Fall 2013

Survey of American Literature I - Syllabus

Instructor Anelka Ragu Supervisor: Dr. Robert Sullivan 063-378 146 E-mail Office Hours Phone Resources:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5 Edition, Volume I, Baym, N. (General Editor), New York:1998 th The Norton Anthology of American Literature , 5 Edition, Volume II, Baym, N. (General Editor), New York:1998 Norton online: http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/
th

andjelka.raguz@ffmo.ba Wednesdays, 3.00-4.00 p.m. Thursdays, 3.00-4.00 p.m.

Course Schedule

Week 1 2 3 4

Topic

Required Reading

Introduction Early American and Colonial Period to 1776 Democratic Origins and Irving, Washington (1783-1859): Rip Van Winkle Revolutionary Writers (1776Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851): The Pioneer 1820) (extract) The Romantic Period (1820-1860) Edgar Allan Poe The Raven, The Purloined Letter, Ms. Found in a Bottle, William Wilson, The Oblong Box

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

Herman Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno

Emily Dickinson

Selected Poetry

Mid-term Examination (in-class, compulsory)

Henry James

The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller

10

Kate Chopin

The Awakening, The Story of an Hour.

11

Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome, Roman Fever.

12

E.A. Robinson

Selected Poetry

13

Robert Frost

Selected Poetry In class - only for students who passed the mid-term examination!

14

End of Term Exam

Fall 2013

Course Requirements Students are required - to attend lectures and classes regularly - to be punctual because you will be given pop quizzes at the beginning of the class - to read all the required material for the designated class - to participate in the tutorials - to hand in your OWN work on time

Grading Policy Percentage 89-100% 76-88,9% 63-75,9% 55 62,9% Below 55% ECTS Grade A B C D F Numerical Grade 5 4 3 2 1

Your grade will consist of the following components:

class participation: 15% essay: 25% mid-term exam 30% + end-of-term exam 30% OR comprehensive written exam 60%

NB: Students who achieve less than 40% of the grade (i.e. less than 16 points) defined by this syllabus for class participation and the formal literary essay will be deemed ineligible to sit the final written exam. Students who fail to pass the mid-term exam are ineligible to sit the end-of-term exam. They will be required to sit a comprehensive written exam covering the material for the whole course during the exam period. In order to pass the course, students must achieve a passing grade on the final exam. Plagiarism Policy Plagiarism will not be tolerated in any form. Any student caught plagiarising will be severely penalised. If you are not sure what constitutes plagiarism, come to see me and we will clarify the issue.

Module Title: Module Code: Module Cycle: ECTS Credit Value: Length: Faculty: Department: Module Status: Time: Module leader: Contact hours: E-mail address: Pre-requisites: Co-requisites: Access restrictions: Assessment:

Survey of American Literature I FQ-BiH and Bologna 2nd Cycle 4 One semester Faculty of Arts, The University of Mostar English Language and Literature Core Dr.sc. Robert Sullivan / A. Ragu robertsully@gmail.com / andjelka.raguz@ffmo.ba Survey of English Literature II BA English majors class participation, quizzes, essay, mid-term exam and end-of-term exam or comprehensive final exam

Module Aims:

The aims of this module are to: Acquaint students with early American literature to the turn of the twentieth century; Inform students of the various literary forms that emerged during the periods studied, and the conventions of the various literary forms; Acquaint students with the historical, social and cultural background that characterised and influenced the development of American literature; Situate a work of literature within a specific historical and social context; Engage students with themes and ideas found in literature through writing and class discussions; Encourage students to participate in an in-class scholarly dialogue and to respond critically to a work of literature; Deepen students awareness of the universal human concerns that are the basis for literary works; Stimulate a greater appreciation of language as an artistic medium, and of the aesthetic principles that shape literary works; Guide students in the conduct of independent research and the writing of a scholarly paper. Upon successful completion of this module, students will be able to: Recall the content of literary texts; Identify representative authors and works in a particular literary tradition;

Learning Outcomes:

Define the various ideas and movements in early American literature; Recognize significant themes and techniques shared by works in a particular literary tradition; Identify important quotations, place them in context and explain the significance of each quotation with respect to its text; Explain ways in which a particular literary work reflects the historical, social and cultural circumstances in which it was produced; Analyse and synthesise literary elements and themes between various texts. Be able to conduct independent research and write a scholarly paper.

Course Description:

The Module is a survey course, which, due to time constraints, is unable to cover all the major American authors. It will, however, present and analyse representative works of literature from the beginnings of American literature in English through to the turn of the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the conventions of the various literary genres and the development thereof. The module includes all literary genres: poetry, prose and drama. The literary works will be studied within their historical, social and cultural contexts, aiming to establish connections across time between different writers, genres and eras. The module will limit the teaching and learning methods to lectures and tutorials. The lectures will acquaint students with the theoretical and background knowledge necessary to analyse the set texts with respect to their historical, social and political context. The tutorials will concentrate on close reading of the set texts in order to show how the literary works reflect the historical, social and cultural context in which they were produced. Students will be assessed based on their completion of various tasks, which include: Class participation (obligatory attendance, quizzes and class participation) Essay (1500-2000 words) Mid-term and final written exam or a comprehensive written exam during the regular exam term. Assessment will be based on students ability to: Recall the content of literary texts; Identify representative authors and works in a particular literary tradition; Define the various ideas and movements in early American

Learning Delivery:

Assessment Rationale:

Assessment criteria:

literature; Recognize significant themes and techniques shared by works in a particular literary tradition; Identify important quotations, place them in context and explain the significance of each quotation with respect to its text; Explain ways in which a particular literary work reflects and shapes the historical, social and cultural circumstances in which it was produced; Analyse and synthesise literary elements and themes between various texts. Conduct research and write a scholarly paper.

