III

Now what interests me, as regards these details, is not the details
themselves, but the fact that none of them was foreseen by me, none of
them was planned by me, I was the author of none of them.  Circumstance,
working in harness with my temperament, created them all and compelled
them all.  I often offered help, and with the best intentions, but it was
rejected--as a rule, uncourteously.  I could never plan a thing and get
it to come out the way I planned it.  It came out some other way--some
way I had not counted upon.

And so I do not admire the human being--as an intellectual marvel--as
much as I did when I was young, and got him out of books, and did not
know him personally.  When I used to read that such and such a general
did a certain brilliant thing, I believed it.  Whereas it was not so.
Circumstance did it by help of his temperament.  The circumstances would
have failed of effect with a general of another temperament: he might see
the chance, but lose the advantage by being by nature too slow or too
quick or too doubtful.  Once General Grant was asked a question about a
matter which had been much debated by the public and the newspapers; he
answered the question without any hesitancy. "General, who planned the
the march through Georgia?"  "The enemy!"  He added that the enemy
usually makes your plans for you.  He meant that the enemy by neglect or
through force of circumstances leaves an opening for you, and you see
your chance and take advantage of it.

Circumstances do the planning for us all, no doubt, by help of our
temperaments.  I see no great difference between a man and a watch,
except that the man is conscious and the watch isn't, and the man TRIES
to plan things and the watch doesn't.  The watch doesn't wind itself and
doesn't regulate itself--these things are done exteriorly.  Outside
influences, outside circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him.  Left
to himself, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he
would keep would not be valuable.  Some rare men are wonderful watches,
with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and some men
are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys.  I am a Waterbury.  A
Waterbury of that kind, some say.

A nation is only an individual multiplied.  It makes plans and
Circumstances comes and upsets them--or enlarges them.  Some patriots
throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a Bastille.  The
PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in, quite unexpectedly, and
turns these modest riots into a revolution.

And there was poor Columbus.  He elaborated a deep plan to find a new
route to an old country.  Circumstance revised his plan for him, and he
found a new WORLD.  And HE gets the credit of it to this day.  He hadn't
anything to do with it.

Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours)
was the Garden of Eden.  It was there that the first link was forged of
the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me into the
literary guild.  Adam's TEMPERAMENT was the first command the Deity ever
issued to a human being on this planet.  And it was the only command Adam
would NEVER be able to disobey.  It said, "Be weak, be water, be
characterless, be cheaply persuadable."  The latter command, to let the
fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed.  Not by Adam himself, but by
his TEMPERAMENT--which he did not create and had no authority over.  For
the TEMPERAMENT is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named
Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more.  The law of the tiger's
temperament is, Thou shalt kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is
Thou shalt not kill.  To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let
the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbue its hands in the
blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands CAN'T be obeyed.
They would invite to violations of the law of TEMPERAMENT, which is
supreme, and take precedence of all other authorities.  I cannot help
feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve.  That is, in their temperaments.
Not in THEM, poor helpless young creatures--afflicted with temperaments
made out of butter; which butter was commanded to get into contact with
fire and BE MELTED.  What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam had been
postponed, and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that
splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of
asbestos. By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan have
beguiled THEM to eat the apple.    There would have been results! Indeed,
yes.  The apple would be intact today; there would be no human race;
there would be no YOU; there would be no ME.  And the old, old
creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild
would have been defeated.

How to make history dates stick

These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words large
enough to command respect.  In the hope that you are listening, and that
you have confidence in me, I will proceed. Dates are difficult things to
acquire; and after they are acquired it is difficult to keep them in the
head.  But they are very valuable.  They are like the cattle-pens of a
ranch--they shut in the several brands of historical cattle, each within
its own fence, and keep them from getting mixed together.  Dates are hard
to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously
unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no
pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help.  Pictures are the
thing.  Pictures can make dates stick. They can make nearly anything
stick--particularly IF YOU MAKE THE PICTURES YOURSELF.  Indeed, that is
the great point--make the pictures YOURSELF.  I know about this from
experience.  Thirty years ago I was delivering a memorized lecture every
night, and every night I had to help myself with a page of notes to keep
from getting myself mixed.  The notes consisted of beginnings of
sentences, and were eleven in number, and they ran something like this:

"IN THAT REGION THE WEATHER--"

"AT THAT TIME IT WAS A CUSTOM--"

"BUT IN CALIFORNIA ONE NEVER HEARD--"

Eleven of them.  They initialed the brief divisions of the lecture and
protected me against skipping.  But they all looked about alike on the
page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never with
certainty remember the order of their succession; therefore I always had
to keep those notes by me and look at them every little while.  Once I
mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the terrors of that
evening.  I now saw that I must invent some other protection.  So I got
ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order--I, A, B, and
so on--and I went on the platform the next night with these marked in ink
on my ten finger-nails.  But it didn't answer.  I kept track of the
figures for a while; then I lost it, and after that I was never quite
sure which finger I had used last.  I couldn't lick off a letter after
using it, for while that would have made success certain it also would
have provoked too much curiosity.  There was curiosity enough without
that.  To the audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails than I
was in my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was the
matter with my hands.

It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles
passed away.  In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, and they did
the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly.  I threw
the pictures away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I could shut
my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a century ago; the
lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I would
rewrite it from the pictures--for they remain.  Here are three of them:
(Fig. 1).

The first one is a haystack--below it a rattlesnake--and it told me where
to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson Valley.  The second one told me
where to begin the talk about a strange and violent wind that used to
burst upon Carson City from the Sierra Nevadas every afternoon at two
o'clock and try to blow the town away.  The third picture, as you easily
perceive, is lightning; its duty was to remind me when it was time to
begin to talk about San Francisco weather, where there IS no
lightning--nor thunder, either--and it never failed me.

I will give you a valuable hint.  When a man is making a speech and you
are to follow him don't jot down notes to speak from, jot down PICTURES.
It is awkward and embarrassing to have to keep referring to notes; and
besides it breaks up your speech and makes it ragged and non-coherent;
but you can tear up your pictures as soon as you have made them--they
will stay fresh and strong in your memory in the order and sequence in
which you scratched them down.  And many will admire to see what a good
memory you are furnished with, when perhaps your memory is not any better
than mine.

Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess
was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads.  Part of
this fun--if you like to call it that--consisted in the memorizing of the
accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from
the Conqueror down.  These little people found it a bitter, hard
contract.  It was all dates, and all looked alike, and they wouldn't
stick.  Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the
kings held the fort; the children couldn't conquer any six of them.

With my lecture experience in mind I was aware that I could invent some
way out of the trouble with pictures, but I hoped a way could be found
which would let them romp in the open air while they learned the kings.
I found it, and they mastered all the monarchs in a day or two.

The idea was to make them SEE the reigns with their eyes; that would be a
large help.  We were at the farm then.  From the house-porch the grounds
sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right to the
high ground where my small work-den stood.  A carriage-road wound through
the grounds and up the hill.  I staked it out with the English monarchs,
beginning with the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and
clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to
Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign--EIGHT HUNDRED AND
SEVENTEEN YEARS OF English history under your eye at once!

English history was an unusually live topic in America just then.  The
world had suddenly realized that while it was not noticing the Queen had
passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and Elizabeth, and gaining in length
every day.  Her reign had entered the list of the long ones; everybody
was interested now--it was watching a race.  Would she pass the long
Edward?  There was a possibility of it.  Would she pass the long Henry?
Doubtful, most people said.  The long George?  Impossible! Everybody said
it.  But we have lived to see her leave him two years behind.

I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and
at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three-foot white-pine
stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.
Abreast the middle of the porch-front stood a great granite flower-vase
overflowing with a cataract of bright-yellow flowers--I can't think of
their name.  The vase of William the Conqueror.  We put his name on it
and his accession date, 1066.  We started from that and measured off
twenty-one feet of the road, and drove William Rufus's state; then
thirteen feet and drove the first Henry's stake; then thirty-five feet
and drove Stephen's; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past the
summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five, ten, and
seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John; turned the curve and
entered upon just what was needed for Henry III.--a level, straight
stretch of fifty-six feet of road without a crinkle in it.  And it lay
exactly in front of the house, in the middle of the grounds.  There
couldn't have been a better place for that long reign; you could stand on
the porch and see those two wide-apart stakes almost with your eyes shut.
(Fig. 2.)

That isn't the shape of the road--I have bunched it up like that to save
room.  The road had some great curves in it, but their gradual sweep was
such that they were no mar to history. No, in our road one could tell at
a glance who was who by the size of the vacancy between stakes--with
LOCALITY to help, of course.

Although I am away off here in a Swedish village [1] and those stakes did
not stand till the snow came, I can see them today as plainly as ever;
and whenever I think of an English monarch his stakes rise before me of
their own accord and I notice the large or small space which he takes up
on our road. Are your kings spaced off in your mind?  When you think of
Richard III. and of James II. do the durations of their reigns seem about
alike to you?  It isn't so to me; I always notice that there's a foot's
difference.  When you think of Henry III. do you see a great long stretch
of straight road?  I do; and just at the end where it joins on to Edward
I. I always see a small pear-bush with its green fruit hanging down.
When I think of the Commonwealth I see a shady little group of these
small saplings which we called the oak parlor; when I think of George
III. I see him stretching up the hill, part of him occupied by a flight
of stone steps; and I can locate Stephen to an inch when he comes into my
mind, for he just filled the stretch which went by the summer-house.
Victoria's reign reached almost to my study door on the first little
summit; there's sixteen feet to be added now; I believe that that would
carry it to a big pine-tree that was shattered by some lightning one
summer when it was trying to hit me.

We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exercise, too.  We
trotted the course from the conqueror to the study, the children calling
out the names, dates, and length of reigns as we passed the stakes, going
a good gait along the long reigns, but slowing down when we came upon
people like Mary and Edward VI., and the short Stuart and Plantagenet, to
give time to get in the statistics.  I offered prizes, too--apples.  I
threw one as far as I could send it, and the child that first shouted the
reign it fell in got the apple.

The children were encouraged to stop locating things as being "over by
the arbor," or "in the oak parlor," or "up at the stone steps," and say
instead that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or in
George III.  They got the habit without trouble.  To have the long road
mapped out with such exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the
habit of leaving books and other articles lying around everywhere, and
had not previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had
often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and failure;
but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send the children.

Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and peg them
alongside the English ones, so that we could always have contemporaneous
French history under our eyes as we went our English rounds.  We pegged
them down to the Hundred Years' War, then threw the idea aside, I do not
now remember why.  After that we made the English pegs fence in European
and American history as well as English, and that answered very well.
English and alien poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues,
cataclysms, revolutions--we shoveled them all into the English fences
according to their dates.  Do you understand?  We gave Washington's birth
to George II.'s pegs and his death to George III.'s; George II. got the
Lisbon earthquake and George III. the Declaration of Independence.
Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French
Revolution, the Edict of Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey,
Patay, Cowpens, Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the
logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph--anything
and everything all over the world--we dumped it all in among the English
pegs according to it date and regardless of its nationality.

If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have lodged the
kings in the children's heads by means of pictures--that is, I should
have tried.  It might have failed, for the pictures could only be
effective WHEN MADE BY THE PUPIL; not the master, for it is the work put
upon the drawing that makes the drawing stay in the memory, and my
children were too little to make drawings at that time.  And, besides,
they had no talent for art, which is strange, for in other ways they are
like me.

But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will be able to
use it.  It will come good for indoors when the weather is bad and one
cannot go outside and peg a road.  Let us imagine that the kings are a
procession, and that they have come out of the Ark and down Ararat for
exercise and are now starting back again up the zigzag road.  This will
bring several of them into view at once, and each zigzag will represent
the length of a king's reign.

And so on.  You will have plenty of space, for by my project you will use
the parlor wall.  You do not mark on the wall; that would cause trouble.
You only attach bits of paper to it with pins or thumb-tacks.  These will
leave no mark.

Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper, each two inches
square, and we will do the twenty-one years of the Conqueror's reign.  On
each square draw a picture of a whale and write the dates and term of
service.  We choose the whale for several reasons: its name and William's
begin with the same letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and
William is the most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a
landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw. By the
time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written "William
I.--1066-1087--twenty-one years" twenty-one times, those details will be
your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory with anything
but dynamite.  I will make a sample for you to copy: (Fig. 3).

I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he is looking for
Harold.  It may be that a whale hasn't that fin up there on his back, but
I do not remember; and so, since there is a doubt, it is best to err on
the safe side.  He looks better, anyway, than he would without it.

Be very careful and ATTENTIVE while you are drawing your first whale from
my sample and writing the word and figures under it, so that you will not
need to copy the sample any more. Compare your copy with the sample;
examine closely; if you find you have got everything right and can shut
your eyes and see the picture and call the words and figures, then turn
the sample and copy upside down and make the next copy from memory; and
also the next and next, and so on, always drawing and writing from memory
until you have finished the whole twenty-one.  This will take you twenty
minutes, or thirty, and by that time you will find that you can make a
whale in less time than an unpracticed person can make a sardine; also,
up to the time you die you will always be able to furnish William's dates
to any ignorant person that inquires after them.

You will now take thirteen pieces of BLUE paper, each two inches square,
and do William II. (Fig. 4.)

Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also make him
small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him that sick look in the eye.
Otherwise you might seem to be continuing the other William, and that
would be confusing and a damage.  It is quite right to make him small; he
was only about a No. 11 whale, or along there somewhere; there wasn't
room in him for his father's great spirit.  The barb of that harpoon
ought not to show like that, because it is down inside the whale and
ought to be out of sight, but it cannot be helped; if the barb were
removed people would think some one had stuck a whip-stock into the
whale.  It is best to leave the barb the way it is, then every one will
know it is a harpoon and attending to business. Remember--draw from the
copy only once; make your other twelve and the inscription from memory.

Now the truth is that whenever you have copied a picture and its
inscription once from my sample and two or three times from memory the
details will stay with you and be hard to forget. After that, if you
like, you may make merely the whale's HEAD and WATER-SPOUT for the
Conqueror till you end his reign, each time SAYING the inscription in
place of writing it; and in the case of William II. make the HARPOON
alone, and say over the inscription each time you do it.  You see, it
will take nearly twice as long to do the first set as it will to do the
second, and that will give you a marked sense of the difference in length
of the two reigns.

Next do Henry I. on thirty-five squares of RED paper. (Fig. 5.)

That is a hen, and suggests Henry by furnishing the first syllable. When
you have repeated the hen and the inscription until you are perfectly
sure of them, draw merely the hen's head the rest of the thirty-five
times, saying over the inscription each time.  Thus: (Fig. 6).

You begin to understand how how this procession is going to look when it
is on the wall.  First there will be the Conqueror's twenty-one whales
and water-spouts, the twenty-one white squares joined to one another and
making a white stripe three and one-half feet long; the thirteen blue
squares of William II. will be joined to that--a blue stripe two feet,
two inches long, followed by Henry's red stripe five feet, ten inches
long, and so on.  The colored divisions will smartly show to the eye the
difference in the length of the reigns and impress the proportions on the
memory and the understanding. (Fig. 7.)

Stephen of Blois comes next.  He requires nineteen two-inch squares of
YELLOW paper. (Fig. 8.)

