

“I will let you know as soon as I find a place,” he said. “Of course I wish to support myself, to be removed from all society, except those persons whom I must see, and to wait my time in penance. You understand it all, Annette. I no longer exist in the ordinary life of men. I am either in purgatory or in hell—I do not yet feel sure which.”

He was going away, but turned at a little distance, and looked at her once again. “My dear,” he said faintly, “good‐by!”

She could not utter a word, could only clasp her hands over her face, and so lose his last glance. For as he spoke that farewell, and as she heard his retreating step, the door of her sealed and frozen heart burst open, and her dead love, stirring uneasily in its grave during these last days, rose up stronger than ever before, and resumed the throne it was never again to abdicate. There, at last, was a man worth loving!

The next evening she received his new address; and he added: “I shall be out to‐morrow, and the padrona will admit you, if you wish to come.”

Of course she went; but, what had not been to her a matter of course, the place pleased her. The house was in an old and crowded part of the city, where the streets swarmed with poor people; but the room was at the very top, in an odd corner quite removed from noise and communication with any other apartment, and had an eastern and a northern window that looked off over palace roofs and through towers and domes to the beautiful mountains. Close to its southern wall pressed a church tower, and on a level with its windows rose the sculptured façade, wreathed with angels. Once there, one might easily forget the steep, dark stair, the squalid street below, and even the bare walls and floor of the room itself.

Annette had not allowed herself to bring any article of comfort, still less of adornment, though her heart had ached with longing to do so. But she placed a beautiful crucifix on the one poor table, and left a volume of lives of saints beside it. A bunch of roses hung at her belt, and her fingers lingered on them in doubt for a moment. But she checked that impulse also. How much might roses breathe of woman’s presence there and all the graces and sweetnesses of life! But before leaving, she hung over an arm of the crucifix a single small bud, where the petals showed like a drop of blood oozing through the green.

As she was placing this last souvenir, her tears dropping over flowers and cross, there was a sound as though a hurricane should draw in its breath before blowing, the floor of the room trembled, then there came a tremendous and reverberating stroke. The great bell in the tower was striking the hour of noon, and the chamber shook as a bird’s nest shakes when a storm sweeps over the tree in which it is built. For the moment everything in the universe was obliterated but sound. She breathed its tremulous waves, she was enveloped and borne up by its strong tide; the very sunshine and the blue of the sky were like bright, resounding tones. Then the stroke ceased; and, circling round and round in fainting rings, the music of the bells went out to join the music of the spheres, perhaps to creep with a golden ripple up the shores of heaven.

The woman who had opened the door wondered much to see the pale signora come down with a face flushed with weeping; but a liberal gift disposed her to think the best of everything.

“You must be very good to him, and not allow any one to intrude,” Annette said to her. “I shall come to the church here below every morning at seven o’clock; and if he should be ill, or any accident should happen to him, I wish you to come there and tell me. But you must not talk to him. Speak to him only when he asks you to.”

That evening she wrote to her mother: “Lawrence has left me, and is in the arms of God. That is all I can say, except that I trust he has won a perfect forgiveness.

“I am sorry, dear mamma, if you are lonely, but I cannot return to America. I do not wish for society anywhere. Here in Rome is my place, with my religion and the poor to occupy my time. Try to be happy, and to think of me as peaceful and contented. And, mamma, if there should be any good, honest man whom you would like to marry, I shall be glad of it. Goodness is the chief thing.”

Mrs. Ferrier wept profusely over this letter, not doubting that Lawrence was dead.

“The poor fellow!” she said. “After all, he wasn’t so bad as he might have been.”

And then, bethinking herself, she wiped away her tears, and calmed her grief as much as possible; for it would not do to render herself unpresentable. It was necessary to go at once with the news to F. Chevreuse.

The way that Mrs. Ferrier took to the priest’s house was a roundabout one; it led in an opposite direction, and stopped before a new dry‐goods store of the most glittering sort. There was, in fact, no shop in Crichton so fine or so much frequented as this. People went there at first from curiosity, and were disposed to make themselves very merry regarding it; but there seemed to be nothing to laugh at, unless it might be certain erroneous notions in their own minds. Everything was well ordered and business‐like, the clerks attentive and respectful, and the proprietor perfectly dignified and watchful. Indeed, a slight excess of dignity and watchfulness had at first marked his conduct, and made his customers wary of giving offence.

We have already intimated that Mrs. Ferrier had a new footman.

This functionary, a slim and sentimental young man, let down the step for his mistress; but before she had made her majestic descent, the proprietor of the shop stood in the door, bowing to his wealthy customer. She beckoned him out, and motioned the footman away out of hearing.

“Poor Lawrence is dead, John!” she said plaintively, a smile tempering her grief. “And it’s best so, of course. I’ve just got a letter from Annette. And, John—”

The lady paused, and looked down, and laughed a little.

“Well, what is it?” asked the new merchant with an appearance of curiosity.

“She’s willing.”

John’s face expressed two contrary emotions at this announcement—one of pleasure, the other a dogged sort of resentment that Annette’s willingness should have been considered of consequence.

“It is pleasanter to have everybody pleased,” the lady said soothingly. “Of course, though, it doesn’t make one bit of difference with me so far as what I shall do; for you know, John, I’d stand by you through thick and thin. Now I must go to F. Chevreuse.”

“There isn’t a more respectable‐looking merchant in the city of Crichton,” said Mrs. Ferrier emphatically to herself, as she drove away.

“Beg y’r pardon, mum?” said the slim footman, leaning over.

“I wasn’t talking to you!” exclaimed his mistress indignantly.

It was, indeed, observed by everybody that Mrs. Ferrier was very high with this unfortunate man, who was humility personified, and only too assiduous in his obedience. She had assumed a trifle more of state with all her servants; but the footman was scarcely allowed to breathe freely.

“I shouldn’t wonder, now, if he might think he could marry Annette,” she muttered to herself, as they drove on.

Poor fellow! his ambition did not soar beyond Betty, and she was treating him with cruelty. However, with a story‐teller’s prescience, we are fully aware that his trials are only the little waves which are sending him nearer and nearer to his haven, and that before the year is over the day will be named. Already in our mind’s eye we see the fair Betty in her bridal robes, with her magnificent and patronizing mistress fastening on the veil, and giving her a kind and resounding kiss at the same time. We even hear the small whisper with which she silences her bridegroom’s last jealous misgiving when he comments on the salute given her by the master of the house:

“What! you think that I could ever have had a fancy for him—a man who drops his h’s?”

The withering contempt of this remark was decisive.

But we are anticipating.

Mrs. Ferrier found the priest at home, and gave him the letter to read. He read it attentively, but came to a different conclusion from hers. He did not tell her so, though, for it was evident that Annette wished them to think that her husband was dead. Her former letters had prepared him to suspect a state of things very near the truth.

After a long conversation, in which F. Chevreuse perceived that his visitor was lingering and hesitating in an unusual manner, Mrs. Ferrier at last called his attention to the concluding sentences of the letter.

He read it a second time, glanced up through his spectacles at his visitor, read it again, and gave the letter back, quite uncomprehending. He was, doubtless, the only person in Crichton who could have been unconscious of her meaning.

“You may think me foolish, father, at my time of life, to be thinking of marrying again,” she said deprecatingly. “But you have no idea how lonely I am. Honora will soon have a house of her own, anybody can see that; Annette won’t come back, and Louis won’t live here, after what has happened. I have nothing to do but wander from room to room of my great house, and think how awfully lonesome I am, and almost wish that I had a little cabin that I could fill. I don’t feel as if I were in a house, but as if I were out somewhere. Many a time I’ve gone and sat in my chamber‐ closet, just to feel my elbows hit something.”

She paused, and F. Chevreuse said, “Yes!” as sympathizingly as he could, wondering greatly what was to come.

“John is a decent man, and my equal in everything but money,” she went on.

“Oh! it’s John!” F. Chevreuse exclaimed, light breaking in.

Mrs. Ferrier dropped her eyes and smiled.

“I don’t see any harm in it, if you have got your mind made up,” the priest said, recovering from his first astonishment. “I suppose it would be of no use for me to try to break off the arrangement, even if I wanted to.”

“Well, John is pretty set,” the lady admitted modestly.

“I dare say,” was the smiling rejoinder. “When is it to be?”

“In a month, if you please. He is started in business now, and is doing well, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be a great merchant as well as any other man. He’s capable of it, if anybody is,” she said, becoming a little defiant.

“Certainly!” replied F. Chevreuse with perfect gravity. “There is not a law in the commonwealth which will prevent his being as great a merchant as he pleases. The world of trade is open to John, and I wish him all success in it. Do you put your property into his hands?”

Instantly the beautiful modesty of the bride‐elect gave place to the business‐like acuteness of the woman who knew perfectly well the value of money.

“No, father, we keep our accounts separate,” she said. “He had half enough to start in business with, and I lent him the other half. The income of the whole is to go toward our housekeeping, but he will have nothing to do with the rest of my property.”

F. Chevreuse nodded. “I see that you haven’t lost your head. You have managed your own affairs so well thus far, you may as well continue to do the same, for your children’s sake.”

A month later there was a quiet marriage at the priest’s house; and the only notice the Crichtonians had of it was when John appeared again in Mrs. Ferrier’s carriage, this time by her side, instead of in the dicky.

Everybody smiled except Honora Pembroke. She alone, perfectly polite, and refraining from all interference, felt haughtily indignant at the marriage. It was in vain that F. Chevreuse tried to reason away her prejudices.

“I do not object because he was poor,” she said. “Riches are less a distinction than a difference. But he has been a servant, and that is irreparable.”

The priest began to hum a tune:

“Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira! Les aristocrats à la lanterne.”

Somewhat to his surprise, she blushed slightly, but did not smile.

“You may think me foolish, or even guilty of sinful pride,” she said with a certain stiffness; “but this is a feeling of which I cannot rid myself. I do not like to sit at table with a person who has once brought me my soup, nor on the same seat in the carriage with one who used to let down the step for me. Of course I recognize and submit to the situation; but I shall go to my own house again immediately.”

“Well!” said the priest, “it takes a good while to get acquainted with people. Here have I known you these ten years and more, have seen you simple, unpretending, humble, apparently, good to the poor, and going freely among them. I thought I knew you thoroughly; yet all at once I come upon the rock in that smooth stream. Have I ever caught a little gray shadow of it before, I wonder? Well, well! I won’t undertake to blast it out of the way at once. I am sorry, though, that you do not like John.”

“I like him in liveries,” said Miss Pembroke with dignity.

“I tell you,” persisted the priest, “they are going to be a very happy couple.”

“I haven’t a doubt of it,” she replied. “But that is no excuse.”

He laughed, and let her go. The haughty recoil of pride in the fibre was not to be reasoned away.

It was a clear afternoon in mid‐autumn; and when Miss Pembroke stepped from the priest’s door, she paused a minute on the sidewalk, and hesitated which way to go. She did not wish to return home, and she did not think of any other place where she would rather go.

And then, without looking, she was aware of a tall gentleman, who came down the street, and, still without looking, knew that he had crossed to her side of the street, and was approaching her. And then, with a perverseness which was scarcely natural to her, she turned quite coolly in the opposite direction, and walked from him, perhaps lest he might think that she wished for his company. Not but she and Mr. Schöninger were on the most friendly, and even cordial, terms—it was, indeed, taken for granted in Crichton that they were the best of friends—but—in short, she walked away from him. Perhaps she found his full and prosperous life a little discordant with her saddened one. She almost fancied sometimes that he had an air of triumphant pride, and that he was being spoiled by the adulation paid him on all sides.

She had been wishing lately that she could go to Annette; and, now that Gerald was dead, if the ambiguous letter they had received really meant that, perhaps Annette would like to have her. Miss Pembroke felt strangely lonely in her native town, where she knew everybody, and where she had not, certainly, to complain of any lack of attention. But she would be lonely for ever rather than Mr. Schöninger should think that she waited on F. Chevreuse’s step for him. He must have been at the end of the street when she came out, and—surely he would never dare to think that she saw him, and had been giving him time to overtake her!

Mr. Schöninger was meantime walking leisurely behind her quickening steps, intending to overtake her presently, but wishing first to watch her a little, and to think of some things. One was that he did not approve of her wearing black any longer. She was beautiful in anything, but too sad in this; and, besides, it interfered with certain plans of his. He made a slight reckoning, as nearly correct as the masculine mind could make it on such a subject. She might put on gray, or black and white, immediately. That would enable her to wear a rich purple in the winter. He liked to see her in purple. Some day, when she should be older, she must have a trailing robe of purple velvet with diamonds. Well, in the spring, then, she could change her deeper color for one of those delicate lavenders or lilacs that women know how to look pretty in; and then the way would be quite open for white, and rose, and blue, and all the fresh, gay colors a bride might wish to wear.

“We should be married by the first of May, at latest,” thought the gentleman very decidedly.

Miss Pembroke was quite right in fancying that there was something triumphant in Mr. Schöninger’s air; but she did not believe, and it was not true, her pettish charge that he was being spoiled by adulation. All was going well with him. Hosts of friends surrounded him—friends as sincere as any one can claim; he did not believe they would stand any great test, but, also, he did not believe that they were hypocrites. In his profession he was winning gold and reputation; and, what no one but himself knew as yet, the fortune for which he had vainly struggled so long was approaching him of itself. Two of those who had stood between it and him had died, and there remained now but a feeble old man. With his death all other claims would die. And not least in his cause of congratulation was his conviction that this fair woman, who walked before him with the black drapery fluttering back from her light foot, the braid of hair just showing its glossy bronze beneath the mourning veil, and, as she turned the corner of a street, the curve of her smooth cheek glowing like a peach, was his own.

What made her cheek so red now?

“Honora!” he said, quickening his pace.

She stopped with a start.

“Mr. Schöninger!”

“I beg your pardon!” he exclaimed, recollecting that he had never called her by her Christian name before. “I was thinking, and I forgot.”

She walked soberly by his side without asking what the subject of his thoughts had been. His exclamation may have revealed to her something of their nature; but she was far from suspecting that she was engaged, still less that her marriage‐day was fixed. She had, indeed, no reason to suppose that Mr. Schöninger had any intention of renewing the suit that she had once rejected.

“You are willing to take a walk?” he asked, and, when she nodded assent, added:

“Let us go up the Cocheco. Last night’s frost has added the finishing touch to the trees, and everybody is admiring them.”

A beautiful road, almost as wild as a country lane, led between the river‐ bank and the flowery cliffs beside it, and here at evening all the youths and maidens, and many of their elders in whom age had not chilled the love of nature, used to walk soberly in the soundless path, or climb the cliffs, or sit on the mossy rocks, or venture out on the rocks that studded the stream. Not a pleasant evening but found people strolling through this romantic avenue.

“Nowhere but in New England does nature dazzle, I think,” Mr. Schöninger said. “See this maple‐leaf! It is a fine scarlet, and as glossy as a gem, even when examined closely. And the elm‐leaf is as fine a gold. Everywhere else the autumn foliage is dingy when looked at so closely. The sky, too. Look at those long lines of fire that are beginning to stretch overhead, and at the gathering crimsons! In half an hour the heavens will be as brilliant as the earth. In Italy the colors are soft, like the colors in an old painting; they have great depth and richness, but they lack the fresh brilliancy of the skies in the New World. You must go to Italy soon, Honora.”

This time the name was used without an apology.

“I have been thinking of it,” she replied quietly, and began to feel as a stranded seaweed may when, after having lain awhile painfully on the dry sand, it finds the bright sea slipping under it, and lifting it from its hard resting‐place. Without a word of explanation she found herself claimed and cared for.

“I wish to go there again as a Catholic,” he continued, “and see with the eyes of faith what I saw before with the eyes of an artist. I shall always admire most the Catholicism of America, or what the Catholicism of America is going to be. It is more intelligent, noble, and reverent. It isn’t a sort of devotion that expresses itself in tawdry paper flowers. Indeed, I believe that America is destined to show the world a Catholicism morally more grand than any it has yet seen—a worship of the heart and the intellect, where children shall be delighted, and yet common sense find nothing to regret. Still, Rome is the sacred city of the martyrs, the popes, and the temples. I think we should go there in two years at latest.”

He had spoken earnestly, and had absolutely forgotten how much remained unsaid, so sure was he of her.

Honora’s glance of astonishment and incredulity reminded him. He bent a little nearer, smiling, and said softly: “But we shall be married long before that time, dear, shall we not?”

“It is the first I have heard of it,” Miss Pembroke managed to say with a certain degree of composure, after a moment.

“You surely are not vexed!” he said quickly, beginning to fear that he had assumed too much. “I asked you once in the proper, lover‐like fashion, and you refused me, not because you were indifferent to me—you never said that—but because you would not marry and would not love one who denied your Saviour. That obstacle no longer exists. You did not imagine that I had become indifferent to you? That is out of the question. Have I made a mistake?”

“No; it is I who have made a mistake,” she answered frankly. “I was afraid that you had given me up.” She hesitated a little, then, since he still listened, added: “I am very glad that you have not.”

“Thank you!” he said.