Assessment Weighting:

class participation: 15% essay: 25% mid-term exam 30% + end-of-term exam 30% OR comprehensive written exam 60% NB: Students who achieve less than 40% of the grade (i.e. less than 16 points) defined by this syllabus for class participation and the formal literary essay will be deemed ineligible to sit the final written exam. Students who fail to pass the mid-term exam are ineligible to sit the end-of-term exam. They will be required to sit a comprehensive written exam covering the material for the whole course during the exam period. In order to pass the course, students must achieve a passing grade on the final exam.

Essential Reading:

Baym, Nina et al, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed., vols. I & II Irving, Washington (1783-1859): Rip Van Winkle Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851): The Pioneer (extract) Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): The Raven, The Purloined Letter, Ms. Found in a Bottle, William Wilson, The Oblong Box Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64): The Scarlet Letter Herman Melville (1819-91): Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno Emily Dickinson (1830-86): Selected Poetry Henry James (1843-1916): The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller Kate Chopin (1851-1904): The Awakening, The Story of an Hour. Edith Wharton (1862 1937): Ethan Frome, Roman Fever. E.A. Robinson (1874-1963): Selected Poetry: Luke Havergal; Richard Cory; Miniver Cheevy; Mr. Floods Party Robert Frost (1874-1963): Selected Poetry: Mending Wall; Home

Burial; After Apple-Picking; The Road Not Taken; Birches; Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening Recommended Reading:

Literature to 1 7 0 0
THE MARVELS OF SPAINAND AMERICA In 1 4 9 4 a m a n w h o h a d c r o s s e d the Atlantic in a large ship returned h o m e to a m a z e t h o s e w h o m he h a d left behind with tales of a new world full of "marv e l s . " N o n e of t h o s e w h o listened to him h a d a c c o m p l i s h e d anything remotely like this. N o n e had h e a r d of this other world, let a l o n e s e e n it, a n d n o n e c o u l d begin to c o m p r e h e n d what its discovery might m e a n for their own familiar univ e r s e . As they listened with rapt attention, the voyager told of things u n d r e a m e d of, p l a n t s a n d a n i m a l s a n d m o s t of all s t r a n g e p e o p l e s w h o s e u n c a n n y c u s t o m s , c o s t u m e s , a n d beliefs a s t o n i s h e d all who h e a r d him. T h e m a n in q u e s t i o n might have b e e n C h r i s t o p h e r C o l u m b u s or any of the d o z e n s of E u r o p e a n s w h o a c c o m p a n i e d him on his first voyage, b u t h e w a s not. In fact, this teller of tales did j o i n in that voyage, but he h a d not sailed from P a l o s , S p a i n , with the other m e n on A u g u s t 6, 1 4 9 2 , a n d h a d not b e e n with t h e m w h e n , at two in the m o r n i n g of O c t o b e r 12, they sighted the B a h a m i a n island they n a m e d S a n S a l v a d o r . T w i c e h e c r o s s e d the Atlantic with C o l u m b u s , but in reverse: first to S p a i n from the Indies a n d then b a c k a g a i n . W e d o not know his original n a m e , but we know that he w a s a T a i n o Indian from the B a h a m a s , o n e of seven natives w h o m C o l u m b u s seized a n d took to S p a i n . T h e r e h e w a s baptized a n d r e n a m e d D i e g o C o l o n , after the son of C o l u m b u s himself. ( C o l o n w a s the S p a n i s h version of the family's n a m e . ) O f the other natives, all of w h o m were similarly r e c h r i s t e n e d , o n e r e m a i n e d in S p a i n , w h e r e h e died within a few years. F o u r others died of s i c k n e s s on the p a s s a g e b a c k to A m e r i c a with C o l u m b u s a n d C o l o n . C o l o n a n d the sixth m a n e s c a p e d the s a m e fate only "by a hair's b r e a d t h , " a s the fleet's p h y s i c i a n , D i e g o Alvarez C h a n c a , wrote in his i m p o r t a n t letter on the s e c o n d voyage. R e t u r n e d to the C a r i b b e a n , the two served a s translators for the m u c h larger party of S p a n i a r d s , p e r h a p s fifteen h u n d r e d strong, w h o arrived in s e v e n t e e n s h i p s early in N o v e m b e r 1 4 9 3 . C o l o n himself already had s e e n service a s a n intermediary during the first voyage. O f the two m e n , only C o l o n is reported by the historian A n d r e s B e r n a l d e z , w h o knew C o l u m b u s a n d u s e d the mariner's own lost a c c o u n t of the s e c o n d voyage, to have regaled the other natives with tales of "the things which h e h a d s e e n in C a s t i l e a n d the marvels of S p a i n , . . . the great cities a n d fortresses a n d c h u r c h e s , . . . the p e o p l e a n d h o r s e s a n d a n i m a l s , . . . the great nobility a n d wealth of the sovereigns a n d great lords, . . . the kinds of food, . . . the festivals a n d t o u r n a m e n t s [and] bull-fighting." P e r h a p s the other m a n h a d died by this point in the s e c o n d voyage. P e r h a p s C o l u m b u s singled out C o l o n for special m e n t i o n b e c a u s e C o l o n had learned C a s t i l i a n well e n o u g h to s p e a k it a n d had s h o w n himself to be a n intelligent m a n a n d a g o o d g u i d e . H e w a s to a c c o m p a n y C o l u m b u s on the w h o l e of this voyage, which lasted three years.
1