That is a steer.  The sound suggests the beginning of Stephen's name.  I
choose it for that reason.  I can make a better steer than that when I am
not excited.  But this one will do.  It is a good-enough steer for
history.  The tail is defective, but it only wants straightening out.

Next comes Henry II.  Give him thirty-five squares of RED paper. These
hens must face west, like the former ones. (Fig. 9.)

This hen differs from the other one.  He is on his way to inquire what
has been happening in Canterbury.

How we arrive at Richard I., called Richard of the Lion-heart because he
was a brave fighter and was never so contented as when he was leading
crusades in Palestine and neglecting his affairs at home.  Give him ten
squares of WHITE paper. (Fig. 10).

That is a lion.  His office is to remind you of the lion-hearted Richard.
There is something the matter with his legs, but I do not quite know what
it is, they do not seem right. I think the hind ones are the most
unsatisfactory; the front ones are well enough, though it would be better
if they were rights and lefts.

Next comes King John, and he was a poor circumstance. He was called
Lackland.  He gave his realm to the Pope. Let him have seventeen squares
of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 11.)

That creature is a jamboree.  It looks like a trademark, but that is only
an accident and not intentional.  It is prehistoric and extinct.  It used
to roam the earth in the Old Silurian times, and lay eggs and catch fish
and climb trees and live on fossils; for it was of a mixed breed, which
was the fashion then. It was very fierce, and the Old Silurians were
afraid of it, but this is a tame one.  Physically it has no
representative now, but its mind has been transmitted.  First I drew it
sitting down, but have turned it the other way now because I think it
looks more attractive and spirited when one end of it is galloping.  I
love to think that in this attitude it gives us a pleasant idea of John
coming all in a happy excitement to see what the barons have been
arranging for him at Runnymede, while the other one gives us an idea of
him sitting down to wring his hands and grieve over it.

We now come to Henry III.; RED squares again, of course--fifty-six of
them.  We must make all the Henrys the same color; it will make their
long reigns show up handsomely on the wall. Among all the eight Henrys
there were but two short ones.  A lucky name, as far as longevity goes.
The reigns of six of the Henrys cover 227 years.  It might have been well
to name all the royal princes Henry, but this was overlooked until it was
too late. (Fig. 12.)

This is the best one yet.  He is on his way (1265) to have a look at the
first House of Commons in English history.  It was a monumental event,
the situation in the House, and was the second great liberty landmark
which the century had set up.  I have made Henry looking glad, but this
was not intentional.

Edward I. comes next; LIGHT-BROWN paper, thirty-five squares. (Fig. 13.)

That is an editor.  He is trying to think of a word.  He props his feet
on a chair, which is the editor's way; then he can think better.  I do
not care much for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor
suggests the sound of Edward, and he will do.  I could make him better if
I had a model, but I made this one from memory.  But is no particular
matter; they all look alike, anyway.  They are conceited and troublesome,
and don't pay enough.  Edward was the first really English king that had
yet occupied the throne.  The editor in the picture probably looks just
as Edward looked when it was first borne in upon him that this was so.
His whole attitude expressed gratification and pride mixed with
stupefaction and astonishment.

Edward II. now; twenty BLUE squares. (Fig. 14.)

Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he
finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that.
That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he is
doing in the picture.  This one has just been striking out a smart thing,
and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating.
They are full of envy and malice, editors are.  This picture will serve
to remind you that Edward II. was the first English king who was DEPOSED.
Upon demand, he signed his deposition himself.  He had found kingship a
most aggravating and disagreeable occupation, and you can see by the look
of him that he is glad he resigned.  He has put his blue pencil up for
good now.  He had struck out many a good thing with it in his time.

Edward III. next; fifty RED squares. (Fig. 15.)

This editor is a critic.  He has pulled out his carving-knife and his
tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for
breakfast.  This one's arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at
first, but I see it now.  Somehow he has got his right arm on his left
shoulder, and his left arm on his right shoulder, and this shows us the
back of his hands in both instances.  It makes him left-handed all
around, which is a thing which has never happened before, except perhaps
in a museum. That is the way with art, when it is not acquired but born
to you: you start in to make some simple little thing, not suspecting
that your genius is beginning to work and swell and strain in secret, and
all of a sudden there is a convulsion and you fetch out something
astonishing.  This is called inspiration. It is an accident; you never
know when it is coming.  I might have tried as much as a year to think of
such a strange thing as an all-around left-handed man and I could not
have done it, for the more you try to think of an unthinkable thing the
more it eludes you; but it can't elude inspiration; you have only to bait
with inspiration and you will get it every time.  Look at Botticelli's
"Spring."  Those snaky women were unthinkable, but inspiration secured
them for us, thanks to goodness.  It is too late to reorganize this
editor-critic now; we will leave him as he is.  He will serve to remind
us.

Richard II. next; twenty-two WHITE squares.  (Fig. 16.)

We use the lion again because this is another Richard.  Like Edward II.,
he was DEPOSED.  He is taking a last sad look at his crown before they
take it away.  There was not room enough and I have made it too small;
but it never fitted him, anyway.

Now we turn the corner of the century with a new line of monarchs--the
Lancastrian kings.

Henry IV.; fourteen squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 17.)

This hen has laid the egg of a new dynasty and realizes the magnitude of
the event.  She is giving notice in the usual way. You notice I am
improving in the construction of hens.  At first I made them too much
like other animals, but this one is orthodox.  I mention this to
encourage you.  You will find that the more you practice the more
accurate you will become.  I could always draw animals, but before I was
educated I could not tell what kind they were when I got them done, but
now I can.  Keep up your courage; it will be the same with you, although
you may not think it.  This Henry died the year after Joan of Arc was
born.

Henry V.; nine BLUE squares. (Fig. 18)

There you see him lost in meditation over the monument which records the
amazing figures of the battle of Agincourt.  French history says 20,000
Englishmen routed 80,000 Frenchmen there; and English historians say that
the French loss, in killed and wounded, was 60,000.

Henry VI.; thirty-nine RED squares. (Fig. 19)

This is poor Henry VI., who reigned long and scored many misfortunes and
humiliations.  Also two great disasters: he lost France to Joan of Arc
and he lost the throne and ended the dynasty which Henry IV. had started
in business with such good prospects.  In the picture we see him sad and
weary and downcast, with the scepter falling from his nerveless grasp.
It is a pathetic quenching of a sun which had risen in such splendor.

Edward IV.; twenty-two LIGHT-BROWN squares. (Fig. 20.)

That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs
crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so
that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they
are and get bribes for it and become wealthy.  That flower which he is
wearing in his buttonhole is a rose--a white rose, a York rose--and will
serve to remind us of the War of the Roses, and that the white one was
the winning color when Edward got the throne and dispossessed the
Lancastrian dynasty.

Edward V.; one-third of a BLACK square. (Fig. 21.)

His uncle Richard had him murdered in the tower.  When you get the reigns
displayed upon the wall this one will be conspicuous and easily
remembered.  It is the shortest one in English history except Lady Jane
Grey's, which was only nine days.  She is never officially recognized as
a monarch of England, but if you or I should ever occupy a throne we
should like to have proper notice taken of it; and it would be only fair
and right, too, particularly if we gained nothing by it and lost our
lives besides.

Richard III.; two WHITE squares. (Fig. 22.)

That is not a very good lion, but Richard was not a very good king.  You
would think that this lion has two heads, but that is not so; one is only
a shadow.  There would be shadows for the rest of him, but there was not
light enough to go round, it being a dull day, with only fleeting
sun-glimpses now and then. Richard had a humped back and a hard heart,
and fell at the battle of Bosworth.  I do not know the name of that
flower in the pot, but we will use it as Richard's trade-mark, for it is
said that it grows in only one place in the world--Bosworth Field--and
tradition says it never grew there until Richard's royal blood warmed its
hidden seed to life and made it grow.

Henry VII.; twenty-four BLUE squares. (Fig. 23.)

Henry VII. had no liking for wars and turbulence; he preferred peace and
quiet and the general prosperity which such conditions create.  He liked
to sit on that kind of eggs on his own private account as well as the
nation's, and hatch them out and count up their result.  When he died he
left his heir 2,000,000 pounds, which was a most unusual fortune for a
king to possess in those days.  Columbus's great achievement gave him the
discovery-fever, and he sent Sebastian Cabot to the New World to search
out some foreign territory for England.  That is Cabot's ship up there in
the corner.  This was the first time that England went far abroad to
enlarge her estate--but not the last.

Henry VIII.; thirty-eight RED squares. (Fig. 24.)

That is Henry VIII. suppressing a monastery in his arrogant fashion.

Edward VI.; six squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 25.)

He is the last Edward to date.  It is indicated by that thing over his
head, which is a LAST--shoemaker's last.

Mary; five squares of BLACK paper. (Fig. 26.)

The picture represents a burning martyr.  He is in back of the smoke.
The first three letters of Mary's name and the first three of the word
martyr are the same.  Martyrdom was going out in her day and martyrs were
becoming scarcer, but she made several.  For this reason she is sometimes
called Bloody Mary.

This brings us to the reign of Elizabeth, after passing through a period
of nearly five hundred years of England's history--492 to be exact.  I
think you may now be trusted to go the rest of the way without further
lessons in art or inspirations in the matter of ideas.  You have the
scheme now, and something in the ruler's name or career will suggest the
pictorial symbol.  The effort of inventing such things will not only help
your memory, but will develop originality in art.  See what it has done
for me.  If you do not find the parlor wall big enough for all of
England's history, continue it into the dining-room and into other rooms.
This will make the walls interesting and instructive and really worth
something instead of being just flat things to hold the house together.

----- 1.  Summer of 1899.

The memorable assassination

Note.--The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva, September
10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain's Austrian residence.  The news came
to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer resort a little way out of Vienna.
To his friend, the Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, he wrote:

"That good and unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman, and
I am living in the midst of world-history again.  The Queen's Jubilee
last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this
murder, which will still be talked of and described and painted a
thousand a thousand years from now.  To have a personal friend of the
wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening
and say, in a voice broken with tears, 'My God! the Empress is murdered,'
and fly toward her home before we can utter a question--why, it brings
the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it and personally
interested; it is as if your neighbor, Antony, should come flying and
say, 'Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!'

"Of course there is no talk but of this.  The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying.  The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black.  Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,
when the funeral cort`ege marches."

He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning it.
He prepared the article which follows, but did not offer it for
publication, perhaps feeling that his own close association with the
court circles at the moment prohibited this personal utterance.  There
appears no such reason for withholding its publication now.

A. B. P.

The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and
tremendous the event becomes.  The destruction of a city is a large
event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand
years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by plague and famine
is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the
murder of a king is a large event, but it has been frequent.

The murder of an empress is the largest of all events.  One must go back
about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one.  The
oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in Rome and
traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of it has
been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until now.  Many
a time during these seventeen centuries members of that family have been
startled with the news of extraordinary events--the destruction of
cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the wreck of dynasties,
the extinction of religions, the birth of new systems of government; and
their descendants have been by to hear of it and talk about it when all
these things were repeated once, twice, or a dozen times--but to even
that family has come news at last which is not staled by use, has no
duplicates in the long reach of its memory.

It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon every individual
now living in the world: he has stood alive and breathing in the presence
of an event such as has not fallen within the experience of any traceable
or untraceable ancestor of his for twenty centuries, and it is not likely
to fall within the experience of any descendant of his for twenty more.

Time has made some great changes since the Roman days.  The murder of an
empress then--even the assassination of Caesar himself--could not
electrify the world as this murder has electrified it.  For one reason,
there was then not much of a world to electrify; it was a small world, as
to known bulk, and it had rather a thin population, besides; and for
another reason, the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial
thrill wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and
by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little of it
left.  It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of the far past; it
was not properly news, it was history.  But the world is enormous now,
and prodigiously populated--that is one change; and another is the
lightning swiftness of the flight of tidings, good and bad.  "The Empress
is murdered!"  When those amazing words struck upon my ear in this
Austrian village last Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew
that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San
Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta,
and that the entire globe with a single voice, was cursing the
perpetrator of it.  Since the telegraph first began to stretch itself
wider and wider about the earth, larger and increasingly larger areas of
the world have, as time went on, received simultaneously the shock of a
great calamity; but this is the first time in history that the entire
surface of the globe has been swept in a single instant with the thrill
of so gigantic an event.

And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this
spectacle?  All the ironies are compacted in the answer.  He is at the
bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and value
go: a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without talents,
without education, without morals, without character, without any born
charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a
single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could
envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent
stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive,
empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human polecat.
And it was within the privileges and powers of this sarcasm upon the
human race to reach up--up--up--and strike from its far summit in the
social skies the world's accepted ideal of Glory and Might and Splendor
and Sacredness!  It realizes to us what sorry shows and shadows we are.
Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things and much of a
size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams.  At our best and
stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but
only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often
forget--or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one
way or another all men are mad.  Many are mad for money.  When this
madness is in a mild form it is harmless and the man passes for sane; but
when it develops powerfully and takes possession of the man, it can make
him cheat, rob, and kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost it
again it can land him in the asylum or the suicide's coffin.  Love is a
madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of despair
and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like Rudolph, throw
away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own life.  All the whole
list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions, passions, cares,
griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipient madness, and ready to grow,
spread, and consume, when the occasion comes.  There are no healthy
minds, and nothing saves any man but accident--the accident of not having
his malady put to the supreme test.

One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the
pleasure derived from being noticed.  Perhaps it is not merely common,
but universal.  In its mildest form it doubtless is universal.  Every
child is pleased at being noticed; many intolerable children put in their
whole time in distressing and idiotic effort to attract the attention of
visitors; boys are always "showing off"; apparently all men and women are
glad and grateful when they find that they have done a thing which has
lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused wondering talk.
This common madness can develop, by nurture, into a hunger for notoriety
in one, for fame in another.  It is this madness for being noticed and
talked about which has invented kingship and the thousand other
dignities, and tricked them out with pretty and showy fineries; it has
made kings pick one another's pockets, scramble for one another's crowns
and estates, slaughter one another's subjects; it has raised up
prize-fighters, and poets, and villages mayors, and little and big
politicians, and big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions,
and banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons. Anything to
get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the township, or the city,
or the State, or the nation, or the planet shouting, "Look--there he
goes--that is the man!"  And in five minutes' time, at no cost of brain,
or labor, or genius this mangy Italian tramp has beaten them all,
transcended them all, outstripped them all, for in time their names will
perish; but by the friendly help of the insane newspapers and courts and
kings and historians, his is safe and live and thunder in the world all
down the ages as long as human speech shall endure!  Oh, if it were not
so tragic how ludicrous it would be!

She was so blameless, the Empress; and so beautiful, in mind and heart,
in person and spirit; and whether with a crown upon her head or without
it and nameless, a grace to the human race, and almost a justification of
its creation; WOULD be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down
re-establishes the doubt.

In her character was every quality that in woman invites and engages
respect, esteem, affection, and homage.  Her tastes, her instincts, and
her aspirations were all high and fine and all her life her heart and
brain were busy with activities of a noble sort.  She had had bitter
griefs, but they did not sour her spirit, and she had had the highest
honors in the world's gift, but she went her simple way unspoiled.  She
knew all ranks, and won them all, and made them her friends.  An English
fisherman's wife said, "When a body was in trouble she didn't send her
help, she brought it herself."  Crowns have adorned others, but she
adorned her crowns.