They walked slowly up the road between the foaming river and the glowing cliffs, praising the skies and the trees as they went, finding everything beautiful, finding each the other more beautiful than all else. And when the evening began to fade a little, they turned their steps, and went down again with the river, filled with that deep and quiet happiness which leaves nothing to wish for and nothing to tell.

The very next morning a little note was sped from Miss Pembroke to Sister Cecilia with the following mysterious announcement:

“My Novena has succeeded perfectly! I will come very soon and tell you all about it.”

Since the matter is settled, we may as well own at once that when Mr. Schöninger first announced himself a Catholic, Honora had said to her friend and confidant at the convent, “If I do not marry him, I shall never marry any one”; and that the result of this confession was a Novena, in which the young woman had asked that she might find favor in his sight.

“I told him about the Novena,” Miss Pembroke said when she made her explanatory visit to the convent. “And I told him that you and all the Sisters joined with me; and he bade me thank you for his part, and say that he hoped you would never be sorry for having done so.”

But Honora did not tell how astonished and touched her lover had been at this confession of what seemed to her the most simple thing in the world.

“I never thought of asking God for you,” he said; “and yet there is nothing in the world so well worth praying for. I am a very ignorant Catholic, Honora, in all except doctrine. You will have much to teach me. But, then,” he added, smiling, “we have all our lives for that.”

“The only blot on my happiness,” Honora said to her friends, “is the thought of Annette. A letter came from her last night which seems to shut us all out from giving her either society or comfort. She evidently does not wish to see any one she has ever known. She says that her time and thoughts are entirely occupied.”

Annette Gerald was fully occupied. She was like one who stands at the head of a long flight of winding stairs, watching another descend, and, beginning to lose sight of the object of her attention, begins to follow slowly, intent, at the same time, not to be too near or too far away.

It was necessary that she should keep Lawrence Gerald in sight without attracting attention either to him or to herself. As a rich lady, driving in her own carriage, she could not do this. She therefore gave up her carriage, and moved to an humbler apartment, where she lived with one servant. Still, the dainty elegance of the widow’s attire she had assumed, fastidious in her choice, not consciously, but from habit, pointed her out as of a different class from the people she went most among. To remedy this, it was necessary only to be passive; and in a few months Roman dust and mud and brambles had reduced her to a dinginess almost Roman, and she could go unremarked, could see Lawrence about his work, digging in the excavations, carrying stone and mortar for the masons, doing any rough labor that offered. She could see him in the church, where he spent an hour every morning; she knew that every Sunday he entered the same confessional, and, as she could well guess, told the same tale to the priest, who, when his penitent left him, leaned forward and looked after him with a sad and earnest gaze. More than once, late in the evening, she had looked up from the street where her close carriage stood waiting, and seen, out on the corner of the open roof, to which no one but he had access, his form drawn clearly against the transparent purple of the sky, and, after waiting as long as prudence would allow, had gone away to her lonely apartment, leaving him there in company of the marble angels that clustered about the church front, and the blessed bells, and whatever invisible spirits God should will and his own soul invoke. Never did she see a light in that lofty window; and, after a while, it occurred to her to ask the reason of the padrona, who often came to the church in the hope of receiving money from the lady.

“He never will have a candle,” the woman said. “I think he is very poor. And he never drinks wine or eats meat. And, signora, he is growing very pale.”

That night Annette Gerald extinguished the candles in her own apartment, and never lighted them again. She could weep and pray without light. The next day she dismissed her one servant, and thenceforward waited on herself. No ease or elegance must her life know while his was passed in such poverty. He ate the dry, sour bread of the poor; she ate it too. He discarded every luxury of the table; she also became an ascetic. If she put wine or fruit to her lips, tears choked her, and she set them aside. As he went down, so she followed him, unseen, weeping pitifully, watching constantly, loving utterly.

Without suspecting it, both became after a while objects of interest to those about them. No dinginess or apparent poverty could hide their refinement; and the extraordinary piety of both invested them with a certain sacredness in the eyes of these people, who had walked and talked with saints. The rude workmen ceased, not only to jest with, but to jest in the presence of this man who never smiled, or spoke without necessity, whose pale face was for ever downcast, and who, in the midst of Italian indelicacy, carried himself with the refinement of an angel. In the long noon rest of the hot summer days they withdrew from the place where he threw himself down, faint with fatigue and the heat, and left him to that solitude he unmistakably desired. Only little children ventured near the “penitent,” as he began to be called, and smiled wistfully in his face, and kissed the hand that now and then gave them a soldo.

Once, as he lay asleep on the grass, in the shadow of a ruined arch, an artist, who was just returning home from a morning’s sketching in the Campagna, paused to look at him. The other workmen lounged about at a distance, some asleep, some eating their noon luncheon of dry bread, others smoking and talking. This one seemed laid there apart for a picture. Thrown carelessly on his back, with his hand under the cheek turned a little aside, and the hat dropped off, his form and face were fully seen. It was not the form and face of a plebeian. The elegant shape was not disguised by its faded garments; the beauty of the face, delicately flushed with heat, and beaded with perspiration, was even enhanced by the unshorn and untended beard and the confused mass of clustering hair; and the expression of calm melancholy, which was not obliterated even by the unconsciousness of sleep, did not belong to a common nature.

The artist drew softly nearer, and opened his portfolio, too much engaged to give more than a passing glance to a woman who stood by the arch. With a rapid pencil he sketched his subject, trying to catch that hovering sadness and the weary bend of the head.

Drawing back presently to see if he could add anything to his sketch, he perceived that the woman who had been standing by the arch was at his side, watching his progress.

“Don’t let the shadow run off so,” she said, looking at the sketch, not at him. “Show how the sunshine comes, close to his feet, so that he has only a step to take to reach it. And do you see how those yellow flowers lean against his hair in the form of a crown? Put them in too; and the group of workmen yonder, and a corner of the excavation, with that beautiful pedestal half uncovered. As you have it, it is only a pretty poem without meaning; give the whole, and it will be a tragical story.”

The artist looked intently at the lady while she spoke. Surely she must be the sister of the sleeper! Their two faces would do to stamp on a coin, the man’s profile showing beyond the woman’s.

“Finish the sketch quickly before he wakes,” she said. “I will pay you whatever you want for it. Some day I will have you paint it. Don’t forget the red poppies at his feet. And can you see, can you show, that there is a blister on his hand?”

Wondering much at this strange sort of poor people whom he found himself among, the artist obeyed.

“But I want to keep the sketch,” he said. “I will make a copy for you, if you will come to my studio for it.”

“Certainly not!” she exclaimed, and for the first time looked at him with a clear and haughty gaze. “You have no right to keep it, for you took it without permission. It would be dishonorable and intrusive of you to show that to any person. We are not contadini!”

The artist rose and bowed.

“Madam, allow me to present my sketch to you,” he said with equal pride.

“Some day you will know, and then you will no longer be offended,” she said calmly, and took the sketch from his hand just as the sleeper stirred and began to awake. “And now, I beg you never to notice him again, or mention him to any one till I come to you for the picture.”

And so three years passed away, and there came an Easter morning such as Easters used to be in the days when the pope was King of Rome, and there was one city in the world where the business was religion.

Who can forget the scene, having once beheld it—the sky built up of sapphires, glitter on glitter of such blue as the queen of heaven might make her mantle of; the full, warm gold of the sunshine looking the sad ruins in the face till they smile, and revealing its hidden rainbows now and then, as the foamy columns of fountains sway in the light breeze, and catch it unawares; the birds, with long, pointed wings, that cut the air, and seem inebriated with the delight of flying. Then the crowd in the piazza of S. Peter’s, the millennial mingling of rich and poor, royal and plebeian, making in all a scene to be witnessed nowhere else.

“How familiar, yet how new!” said a lady who stepped from her carriage at the barrier. “It is all I could wish! I am glad, Max, that we did not come sooner to Rome. I would rather my first sight of it should be a festal one.”

This lady was richly dressed, and the black lace of her large Spanish veil was drawn back from a face like a fresh lily.

She was instantly addressed as principessa by all the beggars about.

“I am sorry I cannot give you the title, Honora,” her husband said, and smilingly dropped a coin into each outstretched hand. “So nothing disappoints you? I thought it would be so. Now, we must not linger outside.”

“Let us go slowly up; and please do not speak to me,” Mrs. Schöninger said. “No, I do not want your arm now. I must enter S. Peter’s the first time praying.”

They went slowly up the ascent, Honora with her hands clasped, and her eyes dilating as they entered the grand vestibule. Then Mr. Schöninger lifted the heavy curtain, and she crossed the threshold.

At that first step into S. Peter’s a Catholic feels as though he had touched the beating heart of mother church.

The crowd pressed in; but still another crowd remained outside, keeping their places for the papal benediction, and listening for the silvery burst of trumpets inside which should tell that the risen God stood on the central altar of Christendom.

Among this crowd was a group, for which they made way, as it crossed the piazza and approached the steps. Yet it was only two poor laborers who supported a sick man between them.

The thin and transparent face of this invalid, bathed now in the perspiration of weakness, showed that he was worn by consumption or by a long and exhausting fever. He was so weak, indeed, that his two assistants supported him in their arms; and when they reached the stone posts at the foot of the steps, he knelt there, and leaned against one of them, almost insensible.

A lady, following closely behind, wet her handkerchief in cologne‐water, and handed it over his shoulder to one of the men, but did not herself speak to them. He revived a little at that, and, still leaning against the central post, remained fixed in prayer.

A whisper began to creep among the poor people about. Some of them had seen this man, and knew what they conceived to be his story, and they told it in intervals of listening to the strains of heavenly music faintly heard now and then from the church.

“He is a penitent,” one whispered, “and has been doing penance here as a laborer, though he is so rich—so rich! Some say that he killed his own mother; but who knows? The beautiful signore! Look at his face! She must have provoked him; and perhaps she was a very wicked woman. Ah! I could tell stories of mothers. They are not all like the blessed Madonna.—There are the trumpets! Alleluia! alleluia! Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord!—And so this poor signore has been living a hard life, and is about to die; and he has come at last to get the Holy Father’s blessing. He would not ask for it before. But, indeed, he might, for he is as holy as the blessed Labré, though he sleeps in a bed and works for his living, instead of begging it. The pale signora who stands behind him is his sister. She has been in Rome all these years, watching over him, without his knowing it. See! she stands out of his sight now. He worked up to a week ago, and then he fell one day in a faint. She was near by, and called a carriage to take him home. And since then she has had a room in the same house, but told the padrona not to let him know. She is rich, for all her poor clothes. She puts something into every hand that is held out to her. See the way she looks at him!—Ah! there they come.”

Mass was over, and the crowd in the church came pouring out. It was with difficulty that Lawrence Gerald’s protectors could keep his place in that pressure. But that he had revived, they could not have done so. With the first intimation that the moment for which he had so long waited was at hand, he had roused himself, and exerted his whole strength. Upright on his knees, with his arms clinging to the post against which he leaned, he fixed his eager eyes upon the balcony where the Pope would in a short time appear. He saw nothing else, not even two familiar forms and faces directly in front of him, which he could scarcely have seen even then with indifference.

“My God!” exclaimed Honora Schöninger, and clung to her husband’s arm. “Look, Max! It is Lawrence, and he is dying!”

Mr. Schöninger drew his wife aside. “It is no time to recognize him now,” he said. “And there is Annette behind him. Poor fellow! poor fellow!”

Annette pressed close to her husband, ready to catch him if he should fall. She knew that he had had an exhausting day. He had risen at early dawn to hear Mass and receive communion, though not really able to leave his bed, and had afterwards spent his remaining strength in the first careful toilet he had made for years. After having so long heaped every indignity on his own body, to‐day he had seemed desirous of treating it with respect as the temple of God. He still wore the dress of the laborer, but his face was shorn of its ill‐tended beard, his hair brushed once more into silken waves, and his linen snowy white. And more exhausting than these efforts had been the excitement of mind under which he labored, and his fear lest in some way he should miss the benediction he so longed for.

“I want to be placed directly in front of the balcony,” he had said, “where I can see the Pope’s face. I shall recognize his face at once. Who knows but he may look at me? If he should, then I shall think that at last God looks at me.”

The crowd hushed itself, as the golden cross came in sight, and after it the crowned and mitred heads, all in white save one. And that one, under its glittering tiara, wore a crown of snowy hair dearer to Catholic hearts than gold or jewels. On this central face the eyes of the sick man fixed themselves with a wide and imploring gaze, and his hands stretched themselves out, as if to beg that he might not be forgotten.

“Do not fear!” Annette whispered in his ear. “The Holy Father knows all your story, and pities you; and there is one standing beside him who will remind him that you are here. He will know just where you are.”

To the waiting and trembling penitent this was like a whisper from his good angel. He associated no other thought with the voice.

The silence deepened till nothing could be heard but the swift wings of a bird flying over the piazza, and the soft “zitti! zitti!” of the fountains, and the heart that each one in that vast crowd felt beat in his bosom.

Surely that mild and blessed face was turned his way! the penitent thought. Surely, surely, the Holy Father had looked at him, searching the crowd one instant with his eyes, and finding him!

Then a single voice was heard—the only voice in the universe, it seemed.

“May the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, in whose power and authority we confide, intercede for us with the Lord.”

“Amen!” chanted the choir, as though the world had found voice.

Again the single voice:

“Through the prayers and merits of blessed Mary ever Virgin, of blessed Michael the archangel, of blessed John the Baptist, of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints, may the omnipotent God have mercy upon you, may all your sins be remitted, and Jesus Christ lead you to eternal life.”

“Amen!”

“Indulgence, absolution, and remission of all your sins, space for true and faithful repentance, hearts ever contrite, and amendment of life, may the omnipotent and merciful God afford you.”

“Amen!”

“And may the blessing of the omnipotent God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, descend upon you, and remain with you for ever.”

“Amen!”

Every stain was washed away! Full and strong the blessing flowed, a divine river from the throne of God himself! On its tide were borne away, not only guilt, but the memory of guilt; not only fear, but the remembrance that fear had been. Supported in the arms of his wife and attendants, and of the old friends of whose presence he was unconscious, Lawrence Gerald lay back with his eyes half closed, and a smile of such peace and ecstasy on his face as could only come from God. His soul was gliding sweetly away on the echoes of that last amen.

The military bands began to play, the guns boomed from Sant’ Angelo, the bells of S. Peter’s rang out with a joyful clash on the air, and all Rome broke into music over the resurrection.

And there was joy before the angels of God over one sinful soul redeemed.

The End.

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Madame Du Deffand

“Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not of love,” the poet tells us. And women too have died, and worms have eaten them, but not of ennui, although Mme. du Deffand for nearly fourscore years woke the echoes of Versailles and Paris with the pitiful lament: “I am bored! I am bored! I am dying of ennui!” If she eventually did die of it—which we stoutly deny—a malady that took eighty years to kill its victim can hardly be called a very cruel one. The vivacious, gossipping, wearied old lady contrived to extract a very reasonable amount of amusement, even of excitement, out of the existence whose wearisomeness she was for ever denouncing; and it is only fair to add that she contributed a very goodly share of amusement to other people. This renowned heroine and victim of ennui, Marie de Vichy‐Chamroud, was born into this wearisome world in the year of grace 1697, of a noble family of the province of Burgundy. The De Vichy‐Chamrouds were richer in parchments than in lands; so it fell out that Marie, young, lovely, accomplished, and teeming with wit, was condemned to marry an old man, and, what was still more terrible, a wearisome old man, who had not a single taste in common with her. Immediately on leaving the convent where she received what in those days was considered a liberal education, the beautiful young lady was presented to her future lord. If she bored herself as a young girl, free and happy, and with life before her, what must she have done as the wife of a querulous, stingy old man? All the revenge that was in her power Marie took. She bored her husband as much as he bored her, until at last, in sheer desperation, he agreed to give her an annuity, and let her go her way without him. As Marquise du Deffand, free and comparatively wealthy, the young wife began a new era. She opened a salon which soon became the centre of the wit and fashion of Paris. All that was eminent in war, arts, sciences, literature, and folly came there, and tried to chase away her eternal ennui. Amongst her many admirers, the President Hénault occupies the most conspicuous place, both from the dignity of his own character and the enduring nature of their mutual attachment. Hénault was one of the most remarkable men of his time. He was educated by the Oratorians, and had early the inestimable advantage of enjoying the advice, and almost the intimacy, of Massillon. He counted the scarcely lesser privilege of early personal acquaintance with the great poet Racine. As soon as he had completed his studies, young Hénault was introduced at court, where he at once made a favorable impression. “This is not to be wondered at,” says a chronicler of the times; “for, in truth, he was a youth of gracious parts, gay, witty, amiable, a good musician, and gifted with the art of making light and graceful verses.” While the Duchesse de Maine held her brilliant court, Hénault was a constant presence there, and one of its principal ornaments. He was so universally beloved that it was popularly said of him: “There is a man who has more friends than he can count, and not a single enemy.” And this lucky man was the devoted admirer of Mme. du Deffand for over fifty years.