LITERATURE

TO

1700

T h e story of C o l o n c a t c h e s in m i n i a t u r e the extraordinary c h a n g e s that were to o c c u r a s natives of the O l d W o r l d e n c o u n t e r e d natives of the N e w for the first time in r e c o r d e d history. His story r e m i n d s us first that discovery w a s m u t u a l rather t h a n o n e s i d e d . T o be s u r e , far m o r e E u r o p e a n s voyaged to A m e r i c a than A m e r i c a n s to E u r o p e , a n d they sent h o m e t h o u s a n d s of reports a n d letters detailing what they s a w a n d did in the N e w W o r l d . B e c a u s e m a n y of t h e s e E u r o p e a n travelers c a m e to A m e r i c a to stay, however, the Indians s o o n h a d a colonial imitation of E u r o p e d e v e l o p i n g before their eyes, c o m p l e t e with fortresses, c h u r c h e s , h o r s e s , n e w foods (on the s e c o n d voyage, C o l u m b u s brought w h e a t , m e l o n s , o n i o n s , r a d i s h e s , s a l a d g r e e n s , g r a p e v i n e s , s u g a r c a n e , a n d various fruit t r e e s ) , a n d m u c h else that C o l o n in 1 4 9 3 c o u l d have f o u n d only in E u r o p e . Over t i m e the natives of A m e r i c a could discover E u r o p e e n c r o a c h i n g on their villages a n d fields as the i m p o r t e d E u r o p e a n l a n d s c a p e vied with their own. E u r o p e w a s p r e s e n t in the textiles on the c o l o n i s t s ' b o d i e s , in the tools in their h a n d s (for both of which the A m e r i c a n Indians t r a d e d ) , a n d in the institutions of the c h u r c h a n d state (slavery b e i n g the m o s t obvious e x a m p l e ) that h a d b e g u n to r e s h a p e the identities a n d reorganize the lives of Native A m e r i c a n p e o p l e s . In s u c h c o n c r e t e t e r m s a n e w world w a s b e i n g c r e a t e d in the W e s t I n d i e s . It was not the new world C o l u m b u s h i m s e l f w a s s p e a k i n g of near the e n d of his life when h e wrote in 1 5 0 0 to the S p a n i s h sovereigns F e r d i n a n d a n d Isabella that he h a d " b r o u g h t u n d e r [their] d o m i n i o n . . . a n o t h e r world, whereby S p a i n , which w a s called poor, is now m o s t r i c h . " T h e n e w world that mattered w a s not j u s t a n e x p a n s e of s p a c e previously u n k n o w n to E u r o p e a n s ; it w a s a genuinely new set of social relationships that would evolve over the next c e n t u r i e s a s E u r o p e a n d the A m e r i c a s c o n t i n u e d to interact. With the E u r o p e a n introduction of African slaves early in the sixteenth century, the terms of this new world b e c a m e m u c h m o r e c o m p l e x . T h e cultural a n d social relations of A m e r i c a n s t o o k their origin in a great mixing of p e o p l e s from the whole Atlantic b a s i n d u r i n g the first c e n t u r y a n d a half after 1 4 9 2 . Discovery b e g a n with w o n d e r t h a t of C o l o n ' s listeners o n his return in 1 4 9 4 a n d that of C o l u m b u s a s he d e s c a n t e d on the green b e a u t y of the i s l a n d s e v o k i n g a m o o d that has r e m a i n e d s t r o n g in A m e r i c a n writing ever s i n c e : he saw "trees of a t h o u s a n d k i n d s " on S a n S a l v a d o r in N o v e m b e r 1 4 9 2 , trees that s e e m e d to " t o u c h the sky . . . as green a n d a s lovely a s they are in S p a i n in M a y . " B u t beyond that t r a n s c e n d e n t m o m e n t , discovery entailed a many-sided p r o c e s s of influence a n d e x c h a n g e that ultimately p r o d u c e d the hybrid cultural universe of the Atlantic world, of which the E n g l i s h colonies were o n e small part. M u c h of this universe c a m e through struggle rather than c o o p e r a t i o n . E a c h p e o p l e u s e d its own traditions or e l e m e n t s recently borrowed from others to e n d u r e or c o n q u e r or outwit its o p p o s i t e n u m b e r s , a n d violence often swallowed up the primal w o n d e r g l i m p s e d in the earliest d o c u m e n t s . With g u n p o w d e r a n d steel, E u r o p e a n s h a d the t e c h n o l o g i c a l e d g e in warfare, a n d it would s e e m t h a t d e s p i t e c e n t u r i e s of p r o p a g a n d a to the c o n t r a r y t h e y took violence m o r e seriously than did the A m e r i c a n I n d i a n s . T h e natives at first f o u n d the s c a l e of E u r o p e a n warfare a p p a l l i n g . In N e w E n g l a n d , the c o l o n i s t s ' native allies a g a i n s t the P e q u o t tribe in 1 6 3 7 c o m p l a i n e d that the E n g l i s h m a n n e r of fighting, a s soldier J o h n Underhill noted in his Newes from America ( 1 6 3 8 ) , "[was] too f u r i o u s , a n d slay[ed] too m a n y m e n . " T h e natives were q u i c k to a d o p t E u r o p e a n w e a p o n s a n d tactics,