It was a swift celebrity the assassin achieved.  And it is marked by some
curious contrasts.  At noon last, Saturday there was no one in the world
who would have considered acquaintanceship with him a thing worth
claiming or mentioning; no one would have been vain of such an
acquaintanceship; the humblest honest boot-black would not have valued
the fact that he had met him or seen him at some time or other; he was
sunk in abysmal obscurity, he was away beneath the notice of the bottom
grades of officialdom.  Three hours later he was the one subject of
conversation in the world, the gilded generals and admirals and governors
were discussing him, all the kings and queens and emperors had put aside
their other interests to talk about him. And wherever there was a man, at
the summit of the world or the bottom of it, who by chance had at some
time or other come across that creature, he remembered it with a secret
satisfaction, and MENTIONED it--for it was a distinction, now!  It brings
human dignity pretty low, and for a moment the thing is not quite
realizable--but it is perfectly true.  If there is a king who can
remember, now, that he once saw that creature in a time past, he has let
that fact out, in a more or less studiedly casual and indifferent way,
some dozens of times during the past week.  For a king is merely human;
the inside of him is exactly like the inside of any other person; and it
is human to find satisfaction in being in a kind of personal way
connected with amazing events. We are all privately vain of such a thing;
we are all alike; a king is a king by accident; the reason the rest of us
are not kings is merely due to another accident; we are all made out of
the same clay, and it is a sufficient poor quality.

Below the kings, these remarks are in the air these days; I know it well
as if I were hearing them:

THE COMMANDER: "He was in my army."

THE GENERAL: "He was in my corps."

THE COLONEL: "He was in my regiment.  A brute.  I remember him well."

THE CAPTAIN: "He was in my company.  A troublesome scoundrel.  I remember
him well."

THE SERGEANT: "Did I know him?  As well as I know you. Why, every morning
I used to--" etc., etc.; a glad, long story, told to devouring ears.

THE LANDLADY: "Many's the time he boarded with me.  I can show you his
very room, and the very bed he slept in.  And the charcoal mark there on
the wall--he made that.  My little Johnny saw him do it with his own
eyes.  Didn't you, Johnny?"

It is easy to see, by the papers, that the magistrate and the constables
and the jailer treasure up the assassin's daily remarks and doings as
precious things, and as wallowing this week in seas of blissful
distinction.  The interviewer, too; he tried to let on that he is not
vain of his privilege of contact with this man whom few others are
allowed to gaze upon, but he is human, like the rest, and can no more
keep his vanity corked in than could you or I.

Some think that this murder is a frenzied revolt against the criminal
militarism which is impoverishing Europe and driving the starving poor
mad.  That has many crimes to answer for, but not this one, I think.  One
may not attribute to this man a generous indignation against the wrongs
done the poor; one may not dignify him with a generous impulse of any
kind.  When he saw his photograph and said, "I shall be celebrated," he
laid bare the impulse that prompted him.  It was a mere hunger for
notoriety. There is another confessed case of the kind which is as old as
history--the burning of the temple of Ephesus.

Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must
concede high rank to the many which have described it as a "peculiarly
brutal crime" and then added that it was "ordained from above."  I think
this verdict will not be popular "above."  If the deed was ordained from
above, there is no rational way of making this prisoner even partially
responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him without
manifestly committing a crime.  Logic is logic, and by disregarding its
laws even the most pious and showy theologian may be beguiled into
preferring charges which should not be ventured upon except in the
shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.

I witnessed the funeral procession, in company with friends, from the
windows of the Krantz, Vienna's sumptuous new hotel.  We came into town
in the middle of the forenoon, and I went on foot from the station.
Black flags hung down from all the houses; the aspects were Sunday-like;
the crowds on the sidewalks were quiet and moved slowly; very few people
were smoking; many ladies wore deep mourning, gentlemen were in black as
a rule; carriages were speeding in all directions, with footmen and
coachmen in black clothes and wearing black cocked hats; the shops were
closed; in many windows were pictures of the Empress: as a beautiful
young bride of seventeen; as a serene and majestic lady with added years;
and finally in deep black and without ornaments--the costume she always
wore after the tragic death of her son nine years ago, for her heart
broke then, and life lost almost all its value for her.  The people stood
grouped before these pictures, and now and then one saw women and girls
turn away wiping the tears from their eyes.

In front of the Krantz is an open square; over the way was the church
where the funeral services would be held.  It is small and old and
severely plain, plastered outside and whitewashed or painted, and with no
ornament but a statue of a monk in a niche over the door, and above that
a small black flag.  But in its crypt lie several of the great dead of
the House of Habsburg, among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon's son, the
Duke of Reichstadt. Hereabouts was a Roman camp, once, and in it the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius died a thousand years before the first Habsburg
ruled in Vienna, which was six hundred years ago and more.

The little church is packed in among great modern stores and houses, and
the windows of them were full of people.  Behind the vast plate-glass
windows of the upper floors of the house on the corner one glimpsed
terraced masses of fine-clothed men and women, dim and shimmery, like
people under water.  Under us the square was noiseless, but it was full
of citizens; officials in fine uniforms were flitting about on errands,
and in a doorstep sat a figure in the uttermost raggedness of poverty,
the feet bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty,
he was, and through the field-glass one could see that he was tearing
apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered somewhere.  Blazing
uniforms flashed by him, making a sparkling contrast with his drooping
ruin of moldy rags, but he took not notice; he was not there to grieve
for a nation's disaster; he had his own cares, and deeper.  From two
directions two long files of infantry came plowing through the pack and
press in silence; there was a low, crisp order and the crowd vanished,
the square save the sidewalks was empty, the private mourner was gone.
Another order, the soldiers fell apart and enclosed the square in a
double-ranked human fence.  It was all so swift, noiseless, exact--like a
beautifully ordered machine.

It was noon, now.  Two hours of stillness and waiting followed.  Then
carriages began to flow past and deliver the two and three hundred court
personages and high nobilities privileged to enter the church.  Then the
square filled up; not with civilians, but with army and navy officers in
showy and beautiful uniforms.  They filled it compactly, leaving only a
narrow carriage path in front of the church, but there was no civilian
among them.  And it was better so; dull clothes would have marred the
radiant spectacle.  In the jam in front of the church, on its steps, and
on the sidewalk was a bunch of uniforms which made a blazing splotch of
color--intense red, gold, and white--which dimmed the brilliancies around
them; and opposite them on the other side of the path was a bunch of
cascaded bright-green plumes above pale-blue shoulders which made another
splotch of splendor emphatic and conspicuous in its glowing surroundings.
It was a sea of flashing color all about, but these two groups were the
high notes.  The green plumes were worn by forty or fifty Austrian
generals, the group opposite them were chiefly Knights of Malta and
knights of a German order.  The mass of heads in the square were covered
by gilt helmets and by military caps roofed with a mirror-like gaze, and
the movements of the wearers caused these things to catch the sun-rays,
and the effect was fine to see--the square was like a garden of richly
colored flowers with a multitude of blinding and flashing little suns
distributed over it.

Think of it--it was by command of that Italian loafer yonder on his
imperial throne in the Geneva prison that this splendid multitude was
assembled there; and the kings and emperors that were entering the church
from a side street were there by his will. It is so strange, so
unrealizable.

At three o'clock the carriages were still streaming by in single file.
At three-five a cardinal arrives with his attendants; later some bishops;
then a number of archdeacons--all in striking colors that add to the
show.  At three-ten a procession of priests passed along, with crucifix.
Another one, presently; after an interval, two more; at three-fifty
another one--very long, with many crosses, gold-embroidered robes, and
much white lace; also great pictured banners, at intervals, receding into
the distance.

A hum of tolling bells makes itself heard, but not sharply. At
three-fifty-eight a waiting interval.  Presently a long procession of
gentlemen in evening dress comes in sight and approaches until it is near
to the square, then falls back against the wall of soldiers at the
sidewalk, and the white shirt-fronts show like snowflakes and are very
conspicuous where so much warm color is all about.

A waiting pause.  At four-twelve the head of the funeral procession comes
into view at last.  First, a body of cavalry, four abreast, to widen the
path.  Next, a great body of lancers, in blue, with gilt helmets.  Next,
three six-horse mourning-coaches; outriders and coachmen in black, with
cocked hats and white wigs.  Next, troops in splendid uniforms, red,
gold, and white, exceedingly showy.

Now the multitude uncover.  The soldiers present arms; there is a low
rumble of drums; the sumptuous great hearse approaches, drawn at a walk
by eight black horses plumed with black bunches of nodding ostrich
feathers; the coffin is borne into the church, the doors are closed.

The multitude cover their heads, and the rest of the procession moves by;
first the Hungarian Guard in their indescribably brilliant and
picturesque and beautiful uniform, inherited from the ages of barbaric
splendor, and after them other mounted forces, a long and showy array.

Then the shining crown in the square crumbled apart, a wrecked rainbow,
and melted away in radiant streams, and in the turn of a wrist the three
dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest little slum-girls in Austria were
capering about in the spacious vacancy.  It was a day of contrasts.

Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state.  The first time was in 1854,
when she was a bride of seventeen, and then she rode in measureless pomp
and with blare of music through a fluttering world of gay flags and
decorations, down streets walled on both hands with a press of shouting
and welcoming subjects; and the second time was last Wednesday, when she
entered the city in her coffin and moved down the same streets in the
dead of the night under swaying black flags, between packed human walls
again; but everywhere was a deep stillness, now--a stillness emphasized,
rather than broken, by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over
pavements cushioned with sand, and the low sobbing of gray-headed women
who had witnessed the first entry forty-four years before, when she and
they were young--and unaware!

A character in Baron von Berger's recent fairy drama "Habsburg" tells
about the first coming of the girlish Empress-Queen, and in his history
draws a fine picture: I cannot make a close translation of it, but will
try to convey the spirit of the verses:

I saw the stately pageant pass:
In her high place I saw the Empress-Queen:
I could not take my eyes away
From that fair vision, spirit-like and pure,
That rose serene, sublime, and figured to my sense
A noble Alp far lighted in the blue,
That in the flood of morning rends its veil of cloud
And stands a dream of glory to the gaze
Of them that in the Valley toil and plod.

A scrap of curious history

Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri--a
village; time, 1845.  La Bourboule-les-Bains, France--a village; time,
the end of June, 1894.  I was in the one village in that early time; I am
in the other now.  These times and places are sufficiently wide apart,
yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that
Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived
there so long ago.

Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic was
taken by an Italian assassin.  Last night a mob surrounded our hotel,
shouting, howling, singing the "Marseillaise," and pelting our windows
with sticks and stones; for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded
that they be turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed, and then
driven out of the village.  Everybody in the hotel remained up until far
into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror which one
reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians and by French
mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival, with rain of
stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal to rearrange plans--followed
by a silence ominous, threatening, and harder to bear than even the
active siege and the noise.  The landlord and the two village policemen
stood their ground, and at last the mob was persuaded to go away and
leave our Italians in peace.  Today four of the ringleaders have been
sentenced to heavy punishment of a public sort--and are become local
heroes, by consequence.

That is the very mistake which was at first made in the Missourian
village half a century ago.  The mistake was repeated and repeated--just
as France is doing in these later months.

In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our Vaillants; and in a
humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled this name wrong.  Fifty
years ago we passed through, in all essentials, what France has been
passing through during the past two or three years, in the matter of
periodical frights, horrors, and shudderings.

In several details the parallels are quaintly exact.  In that day, for a
man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery
was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against
the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could NOT be in his right
mind.  For a man to proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years
ago, was to proclaim himself a madman--he could not be in his right mind.

Now the original first blasphemer against any institution profoundly
venerated by a community is quite sure to be in earnest; his followers
and imitators may be humbugs and self-seekers, but he himself is
sincere--his heart is in his protest.

Robert Hardy was our first ABOLITIONIST--awful name!  He was a journeyman
cooper, and worked in the big cooper-shop belonging to the great
pork-packing establishment which was Marion City's chief pride and sole
source of prosperity.  He was a New-Englander, a stranger.  And, being a
stranger, he was of course regarded as an inferior person--for that has
been human nature from Adam down--and of course, also, he was made to
feel unwelcome, for this is the ancient law with man and the other
animals.  Hardy was thirty years old, and a bachelor; pale, given to
reverie and reading.  He was reserved, and seemed to prefer the isolation
which had fallen to his lot.  He was treated to many side remarks by his
fellows, but as he did not resent them it was decided that he was a
coward.

All of a sudden he proclaimed himself an abolitionist--straight out and
publicly!  He said that negro slavery was a crime, an infamy.  For a
moment the town was paralyzed with astonishment; then it broke into a
fury of rage and swarmed toward the cooper-shop to lynch Hardy.  But the
Methodist minister made a powerful speech to them and stayed their hands.
He proved to them that Hardy was insane and not responsible for his
words; that no man COULD be sane and utter such words.

So Hardy was saved.  Being insane, he was allowed to go on talking.  He
was found to be good entertainment.  Several nights running he made
abolition speeches in the open air, and all the town flocked to hear and
laugh.  He implored them to believe him sane and sincere, and have pity
on the poor slaves, and take measurements for the restoration of their
stolen rights, or in no long time blood would flow--blood, blood, rivers
of blood!

It was great fun.  But all of a sudden the aspect of things changed.  A
slave came flying from Palmyra, the county-seat, a few miles back, and
was about to escape in a canoe to Illinois and freedom in the dull
twilight of the approaching dawn, when the town constable seized him.
Hardy happened along and tried to rescue the negro; there was a struggle,
and the constable did not come out of it alive.  Hardly crossed the river
with the negro, and then came back to give himself up.  All this took
time, for the Mississippi is not a French brook, like the Seine, the
Loire, and those other rivulets, but is a real river nearly a mile wide.
The town was on hand in force by now, but the Methodist preacher and the
sheriff had already made arrangements in the interest of order; so Hardy
was surrounded by a strong guard and safely conveyed to the village
calaboose in spite of all the effort of the mob to get hold of him.  The
reader will have begun to perceive that this Methodist minister was a
prompt man; a prompt man, with active hands and a good headpiece.
Williams was his name--Damon Williams; Damon Williams in public,
Damnation Williams in private, because he was so powerful on that theme
and so frequent.

The excitement was prodigious.  The constable was the first man who had
ever been killed in the town.  The event was by long odds the most
imposing in the town's history.  It lifted the humble village into sudden
importance; its name was in everybody's mouth for twenty miles around.
And so was the name of Robert Hardy--Robert Hardy, the stranger, the
despised.  In a day he was become the person of most consequence in the
region, the only person talked about.  As to those other coopers, they
found their position curiously changed--they were important people, or
unimportant, now, in proportion as to how large or how small had been
their intercourse with the new celebrity.  The two or three who had
really been on a sort of familiar footing with him found themselves
objects of admiring interest with the public and of envy with their
shopmates.