He attained considerable fame as an author, and not the least remarkable feature in his works is that their authorship was vehemently contested, not only during Hénault’s life, but for many years after his death. Most of his books were first published anonymously—a circumstance which, in their early career, may have explained the doubts concerning their origin. But the Abrégé Chronologique, which Hénault regarded as his best, appeared with the author’s name at the outset, and this, strange to say, was the one which the world refused longest to believe was his, and persevered in long attributing to the Abbé Boudot. A copy of the book was found, in the abbé’s own writing, amongst his papers when he died, and this is the only piece of evidence on which Hénault’s detractors built their obstinate denial that he was the author of the Abrégé. Admitting that this fact looked suspicious, the book itself from first to last bears the stamp of Hénault’s composition in the most unmistakable manner; the choice of the subject, its style and treatment, all point emphatically to him as the author, while there is abundant explanation of the accidental presence of the compromising copy amongst Boudot’s papers. Hénault was in the habit of employing him to copy out his compositions. Voltaire, in one of his letters to the president, recommends the abbé as a very clever copyist, and also as a useful person to make researches for him at the Royal Library; and Grimm also recommends him for the same purpose, informing Hénault that Boudot had employment at the library, and was in charge of the literary and historical department. A man who held this subaltern post, and was treated as a mere scribe by such authorities, and who never pleaded guilty to writing even a pamphlet in his life, is, to say the least, a very unlikely person to be the author of such a work as Hénault’s Abrégé. Mme. du Deffand and Grimm, who both liked to sharpen their wits pretty freely at the president’s expense, never for an instant doubted the reality of his authorship, or suspected that any one had had a share in his books.

Unlike so many of his distinguished literary contemporaries, Hénault was a practical Christian. “His piety,” says the Marquis de Agesson, “was as free from fanaticism or bitterness as his books were from pedantry.”

Mme. du Deffand, who spared her friend on no other points, spared him on this. She never laughed at his religion. On that score alone he was safe from her irony and sarcasm. She even openly commended him for challenging Voltaire’s impious vituperation of the faith; and in her own correspondence with the infidel philosopher she speaks almost with enthusiasm of the clear intellect, the pointed wit, and irresistible goodness of his antagonist. When he was past eighty, Hénault wrote privately to Voltaire, imploring him, in the most touching terms, to retract some of his diabolical satires on religion; and this letter, which, unhappily, we know remained without effect, was found amongst Voltaire’s papers after his death. He, on his side, strove to win over Hénault to the “enlightened school,” and with artful flattery and subtlest sophistry urged him to change certain historical passages in the Abrégé Chronologique which strongly vindicated the influence of Christianity. But the Christian writer withstood these blandishments. In a literary point Voltaire contributed in no small degree to the reputation of Hénault, whose style he praised with creditable candor. It is strange to see the lively and bored old marquise holding steadily the friendship of these widely dissimilar men. Diderot, D’Alembert, and Montesquieu were also habitués of her brilliant salon. But none of them could do more than give her momentary deliverance from her life‐long enemy—ennui. She went on boring herself, in spite of the perpetual cross‐fire of esprit that the brightest wits of the age kept up around her, and she bored her friends almost to exasperation by the unceasing repetition of the complaint: Que je m’ennuie! Que je m’ennuie!

At the age of fifty‐four a terrible misfortune befell the marquise. She grew blind. It was soon after this that she became acquainted with Mlle. de l’Espinasse. The sprightliness and the energy of this young girl were an immense consolation to Mme. du Deffand, and cheered her for a time in that “eternal night,” as she pathetically described it, in which she now dwelt. But they did not agree for long. After living happily together for some few years, they quarrelled and separated. It is impossible to say whose fault it was. Each had violent partisans, who accused the other, but proved nothing. Mme. du Deffand was undoubtedly difficult to live with, as all people are who draw exclusively on those around them for amusement; but she was old and she was blind, and it is beyond doubt she was a kind benefactress to her young companion, and that, at the moment of separation, she wrote a most touching letter to her, asking forgiveness for all she had done inadvertently to pain her, and urging the young girl to remember how cruelly she was afflicted both by blindness and by ennui. To this Mlle. de l’Espinasse returned a curt and ungracious answer. Nor did she imitate the kindliness of speech of her quondam employer, who always spoke of her ever after their quarrel with the utmost good‐nature and forbearance.

Just as her home was resounding to these domestic discords, Mme. du Deffand made the acquaintance of Horace Walpole. They were spontaneously pleased with each other. Mme. du Deffand would have probably been still more so, if she could have foreseen how triumphantly this new friendship was destined to rescue her memory from oblivion. We know more of her and her salon through the voluminous correspondence that passed between her and that prince of gossips and most brilliant of scribblers than through any other source; although she comes in, it is true, for more ridicule at his hands than eulogy. He constantly reproaches her for making him the laughing‐stock of Paris and London by her absurd affection, and coarsely tells her he does not want to be the hero of a novel where the heroine is a blind octogenarian.

This correspondence was published at the beginning of the century, and was hailed as a valuable addition to the French literature of that period. On reading it, one feels transported into the society of the fascinating women and accomplished men whom it so cleverly depicts. Mme. du Deffand passes in review the authors and actors of her time with a graphic power of delineation rarely equalled. Unsparing in her criticism, she is in some instances no doubt too severe, and occasionally even unjust; it is nevertheless acknowledged that in her literary judgments she is rarely at fault; they are marked throughout by discrimination, taste, and delicacy.

Horace Walpole made Mme. du Deffand’s acquaintance when she had become quite blind; on his being presented to her, she drew her hand over his face, in order to ascertain whether he was plain or handsome, and what his age was. Her touch had acquired such sensitive delicacy in course of time that it enabled her to calculate people’s ages and looks with the greatest accuracy. In quite the latter years of her life Mme. du Deffand, who had never been avowedly an unbeliever, although practically so, turned her thoughts to religion, and sought in the teaching of the faith those consolations to her ennui that wit and philosophy had failed to secure her. She announces this change of sentiment, with her usual frankness, in one of her letters to Walpole. Her biographers throw but little light on the subject. La Harpe alludes to her having had many interviews with the celebrated Jesuit, F. Lenfant—an episode which is dismissed by Mme. du Deffand herself with the remark that “the Père Lenfant was very clever, and that she was much pleased with him.”

The Père Lenfant who is thus incidentally introduced to us in the memoirs of the lively French woman was one of the countless noble and touching victims of the Revolution—that raging torrent that drowned so many gentle voices in its roar. He was gifted with an eloquence that drew around him all the lovers of rhetoric and the most able men of his day. The poet Young heard him, and was so struck by his power and pathos that he entreated a Protestant clergyman of his acquaintance to go and hear him; the latter did so, and embraced the faith. Once, on coming out from a sermon of the Père Lenfant’s, preached at S. Sulpice during Lent, Diderot exclaimed to D’Alembert, who had been drinking in every word from beginning to end, with his eyes riveted on the preacher: “It would be hard to hear that man often without becoming a Christian.”

When the order of the Jesuits was disbanded in France, the Père Lenfant was thrown upon the world. He was then forty‐seven years of age. The decree which despoiled him of his religious garb could not rob him of its spirit. He continued his good works and his apostolate with fervor and wisdom. Several crowned heads tried to win him to their courts, but in vain. The son of S. Ignatius held steadily aloof from the tempting snare. He preached indefatigably at all times and places, at Lunéville, Vienne, Versailles, wherever he was called; and everywhere the great and the learned flocked round his pulpit. His contemporaries describe the effects of his eloquence as electrical. He captivated his hearers, not so much by the magnificence of his language, as by the pathos of his voice and the force of his own faith. Père Lenfant preached the Lent of 1791 before the court; but on refusing to take the oath of the clergy to the civil constitution, he was obliged to withdraw. Shortly afterwards he was taken prisoner and condemned to death. On being brought before his judges, the people cried out that his life might be spared, and, yielding to the cries, his jailers let him go; before, however, he had got free from the crowd, a woman called out: “There goes the king’s confessor!” At these words the thirst for blood, that had seemed for a moment satiated or suspended, rose up anew. The mob set upon him like tigers. The Père Lenfant uttered only words of love and forgiveness, and, raising his hands to heaven, exclaimed: “My God, I thank thee for allowing me to offer my life for thee, as thou hast offered thine for me!” And with this gracious sentence on his lips the Jesuit father fell and expired under the blows of the murderers.

This little sketch of the Marquise du Deffand would be incomplete without a passing mention of the author of the Esprit des Lois, who was one of the most distinguished of her numerous friends.

Her letters to Montesquieu have been preserved; they are, however, much less interesting than those to Walpole, and consequently much less known. Mme. du Deffand could be a staunch friend, though she was often a trying one; she proved herself such to Montesquieu. Amongst other good offices, she cleared him from the charge of avarice which was laid at his door so generally. History revoked the verdict, it is true, but only when the subject of it was gone beyond the reach of earthly rehabilitation. Montesquieu’s exceeding modesty and desire to have his benefits known only to the recipients was the real, and perhaps the only, cause of his reputed avarice. One example of his delicate generosity we cannot refrain from giving.

He was in the habit of visiting Marseilles to see his sister, Mme. d’Héricourt, who resided there. During one of these visits he happened one evening to be lounging on the quay; the weather was sultry, and it occurred to Montesquieu that he would take a boat, and have a row on the sea. His attention was drawn to a young man who was looking out for a customer. He hailed him, and got in. As soon as they were out a little at sea, Montesquieu perceived that his boatman was a novice at the work, and rowed with difficulty. He questioned him, and learned that he was, in truth, a jeweller by trade, and a boatman only on Sundays and holidays, in order to gain a trifle towards helping his mother and sisters, who were working to procure 4,000 crowns to ransom his father, who was a prisoner at Tetuan. Montesquieu was deeply touched by the story. He made a resolution on the spot, but said nothing. Before landing, however, he got from the boatman his father’s name and the name of his master. On parting, he handed him his purse, and walked away rapidly; great was the delight of the young man, on opening it, to find that it contained sixteen golden louis.

Six weeks after this the captive suddenly appeared in the midst of his wife and children. He saw, by the astonishment mingled with their joy, that it was not to them he owed his liberation; but the surprise and gratitude of all were increased on his telling them that not only was his ransom paid, but likewise his voyage home and his clothing; and, over and above this, a sum of fifty louis d’or had been handed to him on starting. The young boatman no sooner heard this fairy tale than he bethought him of the generous stranger who had presented him the purse and expressed such sympathy on hearing of his sorrow. He determined to seek him. For two years he did so, but in vain. The name of the benefactor to whom he and his owed such a sweet and magnificent debt of gratitude remained an impenetrable mystery. At last one day, while walking in the streets of Paris, he suddenly encountered Montesquieu face to face; the young man fell upon his knees, kissed the hand of his benefactor, and entreated him to come with him to the home he had blessed, and witness the joy that he had brought back to a desolate family. But Montesquieu feigned ignorance and surprise, declared he knew nothing of what the young man was talking about, and at last, wrenching his hand away abruptly, he disappeared in the crowd, nor did his pursuer succeed in finding him again.

This action would never have been discovered had not Montesquieu’s executor found among his papers a memorandum in his own handwriting, stating that he had sent 7,500 francs to Mr. Main, an English banker at Cadiz; on the latter being applied to for information, he replied that he had given that sum, by the order of M. de Montesquieu, for the ransom of a man named Robert, a Marseillais, detained as a slave at Tetuan. Inquiries were set on foot, and the Robert family told the rest.

This touching incident was made the foundation of many dramatic pieces. If it did no more than clear a noble character from the unworthy charge of heartlessness and avarice, the world would have been the better for its discovery.

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Cain, What Hast Thou Done With Thy Brother?

By Ernest Hello.

From The Revue Du Monde Catholique.

By way of preface, I will relate a true story given by F. Agathon, a priest of the Monastery of Ruba, and preserved in the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert.

F. Agathon says: “One day I descended into the valley of Ruba to find the holy solitary, F. Pémeu, as I wished to consult him on a subject that weighed heavily upon my mind. We conversed until late in the evening, and then he sent me into a cavern to pass the rest of the night. Now, as it was winter, and the cold extreme, I was nearly frozen. The next morning, when the old man came in to see me, he asked: ‘How have you passed the night, my son?’

“ ‘Father,’ I answered, ‘I must say, in truth, I passed a terrible night, on account of the extraordinary severity of the cold.’

“ ‘And I did not feel it at all,’ he replied.

“These words filled me with astonishment, as he was nearly naked, and I said: ‘I beg of you, father, to tell me how that could have happened.’

“ ‘For the reason,’ he answered, ‘that a lion came and lay down beside me, and kept me warm. But nevertheless, my dear son, I can assure you that I shall be devoured by wild beasts.’

“ ‘Why do you say so?’ I asked.

“ ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘when I was a shepherd in our country (we were both from Galatia), I would have saved the life of a traveller, if I had accompanied him; but I did not show him that charity, and he was devoured by the dogs. Therefore I shall most certainly meet with a similar death.’

“And it really happened as he said. For three years afterwards he was torn to pieces by wild beasts.”

I.

Dear Marie, cease to think of me; all is ended; I am lost. I do not tell you what will become of me; I know nothing myself. I only know that yesterday I received the fatal blow, from which I cannot recover.

I had just finished the last picture, of which I have so often spoke to you—The First Glance. It is the portrait of a young man, who awakens and looks around him, as though he saw everything for the first time.

Some of my friends thought the picture splendid, but added that it would not sell well, as my name was unknown to the public.

After innumerable attempts, all equally unfortunate, I showed it yesterday to a very rich amateur—Baron de Brienne. He examined the picture, thought it remarkable, and then asked if I had often exhibited my pictures.

On my replying in the negative, his expression changed.

“I thought,” said he, “I did not know your name. You must make yourself known. This picture has great merit, and this sketch also,” he added, throwing a rapid glance at my other picture just commenced—you know it, Marie—Cain after his Crime—“but, in fact, you are not known,” he concluded.

“But, sir,” I replied, “I am endeavoring to make myself known.”

“Well,” continued the baron, “you have talent, that I acknowledge; but I doubt if it is the kind of talent that will be appreciated by the public. If I bought your picture, I would be asked where I found it. As it stands there, it has a certain value; but if you were dead, it would be worth a hundred times as much, and perhaps would soon find purchasers, possibly myself among the first. You see I can’t change the world. So it is with men; they will pay the most ridiculous price for objects of art whose worth is guaranteed by a signature, but will not bother themselves to talk up unknown talent. I,” he added with a happy smile, “recently gave a hundred thousand francs for a picture which I do not place above yours; but it was a Murillo! I am a modest man, and always side with the majority. The majority is always right, and, for my part, I am not vain enough to think I know more than the entire human race. Make yourself known; everything is in that. Make yourself known; put your pictures in the exhibition; receive medals and decorations. But, above all, die; your pictures then will be worth so much gold. You see you are talking to a practical man, who don’t believe in neglected genius. Au revoir, monsieur. You really have talent; more even than that, I do not hesitate to say you have genius. Au revoir.”

This, Marie, was my last adventure. All the others were similar. I will spare you any further details. I have told you in a few words what in reality was a long agony. But despair is brief; it has not the courage to dwell on separate facts; it sums up the causes, and only shows the effects.

Now, my dear Marie, you know what happened yesterday. The day before there came another gentleman, who had not the time to examine my picture as it deserved. This he explained to me for two hours without looking at the picture. He really had no time; for example, every morning he visits his stables from ten to twelve, and in the afternoon rows on the lake from four to six.

As for Baron de Brienne, when he left, he assured me he held my talent in the highest estimation; that he would like to have a gallery of pictures all painted by me, as it would probably one day be very valuable; later, my pictures would sell splendidly, and he could make money by the operation.

If there is ever to be a later day for me, I shall find him, when I will no longer need him, and he will be the first to show me honor.

Adieu, Marie. I was so sanguine, so buoyed up with hope, it needed all this time—all this precious time, of which these gentlemen had so little to waste—to bring me where I am now.

I think the baron saw despair in my face, for he used a singular expression on leaving which I had not provoked by any remark.

“My dear sir, do not look so dismal and wretched. I am not the Don Quixote of budding genius. Make yourself known, make yourself known, and you will find me! But if your courage fails, you will commit blunders and spoil your talent, for which I will not be responsible; like Pilate, I wash my hands of you!”

I listened to them going down the stairs.

“No, no,” said he to his wife; “you see for my portrait I must have a master, a signature.”

“Perhaps,” replied the baroness—“perhaps we have done wrong to discourage the young man.”

“Discourage? What are you talking about? I told him he had great talent. Do you wish to know what I think?” he added, as he stood for an instant before her. “What ruins art in the present day is that it is gorged with gold, and that too few men of genius die in the hospital—that is the reason!”

Adieu, Marie.

Something else was said, which Paul did not hear.

The baroness paused, as she was about to enter the carriage.

“Well, what is the matter with you?” said her husband.

“I am not very well,” she replied.

“So much more reason for getting in the carriage. What ails you?”

“The face of that young man haunts me. Who knows what despair may drive him to? Who knows how terrible may be his hidden suffering? Let us go back. I feel as though we had just committed a crime. Let us go back. Thirty years ago I read a story which I had long forgotten, but that now returns vaguely to my memory as a warning. I no longer remember the whole, but the impression comes back vague and terrible after thirty years. Ah! let us go back.”

The baron stopped, and laughed immensely.