INTRODUCTION

however, applying t h e m to their own d i s p u t e s a n d to their d i s p u t e s with the E u r o p e a n s . T h e ferocity of what E u r o p e a n s have called the " I n d i a n w a r s " w a s the violent recoil in the f a c e of violence from interlopers who t h r e a t e n e d the very life of the native p e o p l e s . A l m o s t literally from 1 4 9 2 , native p e o p l e s b e g a n to die in large n u m b e r s , if not from war then from e n s l a v e m e n t , brutal m i s t r e a t m e n t , d e s p a i r , or d i s e a s e . O n e of the m o r e insidious forms of " e x c h a n g e " involved the transfer to the A m e r i c a n I n d i a n s of the m i c r o b e s to which E u r o p e a n s h a d b e c o m e inured but to which the Indians h a d virtually no r e s i s t a n c e . N o t h i n g better displays the isolation of the c o n t i n e n t s a n d the d r a m a of e n c o u n t e r that b e g a n in 1 4 9 2 than the e p i d e m i c disasters that smallpox, m e a s l e s , typhus, a n d other Old World m a l a d i e s u n l e a s h e d on the Native A m e r i c a n s . W h o l e p o p u l a t i o n s p l u m m e t e d as s u c h d i s e a s e s , c o m b i n e d with the other severe s t r e s s e s p l a c e d o n the natives, s p r e a d t h r o u g h o u t the C a r i b b e a n a n d then on the m a i n l a n d of C e n t r a l a n d S o u t h A m e r i c a . T h e institutional d i s e a s e of slavery further d e c i m a t e d the native p e o p l e s . It is widely a g r e e d that the original p o p u l a t i o n of the island of H i s p a n i o l a ( e s t i m a t e d at anywhere from o n e h u n d r e d t h o u s a n d to eight million in 1 4 9 2 ) p l u n g e d o n c e the S p a n i s h took over the island, partly through d i s e a s e a n d partly through the a b u s e s of the encomienda system of virtual e n s l a v e m e n t . In the face of this s u d d e n d e c l i n e in available native labor, S p a i n i n t r o d u c e d African slavery into Hisp a n i o l a a s early as 1 5 0 1 . By the middle of the sixteenth century the native p o p u l a t i o n h a d b e e n so c o m p l e t e l y d i s p l a c e d by African slaves that the S p a n ish historian A n t o n i o de H e r r e r a called the island "an effigy or a n i m a g e of E t h i o p i a itself." T h u s the d e s t r u c t i o n of o n e p e o p l e w a s a c c o m p a n i e d by the d i s p l a c e m e n t a n d e n s l a v e m e n t of a n o t h e r . By that point, the naive " w o n d e r " of discovery w a s all but u n r e c o v e r a b l e . It would be i n a c c u r a t e to picture the I n d i a n s , however, a s merely victims, suffering d e c l i n e . T h e natives m a d e shrewd u s e of the E u r o p e a n p r e s e n c e in A m e r i c a to forward their own a i m s , as C o l o n r e m i n d s u s . In 1 5 1 9 the disaffected natives in the Aztec E m p i r e clearly threw their lot in with C o r t e s b e c a u s e they saw in him a c h a n c e to settle the s c o r e with their overlord M o n t e z u m a , which they a s s u r e d l y did. In N e w E n g l a n d , the P e q u o t W a r of 1 6 3 7 saw a similar a l i g n m e n t on the E n g l i s h side of tribes s u c h a s the Narr a g a n s e t t s a n d the M o h e g a n s , w h o h a d g r i e v a n c e s with the fierce P e q u o t s , interlopers in the region. U n d e r ordinary c i r c u m s t a n c e s , a s a m o n g the Iroq u o i s in the N o r t h e a s t , E u r o p e a n technology a n d the E u r o p e a n market were seized o n a s a m e a n s of c o n s o l i d a t i n g a d v a n t a g e s g a i n e d before the arrival of the colonists. T h e Iroquois h a d b e g u n to organize their f a m o u s L e a g u e of the Five N a t i o n s before E u r o p e a n s e t t l e m e n t , but they solidified their earlier victories over other native p e o p l e s by forging c a n n y a l l i a n c e s with the D u t c h a n d then the English in N e w York. In the S o u t h e a s t , r e m n a n t p e o p l e s b a n d e d together in the early eighteenth century to c r e a t e the C a t a w b a , a n e w political g r o u p that c o n s t r u c t e d what o n e historian has called a " n e w world" for itself. N o longer known by a bewildering diversity of n a m e s , the former N a s saw a n d Suttirie a n d C h a r r a a n d S u c c a p e o p l e s b a n d e d together with several others in an a t t e m p t to deal m o r e effectively with the e n c r o a c h i n g E u r o A m e r i c a n s of C h a r l e s t o n a n d the L o w C o u n t r y . T h i s hardly w a s a c a s e of d i m i n i s h m e n t or r e d u c t i o n . Even a s fewer a n d fewer of the original millions r e m a i n e d , they s h o w e d t h e m s e l v e s resourceful in resisting, t r a n s f o r m i n g ,