The village weekly journal had lately gone into new hands. The new man
was an enterprising fellow, and he made the most of the tragedy.  He
issued an extra.  Then he put up posters promising to devote his whole
paper to matters connected with the great event--there would be a full
and intensely interesting biography of the murderer, and even a portrait
of him.  He was as good as his word.  He carved the portrait himself, on
the back of a wooden type--and a terror it was to look at.  It made a
great commotion, for this was the first time the village paper had ever
contained a picture.  The village was very proud.  The output of the
paper was ten times as great as it had ever been before, yet every copy
was sold.

When the trial came on, people came from all the farms around, and from
Hannibal, and Quincy, and even from Keokuk; and the court-house could
hold only a fraction of the crowd that applied for admission.  The trial
was published in the village paper, with fresh and still more trying
pictures of the accused.

Hardy was convicted, and hanged--a mistake.  People came from miles
around to see the hanging; they brought cakes and cider, also the women
and children, and made a picnic of the matter.  It was the largest crowd
the village had ever seen.  The rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly bought
up, in inch samples, for everybody wanted a memento of the memorable
event.

Martyrdom gilded with notoriety has its fascinations. Within one week
afterward four young lightweights in the village proclaimed themselves
abolitionists!  In life Hardy had not been able to make a convert;
everybody laughed at him; but nobody could laugh at his legacy.  The four
swaggered around with their slouch-hats pulled down over their faces, and
hinted darkly at awful possibilities.  The people were troubled and
afraid, and showed it.  And they were stunned, too; they could not
understand it.  "Abolitionist" had always been a term of shame and
horror; yet here were four young men who were not only not ashamed to
bear that name, but were grimly proud of it.  Respectable young men they
were, too--of good families, and brought up in the church.  Ed Smith, the
printer's apprentice, nineteen, had been the head Sunday-school boy, and
had once recited three thousand Bible verses without making a break.
Dick Savage, twenty, the baker's apprentice; Will Joyce, twenty-two,
journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four,
tobacco-stemmer--were the other three.  They were all of a sentimental
cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as it
was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been
suspected of having anything bad in them.

They withdrew from society, and grew more and more mysterious and
dreadful.  They presently achieved the distinction of being denounced by
names from the pulpit--which made an immense stir!  This was grandeur,
this was fame.  They were envied by all the other young fellows now.
This was natural. Their company grew--grew alarmingly.  They took a name.
It was a secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were
simply the abolitionists.  They had pass-words, grips, and signs; they
had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with gloomy pomps
and ceremonies, at midnight.

They always spoke of Hardy as "the Martyr," and every little while they
moved through the principal street in procession--at midnight,
black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn drum--on
pilgrimage to the Martyr's grave, where they went through with some
majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his murderers.  They gave
previous notice of the pilgrimage by small posters, and warned everybody
to keep indoors and darken all houses along the route, and leave the road
empty.  These warnings were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones
at the top of the poster.

When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks, a quite
natural thing happened.  A few men of character and grit woke up out of
the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying their faculties, and
began to discharge scorn and scoffings at themselves and the community
for enduring this child's-play; and at the same time they proposed to end
it straightway.  Everybody felt an uplift; life was breathed into their
dead spirits; their courage rose and they began to feel like men again.
This was on a Saturday.  All day the new feeling grew and strengthened;
it grew with a rush; it brought inspiration and cheer with it. Midnight
saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and with a clearly
defined and welcome piece of work in front of it.  The best organizer and
strongest and bitterest talker on that great Saturday was the
Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the original four from his
pulpit--Rev. Hiram Fletcher--and he promised to use his pulpit in the
public interest again now.  On the morrow he had revelations to make, he
said--secrets of the dreadful society.

But the revelations were never made.  At half past two in the morning the
dead silence of the village was broken by a crashing explosion, and the
town patrol saw the preacher's house spring in a wreck of whirling
fragments into the sky.  The preacher was killed, together with a negro
woman, his only slave and servant.

The town was paralyzed again, and with reason.  To struggle against a
visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a plenty of men who
stand always ready to undertake it; but to struggle against an invisible
one--an invisible one who sneaks in and does his awful work in the dark
and leaves no trace--that is another matter.  That is a thing to make the
bravest tremble and hold back.

The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral.  The man who was to
have had a packed church to hear him expose and denounce the common enemy
had but a handful to see him buried. The coroner's jury had brought in a
verdict of "death by the visitation of God," for no witness came forward;
if any existed they prudently kept out of the way.  Nobody seemed sorry.
Nobody wanted to see the terrible secret society provoked into the
commission of further outrages.  Everybody wanted the tragedy hushed up,
ignored, forgotten, if possible.

And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when Will Joyce,
the blacksmith's journeyman, came out and proclaimed himself the
assassin!  Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of his glory.  He made
his proclamation, and stuck to it.  Stuck to it, and insisted upon a
trial.  Here was an ominous thing; here was a new and peculiarly
formidable terror, for a motive was revealed here which society could not
hope to deal with successfully--VANITY, thirst for notoriety.  If men
were going to kill for notoriety's sake, and to win the glory of
newspaper renown, a big trial, and a showy execution, what possible
invention of man could discourage or deter them?  The town was in a sort
of panic; it did not know what to do.

However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter--it had no choice.
It brought in a true bill, and presently the case went to the county
court.  The trial was a fine sensation.  The prisoner was the principal
witness for the prosecution.  He gave a full account of the
assassination; he furnished even the minutest particulars: how he
deposited his keg of powder and laid his train--from the house to
such-and-such a spot; how George Ronalds and Henry Hart came along just
then, smoking, and he borrowed Hart's cigar and fired the train with it,
shouting, "Down with all slave-tyrants!" and how Hart and Ronalds made no
effort to capture him, but ran away, and had never come forward to
testify yet.

But they had to testify now, and they did--and pitiful it was to see how
reluctant they were, and how scared.  The crowded house listened to
Joyce's fearful tale with a profound and breathless interest, and in a
deep hush which was not broken till he broke it himself, in concluding,
with a roaring repetition of his "Death to all slave-tyrants!"--which
came so unexpectedly and so startlingly that it made everyone present
catch his breath and gasp.

The trial was put in the paper, with biography and large portrait, with
other slanderous and insane pictures, and the edition sold beyond
imagination.

The execution of Joyce was a fine and picturesque thing.  It drew a vast
crowd.  Good places in trees and seats on rail fences sold for half a
dollar apiece; lemonade and gingerbread-stands had great prosperity.
Joyce recited a furious and fantastic and denunciatory speech on the
scaffold which had imposing passages of school-boy eloquence in it, and
gave him a reputation on the spot as an orator, and his name, later, in
the society's records, of the "Martyr Orator."  He went to his death
breathing slaughter and charging his society to "avenge his murder."  If
he knew anything of human nature he knew that to plenty of young fellows
present in that great crowd he was a grand hero--and enviably situated.

He was hanged.  It was a mistake.  Within a month from his death the
society which he had honored had twenty new members, some of them
earnest, determined men.  They did not court distinction in the same way,
but they celebrated his martyrdom. The crime which had been obscure and
despised had become lofty and glorified.

Such things were happening all over the country.  Wild-brained martyrdom
was succeeded by uprising and organization. Then, in natural order,
followed riot, insurrection, and the wrack and restitutions of war.  It
was bound to come, and it would naturally come in that way.  It has been
the manner of reform since the beginning of the world.

Switzerland, the cradle of liberty

Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.

It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last.  In that remote
time there was only one ladder railway in the country.  That state of
things is all changed.  There isn't a mountain in Switzerland now that
hasn't a ladder railroad or two up its back like suspenders; indeed, some
mountains are latticed with them, and two years hence all will be.  In
that day the peasant of the high altitudes will have to carry a lantern
when he goes visiting in the night to keep from stumbling over railroads
that have been built since his last round.  And also in that day, if
there shall remain a high-altitude peasant whose potato-patch hasn't a
railroad through it, it would make him as conspicuous as William Tell.

However, there are only two best ways to travel through Switzerland.  The
first best is afloat.  The second best is by open two-horse carriage.
One can come from Lucerne to Interlaken over the Brunig by ladder
railroad in an hour or so now, but you can glide smoothly in a carriage
in ten, and have two hours for luncheon at noon--for luncheon, not for
rest.  There is no fatigue connected with the trip.  One arrives fresh in
spirit and in person in the evening--no fret in his heart, no grime on
his face, no grit in his hair, not a cinder in his eye.  This is the
right condition of mind and body, the right and due preparation for the
solemn event which closed the day--stepping with metaphorically uncovered
head into the presence of the most impressive mountain mass that the
globe can show--the Jungfrau. The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly
confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of
snow, is breath-taking astonishment.  It is as if heaven's gates had
swung open and exposed the throne.

It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken.  Nothing going on--at
least nothing but brilliant life-giving sunshine. There are floods and
floods of that.  One may properly speak of it as "going on," for it is
full of the suggestion of activity; the light pours down with energy,
with visible enthusiasm.  This is a good atmosphere to be in, morally as
well as physically. After trying the political atmosphere of the
neighboring monarchies, it is healing and refreshing to breathe air that
has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years, and to come among a
people whose political history is great and fine, and worthy to be taught
in all schools and studied by all races and peoples.  For the struggle
here throughout the centuries has not been in the interest of any private
family, or any church, but in the interest of the whole body of the
nation, and for shelter and protection of all forms of belief.  This fact
is colossal.  If one would realize how colossal it is, and of what
dignity and majesty, let him contrast it with the purposes and objects of
the Crusades, the siege of York, the War of the Roses, and other historic
comedies of that sort and size.

Last week I was beating around the Lake of Four Cantons, and I saw Rutli
and Altorf.  Rutli is a remote little patch of meadow, but I do not know
how any piece of ground could be holier or better worth crossing oceans
and continents to see, since it was there that the great trinity of
Switzerland joined hands six centuries ago and swore the oath which set
their enslaved and insulted country forever free; and Altorf is also
honorable ground and worshipful, since it was there that William,
surnamed Tell (which interpreted means "The foolish talker"--that is to
say, the too-daring talker), refused to bow to Gessler's hat.  Of late
years the prying student of history has been delighting himself beyond
measure over a wonderful find which he has made--to wit, that Tell did
not shoot the apple from his son's head. To hear the students jubilate,
one would suppose that the question of whether Tell shot the apple or
didn't was an important matter; whereas it ranks in importance exactly
with the question of whether Washington chopped down the cherry-tree or
didn't.  The deeds of Washington, the patriot, are the essential thing;
the cherry-tree incident is of no consequence.  To prove that Tell did
shoot the apple from his son's head would merely prove that he had better
nerve than most men and was skillful with a bow as a million others who
preceded and followed him, but not one whit more so.  But Tell was more
and better than a mere marksman, more and better than a mere cool head;
he was a type; he stands for Swiss patriotism; in his person was
represented a whole people; his spirit was their spirit--the spirit which
would bow to none but God, the spirit which said this in words and
confirmed it with deeds.  There have always been Tells in
Switzerland--people who would not bow.  There was a sufficiency of them
at Rutli; there were plenty of them at Murten; plenty at Grandson; there
are plenty today.  And the first of them all--the very first, earliest
banner-bearer of human freedom in this world--was not a man, but a
woman--Stauffacher's wife.  There she looms dim and great, through the
haze of the centuries, delivering into her husband's ear that gospel of
revolt which was to bear fruit in the conspiracy of Rutli and the birth
of the first free government the world had ever seen.

From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of trifling
width to a lofty mountain barrier, which has a gateway in it shaped like
an inverted pyramid.  Beyond this gateway arises the vast bulk of the
Jungfrau, a spotless mass of gleaming snow, into the sky.  The gateway,
in the dark-colored barrier, makes a strong frame for the great picture.
The somber frame and the glowing snow-pile are startlingly contrasted.
It is this frame which concentrates and emphasizes the glory of the
Jungfrau and makes it the most engaging and beguiling and fascinating
spectacle that exists on the earth.  There are many mountains of snow
that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned, but they
lack the fame.  They stand at large; they are intruded upon and elbowed
by neighboring domes and summits, and their grandeur is diminished and
fails of effect.

It is a good name, Jungfrau--Virgin.  Nothing could be whiter; nothing
could be purer; nothing could be saintlier of aspect.  At six yesterday
evening the great intervening barrier seen through a faint bluish haze
seemed made of air and substanceless, so soft and rich it was, so
shimmering where the wandering lights touched it and so dim where the
shadows lay. Apparently it was a dream stuff, a work of the imagination,
nothing real about it.  The tint was green, slightly varying shades of
it, but mainly very dark.  The sun was down--as far as that barrier was
concerned, but not for the Jungfrau, towering into the heavens beyond the
gateway.  She was a roaring conflagration of blinding white.

It is said the Fridolin (the old Fridolin), a new saint, but formerly a
missionary, gave the mountain its gracious name.  He was an Irishman, son
of an Irish king--there were thirty thousand kings reigning in County
Cork alone in his time, fifteen hundred years ago.  It got so that they
could not make a living, there was so much competition and wages got cut
so.  Some of them were out of work months at a time, with wife and little
children to feed, and not a crust in the place.  At last a particularly
severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were reduced to
mendicancy and were to be seen day after day in the bitterest weather,
standing barefoot in the snow, holding out their crowns for alms.
Indeed, they would have been obliged to emigrate or starve but for a
fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin's, who started a labor-union, the first
one in history, and got the great bulk of them to join it.  He thus won
the general gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor--emperor over
them all--emperor of County Cork, but he said, No, walking delegate was
good enough for him.  For behold! he was modest beyond his years, and
keen as a whip.  To this day in Germany and Switzerland, where St.
Fridolin is revered and honored, the peasantry speak of him
affectionately as the first walking delegate.

The first walk he took was into France and Germany, missionarying--for
missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours.  All
you had to do was to cure the savage's sick daughter by a "miracle"--a
miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance--and
immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes
with a new convert's enthusiasm.  You could sit down and make yourself
easy, now.  He would take an ax and convert the rest of the nation
himself.  Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate.

Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the methods were
sure and the rewards great.  We have no such missionaries now, and no
such methods.

But to continue the history of the first walking delegate, if you are
interested.  I am interested myself because I have seen his relics in
Sackingen, and also the very spot where he worked his great miracle--the
one which won him his sainthood in the papal court a few centuries later.
To have seen these things makes me feel very near to him, almost like a
member of the family, in fact.  While wandering about the Continent he
arrived at the spot on the Rhine which is now occupied by Sackingen, and
proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off.  He appealed to
the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the whole region,
people and all.  He built a great cloister there for women and proceeded
to teach in it and accumulate more land. There were two wealthy brothers
in the neighborhood, Urso and Landulph.  Urso died and Fridolin claimed
his estates.  Landulph asked for documents and papers.  Fridolin had none
to show.  He said the bequest had been made to him by word of mouth.
Landulph suggested that he produce a witness and said it in a way which
he thought was very witty, very sarcastic.  This shows that he did not
know the walking delegate.  Fridolin was not disturbed. He said:

"Appoint your court.  I will bring a witness."

The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and barons.  A day was
appointed for the trial of the case.  On that day the judges took their
seats in state, and proclamation was made that the court was ready for
business.  Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet no
Fridolin appeared. Landulph rose, and was in the act of claiming judgment
by default when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs.
In another moment Fridolin entered at the door and came walking in a deep
hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton stalking in his rear.

Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody suspected
that the skeleton was Urso's.  It stopped before the chief judge and
raised its bony arm aloft and began to speak, while all the assembled
shuddered, for they could see the words leak out between its ribs.  It
said:

"Brother, why dost thou disturb my blessed rest and withhold by robbery
the gift which I gave thee for the honor of God?"

It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict was actually
given against Landulph on the testimony of this wandering rack-heap of
unidentified bones.  In our day a skeleton would not be allowed to
testify at all, for a skeleton has no moral responsibility, and its word
could not be believed on oath, and this was probably one of them.
However, the incident is valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of
the quaint laws of evidence of that remote time--a time so remote, so far
back toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference between
a bench of judges and a basket of vegetables was as yet so slight that we
may say with all confidence that it didn't really exist.

During several afternoons I have been engaged in an interesting, maybe
useful, piece of work--that is to say, I have been trying to make the
mighty Jungfrau earn her living--earn it in a most humble sphere, but on
a prodigious scale, on a prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn't
do anything in a small way with her size and style.  I have been trying
to make her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as
they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, and tell the
time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles of her and to the
people in the moon, if they have a good telescope there.

Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau's aspect is that of a spotless
desert of snow set upon edge against the sky.  But by mid-afternoon some
elevations which rise out of the western border of the desert, whose
presence you perhaps had not detected or suspected up to that time, began
to cast black shadows eastward across the gleaming surface.  At first
there is only one shadow; later there are two.  Toward 4 P.M. the other
day I was gazing and worshiping as usual when I chanced to notice that
shadow No. 1 was beginning to take itself something of the shape of the
human profile.  By four the back of the head was good, the military cap
was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the upper lip sharp, but
not pretty, and there was a great goatee that shot straight aggressively
forward from the chin.

At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably, and the
altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge
buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very
well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet
sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his
head on the Virgin's white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to
her in the sensuous music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and
thunder of the passing avalanche--music very familiar to his ear, for he
had heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came
courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day is
far, yes--for he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages
drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans marched past, and before
the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and wondered
who he might be, and were probably afraid of him; and before primeval man
himself, just emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out upon this
plain, first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a
glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and
consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians wallowed
here, still some eons earlier.  Oh yes, a day so far back that the
eternal son was present to see that first visit; a day so far back that
neither tradition nor history was born yet and a whole weary eternity
must come and go before the restless little creature, of whose face this
stupendous Shadow Face was the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and
begin his shabby career and think of a big thing.  Oh, indeed yes; when
you talk about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday
antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face of the
Jungfrau is not by.  It antedates all antiquities known or imaginable;
for it was here the world itself created the theater of future
antiquities.  And it is the only witness with a human face that was there
to see the marvel, and remains to us a memorial of it.

By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is beautiful.  It is
black and is powerfully marked against the upright canvas of glowing
snow, and covers hundreds of acres of that resplendent surface.

Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear of the face
west of it--and at five o'clock has assumed a shape that has rather a
poor and rude semblance of a shoe.

Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing for
twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair portrait of
Roscoe Conkling.  The likeness is there, and is unmistakable.  The goatee
is shortened, now, and has an end; formerly it hadn't any, but ran off
eastward and arrived nowhere.

By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee has become what
looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed roof, and the shoe had
turned into what the printers call a "fist" with a finger pointing.

If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred miles northward
of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I could get along well enough
from four till six on clear days, for I could keep trace of the time by
the changing shapes of these mighty shadows of the Virgin's front, the
most stupendous dial I am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world
by a couple of million years.

I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows if I hadn't
the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in mountain crags--a
sort of amusement which is very entertaining even when you don't find
any, and brilliantly satisfying when you do.  I have searched through
several bushels of photographs of the Jungfrau here, but found only one
with the Face in it, and in this case it was not strictly recognizable as
a face, which was evidence that the picture was taken before four o'clock
in the afternoon, and also evidence that all the photographers have
persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of the
Jungfrau show.  I say fascinating, because if you once detect a human
face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you never get tired
of watching it.  At first you can't make another person see it at all,
but after he has made it out once he can't see anything else afterward.

The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough when off
duty.  One day this summer he was traveling in an ordinary first-class
compartment, just in his other suit, the one which he works the realm in
when he is at home, and so he was not looking like anybody in particular,
but a good deal like everybody in general.  By and by a hearty and
healthy German-American got in and opened up a frank and interesting and
sympathetic conversation with him, and asked him a couple of thousand
questions about himself, which the king answered good-naturedly, but in a
more or less indefinite way as to private particulars.

"Where do you live when you are at home?"

"In Greece."

"Greece!  Well, now, that is just astonishing!  Born there?"

"No."

"Do you speak Greek?"

"Yes."

"Now, ain't that strange!  I never expected to live to see that.  What is
your trade?  I mean how do you get your living? What is your line of
business?"

"Well, I hardly know how to answer.  I am only a kind of foreman, on a
salary; and the business--well, is a very general kind of business."

"Yes, I understand--general jobbing--little of everything--anything that
there's money in."

"That's about it, yes."

"Are you traveling for the house now?"

"Well, partly; but not entirely.  Of course I do a stroke of business if
it falls in the way--"

"Good!  I like that in you!  That's me every time.  Go on."

"I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now."

"Well that's all right.  No harm in that.  A man works all the better for
a little let-up now and then.  Not that I've been used to having it
myself; for I haven't.  I reckon this is my first.  I was born in
Germany, and when I was a couple of weeks old shipped to America, and
I've been there ever since, and that's sixty-four years by the watch.
I'm an American in principle and a German at heart, and it's the boss
combination. Well, how do you get along, as a rule--pretty fair?"

"I've a rather large family--"

"There, that's it--big family and trying to raise them on a salary.  Now,
what did you go to do that for?"

"Well, I thought--"

"Of course you did.  You were young and confident and thought you could
branch out and make things go with a whirl, and here you are, you see!
But never mind about that.  I'm not trying to discourage you.  Dear me!

I've been just where you are myself!  You've got good grit; there's good
stuff in you, I can see that.  You got a wrong start, that's the whole
trouble.  But you hold your grip, and we'll see what can be done.  Your
case ain't half as bad as it might be.  You are going to come out all
right--I'm bail for that.  Boys and girls?"

"My family?  Yes, some of them are boys--"

"And the rest girls.  It's just as I expected.  But that's all right, and
it's better so, anyway.  What are the boys doing--learning a trade?"

"Well, no--I thought--"

"It's a big mistake.  It's the biggest mistake you ever made.  You see
that in your own case.  A man ought always to have a trade to fall back
on.  Now, I was harness-maker at first.  Did that prevent me from
becoming one of the biggest brewers in America?  Oh no.  I always had the
harness trick to fall back on in rough weather.  Now, if you had learned
how to make harness--However, it's too late now; too late.  But it's no
good plan to cry over spilt milk.  But as to the boys, you see--what's to
become of them if anything happens to you?"

"It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me--"

"Oh, come!  Suppose the firm don't want him?"

"I hadn't thought of that, but--"

"Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and stop
dreaming.  You are capable of immense things--man.  You can make a
perfect success in life.  All you want is somebody to steady you and
boost you along on the right road.  Do you own anything in the business?"

"No--not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I suppose I can
keep my--"

"Keep your place--yes.  Well, don't you depend on anything of the kind.
They'll bounce you the minute you get a little old and worked out;
they'll do it sure.  Can't you manage somehow to get into the firm?
That's the great thing, you know."

"I think it is doubtful; very doubtful."

"Um--that's bad--yes, and unfair, too.  Do you suppose that if I should
go there and have a talk with your people--Look here--do you think you
could run a brewery?"

"I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a little familiarity
with the business."

The German was silent for some time.  He did a good deal of thinking, and
the king waited curiously to see what the result was going to be.
Finally the German said:

"My mind's made up.  You leave that crowd--you'll never amount to
anything there.  In these old countries they never give a fellow a show.
Yes, you come over to America--come to my place in Rochester; bring the
family along.  You shall have a show in the business and the foremanship,
besides.  George--you said your name was George?--I'll make a man of you.
I give you my word. You've never had a chance here, but that's all going
to change. By gracious! I'll give you a lift that'll make your hair
curl!"

At Shrine of St. Wagner

Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891

It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers
that was rolling down upon Bayreuth.  It had been long since we had seen
such multitudes of excited and struggling people.  It took a good
half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train--and it was the
longest train we have yet seen in Europe.  Nuremberg had been witnessing
this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks.  It
gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial
pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is.  The devotees come from the
very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his
own Mecca.

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere
else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would
like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must
use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats, and
you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will get
seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town.  If you
stop to write you will get nothing.  There were plenty of people in
Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first
securing seats and lodgings.  They had found neither in Bayreuth; they
had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to Nuremberg
and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those quaint
streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and empty their guests
into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and
sisters in the faith.  They had endured from thirty to forty hours'
railroading on the continent of Europe--with all which that implies of
worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and
all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking
themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two towns
when other people were in bed; for back they must go over that
unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These
humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of
wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with drowsiness, their bodies were
adroop from crown to sole, and all kind-hearted people refrained from
asking them if they had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as
knowing they would lie.

We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday.  We
were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in
advance.

I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write essays about
the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits. The little children of
Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader intelligence
than I.  I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the operas,
pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them.  What I write about the
performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the public as
merely a cat's view of a king, and not of didactic value.

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house--that is to say,
the Wagner temple--a little after the middle of the afternoon.  The great
building stands all by itself, grand and lonely, on a high ground outside
the town.  We were warned that if we arrived after four o'clock we should
be obliged to pay two dollars and a half extra by way of fine.  We saved
that; and it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity that
Europe offers of saving money.  There was a big crowd in the grounds
about the building, and the ladies' dresses took the sun with fine
effect.  I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were in full dress,
for that was not so.  The dresses were pretty, but neither sex was in
evening dress.

The interior of the building is simple--severely so; but there is no
occasion for color and decoration, since the people sit in the dark.  The
auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with the stage at the narrow end.
There is an aisle on each side, but no aisle in the body of the house.
Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve from one side of the house
to the other.  There are seven entrance doors on each side of the theater
and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit 1,650 persons.
The number of the particular door by which you are to enter the house or
leave it is printed on your ticket, and you can use no door but that one.
Thus, crowding and confusion are impossible.  Not so many as a hundred
people use any one door.  This is better than having the usual (and
useless) elaborate fireproof arrangements.  It is the model theater of
the world.  It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes its
circuit.  It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of lucifer
matches.

If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late you must work
your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to get to
it.  Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until all the
seats are full, and the filling is accomplished in a very few minutes.
Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred heads,
making a steep cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down to the
stage.

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a
deep and solemn gloom.  The funereal rustling of dresses and the low buzz
of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of
a sound was left.  This profound and increasingly impressive stillness
endured for some time--the best preparation for music, spectacle, or
speech conceivable.  I should think our show people would have invented
or imported that simple and impressive device for securing and
solidifying the attention of an audience long ago; instead of which there
continue to this day to open a performance against a deadly competition
in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose
upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave
his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments.
There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept
intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was
going on here, and that these divine souls were the clothing of thoughts
which were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized
and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the
curtain down.  It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway
thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that
nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to
the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts.  I wish I could see a
Wagner opera done in pantomime once.  Then one would have the lovely
orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the
bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb
acting couldn't mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything
in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting;
as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of
them standing still, the other catching flies.  Of course I do not really
mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic
gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and
then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator
attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.

This present opera was "Parsifal."  Madame Wagner does not permit its
representation anywhere but in Bayreuth.  The first act of the three
occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.

I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most
entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles
invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the
chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to
call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture
with the color left out.  I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of
"Parsifal" anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune
or melody; one person performed at a time--and a long time, too--often
in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out
long notes, then some short ones, then another long one, then a sharp,
quick, peremptory bark or two--and so on and so on; and when he was done
you saw that the information which he had conveyed had not compensated
for the disturbance.  Not always, but pretty often.  If two of them would
but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don't
do that. The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred
instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and
melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he
puts in the vocal parts.  It may be that he was deep, and only added the
singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it would make with the
music.  Singing!  It does seem the wrong name to apply to it.  Strictly
described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals,
mainly.  An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic
intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be.  In
"Parsifal" there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in
one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another
character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die.

During the evening there was an intermission of three-quarters of an hour
after the first act and one an hour long after the second.  In both
instances the theater was totally emptied.  People who had previously
engaged tables in the one sole eating-house were able to put in their
time very satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry.  The opera was
concluded at ten in the evening or a little later.  When we reached home
we had been gone more than seven hours.  Seven hours at five dollars a
ticket is almost too much for the money.

While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I
encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different parts of America,
and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that "Parsifal"
seldom pleased at first, but that after one had heard it several times it
was almost sure to become a favorite.  It seemed impossible, but it was
true, for the statement came from people whose word was not to be
doubted.

And I gathered some further information.  On the ground I found part of a
German musical magazine, and in it a letter written by Uhlic thirty-three
years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused Wagner against
people like me, who found fault with the comprehensive absence of what
our kind regards as singing.  Uhlic says Wagner despised "JENE PLAPPERUDE
MUSIC," and therefore "runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him."
I don't know what a SCHNORKEL is, but now that I know it has been left
out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life. And Uhlic
further says that Wagner's song is true: that it is "simply emphasized
intoned speech."  That certainly describes it--in "Parsifal" and some of
the operas; and if I understand Uhlic's elaborate German he apologizes
for the beautiful airs in "Tannh:auser."  Very well; now that Wagner and
I understand each other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall
stop calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him
Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now. The
minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside
little needless puctilios and pronounce his name right!

Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners
of America to hear these operas, when we have lately had a season or two
of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts, and
possibly this same orchestra.  I resolved to think that out at all
hazards.

TUESDAY.--Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever
had--an opera which has always driven me mad with ignorant delight
whenever I have heard it--"Tannh:auser."  I heard it first when I was a
youth; I heard it last in the last German season in New York.  I was busy
yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have another
"Tannh:auser" opportunity in a few days; but after five o'clock I found
myself free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about the
beginning of the second act.  My opera ticket admitted me to the grounds
in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I would take a
rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third act.

In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to
crumble apart and melt into the theater.  I will explain that this
bugle-call is one of the pretty features here.  You see, the theater is
empty, and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the
feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an hour
before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in uniform,
march out with military step and send out over the landscape a few bars
of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances with the
gracious notes; then they march to the other entrance and repeat.
Presently they do this over again.  Yesterday only about two hundred
people were still left in front of the house when the second call was
blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the house, but then
a thing happened which delayed them--the only solitary thing in this
world which could be relied on with certainty to accomplish it, I
suppose--an imperial princess appeared in the balcony above them.  They
stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a stupor of gratitude
and satisfaction.  The lady presently saw that she must disappear or the
doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box.
This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face; she
was without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies.
There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is the most harmful of
all, for wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back
the clock of progress.  The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are
the czars and their sort.  By their mere dumb presence in the world they
cover with derision every argument that can be invented in favor of
royalty by the most ingenious casuist.  In his time the husband of this
princess was valuable.  He led a degraded life, he ended it with his own
hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried
like a god.