“Ha! ha! Are you crazy? Haven’t I the right to choose the pictures I wish to buy? Is there a law which compels me to buy pictures from this gentleman? I speak to you very seriously, my dear; such fancies as these will make you crazy. There is a great deal of insanity in our present day. Let us take care, let us take care!”

II.

Marie, after reading her brother’s letter, was half frantic with terror, as she knew him thoroughly, and understood his bitter despair. She lost no time, but left in the first train. Arrived in Paris, she ran to the little house in the Quartier Latin where Paul lived. She was too excited to take a carriage. The rapid walk seemed to soothe her. In the cars she longed for quicker movement; in the street she wished for wings; at the door she would rather have been at the other end of the world. She dared not go up. She stopped, suffocated with the beating of her heart. If it was already too late—the thought nearly paralyzed her with horror. If she were a minute too late!

Finally, when on the stairs, she wept. Then she dared ring.

“I have wept,” she thought; “he is saved.” Taught by a long and singular experience, the young girl knew that tears were for her the mysterious and certain sign that her prayer was granted. She rang. A servant‐girl, without speaking, led her to a bed, and uttered a single word—“Dead”—and then added: “The funeral will take place in two hours. He threw himself into the Seine from the bridge of Austerlitz.”

“He is not dead,” said Marie.

“The registration of the death has been made,” said the woman.

Without replying, Marie looked fixedly at him, and said to herself:

“He is not dead. I have wept; he is not dead. Paul!” she called. Silence. “Paul!” Silence.

She seized a mirror, and held it to her brother’s lips. At the moment she took it in her hand she burst into tears. “You will see that he is saved!” she said.

The woman thought her crazy. Marie still held the mirror before Paul’s lips. Dead silence; her own poor heart nearly stopped—the mirror was tarnished!

III.

Seven years afterwards M. le Baron de Brienne was conversing in a numerous and choice circle. It was at a grand dinner. The women were crowned with flowers and sparkling with jewels. The conversation turned upon a great crime which had recently been committed, the details of which filled two columns of every paper. Suddenly the Baron de Brienne became singularly agitated, and then, in a voice which he endeavored to keep calm, but whose trembling was still further shown by the effort to subdue it, said:

“It appears that the police have not yet discovered any trace of the assassin.”

“I don’t know,” replied a guest.

“I believe not,” said another.

“Excuse me,” replied a third person; “according to the latest accounts, the police, if not positively sure, had at least great hopes.”

The Baron de Brienne was as white as his napkin. He tried to overcome and conceal his excitement, and attempted to eat; but the effort was too great. He swooned, and fell heavily to the ground.

Every one rose and crowded around him. Water was thrown in his face, salts were held for him to inhale. The hostess neglected none of the ceremonies usual in such cases. Fortunately, there was a physician among the guests. Every attention was lavished upon M. le Baron. His carriage was called, and he was taken home.

The next day he was better; at the end of three days he was well. He made them bring any quantity of papers, and read them to him. Mme. la Baronne, who was the reader, suddenly paused, and said:

“Here is more of the horrid crime of which we were all talking when you were taken ill.”

“Well?” said the baron in a singular tone.

“Well,” continued the baroness, “the murderer has been arrested. But what a strange interest you take in the affair!”

“I?” replied the baron. “Oh! not at all; I can very truly say that. Why do you think otherwise?”

“Because you are so strangely excited whenever the subject is mentioned.”

“What do you mean, talking about my excitement?” he replied. “Can you possibly imagine, like those stupid people at dinner the other evening, that this affair interests me in the slightest degree? They were all there looking at me, looking at me ... with eyes ... with eyes.... Are you, too, going to stare at me now with those eyes ... with those eyes....”

Mme. la Baronne rose, and wrote two lines: “Dear doctor, come instantly.”

“Carry that to the telegraph office,” she said to the servant.

“She did not count the words,” muttered the man in astonishment, as he withdrew. “It must be something very serious.”

IV.

Three months had elapsed, and the baron had resumed his ordinary life, when one evening, in a salon in the faubourg Saint‐Honoré, a gentleman remarked, in the course of conversation, that it was astonishing the number of crimes one daily heard of. And he related the last murder that the daily paper had brought under his eyes.

Said the baron: “Why do you make such an assertion? Never were crimes so rare as to‐day; manners and customs are so much softened, we can almost say there are no longer any criminals. None can be found in the higher class of society; and when we speak of the aristocracy, it means the entire nation. Indeed, to speak the truth, I believe very little in the wonderful crimes with which the daily journals fill their columns when there is a dearth of political news.”

“You are very incredulous, M. le Baron,” replied the Comte de Sartigny. “Probably it is from kindness to the editors that the police seek the criminals, and the courts judge them.”

“You say,” answered the baron, “that the police seek the criminals. It is false, M. le Comte. In the first place, only one is guilty, and the police are not hunting him up; he is already found, and he has no accomplice. He has been found, I tell you, he has been found; and the man has no accomplice. Perhaps I don’t know it. Ha! ha!”

While the baron, pale as death, spoke these words, with terror imprinted on his face, the count looked steadily at him, and said:

“You say that I have spoken falsely, M. le Baron? Will you repeat that remark? I think those were your words, but perhaps I was mistaken.”

“I only say one thing,” replied the baron, “which is, that the criminal has been found and arrested.”

“But a moment ago you denied the reality of the crime.”

“I only say one thing, M. le Comte: that there is no doubt about the name of the assassin.”

The master of the house took the count by the arm, and led him to the recess of a window....

“Ah! very well, very well; I did not know it,” said the count, as he left the room.

While they were conversing together, the baron made several vain efforts to rise. He experienced the supreme anguish of a man who, while still in the possession of his faculties, feels they are leaving him—of a man who has not fainted, but who is about to faint, and who feels on his brow the first drops of cold sweat.

The baroness made her excuses for leaving so early, and, when alone with her husband, asked anxiously:

“What can be the matter with you?”

“And you too, you too,” he replied, pushing her from him, as he raised his blood‐shot eyes.

V.

“We must,” said the doctor, “enter into his mania, so as to endeavor to discover the cause. We must make him talk without questioning him. Do you know, madame, in the life of M. le Baron, of any fact that may have left a disagreeable remembrance?”

“Doctor, do you mean a guilty remembrance?”

“No, madame; something terrifying.”

The baroness thought a long while.

“No,” said she, “not one. Our life has always passed most tranquilly. You know how people of the world live; well, so we live, and have always lived. My husband is a quiet man, who has never had a quarrel in his life with any one, and has never done an injury that I know of.”

“You have never seen in the baron any anxiety of conscience?”

“Any anxiety of conscience? He? Why should he have any? He has never in his life done anything to reproach himself with.”

“The baron,” replied the doctor, “has the reputation of being benevolent and kind‐hearted. I don’t think he is naturally very imaginative; do you, madame?”

“Not at all, doctor. I think he is just the contrary. I can even say he has very little faith.”

“But when and where did you first perceive the commencement of this mania?”

“It was one day when nothing strange had happened. Some one had been speaking of a young sculptor, who now is very famous. A friend told us that he owed his success to a rich banker, who had discovered his talents by some happy accident, and had aided him with his fortune and influence. When our guests had left, and we were alone, I thought he would kill himself; as now, without the slightest reason.”

“In his daily life does he show any eccentricity of which I am yet ignorant?”

“Not precisely eccentricity,” said Mme. de Brienne. “His tastes have changed very much, but that cannot be called eccentricity. He formerly spent quite a fortune in purchasing pictures, of which he has a very fine collection, that he admired extravagantly; now he never looks at them. But he has always been rather fickle.”

“Does he talk in his sleep?”

“No; but one morning (now that you make me think of it) he awoke terribly frightened at a dream. ‘Ah! what a dream I have had,’ he said to me. His face looked worn and haggard, and, as I begged him to relate it, he turned away his eyes, and refused peremptorily. I insisted, but he kept silent, and I have never been able to make him relate it.”

The doctor reflected.

“Perhaps that is the whole secret,” said he. “But if we were to ask him about it now, probably to‐morrow we would be obliged to confine him.”

“Confine him?” cried the baroness. “Do you think him so seriously affected?”

“Very seriously, madame, and more so as he is perfectly sane in relation to other affairs. His mania is confined to one point, and is what we call hallucination. My duty compels me to tell you, madame, that it is a case where science up to the present time has been very unsuccessful.”

“But, doctor, never was there a man less crazy. As for the pictures, which was the only passion I ever knew him to have, he prided himself on never having done a foolish thing; he only bought pictures of known value, with the signatures of the artists fully guaranteed. I, for instance, who am speaking to you, would have sometimes acted more unwisely than he. I remember once he even refused....”

“Nevertheless,” interrupted the doctor, “the case is very serious.”

The baron was alone in his room. His wife listened attentively at the door, and watched him through the key‐hole. He raised the curtains, shook the cushions on the sofa, searched around, and, when convinced that he was alone, spoke in a low voice; but his wife caught his words.

“No one suspects me. No one, not even she; and yet everything should warn them, everything.... The circumstances that accompanied the act are reproduced every instant. For example, the clouds in the sky have nearly always the same form as at that moment.... The clouds do it purposely; they have assumed since that day certain positions always the same. What do they resemble? What I do not wish to say, but I know well since my dream. Oh! that dream.... I am cold, frozen. Why is it no one ever speaks to me of that dream; that no one in this house remembers it? And yet they were all there ... in the dream.... My wife was there, and the other one also,” he added, lowering his voice.

And after a silence, occasionally broken by unintelligible words, and joined to a strange pantomime, he continued:

“It was frightful. How that man struggled for his life!”

And speaking always lower and lower, the baron gasped out:

“He clung to me, and, when I pushed him into the water, an expression passed over his face such as was never seen but then in this world. It was near the bridge of Austerlitz. How he glared at me as he disappeared the last time! How is it that in the street the passers‐by do not say on seeing me, ‘There is the man, there he is—the man who had the dream’? But was it a dream or reality? Men often pass me quickly in the street. Who knows but that they know or see something?”

The baron walked around the room, greatly excited, and then, pausing, he sighed, and said in a mournful tone:

“How do other men act—those who are not followed? They can take a step without hearing behind them another step that goes quicker or slower, according as they walk. Then there are men who do not hear steps behind them as they walk. Yet I always seek the noisiest places; but no noise ever deadens the sound of that step, so faint but so invincible. The noise of carriages, the roar of cannon—I have tried everything.... If possible I would live amidst thunder; but the lightning might fall near me, and cover me with ruins; still should I hear that faint, almost imperceptible noise, a foot that just touches the ground. I am cold! How cold it is! Fire no longer warms me! How lightly that foot touches the ground. It does not press heavily like ours. No, decidedly not; it was no dream—it was reality. That foot never is tired; but when I stop, it stops. It has a certain manner of stopping that makes me always feel that it is there, and that it will resume its walk when I do mine. Sometimes I would rather hear it, and I walk to make it walk; when it is silent, its menace is to me more terrible than the sound of the step.... If it would only change place!... But, no; always at an equal distance from me. Ah! how cruel. If I could but see some one, I think the most horrible spectacle would be less terrifying than this dreary void. To hear and not see!”

Here the baron rapidly jumped backwards, and put out his hand as though to grasp something in the air, then exclaimed:

“Gone! He has escaped—escaped, as ever!”

VI.

The course of the baron’s ordinary life flowed on as smoothly as ever. Nothing was changed, and those who were not much with him perceived no difference; to them he was the same as heretofore.

The following summer he wished to go to the sea‐shore.

They left for Brittany. They spoke of the pleasant walks and drives, and the baron, in an absent manner, asked on which part of the coast was the most sand. He would not hear of the cliffs; he wanted sand—only sand. Gâvre was recommended by a gentleman who was seated near them at the table d’hôte.

The baron instantly decided upon going to Gâvre.

“At what hour shall we leave?” asked the baroness.

The we evidently displeased the baron. He wished to go alone. He gave a thousand pretexts to prevent his wife accompanying him. As she would not admit them, he said, contrary to his usual custom, “I will” ... “I wish to go alone,” said he. “Am I in prison? Do you take me for a criminal?”

The baron left Port Louis in the steamboat. His wife followed him, without being seen, on another boat, and watched his movements through a spy‐ glass, as he paced up and down the shore at Gâvre.

First, according to his usual custom, he assured himself that he was alone. Then he would take several steps, and return quickly, seeing nothing; he searched in the sand, and, finding his own footsteps, he sought a little further on the trace of the other one. All in vain. Disappointed, he went to another spot, and recommenced his weary walk, always seeing his own footprints, never the other. He had hoped in the sand; the sand had proved false, as everything else.

VII.

Meanwhile, the doctor was in Paris, and one evening in a salon in the faubourg Saint Germain. The conversation was on madness; and the doctor, who was a celebrated alieniste, was asked many questions as to the causes of insanity.

“The causes of insanity,” said he, “are so profound and mysterious that to know them one must make the tour of the invisible world.”

“I have known,” said one gentleman, “insane persons who thought themselves guilty of crimes which they had never committed—innocent men, intelligent and good, incapable of harming a bird, and who thought themselves assassins.”

Among the guests that evening was a famous artist, M. Paul Bayard, whose most admired works, The First Glance, and Cain after his Crime, ranked with the chefs‐d’œuvre of the greatest masters of the day.

Said M. Bayard: “I have not studied, like you, doctor, from life. I don’t know any insane persons, and what I am going to tell you is not founded on fact. But this is what I think about this strange remorse felt by innocent people: who knows if they may not have committed spiritually the crime of which they think themselves guilty materially? In this hypothesis they have completely forgotten the real and spiritual crime, which they committed really and spiritually; they did not even know or feel it at the instant they committed it. But this crime real, spiritual, and forgotten is transformed, by virtue of madness, into a material crime, of which they are innocent, but of which they believe themselves guilty. Perhaps a man has betrayed his friend; instead of accusing himself of this treason, he accuses himself of another fault which resembles that one, as the body resembles the soul. I repeat, I cannot cite an example. It is purely hypothetical; but something which I cannot define makes me think it possible, nay, even probable. The guilty person deceived his conscience; conscience in turn deceives him. To make a child understand, we give examples of sensible things. Perhaps justice thus acts with these men, and, finding them insensible in the sphere of the mind, transports their crime into the sphere of the body.

“Perhaps it is a real crime, but too subtle to be understood by them, that descends to their level, and pursues them under the appearance of an external and sensible crime, the only one which they can understand. There are whimsical scruples which resemble madness, as exaggeration resembles falsehood. Who knows if these scruples are not the wanderings, or, if you prefer it, the transpositions of remorse? I say remorse. I do not say repentance, for repentance enlightens, and remorse blinds. Between repentance and remorse there is an abyss: the first gives peace, the second destroys it. Perhaps conscience, not being able to make itself felt by the guilty person on its own ground, speaks to him, by way of revenge, in language as coarse as himself, on his own domain. Through a terrible justice, it makes him reproach himself with what appears unjust on the surface, but which is a thousand times just at the bottom. Conscience, which spoke in vain at the moment of the crime, now arms itself against the criminal as a phantom. We are men here to‐night, as we appear to each other; but who knows if we are not for some one somewhere, at this moment, phantoms?”

The doctor rose, and, taking the artist’s hand, said: “I do not know how much truth there may be in your theory. I only know one thing: that you are a man of genius, and, if I had doubted it before, I am now convinced of it. I will reflect on your words; they open to me a new horizon.”

“I have always been pursued by the thought,” said the artist, “that there is a moment when a man understands for the first time what he has seen since his infancy. It is the day when the eyes of the mind open. It is this I have attempted to show in my picture—The First Glance. But as the horizon is constantly enlarging, I endeavor to throw upon everything, each time, a look which I may call The First Glance. In the other composition, Cain after his Crime, I wished to show in Cain, not the melodramatic assassin, but a vulgar, common man. The stigmata of anger, of which he received the visible mark, opens to him the eyes of the soul. He throws upon his crime a first glance. There are spiritual Cains whose arms are innocent. Perhaps there may be some among the insane, of whom we have spoken; and in that case there is more truth in their madness than in their previous security. Their insanity only deceives them about the nature of the crime; their security deceived them about the crime itself.”

The doctor was thoughtful. He took the artist aside, and in a low tone said: “Shall we leave together?” And they left.

After their departure the conversation turned on what had just been said.

“Were you always a materialist?” asked one person of his neighbor.

“It is scarcely fair or generous to choose this moment for such a question,” was the reply.

“As for me,” said a young lady, “I don’t like to hear M. Bayard talk. He is a great artist—that I admit; but when he commences in that style, he worries me!”

“Would it be indiscreet, madame, to ask you why?” timidly inquired a young man with a badly‐tied cravat.

“Because I am afraid he is right in his opinions. I wish to pass gaily through life; and if we believe what he says, life would be such a serious affair, we should have to think. Really, to hear him, we can imagine ourselves surrounded with mysteries.”

VIII.

“I wish to see and study your picture of Cain. I was going to say your portrait of Cain,” said the doctor to the painter; “for it seems to me that you must have known him personally, from the manner in which you have spoken to me of him.”

“Perhaps I have known him,” said Paul. “At any rate, come!” And they entered the studio.

Arrived before the picture, the doctor started back in surprise.

The portrait of Cain was that of the baron, horrible in the resemblance.