LITERATURE

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and exploiting the exotic c u l t u r e s the E u r o p e a n s were i m p o s i n g on their original l a n d s c a p e .

NATIVE AMERICAN

ORAL

LITERATURE

W h e n C o l u m b u s sailed from E u r o p e in 1 4 9 2 , h e left b e h i n d him a n u m b e r of relatively centralized nation-states with largely agricultural e c o n o m i e s . E u r o p e a n s s p o k e s o m e two or three dozen l a n g u a g e s , m o s t of t h e m closely related; a n d they were generally C h r i s t i a n in religious belief a n d worldview, a l t h o u g h m a n y g r o u p s h a d h a d c o n t a c t a n d conflictwith a d h e r e n t s of J u d a i s m a n d I s l a m . A written a l p h a b e t h a d b e e n u s e d by E u r o p e a n s to preserve a n d c o m m u n i c a t e information for m a n y c e n t u r i e s a n d G u t e n b e r g ' s invention of m o v e a b l e type in the m i d - 1 4 0 0 s h a d s h o w n the way to a m e c h a n i c a l m e a n s of "writing"; by 1 4 9 2 , E u r o p e w a s on its way to b e c o m i n g a print c u l t u r e . By c o n t r a s t , in 1 4 9 2 in N o r t h A m e r i c a , native p e o p l e s p o k e h u n d r e d s of l a n g u a g e s , b e l o n g i n g to entirely different linguistic families (e.g., A t h a p a s c a n , U t o - A z t e c a n , C h i n o o k a n , S i o u a n , a n d A l g o n q u i a n ) a n d s t r u c t u r e d their c u l t u r e s in extraordinarily diverse e c o n o m i c a n d political f o r m s . In the G r e a t B a s i n of the W e s t , s m a l l , loosely organized b a n d s of U t e s e k e d o u t a b a r e s u b s i s t e n c e by h u n t i n g a n d gathering, while the s e d e n t a r y P u e b l o p e o p l e s of the S o u t h w e s t a n d the I r o q u o i a n s of the N o r t h e a s t h a d both highly develo p e d agricultural e c o n o m i e s a n d c o m p l e x m o d e s of political organization. In spite of s o m e c o m m o n f e a t u r e s , religious a n d mythological beliefs were also diverse. A m o n g N o r t h A m e r i c a n p e o p l e s a l o n e , eight different types of creation stories have b e e n d o c u m e n t e d , with wide variations a m o n g t h e m . All of t h e s e differ substantially from the c r e a t i o n stories of J u d a i s m , Christianity, and Islam. Also unlike E u r o p e a n c u l t u r e s , N o r t h A m e r i c a n p e o p l e s did not u s e a written a l p h a b e t . T h e i r s were oral c u l t u r e s , relying on the s p o k e n w o r d w h e t h e r c h a n t e d , s u n g , or p r e s e n t e d in lengthy n a r r a t i v e s a n d the m e m o r y of t h o s e words to preserve i m p o r t a n t cultural i n f o r m a t i o n . T h e term literature c o m e s from the L a t i n littera, "letter." N a t i v e A m e r i c a n literatures were not, until long after the arrival of the E u r o p e a n s , written "littera-tures." I n d e e d , a s the p h r a s e oral literature might a p p e a r to be a c o n t r a d i c t i o n in t e r m s , s o m e have c h o s e n to call the e x p r e s s i o n s of the oral tradition orature. T h e s e e x p r e s s i o n s were, like the l a n g u a g e s , political e c o n o m i e s , a n d relig i o u s beliefs of Native A m e r i c a n p e o p l e s , extremely v a r i o u s . E u r o p e a n s in 1 4 9 2 c o u l d n a m e the tragedy, the c o m e d y , the e p i c , the o d e , a n d a variety of lyric f o r m s a s types of literature. In Native A m e r i c a t h e r e w e r e a l m o s t surely (almost, b e c a u s e we have no a c t u a l r e c o r d s that p r e d a t e 1 4 9 2 ) s u c h things a s Kwakiutl winter c e r e m o n i e s , W i n n e b a g o trickster tale c y c l e s , A p a c h e j o k e s , H o p i p e r s o n a l n a m i n g a n d g r i e v a n c e c h a n t s , Yaqui d e e r s o n g s , Y u m a n d r e a m s o n g s , P i m a n s h a m a n i c c h a n t s , I r o q u o i s c o n d o l e n c e rituals, N a v a j o c u r i n g a n d b l e s s i n g c h a n t s , a n d C h i p p e w a s o n g s of the G r e a t M e d icine S o c i e t y , to n a m e only s o m e of the types of N a t i v e A m e r i c a n verbal expression. T h a t there are m a n y s u c h types is u n q u e s t i o n a b l e , b u t a r e t h e s e literary types? T h i s q u e s t i o n would not m a k e s e n s e to traditional native p e o p l e s , w h o