In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of
open gallery, in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them; it is
the holy of holies.  As soon as the filling of the house is about
complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the princely
layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like
sinners looking into heaven.  They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in
worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this.
It is worth crossing many oceans to see.  It is somehow not the same gaze
that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the
mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the great pyramid, or
distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by
his genius and achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the
praises of books and pictures--no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense
curiosity, interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts
that taste good all the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a
lifetime.  Satisfy it--that is the word.  Hugo and the mastodon will
still have a degree of intense interest thereafter when encountered, but
never anything approaching the ecstasy of that first view.  The interest
of a prince is different.  It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless
it is a mixture of both--and it does not satisfy its thirst with one
view, or even noticeably diminish it.  Perhaps the essence of the thing
is the value which men attach to a valuable something which has come by
luck and not been earned.  A dollar picked up in the road is more
satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for,
and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same
way.  A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and
gratis support by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands
always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental
representative of luck.  And then--supremest value of all-his is the only
high fortune on the earth which is secure.  The commercial millionaire
may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake
and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive
battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a
prince--that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor an
infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can
undeify him.  By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the
most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved
or undeserved.  It follows without doubt or question, then, that the most
desirable position possible is that of a prince.  And I think it also
follows that the so-called usurpations with which history is littered are
the most excusable misdemeanors which men have committed.  To usurp a
usurpation--that is all it amounts to, isn't it?

A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not
been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is likely
to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of no greater
interest the next time.  We want a fresh one.  But it is not so with the
European.  I am quite sure of it.  The same old one will answer; he never
stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an
Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December afternoon to
visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an hour
and then they arrived, frozen.  They explained that they had been delayed
by an unlooked-for circumstance: while passing in the neighborhood of
Marlborough House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the
Prince of Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of
him.  They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the
crowd, but were disappointed at last--the Prince had changed his mind.  I
said, with a good deal of surprise, "Is it possible that you two have
lived in London all your lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales?"

Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: "What
an idea!  Why, we have seen him hundreds of times."

They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour in
the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients from the
same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again.  It was a stupefying
statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even when they say
a thing like that.  I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:

"I can't understand it at all.  If I had never seen General Grant I doubt
if I would do that even to get a sight of him." With a slight emphasis on
the last word.

Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in.
Then they said, blankly: "Of course not.  He is only a President."

It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an interest
not subject to deterioration.  The general who was never defeated, the
general who never held a council of war, the only general who ever
commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long, the smith
who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and
re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies
present and to come, was really a person of no serious consequence to
these people.  To them, with their training, my General was only a man,
after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that--a being of
a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and being of no more
blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of the
firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of commerce that sputter and
die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of ashes and a stink.

I saw the last act of "Tannh:auser."  I sat in the gloom and the deep
stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how
long--then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its
rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the
drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing
the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying
and a man standing near.  Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was
heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain
it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to
make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.

To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I
wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you.  If you do, you will never
cease to be thankful.  If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to
save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large
village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses.  The principal
inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun.  At either of these places you
can get an excellent meal--no, I mean you can go there and see other
people get it. There is no charge for this.  The town is littered with
restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven with
custom.  You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you
arrive you will find somebody occupying it.  We have had this experience.
We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say we, I include
shoals of people.  I have the impression that the only people who do not
have to scramble are the veterans--the disciples who have been here
before and know the ropes.  I think they arrive about a week before the
first opera, and engage all the tables for the season.  My tribe had
tried all kinds of places--some outside of the town, a mile or two--and
have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance a
complete and satisfying meal.  Digestible?  No, the reverse. These odds
and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in that regard
their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade, bric-a-brac
gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb a
Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property until
the time comes to embalm the rest of you.  Some of these pilgrims here
become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth.  It is
believed among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead
Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from.  But
I like this ballast.  I think a "Hermitage" scrap-up at eight in the
evening, when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their
mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson
except gravel.

THURSDAY.--They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles,
and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world,
with Materna and Alvary in the lead.  I suppose a double team is
necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week, for
all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night.  Nearly
all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and apparently they
are required to furnish all the noise they can for the money.  If they
feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out
and let the public know it.  Operas are given only on Sundays, Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible rest per week,
and two teams to do the four operas; but the ostensible rest is devoted
largely to rehearsing.  It is said that the off days are devoted to
rehearsing from some time in the morning till ten at night.  Are there
two orchestras also?  It is quite likely, since there are one hundred and
ten names in the orchestra list.

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde."  I have seen all sorts of
audiences--at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons,
funerals--but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for
fixed and reverential attention.  Absolute attention and petrified
retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning
of it.  You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.
You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb.  You know that they
are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when
they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and
times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief
to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one
utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have
slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake
the building with their applause.  Every seat is full in the first act;
there is not a vacant one in the last.  If a man would be conspicuous,
let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It
would make him celebrated.

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I
have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the
inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after
centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they
last knew in life.  Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and
sit in the dark and worship in silence.  At the Metropolitan in New York
they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they
squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time.  In some of the
boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the
attention of the house with the stage.  In large measure the Metropolitan
is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian
music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show
their clothes.

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music
produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very
deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated
things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity?
Manifestly, no.  Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious
traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands
explained.  These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.
It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any
worldly pollution.  In this remote village there are no sights to see,
there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world, there
is nothing going on, it is always Sunday.  The pilgrim wends to his
temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed with
his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous
emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid
and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service.  This
opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all
witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of
many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away.  I feel
strongly out of place here.  Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a
community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all
others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and
always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of
the most extraordinary experiences of my life.  I have never seen
anything like this before.  I have never seen anything so great and fine
and real as this devotion.

FRIDAY.--Yesterday's opera was "Parsifal" again.  The others went and
they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went hunting for relics
and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable
"Memoirs."  I am properly grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire
upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand touched
or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me.  I am her pilgrim; the rest
of this multitude here are Wagner's.

TUESDAY.--I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we
cross over into Bohemia this afternoon.  I was supposing that my musical
regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of
these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was "Parsifal,"
but the experts have disenchanted me.  They say:

"Singing!  That wasn't singing; that was the wailing, screeching of
third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy."

Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has
never failed me in matters of art.  Whenever I enjoy anything in art it
means that it is mighty poor.  The private knowledge of this fact has
saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a
chromo.  However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was
the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those
two operas.

William Dean Howells



Is it true that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at forty and
then begins to wane toward setting?  Doctor Osler is charged with saying
so.  Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't; I don't know which it is.  But if
he said it, I can point him to a case which proves his rule.  Proves it
by being an exception to it.  To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.

I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago.  I compare it with his
paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and I cannot find that
his English has suffered any impairment.  For forty years his English has
been to me a continual delight and astonishment.  In the sustained
exhibition of certain great qualities--clearness, compression, verbal
exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of
phrasing--he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing
world.  SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word.  There
are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but
only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of
veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails
cloudless skies all night and all the nights.

In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose.
He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain
of gold, the RIGHT WORD.  Others have to put up with approximations, more
or less frequently; he has better luck.  To me, the others are miners
working with the gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and
escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a
riffle--no grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him.  A
powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it
plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is
done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and
applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE right one blazes out on
us.  Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book
or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and
electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of
the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that
creams the sumac-berry.  One has no time to examine the word and vote
upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is
so immediate.  There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals
largely in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen
through the rain; the right word would dismiss the rain, then you would
see it better.  It doesn't rain when Howells is at work.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its
cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of
construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of
compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt.  All in shining good
order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just
as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and
use.  He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his
English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say--can throw down the
glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.

I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to
examine this passage from it which I append.  I do not mean examine it in
a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it
aloud.  I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out
of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:

Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by
Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a
political moralist of our time and race would be judged.  He thinks that
Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the
first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily
transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary
issues of reverie.  The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be
politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds up an
atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers. What
Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which there
was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without patriotism.  When a
miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and reduced both tyrants
and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a
dreamer the savior of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always
looking for.  Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the
diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he extolled the
strong man who destroys liberty in creating order. But Carlyle has only
just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still
Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that his name
stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human nature.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I can make
out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused
by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all
adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how compressed, how compact,
without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere to call attention to it.

There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage.  After reading it
several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is crowded
into that small space.  I think it is a model of compactness.  When I
take its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my
way, I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole, there not
being room enough.  I find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk: he
can get the things out, but he can't ever get them back again.

The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the
article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words. The sample is
just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is, it
holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay.  Also,
the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely; there is a
plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs.  This is
claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the
one in the middle sentence: "an idealist immersed in realities who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the
visionary issues of reverie."  With a hundred words to do it with, the
literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and reduce
it to a concrete condition, visible, substantial, understandable and all
right, like a cabbage; but the artist does it with twenty, and the result
is a flower.

The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same
source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of us
and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the
words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all
seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes
their message take hold.

The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the
tomb.

It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp notes in it.
The words are all "right" words, and all the same size.  We do not notice
it at first.  We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we do
not know why.  It is when the right words are conspicuous that they
thunder:

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!

When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him arranging
and clustering English words well, but not any better than now.  He is
not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in
translating, then, the visions of the eyes of flesh into words that
reproduced their forms and colors:

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest.  It is at once
shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked FACCHINI; and now in
St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and
I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a
struggle for the possession of the Piazza.  But the snow continued to
fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and
encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when the
most determined industry seems only to renew the task.  The lofty crest
of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no
longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the
Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church was perfectly penciled
in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a
spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me
too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation
of magic.  The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for
all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that
it looked as if just from the hand of the builder--or, better said, just
from the brain of the architect.  There was marvelous freshness in the
colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that
gracious harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy
exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred
times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes.
The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that tremble like
peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white;
it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if
exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer
of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite
pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the
winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so gentle and
mild he looked by the tender light of the storm.  The towers of the
island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors in
the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms
among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance
more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost palpable,
lay upon the mutest city in the world.

The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and Decay, fagged
with distributing damage and repulsiveness among the other cities of the
planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession,
come for rest and play between seasons, and treat themselves to the
luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and squandering
charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their
habit when not on vacation.

In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a
character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note of pathetic
effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified
and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to
neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation; a descent which
reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble
professionals of the faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.

What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street!  I
don't think I was ever in a street before when quite so many professional
ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs. on their
door-plates.  And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious air
of going to the deuce.  Every house seems to wince as you go by, and
button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt
on--so to speak.  I don't know what's the reason, but these material
tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn't
dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that's once been a home, in a street
like this.

Mr. Howells's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs;
they are photographs with feeling in them, and sentiment, photographs
taken in a dream, one might say.

As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try,
if I had the words that might approximately reach up to its high place.
I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully
and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with,
nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing
themselves and he was not aware that they were at it.  For they are
unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways, and well conducted.  His is a humor
which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the
page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no
more noise than does the circulation of the blood.

There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in Mr. Howells's
books.  That is his "stage directions"--those artifices which authors
employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a
conversation, and help the reader to see the one and get at meanings in
the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the
bare words of the talk.  Some authors overdo the stage directions, they
elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take
up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked
and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn't
said it all.  Other authors' directions are brief enough, but it is
seldom that the brevity contains either wit or information.  Writers of
this school go in rags, in the matter of state directions; the majority
of them having nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a
bursting into tears.  In their poverty they work these sorry things to
the bone.  They say:

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar." (This explains
nothing; it only wastes space.)

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."  (There was nothing to laugh
about; there never is.  The writer puts it in from habit--automatically;
he is paying no attention to his work; or he would see that there is
nothing to laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly
flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging the stage
direction and making Richard break into "frenzies of uncontrollable
laughter."  This makes the reader sad.)

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."  (This poor old shop-worn blush is a
tiresome thing.  We get so we would rather Gladys would fall out of the
book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it, and
usually irrelevantly.  Whenever it is her turn to murmur she hangs out
her blush; it is the only thing she's got.  In a little while we hate
her, just as we do Richard.)

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."  (This kind keep a book
damp all the time.  They can't say a thing without crying.  They cry so
much about nothing that by and by when they have something to cry ABOUT
they have gone dry; they sob, and fetch nothing; we are not moved.  We
are only glad.)

They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions, these carbon
films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now carry any faintest
thread of light.  It would be well if they could be relieved from duty
and flung out in the literary back yard to rot and disappear along with
the discarded and forgotten "steeds" and "halidomes" and similar
stage-properties once so dear to our grandfathers.  But I am friendly to
Mr. Howells's stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one
else's, I think.  They are done with a competent and discriminating art,
and are faithful to the requirements of a state direction's proper and
lawful office, which is to inform.  Sometimes they convey a scene and its
conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the
spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if some one would read
merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk.  For instance,
a scene like this, from THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:

". . . and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on her father's
shoulder."

". . . she answered, following his gesture with a glance."

". . . she said, laughing nervously."

". . . she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching
glance."

". . . she answered, vaguely."

". . . she reluctantly admitted."

". . . but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his
face with puzzled entreaty."

Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to; he can
invent fresh ones without limit.  It is mainly the repetition over and
over again, by the third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless
forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I
think.  We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we
turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of
them and wish they would do other things for a change.

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing."

". . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chief of police, blushing."

". . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears."

And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite.  I always notice
stage directions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of
their way, just as the automobiles do.  At first; then by and by they
become monotonous and I get run over.

Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as
the make of it.  I have held him in admiration and affection so many
years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but
his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years do not count.  Let him have
plenty of them; there is profit in them for us.

English as she is taught

In the appendix to Croker's Boswell's Johnson one finds this anecdote:

CATO'S SOLILOQUY.--One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to
him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato's Soliloquy, which she went through very
correctly.  The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child:

"What was to bring Cato to an end?"

She said it was a knife.

"No, my dear, it was not so."

"My aunt Polly said it was a knife."

"Why, Aunt Polly's knife MAY DO, but it was a DAGGER, my dear."

He then asked her the meaning of "bane and antidote," which she was
unable to give.  Mrs. Gastrel said:

"You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words."

He then said:

"My dear, how many pence are there in SIXPENCE?"

"I cannot tell, sir," was the half-terrified reply.

On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:

"Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to teach a child
Cato's Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence there are in a
sixpence?"

In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor Ravenstein
quoted the following list of frantic questions, and said that they had
been asked in an examination:

Mention all names of places in the world derived from Julius Caesar or
Augustus Caesar.

Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon,
Mulde?

All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos, Crivoscia,
Basces, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.

The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.

The number of universities in Prussia.

Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow [sic]?

Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from the
Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.

That list would oversize nearly anybody's geographical knowledge.  Isn't
it reasonably possible that in our schools many of the questions in all
studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil is?--that he is set to
struggle with things that are ludicrously beyond his present reach,
hopelessly beyond his present strength?  This remark in passing, and by
way of text; now I come to what I was going to say.

I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity. It is a little
book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler sent it to me with the
request that I say whether I think it ought to be published or not.  I
said, Yes; but as I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious; and so, now
that the publication is imminent, it has seemed to me that I should feel
more comfortable if I could divide up this responsibility with the public
by adding them to the court.  Therefore I will print some extracts from
the book, in the hope that they may make converts to my judgment that the
volume has merit which entitles it to publication.