There was on that face the coldness of the criminal and the horror of the cursed. The coldness did not impair the horror, nor the horror the coldness; and from the mouth of Cain the spectator might expect to hear the words that S. Bridget heard from the mouth of Satan when he said to God:

“O Judge! I am coldness itself.”

Indifference and despair were in those eyes, on those lips, and on that brow. But the despair was not heartrending, for repentance was wanting, and this despair even appeared expiatory, like justice eating its bread.

The doctor remained a long while motionless. The horizon opened before his eyes. His science sought new depths. He did not precisely reflect, but he remembered, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, passed an hour in profound contemplation.

“So you know him?” said he at last to Paul.

“Whom do you mean?”

“Why, my patient!”

“I don’t know any of your patients.”

Professional discretion arrested the name before it passed the doctor’s lips.

“But, really,” said he, “this head is a portrait. You could not have drawn it by chance.”

“Neither one nor the other,” replied Paul. “No one sat for me, and I did not draw it by chance. It appears to me, when I work, certain faces are offered to me without forcing themselves upon me. I perceive them interiorly; for my eyes are closed and I see nothing. Perceive is not the proper word, for the sense of sight is not needed. If I perceive them, it is with an unknown sense which is not that of sight, and in a peculiar condition, in comparison with which wakefulness is profound sleep. I think these perceptions correspond with some reality, either distant or future, whose photographic likeness at that moment passes before the eyes of the mind.

“This faculty, which may be called natural inspiration, has never abandoned me. The aptitude to surmise what I do not know is the highest form of the activity of my mind, and not only do I surmise what I do not know, but very often I do it, I realize it, without intention and without knowledge. It is as though I were an actor in a drama of which I was ignorant. I recite a part in a play that I do not know, and whose title and plot are equally unknown.

“Yet I feel myself free, and the profound sentiment of my liberty bursts forth, above all, in the remembrance of my faults. I wished to die, but death did not want me. I have sometimes asked myself if, having wished to lose my life, I might not lose inspiration, which would be for me a subtle and cruel manner of death. It has seemed to me that the question has been agitated somewhere, and that inspiration, which has compassion on the weak, came back to me gratuitously. If I had been criminal from malice, it would have abandoned me, perhaps, or have become in me the auxiliary of a future crime. It might have refused to help me, or have assisted me in doing wrong.”

IX.

Shortly after this interview the baron returned to Paris, apparently calmer than usual.

“He is much better,” said Mme. la Baronne. “The doctor alarmed me terribly; but I knew very well in reality there was no danger. My husband is a cold man, and I have nothing to fear for his reason.”

The following night the baron waited until the house was quiet, and then went on tiptoe, as though afraid of being surprised or disturbed. Once safely in his picture gallery, he cut each of the pictures with a penknife, and then one by one burst them open by placing his knee against the canvas; and, that accomplished, left the house toward morning. The porter saw him pass, but did not recognize him.

“Who is that old man,” said he to his wife, “who passed the night in the house?”

The baron’s hair, black the night before, was white as snow.

They waited for him at breakfast, they waited for him at dinner; he did not return. In searching his papers his wife found a note containing these words:

“This time I will not escape; the police are on my track.”

Said madame: “I always feared some misfortune would happen to me.”

The next day the baron’s body was found in the Seine under the bridge of Austerlitz.

“I am much distressed, but not astonished,” said the doctor to madame. “I always thought his madness absolutely incurable.”

“Ah! doctor, he destroyed all the pictures. I have not even his portrait.”

“You shall have it, madame,” said the doctor.

Eight days afterwards the doctor kept his promise. He brought the baroness a photograph.

Madame de Brienne was profoundly agitated, and nearly fainted.

“Oh! what a resemblance,” she gasped, “what a resemblance! Doctor, how was it done? This is not natural. It is not his portrait, it is himself. He is going to speak. I am afraid!”

There was horror in the astonishment of the poor woman. She threw upon her husband and herself a first glance.

“But tell me, doctor, where did you find it?”

“Allow me to keep the secret, madame.”

In reality, the thing was very simple: they had only photographed the picture of the great artist—Cain after his Crime.

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The Legend Of Vallambrosa

An ancient myth like ivied vesture clings About fair Vallambrosa’s cloistered walls, Telling that ’neath the roof sweet charity Has spread her soft, warm draperies within What time eight circling centuries have traced, In memories gray and green, her blessedness.

Of the fair, nestling valley here to sing, With sweet‐strung choice of cadenced synonymes, Could better music hold the ear, to note Its silver‐dropping streams and shadowy dells Than that wherewith Italia christened it, Calling it Aqua‐Bella, or the Val‐Ambrosa, liquid‐toned and clear? No ripple, Methinks, of happier tones or tenderer hues Could voice its lapsing falls and verdant vales Than lives within such naming! Hither came Long years agone—long years before the years That gave the legend birth—a prayerful priest, Bearing the cross where untamed beast and bird, Alone frequenting, poured in wildest notes The praise for life which lowest life uplifts! And here, as ever, man’s triumphant voice Leaped up above the brute’s, beseeching heaven To consecrate with holy dews, and bless, The heights which, cycles later, cradling held The hermitage of one so famed; and grew, As seed luxuriant in rich soil will grow, Because all teeming life must needs expand, These walls of generous hospice that outstretch Their sheltering arms to weary travellers.

If it be true, as we have often heard, That lukewarm sinners make but lukewarm saints, Perhaps the converse proof we hold in hand; For, mark! once lived in Florence, of the proud Gualberto house, one heir to all its pride, Giovanni named—he this same sinner‐saint.

Quickened by summers of some eighteen years, And flushed by southern suns to fervid warmth Of life impetuous, his youthful form Bore stamp already of the venturous will Of a gay, dashing cavalier outgiven To heedless coursings in the round of sense. And yet there dwelt adeep within his breast A living well of tenderness that flowed In gentle care for Hubert, his beloved And only brother. Hubert (a twelvemonth Scarce younger) stood between his tempted soul And much that might have swayed it past recall Over the margin of sin’s dread abyss. ’Twas not that Hubert was a chastened saint, But love within the brother’s ardent soul Invested him with raiment pure and white— Love holding from assoil the fabric fine Itself had wove, and still will choose to weave So long as life is life, or love is love. Thus, when unto Giovanni came a dawn That kindled to a conscious glow of health His own quick pulse, yet, warming, failed to melt The frozen current in pale Hubert’s veins, Because those veins had felt the frigid touch Of steel in duelling combat, there arose Within his anguished heart a stern demand Against the murderer of life for life— An unrelenting thirst of blood, to quell The ghostly phantoms of his fevered brain, And satisfy with feast of sweet revenge His brother’s manes. On one Good‐Friday morn, Followed by armed retainers, and slow bent Unto San Miniato to attend High Mass, in faithfulness to Hubert’s soul, He met unwittingly within a pass That leads to the Basilica this man, Of all men hated most. Close, face to face, Spell‐bound they stood a moment’s span; then flashed From out Giovanni’s sheath his gleaming sword, And by its glittering sign with one will rose From every trusty scabbard near at hand Sharp kindred swords that gleamed defiant fire Into the bright’ning day, and in his face Who stood unarmed, alone. The unsheathed sword Of pitiless Giovanni had well‐nigh Its rueful deed of deadly wrath made sure When he, the helpless foe confronted thus By certain death, saw in death’s pallid light The spectre of his sin as it must seem To disembodied spirits, and he fell Prone, horror‐stricken, at the avenger’s feet. There, graving on the ground with level arms The crucial sign, he prayed for pardoning grace, And grace of lengthened days for penitence, And all in name of Him whose agony Upon the cross he thus in dust recalled!

The sword is stayed, and in the tremulous pause Great waves of varying passions meet And battle in Giovanni’s breast. Through all A voice, as of faint music o’er the din Of tumult, whispers: “Who loveth brother more Than me, or any loved one more than me, Is all unworthy of me.” Quick, with ever Conquering motions of the Spirit’s power, As winds of peace the passionate waters calm, His sword is dropped, and, offering helpful hands, He cries: “Thou who hast slain my brother be As Christ doth will—a brother unto me.”

O’erwhelmed with gratitude, and filled with deep Contrition for his sin, the uplifted foe Lets fall his head upon Giovanni’s neck, And there with loosened torrent of remorse He pours the unguent of his tears, as once Another penitent poured costly balm Upon the Holiest One, growing therefrom Through mercy’s twofold grace to peace and joy.

While yet the day was young, the legend tells How both these humbled, contrite cavaliers Offered their thanks for comfort at the shrine Whither their steps together now were led; And how, while kneeling at the crucifix, Broke from the Saviour’s parted lips a smile Upon Giovanni, while the sacred head In gracious token bowed. O crowning joy! Too much to halo one poor human brow, And not the radiance divine extend To others all unconscious, even as once Himself had been of its illumining might! Henceforth no other smile was aught to him If for a passing moment it could hide The memory of that glory from his eyes.

Henceforth the impulse of his life was one Deep, passionate desire to shadow forth, In the best shadowy way a mortal can, The glowing flame of beatific fire That hallowed smile had kindled in his soul. And thence so perfect was his Godward walk That scarce five summers of devoted life Were added to his eighteen worldly years Before San Miniato’s brotherhood Decreed him to its abbacy. But, no! Nor stole nor triple crown had charm for one Too wholly Christ’s to care for stole or crown, Save for that lustrous crown of ransomed souls His earnest life might win to shine as stars. For this to Vallambrosa’s lonely height In rapt and silent vigil he withdrew; But even as sweetness bursts the seedling’s cell, So holiness from him exhaled in light That drew, to seek his counsel, devotees Led faithfully by his unswerving faith To live with him a life of prayer and praise. Or, if they came not cowled as lowly monks, Still hither fared the noble of the land, Even kings whose purple paled beside his gray, And royal ladies and most knightly knights, To pour their wealth of treasure at the feet Of one all saintly. Thus the order grew Of world‐famed Vallambrosa, where to‐day The weary find repose and welcoming cheer, And benison of heavenly graciousness. And thus of one soul’s overflow of light The Saviour’s smile is seen in saving love To stream adown the ever‐widening years That close and closer bring us to the day Of promised joy, when all our utmost need Shall in that glorious smile be satisfied.

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Odd Stories. VIII. Snifkin

There certainly was a time when dogs were more respected than now. Such a period in particular must have been the reign of Gigag, when the Odomites, who had once kicked, maimed, and starved their poor curs in a manner inhuman, now fed and fondled them with an affection that was almost canine. This revolution in sentiment was entirely due to what may be called a genius of instinct possessed by one extraordinary dog. His owner, who was none other than the goblin Gigag, had, in one of those journeys which he sometimes took through his underground thoroughfare, named his four‐footed companion, with a fond conceit, Snifkin; and when they emerged into the atmosphere of the king’s grounds, the latter was allowed the chief place at supper among the royal dogs. Some of this many‐colored pack were wont to bark, as others were to bite. Some were renowned for scent and vigilance, and others for speed and courage; still others for motley skins, lapping lips, great ears, and yelling, yelping, and howling. But the dog Snifkin united their best qualities with a sagacity that was almost diplomatic. He never barked till he was prepared to bite, and he sometimes bit without barking. He had a scent and sight which are only acquired by dogs who have seen a great deal of human nature. So various and cabalistic seemed the marks and colors upon him, that the vulgar ascribed them to the science of Gigag rather than to natural revelation. To crown all, the dog Snifkin showed his ivory teeth at times, sneezing, snorting, and laughing in a way next to human for its friendliness.

From a number of the faculties described arose two incidents which increased the fame and worth of all dogs, and which no man can sufficiently admire. A miser, in whom the sagacious Snifkin recognized a former oppressor of his kind, came to plead his cause at court, alleging his ownership of four hundred and ninety‐five thriving estates, and prosecuting his poor nephew for about as many cents. At a contrast so preposterous the knowing dog could not contain himself, and sniffed, snorted, and showed his teeth to such a degree that even his royal master, at whose side he sat during the hearing of the plea, was forced to join in the general guffaw which greeted the miser.

Another incident related chiefly to one of four malcontent noblemen, who, with bows and smiles, came to the royal presence. With no more ado the dog Snifkin jumped at his throat, bringing him to the foot of the king, when a concealed bodkin fell out of his bosom, and a number of poisons, which Gigag recognized as badly prepared, were strewn upon the floor. Without a word the king understood why it was that his dumb counsellor had not taken soup that day. While irons were being placed on the limbs of the malcontents, a collar made of the finest cloth of gold, adorned with precious stones, was put upon the neck of the loyal dog. By sovereign order it was decreed that, taking with him all the dogs in the kennels of the palace, the crown crier should go out and cry to all the people the patriotism of Snifkin, and the fidelity of dogs generally.

But it would require a million miracles to convince those whose unreason has placed them nearest to the brutes, that dogs and other animals, human and inhuman, exist for the trying and proving of the souls of men. As Snifkin was one day seated in the high easy‐chair of the barber who clipped and shaved for the king’s dogs, a commotion in the street provoked him to bark loudly, hazarding thereby the loss of his nose at the hands of the barber. Arrived in the street, what was his surprise to see fifty of the royal hounds yelping in the most distressful manner over the loss of his tail by the chief hound, who had provoked by impudent barking a slashing cut from the sword of a cavalier, who, it came to be known, was a conspirator against the life of King Gigag. Not being able to contend with swordsmen, Snifkin quickly seized upon the largest and finest specimen of the breed of curs who barked against the king’s hounds, and made short work of him.

This act, loyal though it was, became the signal for that factious state of feeling among the Odomites which eventuated in the famous war of tails. Most of the best dogs belonging to the houses which barked against the king having had their tails cut off, it grew to be a fashion with the malcontents of the realm to reject everything with a tail to it, even were it a shirt, or an entailed estate not already owned and occupied by one of their number, or a story which was not to be continued. In fact, it became a question whether they would give ear to any tale whatever, and hence it was truly said of the malcontent faction that their ears were longer than their tails. Of course the scientific king lost no time in improving the situation; indeed, of putting an end to it. He trained a pack of dogs, under the teaching of Snifkin, to scent out treason, and, when that was done, he managed to give the hydrophobia to a large number of rebellious curs, who afterwards bit their masters. The dog Snifkin barked against this measure in vain.

A war now broke out, assisted by the prince of a neighboring country, who had conceived a great hatred of the goblin Gigag. It was the habit of the royal dogs to discover supplies to their masters, and guard their camp at night, and, besides, to indicate in what direction were the princely headquarters and trains of the enemy, which they knew by the smell of many viands.

The same, perhaps, would have been the practice of those dogs without tails who barked for the malcontents and their ally, were it not that the poor fare they received compelled their flight to the better provisions of the enemy. Nevertheless, it would have gone hard with King Gigag if his rival’s device of drawing off the dogs by a concentration of savory meats in an ambushed ravine had succeeded; for the king, had it not been for the sagacity of Snifkin, would certainly have gone to the dogs. Despairing now of being able to foil their antagonists, the allies heard with growing dismay the general bark and howl in the king’s camp at night ere his warriors slept upon their arms. Only a low growl here and there, or perhaps the voice of some lonely hound who had strayed out of camp to bay the moon, broke the silence of the sleep of war.

While thus the silent avalanche was prepared that was to overwhelm the allies in the carnage of civil strife, a most unforeseen accident occurred. King Gigag was on his rounds through the camp when a dog taken with hydrophobia bit him in the leg. Returning mad to his headquarters, he saw the dog Snifkin laughing and wagging his tail, and, frenzied by the sight, he drew his sword, and at once cut off the whole of that pleasant appendage. Immediately the dog Snifkin became the most beautiful young prince you ever saw. Seizing an enchanted blade that hung up in the tent of the goblin, he defended himself with fury, and by an artful stroke put the unlucky Gigag out of his pains. When it became known throughout both camps that King Gigag had cut off the tail of the dog Snifkin, a reconciliation grew apace between those dogs who had tails and those dogs who had none; and, indeed, the royal hounds especially were anxious to have their tails cut off, so that they might turn at once into princes; but, unfortunately, this result never happened, two of these dogs at least having been curtailed, to their great shame and mortification, without so much as becoming scullions, or anything but unlucky dogs. It was then seen by the Odomites that the dog Snifkin was none other than their long‐lost Prince Gudood, who would have been devoured by the giant Googloom, had not the goblins got hold of him and changed him into a dog; in which character he served the excellent goblin Gigag, who, however, was not made aware of his identity by the evil goblins from whom he had escaped. By means of a birthmark on his right arm the allied lords were speedily brought to understand that this, indeed, was the long‐lost prince who had been affianced to the daughter of the neighboring king. And now with one heart and soul they hastened the marriage of the prince and princess, who ever afterwards lived happily in the joy and glory and union of both kingdoms. In the magnificent bridal procession nothing was more astonishing than the thousand trained dogs of all kinds, large and small, who marched in order, clad sometimes in variegated suits, and wearing rich collars. First came the royal hounds and mastiffs; second, a fine breed of mountaineer dogs as large as wolves; third, two or three hundred pointers, spotted all colors; fourth, as many setters, their backs streaked with colors like gold and snow; fifth, a battalion of mixed red, white, and blue dogs; sixth, a body of sky‐terriers, followed by the finest array of black‐and‐tan dogs that was ever known; sixth, a large number of dogs who looked like nothing so much as walking hearth‐rugs; seventh, a noble lot of shaggy water‐dogs as large as men; then a great many shepherd‐dogs, spaniels, poodles, pups; after these a battalion of dogs shaved to look like lions; and finally a rear‐guard of bull‐dogs with their tails cut off, walking as steadily as firemen on parade. A loud and harmonious barking at intervals interrupted the sound of the wedding bells, and five hundred terrier dogs at least stood up on their hind legs when the marriage ceremony was performed.