INTRODUCTION

do not have a category of l a n g u a g e u s e c o r r e s p o n d i n g to our category of literature. F r o m a W e s t e r n p e r s p e c t i v e , however, the types of native verbal expression c o u l d only be c o n s i d e r e d as literature after that late-eighteentha n d early-nineteenth-century revolution in E u r o p e a n c o n s c i o u s n e s s known as R o m a n t i c i s m . In that period the c o n c e p t of literature shifted away from being defined by the medium of expression (all l a n g u a g e preserved in letters) to the kind of expression (those texts that e m p h a s i z e d the imaginative a n d e m o t i o n a l possibilities of l a n g u a g e ) . With this shift in the m e a n i n g of literature, m a n y Native A m e r i c a n verbal types c o u l d quite comfortably be considered literary. W e read t h e s e f o r m s on the p a g e , but it b e a r s r e p e a t i n g that traditional Native A m e r i c a n literatures originate a s oral p e r f o r m a n c e s . T h e y are offered to a u d i e n c e s a s d r a m a t i c events in t i m e , l a n g u a g e for the ear, rather than o b j e c t s in s p a c e for the eye. A n d in p e r f o r m a n c e , a p a u s e , a q u i c k e n i n g of p a c e or a s u d d e n retardation, a g e s t u r e , or a lowering of the voice affects m e a n i n g . N o t surprisingly, s c h o l a r s differ a b o u t the b e s t way to transfer p e r f o r m a n c e to the p a g e . S o m e have o p t e d for a stylized typography where type size and a r r a n g e m e n t s e e k to convey s o m e t h i n g of the feeling of what an a c t u a l p e r f o r m a n c e might have b e e n like. O t h e r s , a c k n o w l e d g i n g that b l a c k m a r k s on a white p a g e c a n n o t r e p r o d u c e a living v o i c e , have left it to the r e a d e r to i m a g i n e t h e s e words in p e r f o r m a n c e . T h i s matter of translating the words effectively is controversial. W h e n we know that the original p e r f o r m a n c e u s e d a r c h a i c a n d u n f a m i l i a r t e r m s , s h o u l d we u s e a r c h a i c a n d unfamiliar t e r m s in the translation, even t h o u g h they may a p p e a r stiff a n d old-fashioned on the p a g e ? W h a t would the c o n temporary reader think of the following excerpt from J . N. B. Hewitt's rendition of the Iroquois creation story: " T h r o u g h the crafty m a c h i n a t i o n s of the Fire D r a g o n of the W h i t e Body, the c o n s u m i n g j e a l o u s y of the a g e d presiding chief w a s kindled a g a i n s t his y o u n g s p o u s e . " S h o u l d we instead opt for the n o n s t a n d a r d E n g l i s h , the Red E n g l i s h , or R e s e r v a t i o n E n g l i s h a s it h a s b e e n c a l l e d , of native c o l l a b o r a t o r s in the translation p r o c e s s e v e n if it may strike s o m e readers not a s lively a n d colloquial but illiterate? H e r e are a few lines from a c o n t e m p o r a r y translation in Red E n g l i s h of a folktale from the N o r t h w e s t : " H e told the chief: 'Yes, I r e m e m b e r , I t h o u g h t of it, I have a worker[,] a boy, a n d I a s k e d him [to c o m e ] but n o , he didn't want to leave his work a n d his e a t i n g s . ' " O f c o u r s e , if we t r a n s l a t e t h e s e texts into standard, or "literary," E n g l i s h , we may have substantially m i s r e p r e s e n t e d verbal expression that, in the original, would surely strike u s a s s t r a n g e . C o n s i d e r the following translation: You have b e e n falling falling H a v e you fallen from the top of the s a l m o n berry b u s h e s falling falling

LITERATURE

TO

1700

This is attractive by c o n t e m p o r a r y s t a n d a r d s , but, for the s a k e of a e s t h e t i c s , it gives u p a g o o d deal of fidelity to the original, w h i c h never a p p e a r e d o n the p a g e . While the q u e s t i o n of how best to t r a n s l a t e Native A m e r i c a n verbal expression m u s t r e m a i n o p e n , r e a d i n g the w o r d s of native oral literature conveys s o m e s e n s e of i n d i g e n o u s literary e x p r e s s i o n a s it m a y have b e e n before the c o m i n g of the E u r o p e a n s .