As to its character.  Every one has sampled "English as She is Spoke" and
"English as She is Wrote"; this little volume furnishes us an instructive
array of examples of "English as She is Taught"--in the public schools
of--well, this country.  The collection is made by a teacher in those
schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none of them have been
tampered with, or doctored in any way.  From time to time, during several
years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly
quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this teacher and
her associates have privately set that thing down in a memorandum-book;
strictly following the original, as to grammar, construction, spelling,
and all; and the result is this literary curiosity.

The contents of the book consist mainly of answers given by the boys and
girls to questions, said answers being given sometimes verbally,
sometimes in writing.  The subjects touched upon are fifteen in number:
I. Etymology; II. Grammar; III. Mathematics; IV. Geography; V.
"Original"; VI. Analysis; VII. History; VIII. "Intellectual"; IX.
Philosophy; X. Physiology; XI. Astronomy; XII. Politics; XIII. Music;
XIV. Oratory; XV. Metaphysics.

You perceive that the poor little young idea has taken a shot at a good
many kinds of game in the course of the book.  Now as to results.  Here
are some quaint definitions of words.  It will be noticed that in all of
these instances the sound of the word, or the look of it on paper, has
misled the child:

ABORIGINES, a system of mountains.

ALIAS, a good man in the Bible.

AMENABLE, anything that is mean.

AMMONIA, the food of the gods.

ASSIDUITY, state of being an acid.

AURIFEROUS, pertaining to an orifice.

CAPILLARY, a little caterpillar.

CORNIFEROUS, rocks in which fossil corn is found.

EMOLUMENT, a headstone to a grave.

EQUESTRIAN, one who asks questions.

EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.

FRANCHISE, anything belonging to the French.

IDOLATER, a very idle person.

IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.

IRRIGATE, to make fun of.

MENDACIOUS, what can be mended.

MERCENARY, one who feels for another.

PARASITE, a kind of umbrella.

PARASITE, the murder of an infant.

PUBLICAN, a man who does his prayers in public.

TENACIOUS, ten acres of land.

Here is one where the phrase "publicans and sinners" has got mixed up in
the child's mind with politics, and the result is a definition which
takes one in a sudden and unexpected way:

REPUBLICAN, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.

Also in Democratic newspapers now and then.  Here are two where the
mistake has resulted from sound assisted by remote fact:

PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.

DEMAGOGUE, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.

I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in the
following instances; it would not seem to have been the sound of the
word, nor the look of it in print:

ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.

QUARTERNIONS, a bird with a flat beak and no bill, living in New Zealand.

QUARTERNIONS, the name given to a style of art practiced by the
Phoenicians.

QUARTERNIONS, a religious convention held every hundred years.

SIBILANT, the state of being idiotic.

CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.

In the following sentences the pupil's ear has been deceiving him again:

The marriage was illegible.

He was totally dismasted with the whole performance.

He enjoys riding on a philosopher.

She was very quick at repertoire.

He prayed for the waters to subsidize.

The leopard is watching his sheep.

They had a strawberry vestibule.

Here is one which--well, now, how often we do slam right into the truth
without ever suspecting it:

The men employed by the Gas Company go around and speculate the meter.

Indeed they do, dear; and when you grow up, many and many's the time you
will notice it in the gas bill.  In the following sentences the little
people have some information to convey, every time; but in my case they
fail to connect: the light always went out on the keystone word:

The coercion of some things is remarkable; as bread and molasses.

Her hat is contiguous because she wears it on one side.

He preached to an egregious congregation.

The captain eliminated a bullet through the man's heart.

You should take caution and be precarious.

The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the perennial time
came.

The last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to know what it
means, and yet he knows all the time that he doesn't.  Here is an odd
(but entirely proper) use of a word, and a most sudden descent from a
lofty philosophical altitude to a very practical and homely illustration:

We should endeavor to avoid extremes--like those of wasps and bees.

And here--with "zoological" and "geological" in his mind, but not ready
to his tongue--the small scholar has innocently gone and let out a couple
of secrets which ought never to have been divulged in any circumstances:

There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.

Some of the best fossils are found in theological gardens.

Under the head of "Grammar" the little scholars furnish the following
information:

Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.

A verb is something to eat.

Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.

Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.

"Caterpillar" is well enough, but capital letter would have been
stricter.  The following is a brave attempt at a solution, but it failed
to liquify:

When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they say the
poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the introduction of
the prose or poetry.

The chapter on "Mathematics" is full of fruit.  From it I take a few
samples--mainly in an unripe state:

A straight line is any distance between two places.

Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

Things which are equal to each other are equal to anything else.

To find the number of square feet in a room you multiply the room by the
number of the feet.  The product is the result.

Right you are.  In the matter of geography this little book is
unspeakably rich.  The questions do not appear to have applied the
microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor Ravenstein;
still, they proved plenty difficult enough without that.  These pupils
did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted with a shot-gun; this is
shown by the crippled condition of the game they brought in:

America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.

North America is separated by Spain.

America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.

The United States is quite a small country compared with some other
countrys, but it about as industrious.

The capital of the United States is Long Island.

The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.

The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.

The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.

The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.

Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and flowing into
the Gulf of Mexico.

Mason and Dixon's line is the Equator.

One of the leading industries of the United States is mollasses,
book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber, manufacturers, paper-making,
publishers, coal.

In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.

Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.

Russia is very cold and tyrannical.

Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.

Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the Mediterranean
Sea.

Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and green.

The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon the
surrounding country.

The imports of a country are the things that are paid for, the exports
are the things that are not.

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.

The chapter headed "Analysis" shows us that the pupils in our public
schools are not merely loaded up with those showy facts about geography,
mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state; no, there's
machinery for clarifying and expanding their minds.  They are required to
take poems and analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to
statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation which
shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get at.  One
sample will do.  Here is a stanza from "The Lady of the Lake," followed
by the pupil's impressive explanation of it:

Alone, but with unbated zeal, The horseman plied with scourge and steel;
For jaded now and spent with toil, Embossed with foam and dark with soil,
While every gasp with sobs he drew, The laboring stag strained full in
view.

The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made
of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from
the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with
weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with cries full or
sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.

I see, now, that I never understood that poem before.  I have had
glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as ignorant with
weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea of
it ever filtered in sight.  If I were a public-school pupil I would put
those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it is
the thing to spread your mind.

We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say.  As
one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth to which one date has
been driven into the American child's head--1492.  The date is there,
and it is there to stay.  And it is always at hand, always deliverable at
a moment's notice.  But the Fact that belongs with it?  That is quite
another matter.  Only the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast Fact
has failed of lodgment.  It would appear that whenever you ask a
public-school pupil when a thing--anything, no matter what--happened,and
he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492.  He applies it to
everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of the
horse-car.  Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it is right
enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach our children to
honor it:

George Washington was born in 1492.

Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.

St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.

The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius
Caesar.

The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.



To proceed with "History"

Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.

Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so
that Columbus could discover America.

The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then
scalping them.

Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life
was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should be
null and void.

Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted.  His remains were taken
to the cathedral in Havana.

Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.

John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get fugitives slaves
into Virginia.  He captured all the inhabitants, but was finally
conquered and condemned to his death.  The confederasy was formed by the
fugitive slaves.

Alfred the Great reigned 872 years.  He was distinguished for letting
some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.

Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing lost several
wives.

Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few days.

John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.

Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.

The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.

Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years
ago.  His birthday was November 1883.  He was once a Pope.  He lived at
the time of the Rebellion of Worms.

Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I came I saw I
conquered.

Julius Caesar was really a very great man.  He was a very great soldier
and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.

Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a wine
cup.

The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.

The Persian war lasted about 500 years.

Greece had only 7 wise men.

Socrates . . . destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.

Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with such
ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey
misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:

By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the
throne.

To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious and
diligent boosting in the public school, we select the following mosaic:

Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.

In the chapter headed "Intellectual" I find a great number of most
interesting statements.  A sample or two may be found not amiss:

Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.

Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.

The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.

Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and wrote
histories.

Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.

In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to the
shrine of Thomas Bucket.

Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.

Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American Writer.  His
writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred years elapsed.

Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St. James because
he did it.

In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning
Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel
Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope,
Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge,
Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray,
Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli--a fact which shows that
into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every
year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the same
is there digested and disposed of in a most successful and characteristic
and gratifying public-school way.  I have space for but a trifling few of
the results:

Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.

Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.

Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy.  This was original.

George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius.

George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest
female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.

Bulwell is considered a good writer.

Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson were the
first great novelists.

Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law, he
was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.

Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value, if taken
in moderation:

Homer's writings are Homer's Essays Virgil the Aenid and Paradise lost
some people say that these poems were not written by Homer but by another
man of the same name.

A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant's poems.

Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.

When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political features of the
Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:

A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.

The three departments of the government is the President rules the world,
the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.

The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.

The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic
hostility.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again.  As follows:

The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the
end which nobody reads.

And here she rises once more and untimely.  There should be a limit to
public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well to let the young
find out everything:

Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.

Here are some results of study in music and oratory:

An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from one piano to
the next.

A rest means you are not to sing it.

Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.

The chapter on "Physiology" contains much that ought not to be lost to
science:

Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.

Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is
impure blood.

We have an upper and lower skin.  The lower skin moves all the time and
the upper skin moves when we do.

The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious
tissue.

The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.

The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart where
it meets the oxygen and is purified.

The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar
cane.

The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed into
the special sense of hearing.

The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the
stomach.

If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would
deafen our ears so that we couldn't see to get off the track.

If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added flavor to the
Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article, let us make another
attempt:

The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature
originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage in the Gospel of
Plato.

The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of known lead with
that of a mass of unknown lead.

To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree on a meridian
and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.

The spheres are to each other as the squares of their homologous sides.

A body will go just as far in the first second as the body will go plus
the force of gravity and that's equal to twice what the body will go.

Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an equal volume
of or that is the weight of a body compared with the weight of an equal
volume.

The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of organized bodies
by the form of attraction and the number increased will be the form.

Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change
its own condition of rest or motion.  In other words it is the negative
quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or insipient
latescence.

If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the unintelligent
teacher--or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees, and
Trustees--are the proper target for it.  All through this little book one
detects the signs of a certain probable fact--that a large part of the
pupil's "instruction" consists in cramming him with obscure and wordy
"rules" which he does not understand and has no time to understand.  It
would be as useful to cram him with brickbats; they would at least stay.
In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a gentleman set
forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give a prize to every
public-school pupil who should furnish the correct solution of it.
Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public schools entered the
contest.  The problem was not a very difficult one for pupils of their
mathematical rank and standing, yet they all failed--by a hair--through
one trifling mistake or another.  Some searching questions were asked,
when it turned out that these lads were as glib as parrots with the
"rules," but could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle
underlying it.  Their memories had been stocked, but not their
understandings.  It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and simple.

There are several curious "compositions" in the little book, and we must
make room for one.  It is full of naivete, brutal truth, and
unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest (genuine) boy's composition
I think I have ever seen:



ON GIRLS

Girls are very stuck up and dignefied in their maner and be have your.
They think more of dress than anything and like to play with dowls and
rags.  They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of
guns.  They stay at home all the time and go to church on Sunday.  They
are al-ways sick.  They are always funy and making fun of boy's hands and
they say how dirty. They cant play marbels.  I pity them poor things.
They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them.  I dont beleave
they ever kiled a cat or anything.  They look out every nite and say oh
ant the moon lovely.  Thir is one thing I have not told and that is they
al-ways now their lessons bettern boys.

From Mr. Edward Channing's recent article in SCIENCE:

The marked difference between the books now being produced by French,
English, and American travelers, on the one hand, and German explorers,
on the other, is too great to escape attention. That difference is due
entirely to the fact that in school and university the German is taught,
in the first place to see, and in the second place to understand what he
does see.

A simplified alphabet

(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about the last
writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.)

I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly feeling
toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the movement three
years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that. It seemed to me to merely
propose to substitute one inadequacy for another; a sort of patching and
plugging poor old dental relics with cement and gold and porcelain paste;
what was really needed was a new set of teeth.  That is to say, a new
ALPHABET.

The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet.  It doesn't know
how to spell, and can't be taught.  In this it is like all other
alphabets except one--the phonographic.  This is the only competent
alphabet in the world.  It can spell and correctly pronounce any word in
our language.

That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that inspired alphabet,
can be learned in an hour or two.  In a week the student can learn to
write it with some little facility, and to read it with considerable
ease.  I know, for I saw it tried in a public school in Nevada forty-five
years ago, and was so impressed by the incident that it has remained in
my memory ever since.

I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written (and printed)
character.  I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply the consonants and the
vowels--I don't mean any REDUCTIONS or abbreviations of them, such as the
shorthand writer uses in order to get compression and speed.  No, I would
SPELL EVERY WORD OUT.

I will insert the alphabet here as I find it in Burnz's PHONIC SHORTHAND.
[Figure 1]  It is arranged on the basis of Isaac Pitman's PHONOGRAPHY.
Isaac Pitman was the originator and father of scientific phonography.  It
is used throughout the globe.  It was a memorable invention.  He made it
public seventy-three years ago.  The firm of Isaac Pitman & Sons, New
York, still exists, and they continue the master's work.

What should we gain?

First of all, we could spell DEFINITELY--and correctly--any word you
please, just by the SOUND of it.  We can't do that with our present
alphabet.  For instance, take a simple, every-day word PHTHISIS.  If we
tried to spell it by the sound of it, we should make it TYSIS, and be
laughed at by every educated person.

Secondly, we should gain in REDUCTION OF LABOR in writing.

Simplified Spelling makes valuable reductions in the case of several
hundred words, but the new spelling must be LEARNED.  You can't spell
them by the sound; you must get them out of the book.

But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in the language,
the phonographic alphabet would still beat the Simplified Speller "hands
down" in the important matter of economy of labor.  I will illustrate:

PRESENT FORM: through, laugh, highland.

SIMPLIFIED FORM: thru, laff, hyland.

PHONOGRAPHIC FORM: [Figure 2]

To write the word "through," the pen has to make twenty-one strokes.

To write the word "thru," then pen has to make twelve strokes--a good
saving.

To write that same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to
make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "laugh," the pen has to make FOURTEEN strokes.

To write "laff," the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of strokes--no labor
is saved to the penman.

To write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to
make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "highland," the pen has to make twenty-two strokes.

To write "hyland," the pen has to make eighteen strokes.

To write that word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make
only FIVE strokes.  [Figure 3]

To write the words "phonographic alphabet," the pen has to make
fifty-three strokes.

To write "fonografic alfabet," the pen has to make fifty strokes. To the
penman, the saving in labor is insignificant.

To write that word (with vowels) with the phonographic alphabet, the pen
has to make only SEVENTEEN strokes.

Without the vowels, only THIRTEEN strokes. [Figure 4]  The vowels are
hardly necessary, this time.

We make five pen-strokes in writing an m.  Thus: [Figure 5] a stroke
down; a stroke up; a second stroke down; a second stroke up; a final
stroke down.  Total, five.  The phonographic alphabet accomplishes the m
with a single stroke--a curve, like a parenthesis that has come home
drunk and has fallen face down right at the front door where everybody
that goes along will see him and say, Alas!