Thus the reign of humanity and utility succeeded to the reign of science and pelf. Only dogs were allowed to do the fighting, and they were treated so well that they did nothing worse than bark. The following conversation was one time overhead among them in a street near the king’s palace:

Royal Mastiff.—Bowoghowow! Bowgh!

Hound without tail.—Boowoogh! Boohoo! Wowoo!

Terrier dog.—Gr‐r‐r‐r‐row, r‐row!

Bull‐dog.—Hr‐r‐r‐um‐g‐r‐r‐u‐m. Bowowgh!

From these syllables it was conjectured by the knowing that the new King Gudood had no enemies, and that peace abode in the land.

New Publications.

DE L’AUTORITE; OU, LA PHILOSOPHIE DU PERSONNALISME. LETTRE AU REV. PERE J. F. HECKER, SUIVIE D’UN APPENDICE SUR LA SOUVERAINETE DU PEUPLE. PAR DWIGHT H. OLMSTEAD. Traduction approuvée par l’auteur. Genève: Japonnier et Steuder. 1874.

This pamphlet, the English original of which we have not seen, has been sent to us from Geneva, by the author, we presume. The Rev. F. I. T. (not J. F.) Hecker has been abroad, travelling for the restoration of his impaired health, for more than a year, and cannot, therefore, give his personal attention to Mr. Olmstead’s very courteous Letter, at least for the present, and in the columns of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. Moreover, the author is mistaken in attributing a certain article in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, with which he chiefly employs his pen in the Letter, to F. Hecker. The article in question is one of the numerous contributions with which Dr. Brownson enriched and adorned our pages during the interval of the suspension of his own Review. In our opinion, Mr. Olmstead has not dealt a very heavy blow upon the head‐piece of his veteran antagonist. In fact, we do not see that he has attempted any serious answer to arguments which he would find it no easy task to refute. Mr. Olmstead deals more in objections and assertions than in arguments, and his assertions are so general and vague that one would need to write a treatise on general and special metaphysics to refute them. They merely amount to this: that Mr. Olmstead agrees with Kant and J. Stuart Mill. F. Hecker’s works were written for persons who either believe in some sense in Christianity, or at least in God and in human reason and intelligence. It is not necessary to prove the premises admitted by the persons with whom you argue. If they are Protestants, you assume the truth of Christianity. Your only effort is then to prove that Catholicity is the genuine Christianity. If they are rationalistic theists, you prove that the truth of Christianity, and specifically the authority of the church as one of its essential doctrines and laws, is demonstrable from principles of reason and natural theology. When it is a question of arguing with an atheist or sceptic, these topics must be postponed, and the discussion turned upon the first principles of metaphysics. Even here something in common must be admitted as a starting‐ point for argument. If a man denies everything or doubts everything, the only thing which can possibly be done is to watch him closely until he asserts something, and then you can do no more than show to a bystander his absurdity. If we understand Mr. Olmstead correctly, he admits the reality of all that is contained within self‐consciousness, and considers all else, by the mere fact of its being exterior to consciousness, as an unknown quantity in respect to its reality. He merely holds this, however, as an opinion, and admits that the contrary is very probable. If he is in earnest—and it is fair to presume that he is—in searching for philosophical truth, the only way in which a Catholic philosopher could argue with him to any purpose would be by presenting a theory of the origin of ideas and knowledge, which would give him something objective as a primitive element in his very first act of intellectual self‐ consciousness. This is rather too serious a task to be performed in a hurry. Whatever we have to say on these great fundamental topics of philosophy has been already partly said in the elaborate articles which have appeared in our columns, and will be said hereafter in articles of a similar nature. We refer the author of the Letter and others in a similar position to THE CATHOLIC WORLD, passim, to get what modicum of light we are able to furnish them. If they wish for more light, they must go to the great works of great authors, and study them carefully. As for the great number of very excellent persons who do not trouble their heads with philosophy, and who complain that our philosophical articles are too dry and abstruse, we must beg them to content themselves with the lighter portions of the magazine, and allow us to give a reasonable amount of space to the few readers who have some taste and capacity for real science.

HOLY PLACES: THEIR SANCTITY AND AUTHENTICITY. By F. Philpin de Rivières, of the London Oratory. London: Washbourne. 1874. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

F. De Rivières gives play both to reason and imagination in an instructive and agreeable manner in treating of the attractive topic of holy places. The book contains some interesting information about the recent explorations in Jerusalem.

THE MONTH OF MARY OF OUR LADY OF LOURDES. By Henri Lasserre. Translated from the French (23d edition) by Mrs. Crosier. London: Burns and Oates. 1874. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Henri Lasserre’s beautiful work—of which a translation, which the best judges have pronounced to be of the very highest literary merit as well as the most literal accuracy, appeared in this magazine—is abridged and divided into thirty‐one chapters for each day of the month of May, in this neat and pretty volume.

The Blessed Virgin pressed very hard on the head of the old serpent when she appeared at the rocks of Massabielle. The sympathizers with this “revolutionnaire malheureux,” as Renan calls him, in his warfare on the Queen of Heaven, frequently show their perplexity and vexation at the overwhelming proof of the miracles she has wrought, by an attempt at scornful ridicule, which is always unaccompanied by any argument, or any attempt at meeting the challenge so often addressed to them to rebut the evidence M. Lasserre has furnished. Louis Veuillot, probably the wittiest man now on the earth, once said of a certain Frenchman that he was a clever writer, but fort piqué contre le Saint Esprit. Dr. Coxe, who has formerly shown himself to be a clever poet, to say the least, in his recent pamphlet against Bishop Ryan, which is not at all clever, but only cunning, has exhibited a great pique against Our Lady of Lourdes. In this we see a fulfilment of the ancient prophecy, “I will place enmity between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed.” The vulgar and unmeaning jibes of the infidel and the heretic, as well as the pious writings and devout pilgrimages of the faithful, alike serve to make the wonderful event of Lourdes more and more widely known all over the world, to the greater glory of God, and his Blessed Mother.

A FULL CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC RELIGION (preceded by a short history of religion), from the creation of the world to the present time. With Questions for Examination. Translated from the German of the Rev. Joseph Deharbe, S.J., by the Rev. John Fander. Fourth Edition. London: Burns & Oates. 1874. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This is the most celebrated catechism of the century, has been most extensively approved and brought into use, and will be of great service to those who are employed in teaching young people the Christian doctrine, as well as for the instruction of converts.

THE COMMONITORY OF S. VINCENT OF LERINS. London: Washbourne. 1874. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

There is no treatise of such small size as the Commonitory among Christian writings, so far as we know, which has been so universal in fame and influence, and has made its author so illustrious, as this one.

The neat little libretto, containing the translation, with some accompanying testimonies of eminent Protestant divines to the excellence of the work, is edited by the Rev. John Lynch, of Ballymena, Diocese of Down and Connor, Ireland. In the preface he mentions the fact that S. Vincent and S. Patrick were fellow‐students. The treatise can be easily read and understood by any intelligent person, and yet contains an amount of instruction and information on Catholic doctrine equal to that which is ordinarily spread through volumes.

MONASTICON HIBERNICUM. With Engravings in Gold and Colors, Maps and Views. By Mervyn Archdall, A.M. Edited by the Right Rev. Dr. Moran. Vol. I., 4to. Dublin: W. B. Kelly. 1873.

This well‐known historical work is now republished in the most splendid style. It is a history of religious houses and orders in Ireland, extensive, learned, and full of romantic and religious interest. The first volume contains two fine views of the exterior and interior of S. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, one of the ancient episcopal palace, and several engravings, in gold, of different religious orders. The work is, of course, a costly one, and is only published by subscription. Every wealthy Irishman in the United States ought to subscribe for a work which is an honor to his country and the Catholic religion. The first edition is, however, limited to one thousand copies, and we presume that persons desiring to procure a copy will find it necessary to send on their names immediately.

CHERUBINI: MEMORIALS ILLUSTRATIVE OF HIS LIFE. By Edward Bellasis, Barrister‐at‐Law. London: Burns & Oates. (With a portrait.)

This is an elaborate biography of the great musical composer, edited and published with the greatest care in an attractive style of typography. It cannot fail to interest very much those who have a taste for musical literature.

LA SAINTE ECRITURE ET LA REGLE DE FOI. Par l’Abbé Bégin, de l’Université Laval. Québec: Coté et Cie. 1874.

With admirable precision and clearness the Abbé Bégin develops and defends in this volume the Catholic doctrine of the rule of faith in accordance with the soundest and most orthodox theology. We cannot sufficiently recommend his treatise to clergymen and other students of sacred science. There are some mistakes in the spelling of English names, as is very usual in French books. For example, we have Richard Buxter instead of Baxter. Whoever wishes to preach, lecture, or write for the press on the topics treated in this volume will find it even more available for use than the treatises contained in our dogmatic text‐books.

SKETCHES OF ILLUSTRIOUS SOLDIERS. By James Grant Wilson. New York. George P. Putnam’s Sons. 1874.

This work has a promising look, the author’s name reminding us that the military profession was for some time his own, and that he is a diligent student of the literature of his subject.

Military biography has a strange charm for most readers; indeed, it is doubtful whether fiction has an equal fascination at certain periods of our lives. Few of us have attained middle age without having had our cheeks frequently glow and our patriotism grow warm at the narration of deeds of prowess performed by our favorite heroes. Unfortunately, however, the production of this species of literature has fallen to a great extent into the hands of literary adventurers‐writers who looked only to making the most of a profitable enterprise. Hence the periodical eruption of lives of great captains, distinguished, indeed, as men count greatness, but whose most valid claim to eminence consisted in their ability to destroy whatever opposed the realization of the objects of their ambition, and the permanent maintenance of unjustly‐won crowns. To this cause we may partly attribute the fact that people have well‐nigh lost sight of the loftiest form of heroism—that which prompts a man to stake everything on the defence of a principle; to brave all dangers and sustain all privations, so that conscience be kept pure and the Christian character preserved unsullied.

The work under notice belongs to a different category. It is written, for the most part, in a calm, judicial spirit, the author evidently intending to avoid partisanship, and exhibiting a painstaking fidelity to the data before him. Occasionally, however, he betrays the hero‐worshipper in the case of individuals who appear anything but admirable to us. On such common ground as the sketch of Washington we are glad to express our agreement with the author. We also like his estimate of anecdotes as illustrations of character.

UNIVERSAL PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY AND MYTHOLOGY. By J. Thomas, A.M., M.D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1874.

A COMPLETE PRONOUNCING GAZETTEER. Edited by J. Thomas and T. Baldwin, assisted by several other gentlemen. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. (Sold at 25 Bond St., New York)

Next to a dictionary of the language we rank dictionaries of persons and places, as works of reference for those engaged in writing, and, indeed, for all intelligent readers as well. We hear of so many men of eminence, or of localities so nearly alike in orthography, that we never feel entirely at ease without reference to a good authority; so that, for the mere purpose of identification, books like these are worth all they cost. The period and country at and in which a given subject lived, his occupation, his contemporaries, and for what he was distinguished; the county, state, or kingdom in which a certain city or town lies, serve all ordinary uses. Should we desire more, we can at our leisure resort to the encyclopædias or individual biographies for fuller information. Of course these works would be more acceptable if written from our point of view; but that we cannot expect for a long time to come. Meanwhile, being reasonably impartial, as we have found them to be so far as we have examined, we accept them as the best attainable. Lest the fact that they are each in one volume should convey an inadequate idea of their extent, we may state that the Biographical Dictionary has 2,345 closely‐printed royal octavo pages, and the Gazetteer xviii.‐2,182 pages of the same size and compactness. We know of no works of the kind so convenient and full in all matters for which they are ordinarily consulted.

A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. By Joseph E. Worcester, LL.D. Boston: Brewer & Tileston. 1874.

As it would be quite superfluous to advise any one to get a dictionary at the present time, we content ourselves with asking our readers to get the best—Worcester’s Unabridged. We have warmed towards this author, among other reasons, because he is less of an iconoclast than some of his fellow‐lexicographers. It has grieved us not a little to see our favorite words maltreated as if they had no personality about which to be sensitive, or pedigree whereof to be proud. We can scarcely recognize them in the new dress, or rather mask, in which they are often presented. Were we a boy again, not a hair of our head would rise at a spect_er_, and we should have an additional reason for refusing allegiance to a sovereign who held only a scept_er_—though the sun should still refuse to set on her dominions.

In saying this we would by no means disparage a standard in spelling. When some new Ursa Major shall arise who will not only give us an uniform, harmonious system of orthography, but such substantial reasons in favor of it as will satisfy the learned and confound all opponents, we may yield to the general verdict. But we are not at all on the lookout for such a contingency while our language is in the process of formation, and expect to possess our Worcester Unabridged in peace for many long years to come. The work has lxviii.‐1,786 pages quarto, and is quite as full, we believe, as any other extant in the various tables, grammatical and other information having a bearing on the main purpose of the volume.

The same publishers also issue Worcester’s Comprehensive Dictionary, Worcester’s Primary Dictionary, and A Pocket Dictionary, compiled from the quarto and school dictionaries of J. E. Worcester, by Loomis J. Campbell; for those who desire inexpensive and portable manuals.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XIX., NO. 114.—SEPTEMBER, 1874

Matter.

II.

The activity displayed by matter in the production of natural phenomena is twofold, viz., attractive and repulsive; and the question has been raised whether these two kinds of activity can reside in one and the same subject, or, owing to their opposite nature, require separate subjects. With regard to molecules, it is quite certain, though some have thought otherwise, that in all ponderable bodies each molecule is in possession of both powers; but with regard to the primitive elements which enter into the constitution of a molecule, the question needs a special treatment, as no direct evidence is supplied by experimental science for an affirmative more than for a negative solution, and different views have been advanced which it is important to examine in the light of philosophical principles, that we may ascertain which of them has the best claim to adoption both in philosophy and in molecular mechanics.

Attractive and repulsive powers.

Since it is well known that all the phenomena of the material order, whether physical or chemical, ultimately depend on attractions and repulsions, we are compelled to admit the existence in nature of attractive and repulsive powers. Neither attractive powers alone nor repulsive powers alone would afford us a rational explanation of natural facts. If the primitive elements of matter were all repulsive, and nothing but repulsive, then neither the cohesion of material particles nor the gravitation of bodies would be possible; no solid and no liquid would exist; and all matter from the very beginning of its existence would have vanished in a state of extreme attenuation through the immensity of space. If, on the contrary, the primitive elements of matter were all attractive, and nothing but attractive, no expansive power would be found in nature; for the expansion of bodies evidently depends on a repulsion prevailing between their molecules. All solid and liquid bodies likewise proclaim the existence of repulsive powers by the resistance they oppose to compression. This resistance shows that their molecules are endowed with powers whose exertion impedes their mutual approach as soon as they have reached a certain limit of distance. It is plain that the power which impedes the approach under pressure must be a repulsive one. Thus both attractive and repulsive powers exist in nature.

But do they exist together in the same primitive element of matter? Boscovich answers in the affirmative; but his answer is not supported by any cogent reason. Having found no other means of accounting for the impenetrability of bodies, he assumed that every element of matter is so constituted as to be attractive at all great distances, according to the law of universal attraction, but that each element, at molecular distances, becomes repulsive in order to resist pressure, and again attractive in order to exercise chemical affinity, and then repulsive again, these alternations going on a certain number of times, till at last repulsivity alone prevails, which indefinitely increases when the distance of two elements indefinitely diminishes.

Yet this theory is by no means needed to account either for the impenetrability of bodies or for any other phenomenon; as what Boscovich ascribes to elements may be, and is in fact, a property of molecules—that is, of a compound system of elements. On the other hand, the theory is unnaturally complex, and the alternation of the attractive and repulsive exertions looks as unscientific as the epicycles of the old astronomers and other hypotheses once admitted as plausible, and now superseded by a fuller knowledge of natural laws. To a mind which examines the question of attractive and repulsive powers in the light of philosophy, it must be evident that each primitive element of matter cannot possess them both. If an element is attractive at any distance, it must be attractive at all distances, whether enormously great or indefinitely small; likewise, if an element is repulsive at any distance, it must be repulsive at all distances.

This proposition can be proved as follows: Opposite actions cannot originate from one and the same simple principle when such a principle has no control over itself, but acts by inherent necessity. But in each primitive element of matter there is but one simple principle of activity, which has no control over itself, as it acts by inherent necessity. And therefore no primitive element can be both attractive and repulsive, but is either attractive at all distances or at all distances repulsive.