VOYAGES OF

DISCOVERY

C o l u m b u s w a s still m a k i n g voyages to A m e r i c a ( 1 4 9 2 - 9 3 ; 1 4 9 3 - 9 6 ; 1 4 9 8 ; a n d 1 5 0 2 - 0 4 ) a s other E u r o p e a n s , following his e x a m p l e , f o u n d their way to the W e s t Indies. G i o v a n n i C a b o t o (known a s J o h n C a b o t to the E n g l i s h for w h o m he sailed) a n d his fellow Italian A m e r i g o V e s p u c c i both c r o s s e d the o c e a n before 1 5 0 0 , a s did the P o r t u g u e s e native P e d r o C a b r a l . After that d a t e the voyagers b e c a m e too m a n y to track. Unlike the Viking invasion of five h u n d r e d years b e f o r e , which h a d e s t a b l i s h e d m o d e s t c o a s t a l s e t t l e m e n t s in N o r t h A m e r i c a that Native A m e r i c a n s s o o n w i p e d o u t , this s e c o n d E u r o p e a n wave quickly gathered m o m e n t u m a n d e x t e n d e d itself far to the north a n d s o u t h of the C a r i b b e a n b a s i n that C o l u m b u s explored. C a b o t w a s n e a r the m o u t h of the S t . L a w r e n c e in C a n a d a the year before V e s p u c c i f o u n d that of the A m a z o n , nearly five t h o u s a n d miles away in S o u t h A m e r i c a . S o o n the E u r o p e a n s were e s t a b l i s h i n g c o l o n i e s everywhere. T h e first c o l o n i s t s lingered on the C a r i b b e a n island of H i s p a n i o l a following the d e p a r t u r e of C o l u m b u s in 1 4 9 3 . A l t h o u g h that small s e t t l e m e n t of L a N a v i d a d w a s soon destroyed in a c l a s h with T a i n o natives u n d e r the c a c i q u e C a o n a b o of M a g u a n a , the m a s s i v e s e c o n d voyage in 1 4 9 3 c a m e e q u i p p e d to stay, a n d from that point on S p a i n a n d E u r o p e generally m a i n t a i n e d a n a g g r e s s i v e p r e s e n c e in the W e s t Indies. T h e c o n s t a n t battles a l o n g v a g u e frontiers with Native A m e r i c a n s a d d e d fuel to the d i s s e n s i o n a n d political in-fighting a m o n g the settlers t h e m s e l v e s , w h o s e riots a n d m u t i n i e s nearly ruined s e t t l e m e n t after s e t t l e m e n t . J o h n S m i t h ' s e x p e r i e n c e d u r i n g the first J a m e s t o w n voyage of 1 6 0 7 provides probably the m o s t f a m o u s e x a m p l e from A n g l o - A m e r i c a . Arrested a n d nearly e x e c u t e d (probably for offending his " b e t t e r s , " s o m e t h i n g he h a d the habit of doing) en route to A m e r i c a in 1 6 0 7 , S m i t h w a s r e l e a s e d in Virginia w h e n the colony's s e a l e d instructions were o p e n e d , revealing that this apparently m o d e s t soldier h a d b e e n n a m e d to the p r e s t i g i o u s governing council even before the s h i p s h a d left E n g l a n d . C o l u m b u s himself b e c a m e the f o c u s of fierce c o m p e t i t i o n s a m o n g greedy settlers a n d officials in Hisp a n i o l a by the time of his third voyage a n d , stripped of his property a n d p o w e r s by a royal official m a d d e n e d by the u p r o a r , went b a c k to S p a i n in c h a i n s in 1 5 0 0 . E u r o p e c o n t i n u e d to e x p a n d in the N e w W o r l d a m i d the disorder within s e t t l e m e n t walls a n d the great violence o u t s i d e . C o l u m b u s f o u n d the mainland of S o u t h A m e r i c a in 1 4 9 8 a n d C e n t r a l A m e r i c a in 1 5 0 2 , by which time J o h n C a b o t a n d the P o r t u g u e s e C o r t e - R e a l b r o t h e r s , G a s p a r a n d M i g u e l , h a d b e e n d o w n the c o a s t of N o r t h A m e r i c a from L a b r a d o r to the C h e s a p e a k e , a n d C a b r a l a n d V e s p u c c i h a d c o v e r e d the e a s t c o a s t of S o u t h A m e r i c a from the O r i n o c o River in p r e s e n t - d a y V e n e z u e l a to well s o u t h of the Rio de la Plata on the border of p r e s e n t - d a y U r u g u a y a n d A r g e n t i n a . B e t w e e n 1 5 1 5