When our written m is not the end of a word, but is otherwise located, it
has to be connected with the next letter, and that requires another
pen-stroke, making six in all, before you get rid of that m.  But never
mind about the connecting strokes--let them go.  Without counting them,
the twenty-six letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty pen-strokes
for their construction--about three pen-strokes per letter.

It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic alphabet.  It
requires but ONE stroke for each letter.

My writing-gait is--well, I don't know what it is, but I will time myself
and see.  Result: it is twenty-four words per minute.  I don't mean
composing; I mean COPYING.  There isn't any definite composing-gait.

Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour--say 1,500.  If I
could use the phonographic character with facility I could do the 1,500
in twenty minutes.  I could do nine hours' copying in three hours; I
could do three years' copying in one year.  Also, if I had a typewriting
machine with the phonographic alphabet on it--oh, the miracles I could
do!

I am not pretending to write that character well.  I have never had a
lesson, and I am copying the letters from the book. But I can accomplish
my desire, at any rate, which is, to make the reader get a good and clear
idea of the advantage it would be to us if we could discard our present
alphabet and put this better one in its place--using it in books,
newspapers, with the typewriter, and with the pen.

[Figure 6]--MAN DOG HORSE.  I think it is graceful and would look comely
in print.  And consider--once more, I beg--what a labor-saver it is!  Ten
pen-strokes with the one system to convey those three words above, and
thirty-three by the other! [Figure 6]  I mean, in SOME ways, not in all.
I suppose I might go so far as to say in most ways, and be within the
facts, but never mind; let it go at SOME.  One of the ways in which it
exercises this birthright is--as I think--continuing to use our laughable
alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a rational one at
hand, to be had for the taking.

It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of Chaucer's rotten
spelling--if I may be allowed to use to frank a term as that--and it will
take five hundred years more to get our exasperating new Simplified
Corruptions accepted and running smoothly. And we sha'n't be any better
off then than we are now; for in that day we shall still have the
privilege the Simplifiers are exercising now: ANYBODY can change the
spelling that wants to.

BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN'T ANY WAY.  It
will always follow the SOUND.  If you want to change the spelling, you
have to change the sound first.

Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that unhappy guild
that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform our drunken old alphabet
by reducing his whiskey.  Well, it will improve him.  When they get
through and have reformed him all they can by their system he will be
only HALF drunk.  Above that condition their system can never lift him.
There is no competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but to take
away his whiskey entirely, and fill up his jug with Pitman's wholesome
and undiseased alphabet.

One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print a simplified
word looks so like the very nation! and when you bunch a whole squadron
of the Simplified together the spectacle is very nearly unendurable.

The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get rekonsyled to
the bezair asspekt of the Simplified Kombynashuns, but--if I may be
allowed the expression--is it worth the wasted time? [Figure 7]

To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed
offends the eye, and also takes the EXPRESSION out of the words.

La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!

It doesn't thrill you as it used to do.  The simplifications have sucked
the thrill all out of it.

But a written character with which we are NOT ACQUAINTED does not offend
us--Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and the others--they have an
interesting look, and we see beauty in them, too.  And this is true of
hieroglyphics, as well.  There is something pleasant and engaging about
the mathematical signs when we do not understand them.  The mystery
hidden in these things has a fascination for us: we can't come across a
printed page of shorthand without being impressed by it and wishing we
could read it.

Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is not
shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND ALPHABET UNREACHED.
You can write three times as many words in a minute with it as you can
write with our alphabet.  And so, in a way, it IS properly a shorthand.
It has a pleasant look, too; a beguiling look, an inviting look.  I will
write something in it, in my rude and untaught way: [Figure 8]

Even when _I_ do it it comes out prettier than it does in Simplified
Spelling.  Yes, and in the Simplified it costs one hundred and
twenty-three pen-strokes to write it, whereas in the phonographic it
costs only twenty-nine.

[Figure 9] is probably [Figure 10].

Let us hope so, anyway.

As concerns interpreting the deity

I

This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the despair of all the
scholars who labored over the mysteries of the Rosetta stone: [Figure 1]

After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:

Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all the temples,
this upon pain of death.

That was the twenty-forth translation that had been furnished by
scholars.  For a time it stood.  But only for a time.  Then doubts began
to assail it and undermine it, and the scholars resumed their labors.
Three years of patient work produced eleven new translations; among them,
this, by Gr:unfeldt, was received with considerable favor:

The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense; this
upon pain of death.

But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by the learned
world with yet greater favor:

The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all these people,
and these shall listen with reverence, upon pain of death.

Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely varying
renderings were scored--none of them quite convincing. But now, at last,
came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the scholars, with a translation
which was immediately and universally recognized as being the correct
version, and his name became famous in a day.  So famous, indeed, that
even the children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the
achievement itself make that not even the noise of the monumental
political event of that same year--the flight from Elba--was able to
smother it to silence.  Rawlinson's version reads as follows:

Therefore, walk not away from the wisdom of Epiphanes, but turn and
follow it; so shall it conduct thee to the temple's peace, and soften for
thee the sorrows of life and the pains of death.

Here is another difficult text: [Figure 2]

It is demotic--a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of the language
which has perished from the knowledge of all men twenty-five hundred
years before the Christian era.

Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of pictures, upon our
crags and boulders.  It has taken our most gifted and painstaking
students two centuries to get at the meanings hidden in these pictures;
yet there are still two little lines of hieroglyphics among the figures
grouped upon the Dighton Rocks which they have not succeeds in
interpreting to their satisfaction.  These: [Figure 3]

The suggested solutions are practically innumerable; they would fill a
book.

Thus we have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only
when we set out to discover the secret of God that our difficulties
disappear.  It was always so.  In antique Roman times it was the custom
of the Deity to try to conceal His intentions in the entrails of birds,
and this was patiently and hopefully continued century after century,
although the attempted concealment never succeeded, in a single recorded
instance.  The augurs could read entrails as easily as a modern child can
read coarse print.  Roman history is full of the marvels of
interpretation which these extraordinary men performed.  These strange
and wonderful achievements move our awe and compel our admiration.  Those
men could pierce to the marrow of a mystery instantly.  If the
Rosetta-stone idea had been introduced it would have defeated them, but
entrails had no embarrassments for them.  Entrails have gone out,
now--entrails and dreams.  It was at last found out that as hiding-places
for the divine intentions they were inadequate.

A part of the wall of Valletri in former times been struck with thunder,
the response of the soothsayers was, that a native of that town would
some time or other arrive at supreme power. --BOHN'S SUETONIUS, p. 138.

"Some time or other."  It looks indefinite, but no matter, it happened,
all the same; one needed only to wait, and be patient, and keep watch,
then he would find out that the thunder-stroke had Caesar Augustus in
mind, and had come to give notice.

There were other advance-advertisements.  One of them appeared just
before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most poetic and touching and
romantic in its feelings and aspects. It was a dream.  It was dreamed by
Caesar Augustus's mother, and interpreted at the usual rates:

Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched to the
stars and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven and
earth.--SUETONIUS, p. 139.

That was in the augur's line, and furnished him no difficulties, but it
would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion fourteen years to make sure of
what it meant, because they would have been surprised and dizzy.  It
would have been too late to be valuable, then, and the bill for service
would have been barred by the statute of limitation.

In those old Roman days a gentleman's education was not complete until he
had taken a theological course at the seminary and learned how to
translate entrails.  Caesar Augustus's education received this final
polish.  All through his life, whenever he had poultry on the menu he
saved the interiors and kept himself informed of the Deity's plans by
exercising upon those interiors the arts of augury.

In his first consulship, while he was observing the auguries, twelve
vultures presented themselves, as they had done to Romulus.  And when he
offered sacrifice, the livers of all the victims were folded inward in
the lower part; a circumstance which was regarded by those present who
had skill in things of that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of great
and wonderful fortune.--SUETONIUS, p. 141.

"Indubitable" is a strong word, but no doubt it was justified, if the
livers were really turned that way.  In those days chicken livers were
strangely and delicately sensitive to coming events, no matter how far
off they might be; and they could never keep still, but would curl and
squirm like that, particularly when vultures came and showed interest in
that approaching great event and in breakfast.

II

We may now skip eleven hundred and thirty or forty years, which brings us
down to enlightened Christian times and the troubled days of King Stephen
of England.  The augur has had his day and has been long ago forgotten;
the priest had fallen heir to his trade.

King Henry is dead; Stephen, that bold and outrageous person, comes
flying over from Normandy to steal the throne from Henry's daughter.  He
accomplished his crime, and Henry of Huntington, a priest of high degree,
mourns over it in his Chronicle.  The Archbishop of Canterbury
consecrated Stephen: "wherefore the Lord visited the Archbishop with the
same judgment which he had inflicted upon him who struck Jeremiah the
great priest: he died with a year."

Stephen's was the greater offense, but Stephen could wait; not so the
Archbishop, apparently.

The kingdom was a prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire, and rapine
spread ruin throughout the land; cries of distress, horror, and woe rose
in every quarter.

That was the result of Stephen's crime.  These unspeakable conditions
continued during nineteen years.  Then Stephen died as comfortably as any
man ever did, and was honorably buried.  It makes one pity the poor
Archbishop, and with that he, too, could have been let off as leniently.
How did Henry of Huntington know that the Archbishop was sent to his
grave by judgment of God for consecrating Stephen?  He does not explain.
Neither does he explain why Stephen was awarded a pleasanter death than
he was entitled to, while the aged King Henry, his predecessor, who had
ruled England thirty-five years to the people's strongly worded
satisfaction, was condemned to close his life in circumstances most
distinctly unpleasant, inconvenient, and disagreeable.  His was probably
the most uninspiring funeral that is set down in history.  There is not a
detail about it that is attractive.  It seems to have been just the
funeral for Stephen, and even at this far-distant day it is matter of
just regret that by an indiscretion the wrong man got it.

Whenever God punishes a man, Henry of Huntington knows why it was done,
and tells us; and his pen is eloquent with admiration; but when a man has
earned punishment, and escapes, he does not explain.  He is evidently
puzzled, but he does not say anything.  I think it is often apparent that
he is pained by these discrepancies, but loyally tries his best not to
show it. When he cannot praise, he delivers himself of a silence so
marked that a suspicious person could mistake it for suppressed
criticism.  However, he has plenty of opportunities to feel contented
with the way things go--his book is full of them.

King David of Scotland . . . under color of religion caused his
followers to deal most barbarously with the English.  They ripped open
women, tossed children on the points of spears, butchered priests at the
altars, and, cutting off the heads from the images on crucifixes, placed
them on the bodies of the slain, while in exchange they fixed on the
crucifixes the heads of their victims.  Wherever the Scots came, there
was the same scene of horror and cruelty: women shrieking, old men
lamenting, amid the groans of the dying and the despair of the living.

But the English got the victory.

Then the chief of the men of Lothian fell, pierced by an arrow, and all
his followers were put to flight.  For the Almighty was offended at them
and their strength was rent like a cobweb.

Offended at them for what?  For committing those fearful butcheries?
No, for that was the common custom on both sides, and not open to
criticism.  Then was it for doing the butcheries "under cover of
religion"?  No, that was not it; religious feeling was often expressed in
that fervent way all through those old centuries.  The truth is, He was
not offended at "them" at all; He was only offended at their king, who
had been false to an oath. Then why did not He put the punishment upon
the king instead of upon "them"?  It is a difficult question.  One can
see by the Chronicle that the "judgments" fell rather customarily upon
the wrong person, but Henry of Huntington does not explain why. Here is
one that went true; the chronicler's satisfaction in it is not hidden:

In the month of August, Providence displayed its justice in a remarkable
manner; for two of the nobles who had converted monasteries into
fortifications, expelling the monks, their sin being the same, met with a
similar punishment.  Robert Marmion was one, Godfrey de Mandeville the
other.  Robert Marmion, issuing forth against the enemy, was slain under
the walls of the monastery, being the only one who fell, though he was
surrounded by his troops.  Dying excommunicated, he became subject to
death everlasting.  In like manner Earl Godfrey was singled out among his
followers, and shot with an arrow by a common foot-soldier. He made light
of the wound, but he died of it in a few days, under excommunication.
See here the like judgment of God, memorable through all ages!

The exaltation jars upon me; not because of the death of the men, for
they deserved that, but because it is death eternal, in white-hot fire
and flame.  It makes my flesh crawl.  I have not known more than three
men, or perhaps four, in my whole lifetime, whom I would rejoice to see
writhing in those fires for even a year, let alone forever.  I believe I
would relent before the year was up, and get them out if I could.  I
think that in the long run, if a man's wife and babies, who had not
harmed me, should come crying and pleading, I couldn't stand it; I know I
should forgive him and let him go, even if he had violated a monastery.
Henry of Huntington has been watching Godfrey and Marmion for nearly
seven hundred and fifty years, now, but I couldn't do it, I know I
couldn't.  I am soft and gentle in my nature, and I should have forgiven
them seventy-and-seven times, long ago.  And I think God has; but this is
only an opinion, and not authoritative, like Henry of Huntington's
interpretations. I could learn to interpret, but I have never tried; I
get so little time.

All through his book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the intentions
of God, and with the reasons for his intentions. Sometimes--very often,
in fact--the act follows the intention after such a wide interval of time
that one wonders how Henry could fit one act out of a hundred to one
intention out of a hundred and get the thing right every time when there
was such abundant choice among acts and intentions.  Sometimes a man
offends the Deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty years
later; meantime he was committed a million other crimes: no matter, Henry
can pick out the one that brought the worms. Worms were generally used in
those days for the slaying of particularly wicked people.  This has gone
out, now, but in old times it was a favorite.  It always indicated a case
of "wrath." For instance:

. . . the just God avenging Robert Fitzhilderbrand's perfidy, a worm
grew in his vitals, which gradually gnawing its way through his
intestines fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating
sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting
punishment brought to his end. --(P. 400.)

It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it was a
particular breed, and only used to convey wrath. Some authorities think
it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt.

However, one thing we do know; and that is that that worm had been due
years and years.  Robert F. had violated a monastery once; he had
committed unprintable crimes since, and they had been permitted--under
disapproval--but the ravishment of the monastery had not been forgotten
nor forgiven, and the worm came at last.

Why were these reforms put off in this strange way?  What was to be
gained by it?  Did Henry of Huntington really know his facts, or was he
only guessing?  Sometimes I am half persuaded that he is only a guesser,
and not a good one.  The divine wisdom must surely be of the better
quality than he makes it out to be.

Five hundred years before Henry's time some forecasts of the Lord's
purposes were furnished by a pope, who perceived, by certain perfectly
trustworthy signs furnished by the Deity for the information of His
familiars, that the end of the world was

. . . about to come.  But as this end of the world draws near many
things are at hand which have not before happened, as changes in the air,
terrible signs in the heavens, tempests out of the common order of the
seasons, wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes in various places; all
which will not happen in our days, but after our days all will come to
pass.

Still, the end was so near that these signs were "sent before that we
may be careful for our souls and be found prepared to meet the impending
judgment."

That was thirteen hundred years ago.  This is really no improvement on
the work of the Roman augurs.