In this syllogism the major is evident. An active principle which, like the human soul, can, by immanent operations, assume at pleasure different attitudes towards the term of its action, and which masters the conditions and controls the intensity of its exertions, may perhaps be considered competent to originate actions of opposite kinds.(159) But a being which is destitute of immanent operations, and acts by an inherent necessity of its nature, has no power to modify itself or to alter its intrinsic determination; and its action is so ruled by its intrinsic determination that there is no chance of its being either transmuted into its opposite, or even partially suspended. Now, in a primitive being the principle of activity is nothing else than the simple act which formally determines its nature; and it is plain that wherever there is one simple formal act, there can be only one formal determination to act. And consequently a simple principle of activity which has no immanent operations cannot be the source of two opposite kinds of actions. Bodies and their molecules, on account of their physical composition, contain as many distinct principles of activity as they contain physical components or elements; hence we can easily account for their capability of originating opposite actions by admitting that among those elements some are attractive and others repulsive. But in a primitive element it is impossible to admit of two opposite active principles; for a primitive element is a being entitatively one, having only one essential act, and consequently only one active principle and one intrinsic determination to act. It would therefore be absurd to expect from such an element actions of such an opposite nature as are attraction and repulsion. For evidently, to enable the element to display two opposite powers, two opposite determinations would be necessary. Hence, if the intrinsic determination enables the primitive element to attract, such an element will always attract, and never repel; and if, on the contrary, the intrinsic determination enables the primitive element to repel, such an element will always repel, and never attract. In other terms, the attractive and the repulsive power cannot coexist in the same primitive element.

This conclusion, which affords the only possible basis for the speculations of molecular mechanics, is one of those which mere scientists cannot reach through their empirical and inductive method; but its truth is not less certain for that; it is rather all the more certain, as it is not founded on accidental facts, but on the unchangeable nature of things and the transcendental relation of the principles involved in the constitution of real beings.

Our proposition may be confirmed by reflecting that the change of attraction into repulsion, according to Boscovich, would depend on the diminution of the distance between the agent and the patient. Now, this view is inadmissible. For a change of distance, though necessarily accompanied by a change in the intensity of the action, cannot exercise any influence on the specific nature of the action. The intensity of the action is an accidental thing, and can change without in the least interfering with the nature of the agent; and for this reason it can, and must, depend on distance as a condition implied in the exercise of the active power. But the nature of the action always follows the nature of the substance from which it proceeds. Now, a change of distance does not change the nature of the substance. And accordingly the nature of the action must remain the same, even though the distance be indefinitely diminished.

Moreover, if there were any distance at which the action of a primitive element could change from attractive to repulsive, evidently the element, at such a distance, would be unable to exercise either attraction or repulsion, as Boscovich concedes; and therefore, at such a distance, the material element would have no activity. We may, then, ask: Whence does the attractive power emanate which is to have uncontrolled sway at all greater distances? Does it emanate from any point of space outside the element? Then it would not be the active power of the element, as it would have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, it is obvious that if it emanates from the element, it does not end at a distance from it. For, since the active power is really identical with the formal principle from which the primitive element receives its nature, it is as necessary for the elementary power to reach the very centre of the element as it is for the form to be intrinsically terminated to its matter. Whence it follows that the elementary power of attraction, which prevails at all great distances, must emanate from the very centre of the element. But if so, why shall it not prevail up to that very centre? Is it, forsooth, because in the neighborhood of the centre an opposite principle prevails? Were this the case, the same primitive being would have two formal acts, and it would be two beings and two natures; which is an evident contradiction. As long, therefore, as we adhere to the fundamental doctrine that a primitive being cannot have more than one simple principle of activity, we must admit that a primitive element, if attractive at any distance, is attractive at all molecular distances, and, if repulsive at molecular distances, is repulsive at all distances.

Against the existence of attractive and repulsive powers in distinct primitive elements some objections now and then have been made. It has been said, first, that what we call repulsion is only a result of certain vortical movements of the ether all around the molecules of ponderable bodies. This objection is based on a false supposition. We have already shown that the arbitrary theory of the vortices fails altogether to explain the great phenomenon of universal attraction; and we may easily show that it fails as completely in regard to molecular repulsion. In fact, the centrifugal forces which are developed by vortical movements, and which in this theory are assumed as the cause of the phenomena of molecular resistances, are not active powers. They are components of the vortical movements, and nothing more; that is to say, they do not efficiently produce movements, but are the formal principles of movements already produced. To ascribe to them the molecular resistances and the impenetrability of bodies is, therefore, to admit the effect without the cause.

Secondly, some authors object that the resistance called into play by pressure is not a real action, and requires no efficient repulsive powers. They consider it, according to the vulgar prejudice, as a merely passive resistance; for they imagine that a body, when pressed or impinged on, resists the progress of the obtruding body by its own inert matter, which with its materiality obstructs the way onward. This old explanation is still popular with the great mass of the uninstructed, but is scientifically and philosophically worthless. For whatever causes a real change really acts; now, a body resisting the advance of another body causes a real change in the rate of its movement; therefore a body resisting the advance of another body really acts. Its resistance is therefore active, and not passive; that is, it consists in an exertion of repulsive power, and not in a material obstruction of the path.

Hence what physicists call “force of inertia” is not a passive resistance proceeding from the inertia of matter, but an active exertion of the molecular powers, and has been so called only because, all other things being equal, its intensity is proportional to the mass of the inert body.(160) Evidently, inertia itself cannot resist or check the advance of an impinging body. Nothing but a positive action can do it; for nothing but a positive action can communicate to the advancing body that impetus in the opposite direction which alone is competent to neutralize the impetus of the advance. Physicists know this very well, though many of them, owing to the difficulty of analyzing and expressing certain things with philosophical accuracy, do not always use, in this particular, a very correct language—a thing which, after all, must not surprise us, as one can be well read in physics without necessarily being a profound philosopher.

The third objection is aimed at our argument against Boscovich’s theory, in which we have said that attraction and repulsion are actions of opposite kinds. Boscovich, on the contrary, maintains that attraction and repulsion differ only as the greater from the less, and therefore cannot be considered as actions of a different kind. He says: “Both actions are of the same kind; for the one, as compared with the other, is negative; and negative things do not differ in kind from positive ones. That the one, as compared with the other, is negative, is evident from this: that they differ only in direction. That the negative and the positive belong to the same kind is evident from the principle, More and less do not differ in kind. In fact, from the positive, by a continued subtraction or diminution, we obtain first some smaller positive quantities, then zero, and lastly, if we still go on in our subtraction, negative quantities.”(161)

This argument, notwithstanding its speciousness, is not difficult to upset. It is not true, in the first place, that attraction and repulsion differ only in direction; on the contrary, they differ in everything except in direction. Two points A and B being given, there is only one direction from A to *B*, whether A be attractive or repulsive. If A is attractive, its attraction is directed from A to B; and if A is repulsive, its repulsion is no less directed from A to B. This is quite evident, as the action must in all cases proceed from the agent to the patient. It is evident, therefore, that the two actions must have the same direction. The movements of B will indeed have opposite directions, according as B is attracted or repelled; but this does not show that the actions themselves have opposite directions; it shows, on the contrary, that those actions, though directed in the same manner from A to B, are of a different nature, and proceed from opposite principles. And this conclusion may be confirmed by remarking that the direction is always from a point to a point, or from matter to matter; and consequently it is not the active power or the action, but only the position of the material centres, that can determine any direction. Accordingly, so long as such a position is not inverted, it is impossible to conceive two opposite directions from A to B. It is therefore evidently false that attraction and repulsion differ in direction.

It is not true, in the second place, that attraction and repulsion differ only as the positive differs from the negative, or the greater from the less. In the mathematical expression of mechanical relations, if we consider a movement as positive, the movement which points to an opposite direction must, of course, be affected by the negative sign. The same we must do with regard to forces and actions; for we estimate the actions by the movements which they produce, and we express them only in terms of movement—that is, by their effects. But this does not mean that there is either any movement or any action absolutely negative; for a negative movement would be no movement, and a negative action no action. It is in a relative and conventional sense only that movements are considered as positive or negative; and, moreover, either of the two opposite movements can be assumed as positive or as negative, at will; which shows very clearly that the negative and the positive do not differ in this case as the greater differs from the less, as Boscovich assumes; for either of the two can, at pleasure, be taken as positive, whereas it would be absurd to pretend that either of the two can, at pleasure, be pronounced to be the greater. Thus, when a stone is thrown up vertically, and abandoned to itself, if its ascent is taken as positive, its descent will be considered as negative. Now, according to Boscovich’s reasoning, we should infer that the ascent is greater than the descent, though they are evidently equal. And in the same manner, if the ascent is taken as negative (which nothing forbids), the descent must be taken as positive; whence, according to Boscovich, we ought to infer also that the descent is greater than the ascent. Any argument which leads to such glaring contradictions must be radically false. And therefore it is false that attraction and repulsion differ from one another as the greater from the less.

It might be urged, as a fourth objection, that if an attractive and a repulsive power differ in kind, then a repulsive element and an attractive element will be two kinds of material substance; which is inadmissible. For we cannot admit two kinds of primitive material beings essentially different, as the essence of matter must be the same in all the elements.

To this we answer that although there are two kinds of elements, there are not two kinds of matter. In other terms, an attractive element differs from a repulsive one as to the principle of action, but not as to the matter itself. In fact, the essence of a material being as such requires nothing more than a form giving existence to matter; hence, wherever there is a form giving existence to matter, there also is the essence of matter. Now, matter is as much and as completely actuated by a form or act which is a principle of attraction as by a form or act which is a principle of repulsion. For the actuation of the matter by its form is not efficient, but formal; and its result is not to approach by attraction or to recede by repulsion, but to be simply and absolutely; so that neither attractivity nor repulsivity has any bearing on the essential constitution of a material element as such—that is, inasmuch as it is material. Accordingly, two elements of opposite natures differ in kind as agents, but not as material beings; and thus the essence of matter as such remains one and the same in all the elements. Matter, as we have already shown, is the centre of a sphere of activity; and it is evident that, by this activity of an attractive or of a repulsive nature, the centre remains a centre, and the sphere a sphere, without the least alteration. Gold and ivory differ in kind; but a sphere of ivory and a sphere of gold do not differ in kind as spheres, and their centres do not differ in kind as centres. In a like manner the sphere of activity of an attractive element does not differ from the sphere of activity of a repulsive element, nor the centre of the one from the centre of the other. And therefore two elements, however different in their nature as agents, do not cease to be of the same kind as material. Their form is different, but informs equally, and their matter is exactly the same.

We have stated that Boscovich was led to admit two opposite powers in the same element, because he thought this to be the only means of accounting for the impenetrability of bodies. We observe that, although the impenetrability of bodies peremptorily proves the existence of repulsive powers, it by no means proves that the repulsive power coexists with the attractive in the same primitive element. Hence Boscovich’s inference is not legitimate. Molecules, as we have already remarked, may possess both powers, as their composition involves a great number of elements, which can be of different natures. And this suffices to explain the impenetrability of bodies, and all other properties dependent on molecular actions, without need of arbitrary hypotheses.

A last objection against the doctrine we have established might be drawn from the difficulty of reconciling the existence of repulsive elements with universal attraction; for if we admit that repulsion can be exercised at astronomical distances, it will be difficult to see how the celestial bodies can attract one another in the direct ratio of their masses, as the law of attraction requires.

The answer is obvious. If all matter were repulsive, universal repulsion would be the consequence. But if bodies are made up partly of attractive and partly of repulsive elements, then will either universal repulsion or universal attraction prevail, according as the number and power of the repulsive elements is greater or smaller than that of the attractive ones. Hence, from the fact that in the solar system and elsewhere attraction prevails, it follows, indeed, that the attractive powers are the stronger, but it does not follow that they are the whole stuff of which bodies are compounded.

As to the law of attraction in the direct ratio of the masses, a distinction is to be made. The law is certainly true if by masses we mean the masses acted on; not so, however, if for the masses acted on we substitute the masses of the attracting bodies. The fact of universal attraction shows that two planets, all other things being equal, must be attracted by the sun in the direct ratio of their masses. This is an established truth. But to say that, all other things being equal, the sun and the earth would attract the moon in the direct ratio of their absolute masses, is to assume what no fact whatever gives us the right to assert. Physicists very commonly admit this second assumption, and consider it a part of the law of attraction; but they would be not a little embarrassed were they required to undertake its demonstration. They take for granted that all the particles of matter are equally and uniformly attractive. Now, this assumption has never been established by facts; it simply arises from an unlawful generalization—that is, from the extension of the law of kinetic forces to dynamical actions. The momenta of two bodies animated by equal velocities are proportional to the masses of the same bodies; but nothing justifies the inference that therefore the attractive powers must be proportional to the masses. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to believe that equal masses of lead, iron, and zinc possess equal powers. Their properties are, in fact, so different that we cannot assume their constitution to be the result of an assemblage of equal powers. Hence we maintain that, unless two bodies have the same molecular constitution, their attractions cannot be proportional to their masses.(162)

Universal attraction being also proportional to the inverse squares of the distances, as we are going to show, we may add that the existence of repulsive elements in the sun and in the planets by no means interferes with this law. In fact, the total action of one celestial body on another, on account of the great distance at which the law of universal attraction is applied, equals the algebraic sum of all the actions by which one body makes an impression upon the other. Hence, if all the elements of which the body consists, whether they be attractive or repulsive, act proportionally to the inverse square of the distance, it is evident that the resultant of all such actions will also be proportional to the inverse square of the distance, whenever the form of the body is spherical, or nearly so, as is the case with the celestial bodies. And thus it is plain that no valid objection can be drawn from universal attraction against the existence of repulsive elements.

Law of elementary actions.

We have now to establish the general law of elementary attraction and repulsion. We hold that the actions of every primitive element are always inversely proportional to the squares of the distances, no matter whether such distances be great or small, astronomical or molecular.

This proposition can be briefly proved in the following manner: Astronomy teaches us that the Newtonian law, according to which the actions are inversely proportional to the squares of the distances, is true for all the celestial bodies. Now, the total action of one celestial body upon another is a resultant of elementary actions, and arises from the algebraic sum of them all. Hence it follows that every element of matter, when acting from certain distances, obeys the Newtonian law; for it is evident, from the theory of the composition of forces, that the sum of the elementary actions cannot follow the Newtonian law unless these actions themselves follow it. But if the law is true in the case of astronomical distances, it must be true also in the case of microscopical and molecular distances. For as a primitive element cannot have two laws of action, so neither can it follow at molecular distances any other law than that which it follows at all other distances.

That a primitive element cannot have two different laws of action will be manifest by considering that the law which an element obeys in its actions results from the intrinsic determination of its nature—that is, from its formal constitution—inasmuch as the principle of action is, in every primitive substance, the formal principle of its very being: Principium essendi est principium operandi. Now, a primitive element has but one formal principle of being; for it is entitatively one, and therefore it has but one formal determination to act, which, as resulting from its essential constitution, is unchangeable and inviolable. But it is evident that from one formal determination to act only one law of action can possibly result. Two laws would be two formal results, and would require two formal principles giving two different determinations. Accordingly, since each primitive element has but one formal principle, it cannot have two laws of action. And therefore the Newtonian law, which primitive elements follow at astronomical distances, must prevail also at all other distances.

Let the reader observe that this conclusion regards the action of primitive elements, not the action of molecules. That molecular actions at molecular distances are not inversely proportional to the square of the distance is a known fact. Molecular cohesion, for instance, is immensely greater than it could possibly be by the Newtonian law; so also molecular repulsion. This is what prevented physicists from recognizing the applicability of the Newtonian law at molecular distances. As long as the primitive elements were confounded, under the name of atoms, with the molecules of the so‐called primitive bodies, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc., it was impossible to recognize in the molecular actions any trace of the Newtonian law; hence came the division of attraction into universal and molecular, the first following a known law, the second following some other law or laws which physicists could never discover. Their embarrassment was a necessary consequence of an incomplete analysis of the material compound. The molecule of a given substance, though often called an atom, is a system of primitive elements; and elements acting according to the Newtonian law can give rise to molecular systems which, at very small distances, will act according to any other law that may be indicated by molecular phenomena. This other law depends entirely on the number, kind, strength, and geometrical arrangement of the primitive elements which enter into the constitution of the molecule; and since molecules of different primitive substances are very differently constituted, every kind of molecule must have its own peculiar law of acting at molecular distances—a fact on which the scientific explanation of the different physical and chemical properties of different substances entirely depends. Hence it is clear that all the attempts at finding a general law of molecular attraction were, from the very nature of the case, destined to fail. The only general law of action which all matter obeys is the Newtonian law; and what was once considered to form an exception to it is now acknowledged to be the result of its application to a complex system of attractive and repulsive elements.

From the fact that the actions of all elements are proportional to the inverse squares of the distances, it follows that the sphere of activity of material elements extends beyond any assignable limit. The intensity of the action cannot, in fact, become = 0 unless the distance becomes infinite. The objections to which this corollary of the Newtonian law may give rise will be answered in our next article, where all the difficulties concerning the actio in distans will be solved.

Mode of action.

A last question remains here to be examined respecting the action of primitive material elements—viz., whether such an action needs a medium through which it may be transmitted and communicated to distant bodies, or whether, on the contrary, it is exerted upon them directly without dependence on any material medium.

In answering this question we must be careful not to confound action with movement. Movement, though not properly transmitted, is propagated, as we shall explain; and this cannot take place where there is no movable matter. Those who are wont to identify movement with force, and force with action, as is unfortunately the fashion even in scientific treatises, will no doubt imagine that actions must be transmitted or propagated through a material medium, just as sound through air, or as light through luminiferous ether. But action is not movement; and therefore the question how elementary actions—that is, how attractions or repulsions—reach distant bodies has to be resolved on its own merit, as one altogether distinct from the question about the propagation of movement. This premised, we are going to show that the elementary actions are independent of all material medium of communication.

In the first place, there is no reason why we should assume that the elementary action (attraction or repulsion) depends on a medium of communication, except inasmuch as we may apprehend that the action itself, or the active power whence it proceeds, is in need of being transmitted to some matter located at a certain distance. But neither the elementary power nor the elementary action can be transmitted to the distant matter. And therefore neither the power nor the action can be dependent on a medium of communication.

In this syllogism the major is evident; and the minor can be proved in two manners: First, because the power and the action are, of their own nature, intransmissible. Secondly, because, prescinding from their intransmissibility, no medium can be assigned which would be capable of transmitting them. And as to the first, we know that nothing can be transmitted to a distant place except by local movement; but neither the active power nor the elementary action is capable of receiving local movement; for there is no other subject capable of local movement than matter alone, on account of its passive potentiality. Hence neither power nor action can be transmitted. And in the second place, even were they transmissible, what medium could be found for their transmission? If any such medium could be found, it would consist of some matter like ether or air, this being the view of those who admit the necessity of such a medium. On the other hand, a material substance is not a suitable medium for transmitting action or power. For whenever an active power is exerted upon matter, the result of the exertion is nothing but a determination to a change of place; as it is well known that matter cannot receive any other determination. And therefore it is not the power that is received in the matter acted on, but only the act produced by its exertion, which act is otherwise called a momentum either statical or dynamical. Strictly speaking, not even the action itself is received in the matter, although we are wont to tolerate such an expression; for the action properly so called is the production of an act, and the matter receives, indeed, the act produced, but not its production. And thus the action, properly speaking, is terminated to the matter, and not received in it. Hence we see that neither the power of the agent nor its exertion is received in the matter acted on; it is merely the produced accidental act, or, in other terms, the momentum, that is received. But evidently matter cannot transmit what it does not receive. And therefore matter cannot be a medium for transmitting either power or action. Whether it can transmit movement we shall examine at the end of the present question.

This argument would suffice to show that elementary actions are quite independent of a material medium. Yet as the prejudice against which we are fighting is ancient, popular, and deeply rooted, we think it will not be superfluous to confirm our proof by a few other considerations.

Those who maintain the transmission of forces admit a material medium, in which, by successive contact of particles with particles, the transmission of the force to a distant body is supposed to be carried on. By the word “force” they understand action as well as movement. Now, let us ask them whether the particles of their material medium come into mathematical contact or not. If they do not come into mathematical contact, then the action is not transmitted by the medium from one particle to another, for there will be a vacuum between them; and vacuum is not a material medium. If, on the contrary, the particles come into mathematical contact with their own matter, then, as we have already shown in our past article, they cannot by such a contact communicate any movement to each other; and since the transmission in question should be carried on by successive communications of movement, it is plain that no such transmission will be possible. And accordingly the theory of the transmission of actions through a medium must be rejected.

Moreover, elementary actions are either attractive or repulsive, and neither of them can be conceived without intensity and direction. Now, no direction is possible unless there be two points distinctly ubicated in space. And therefore the action, no matter whether attractive or repulsive, cannot reach any material point which is not distant from the matter of the agent. But if so, the action is independent of a medium of communication; for the material medium, if it were needed, should lie between the agent and the patient in such a manner as to link them together, and fill by its material continuity the gap by which they are separated; and if this were the case, the medium could not be set in motion, as its contact with the agent would exclude distance, and consequently the possibility of any direction from the agent to the medium itself.

Some will say that this argument proves nothing, as the direction of the action can be sufficiently accounted for by the direction of the impulse. But this conclusion is evidently wrong. For what impulse can they imagine to proceed from the sun to the moon? Uncultivated minds are easily deluded by unlawful generalizations. They apply to all actions what they imagine to agree with some special phenomenon; and because they see that in the case of impact there is an impulse in a certain direction, they hastily conclude that the direction of every action depends on the direction of some impulse. We may remark that, even in the case of impact, it is not safe to conclude that the direction of the movement will follow the direction of the impulse, unless the impulse be central, and the body impinged upon homogeneous. But leaving aside the theory of impact, which has nothing to do with the present question, what impulse can explain the continuous resistance of a body to statical forces? What impulse can account for the expansive tendency of gases, and for their continuous pressure against the recipients in which they are contained? What impulse, above all, can account for universal attraction?

We have mentioned this objection, not because it needed any scientific or philosophical discussion, but simply because it is one of those notions to which the prejudices of our infancy give easy admittance into our minds when we allow ourselves to be guided, as is often the case, by our senses and imagination, in matters pertaining in great part to the intellectual order. Our mistakes in the appreciation of the character and conditions of natural facts most ordinarily originate in the unwarranted assumption that, since the facts are sensible, our knowledge of them must wholly depend on our senses; whilst the truth is that our senses perceive the movements, but not the actions which cause them, and therefore do not see the entirety of the natural facts, but that portion only which is most superficial. “A fundamental fact, like an elementary principle, never fails us,” says M. Faraday, speaking of natural philosophy; “its evidence is always true; but, on the other hand, we frequently have to ask, What is the fact? often fail in distinguishing it—often fail in the very statement of it—and mostly overpass or come short of its true recognition. If we are subject to mistake in the interpretation of our mere sense impressions, we are much more liable to error when we proceed to deduce from these impressions (as supplied to us by our ordinary experience) the relation of cause and effect; and the accuracy of our judgment, consequently, is more endangered.”(163)

And now, let no one imagine that we have any intention of denying the existence of a material medium between the celestial bodies. We only deny that there is a medium for transmitting actions. Again, we do not deny that when the earth, for instance, acts upon the moon, the elements of matter lying between the earth and the moon exert their activity on one another. But we maintain that their actions are their own, and proceed from their own intrinsic and permanent power, and not from any extrinsic agent, and that such actions are not travelling from element to element till they reach the moon. Neither do we deny that the elements located between the earth and the moon are also acted on, for it is clear that gravity must tend to alter their position in space; but we hold that the whole possible effect of gravity on all such elements is movement, and that movement is a mere change of place, and not a transmission of the action by which it is produced. How the movements themselves are communicated from element to element we shall explain presently.

Meanwhile, from the fact that the elementary actions are independent of all material medium of communication, we infer that bodies, in attracting and in repelling, act with equal promptitude, and without loss of time, whether the distance of the body acted on be great or small. Time, in fact, follows movement; for without movement there is no succession. Now, the action of a body does not reach the distant body through movement—that is, through successive transmission; on the contrary, each element is, of its own nature, determined to act directly and immediately on every other element existing in the indefinite sphere of its activity. Hence a body will indeed act with a greater intensity at a less distance, but will not act sooner than at a greater distance. There have been scientists who surmised that the solar attraction may perhaps need time for reaching the earth and the planets, and therefore that the attraction may reach Mercury in a shorter time than Jupiter or Neptune. From what precedes it is manifest that the surmise is wholly without foundation. Light needs time for its propagation, because it consists in a kind of movement; but attraction, as we have just remarked, is not movement, and therefore is not dependent on time.

Propagation of movements.

We have shown that there is no material medium for the transmission of forces, if the word “forces” is taken to mean “actions”; but if the word is intended to express “movements,” then the material medium is quite indispensable. We read very frequently in scientific books that actions are transmitted; but as this is not true of the actions themselves, we must suppose that the phrase is intended to express only the fact of a progressive development of the effects resulting from those actions. In the same way, when we read that actions are conveyed through a material medium, we interpret this expression as meaning that a material medium is strictly required for the progressive development of the series of effects due to such actions. We will explain the fact by an example.

If, a mass of air being at rest, a string is stretched in order to elicit sound, the vibrations of the string will be communicated to the neighboring molecules of air by the action (not by the movement) of the string itself; these first molecules, being thrust out of their position of equilibrium, will, by their action (that is, by the exertion of a power residing in each of their component elements, not of a power coming from the string, nor by their movement, nor by transmitted action), put in movement a following set of molecules, and so on indefinitely; so that, in the whole series of molecular vibrations, each preceding molecule causes the motion of the following one, and causes it by the exertion of its own powers, not of any power transmitted. It is evident that the string cannot give activity to the molecules of air. These molecules, whether the string vibrates or not, have already their own activity and their own mutual action; only their actions balance each other as long as the mass of air is at rest. But when the string begins to vibrate, the equilibrium being broken near it, those molecules of air which first cease to be in equilibrium begin to act on the following molecules with a different intensity, according to the change of the molecular distance. Thus the movement by which the distance is altered is not the cause, but the condition, of the phenomenon.

What we say of air and sound applies to any other medium, as ether with its vibrations, whether luminous or calorific. The molecules of ether have their own powers, and exert them continually, whether there exists a flame determining a series of vibrations or not; but with the flame the first molecules of ether which are displaced from their position of equilibrium will acquire a new local relation with regard to the following, and their actions will be of a new intensity, sufficient to cause the displacement of the next set of molecules, and so on. The flame, then, causes the displacement of the first set of molecules; the first set displaced causes the displacement of the second; the second displaced causes the displacement of the third, etc.; each set producing its own effect by its own inherent powers, not by the exertion of any power communicated to them by the flame, and their displacement being not a cause, but only a condition, on which the intensity of the exertion depends.

Hence it appears that in phenomena of this description it is not the action, and much less the power, that is transmitted, but only the movement, or the formal perturbation of the equilibrium; and even the movement is not properly transmitted, but only propagated; because the movement of each following molecule is not the identical movement of each preceding one, but is a movement really produced in the very impact of the one on the other, as our reader must have easily gathered from our preceding discussion. And therefore one movement succeeds another indefinitely, the one being a condition for the existence of the other; which constitutes propagation, not properly transmission.

To Be Continued.

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Antar And Zara; Or, “The Only True Lovers.” V

An Eastern Romance Narrated In Songs.

By Aubrey De Vere.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. They Sang

I.

Sudden, in golden arms he came: I stood begirt with maiden bands: Sudden he came, all bright like flame; Upon my head he laid his hands.

“This day past victories I disown: This day I seek the battle‐field A stranger chief, a knight unknown, Without a blazon on my shield.”

“Not man, but He the worlds who made, My hope shall frustrate or approve”— I only bent my knee, and said, “Victor or vanquished, thee I love.”

II.

They set me on a milk‐white horse; Our household tribe around me trod; Like rivers down a rocky course, On rushed the warriors vowed to God.

I rode, the victor’s destined prize, Last stake when hope was all but gone: The flashes from a virgin’s eyes Like music swept the warriors on!

’Twas theirs their maid elect to guard, The direful battle’s gentle guest: ’Twas mine to watch, inspire, reward; To honor all—to crown the best.

But who that stranger chief from far That like some brave ship tempest‐tossed Bore on o’er all the waves of war; Redeemed a battle all but lost?

I knew. The victor’s crown I dropp’d Upon thy brows, my future lord: That night thou satt’st—O boon unhoped— The first time by my father’s board!

III.

The victory ours, the feasting o’er, The nameless victor gazed around; “Emir! I claim the prize of war, Thy daughter’s hand.” My father frowned.

“Uplift her in thine arms,” he said; “Then scale yon hillside smooth and dry: This done, my daughter thou shalt wed: To halt—forget not—is to die.”

I stood: my beating heart cried out, “Thou canst not fail!” That cry he heard: He raised me ’mid the warriors’ shout; Forward he rushed without a word.

His breath came quick: his brows grew dark: “My brother, lover, friend,” I cried: He reeled: his eyes were stiff and stark: I wept, “This day thou winn’st thy bride!”

He fell—but on the summit won, Amid the vast and wide acclaim: He lay, a dead man, in the sun: I kissed his lips, and felt no shame.

Round him the warriors stood amazed; His love—’twas that brought back his life: Down on him long my father gazed, Then spake, “My son, behold thy wife!”

IV.

On carpets heaped my mother sate: I sate, I nestled on her knee; We heard a murmur round the gate: My mantle, purple as the sea,

I drew about my little feet, And nearer sought my mother’s breast: He came; she spake, not slow to greet With courteous words the victor‐guest.

Slowly my veil my mother’s hands Lifted, to boast the battle’s prize;— “Prince! thou would’st give thy life and lands, If I but raised it to her eyes!”

V.

I knew thee well when first we met; I knew thee well when seldom seen; When we had parted, plainlier yet I read thy nature—nay, thy mien.

Thine earliest glance my tremors stayed; Then softly, and by slow degrees, With thee my confidence I made, And, pleased, discovered I could please.

But now that we are drawn so near, I lose thee in thine own fair light; Vanish the outlines once so clear:— I know thee more by faith than sight.

VI.

Upon my shoulder, lightly as a bird, Her white hand lit: then back she fled, afraid; Beside my seat once more she stood, nor stirred, But loosed her hair, and round me dropped its shade.

Down to my feet it fell—a sudden night: She spake, “Thy darkness and eclipse am I; But thou my sunrise art, and all my light; Still to weak things love grants the victory.”

More dulcet than the viol rang her laugh; Low laughed her mother; laughed her nurse full loud: “Not thee I fear,” she cried, indignant half, And kissed, methought, the head o’er which she bowed.

VII.

My Lyre reproved my childish mirth: My Lute, remembering sad, old years, Complained, “Thy feet are yet on earth; Thou caroll’st in the vale of tears.”

I hung my head: ashamed I moved; I answered soft with whispering voice, “O Love! ’tis thou that stand’st reproved; The fault is thine, if I rejoice;

“Not less this covenant have I made: I will not fold my hands in sleep Till aid to those who cry for aid I stretch—have wept with them that weep.”

VIII.

He sang, “I dreamed. Of thee, all night, one thought Shone like a white flower on a darkling mere Or like one star that flashes, rapture‐fraught, Through one blue gulf of heaven serene, and clear.”

She sang, “I dreamed not: happiest sleep is deep: I woke as wakes the young bird in the woods;— Thy spirit must have hung above my sleep, A bower balm‐breathing from a thousand buds.”

We strove in song; we sang, my love and I, Where laughed the streams, and where the rock’s broad breast Echoed the untaught, ecstatic harmony: We warred in happy songs; but hers was best.

IX.

Thou art not mine as I am thine: As great, or greater, is thy love; But loftier thoughts above thee shine, And lordlier aims before thee move.

The hand now clasping mine—that hand Let drop this hand to grasp the sword; It hurled in ruin from our land The impostor Prophet’s sons abhorred.

Manhood fell on thee with my tears At parting. With a woman’s joy I loved the warrior ’mid his peers— ’Twas girlish fancy loved the boy!

X.

Mother of him I loved and love, My mother too, ere long, to be! With loving words his choice approve, And take thy daughter to thy knee:

So shall mine eyes, up‐gazing still, Thine eyes in filial reverence watch; My hand be subject to thy will; My heart from thine its greatness catch.

The young can learn, and I am young And labor to be good and true— Tell her, O thou that know’st! I long To give her age its honors due.

XI.

He sang, “Upon the myrtle’s silver stem Thy name I carved. Henceforth that tree is mine!” Low‐laughing ’neath her vine‐wrought anadem She sang, “Thy name I graved upon the pine!

“The slenderer hand the stronger bark subdued— Say, is it lordlier, bound and tamed to lead The forest‐monarch from his sunburnt wood, Or snare some little bird that took no heed?”

We sang in valleys where the spring flowers sprang To passionate life: the eagle o’er us sailed: Down plunged the torrents, and the gray cliffs rang: We clashed our songs in war; but hers prevailed.

XII.

Methought to thine my angel spake:— Near us he seemed, and yet above— “Two children these! their sport they take; They teach each other how to love.”

Thine angel answered thus to mine: “When Virtue, perfected by pain, Has changed earth‐love to love divine, Then, stooping, we will lift these twain

“From this dull cave of mortal life Low‐roofed, and dimly lit with spars, To realms with love’s whole glories rife, And over‐vaulted by the stars,

“Where souls that love their God are one; Where He who made them is their joy: Play on—too young for love—play on! Your sports are sport of girl and boy!”

XIII.

Two hands—they meet; they part—’tis better so; Parted, they meet to shape one coronal: Two feet—they meet; they part, now swift, now slow They pace to music through one palace hall.

Two eyes—they move in concord: wanderers long, At last they rest on one unmoving star: Two mouths, in kisses met, dispart in song— Sweet are our meetings; sweet our partings are.

XIV.

I come, I go; yet neither shall repine: Sad is the parting; the return is sweet: Once more the battle with a voice divine Decrees our severance. Soon once more we meet.

We part not, save in seeming. We are one, In spirit one; in spirit we rejoice; Two voices are we, blent in unison, Two echoes of one mountain‐thrilling voice.

Nearer we are than words, than thought, can reach; Nearer we shall be; nearest, met on high; Nearest as not belonging each to each, But both to Him—that Love Who cannot die.

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