INTRODUCTION

a n d the 1 5 2 0 s , S p a i n , u n d e r the reign of C h a r l e s V, aggressively r e a c h e d o u t over the G u l f of M e x i c o , toward the Y u c a t a n p e n i n s u l a a n d M e x i c o a n d Florida a n d the I s t h m u s of P a n a m a , then s e n t expeditions into the heart of N o r t h A m e r i c a from the 1 5 2 0 s to the 1 5 4 0 s , c o v e r i n g a vast region s t r e t c h i n g from Florida to the G u l f of C a l i f o r n i a a n d north a s far a s K a n s a s a n d the T e n n e s s e e River. At the s a m e t i m e , other S p a n i s h explorers a n d c o n q u i s t a dors s p r e a d out over S o u t h A m e r i c a , especially its west c o a s t , w h e r e in imitation of C o r t e s ' s C o n q u e s t of M e x i c o a d e c a d e earlier J u a n Pizarro overc a m e the I n c a n E m p i r e , recently b e s e t with violent civil war. In that s a m e period, the P o r t u g u e s e e s t a b l i s h e d their first p e r m a n e n t s e t t l e m e n t s in Brazil, a n d the F r e n c h explorer J a c q u e s C a r t i e r sailed into the G u l f of S t . L a w r e n c e , then u p its c h i e f river a s far a s the site of the future M o n t r e a l . Within fifty years of 1 4 9 2 , then, the e a s t c o a s t s of m u c h of b o t h c o n t i n e n t s h a d b e e n explored, a n d m a n y of their m a j o r r e g i o n s had b e e n t r a v e r s e d ; the m o s t s p e c t a c u l a r of their p e o p l e s , the Aztecs a n d the I n c a s , h a d b e e n c o n q u e r e d ; a n d E u r o p e h a d settled in for a l o n g stay. S p a i n u n d e r F e r d i n a n d a n d Isabella a n d their g r a n d s o n C h a r l e s V took the m o s t aggressively expansive role in A m e r i c a . O t h e r E u r o p e a n n a t i o n s , m o s t c o n s p i c u o u s l y F r a n c e a n d E n g l a n d , were m o r e s e l f - a b s o r b e d , awake n i n g slowly to what w a s h a p p e n i n g a c r o s s the s e a . T h e i r first explorers enjoyed b a d luck a n d i n c o n s i s t e n t s u p p o r t . J o h n a n d S e b a s t i a n C a b o t h a d sailed for E n g l i s h m e r c h a n t s a n d the m o n a r c h s H e n r y VII a n d H e n r y VIII, b u t the first C a b o t w a s lost on his voyage in 1 4 9 8 , a n d the s e c o n d kept his interest in A m e r i c a alive only by e n t e r i n g the service of the S p a n i s h C r o w n after 1 5 1 2 . A return to his a d o p t e d h o m e l a n d of E n g l a n d a n d a royal p e n s i o n from E d w a r d VI c a m e to him only in the 1 5 4 0 s , by w h i c h p o i n t he h a d c o m m i t t e d h i m s e l f to the s e a r c h for an e a s t w a r d route to C h i n a via the s e a s north of R u s s i a . In F r a n c e , C a r t i e r enjoyed early s u p p o r t from F r a n c i s I, but his failure to find gold a n d other riches in the S t . L a w r e n c e valley a n d his d i s p u t e with the n o b l e m a n Roberval, w h o m the king a p p o i n t e d to c o m m a n d Cartier's third voyage in 1 5 4 1 , led to p r o f o u n d d i s e n c h a n t m e n t in F r a n c e . F i s h e r m e n from b o t h n a t i o n s c o n t i n u e d to harvest the f a b u l o u s riches of the s h o a l s off N o r t h A m e r i c a a n d s u m m e r e d on the s h o r e , drying their c a t c h . B u t not until the 1 5 7 0 s for E n g l a n d a n d the b e g i n n i n g of the next c e n t u r y for F r a n c e , a s a n e w g e n e r a t i o n of a d v e n t u r e r s a r o s e a n d a p e r i o d of c o m mercial e x p a n s i o n set in, did b r o a d p u b l i c s u p p o r t a n d g o v e r n m e n t a l s a n c tion c o m b i n e to stir lasting curiosity a n d i n v e s t m e n t . A series of l u c k l e s s N o r t h A m e r i c a n voyages by the E n g l i s h u n d e r Martin F r o b i s h e r , H u m p h r e y Gilbert, a n d then W a l t e r R a l e g h e n d e d in the tragedy of the " L o s t C o l o n y " of R o a n o k e I s l a n d in t h e 1 5 8 0 s . F o r a n o t h e r twenty y e a r s few E n g l i s h explorers m a d e s e r i o u s new efforts, a l t h o u g h the p r e s s b u b b l e d with p u b l i c a t i o n s regarding the N e w W o r l d , particularly the works of R i c h a r d Hakluyt the younger, w h o s e great c o l l e c t i o n s g a t h e r e d t h e fugitive r e c o r d s of E n g l i s h , a n d i n d e e d E u r o p e a n , e x p a n s i o n o v e r s e a s . Hakluyt's m a s t e r w o r k , The Principall Navigations ( 1 5 9 8 1 6 0 0 ) , b r o u g h t the literary p r o d u c t i o n s of c o u n t less E u r o p e a n m a r i n e r s to the attention of a public newly stirred by w h a t S h a k e s p e a r e s o o n w a s to call this "brave n e w w o r l d " of E u r o - A m e r i c a . H a k luyt n o t w i t h s t a n d i n g , only in 1 6 0 6 did a s e c o n d Virginia c o l o n y set forth, a n d this o n e faltered grievously at the start with a s h i p w r e c k on B e r m u d a (which w a s to inspire S h a k e s p e a r e ' s The Tempest), riots at J a m e s t o w n , n e a r starvation, a n d violent e n c o u n t e r s . By 1 6 0 3 F r e n c h interest h a d revived u n d e r the

LITERATURE

TO

1700

direction of a g r o u p of explorers a n d e x p a n s i o n i s t s , S a m u e l d e C h a m p l a i n m o s t significantly, w h o h o p e d for profit from the N e w W o r l d a n d , even m o r e , a r o u t e through it to the fabled riches of A s i a . S e a s o n e d from his voyages to S p a n i s h A m e r i c a , C h a m p l a i n picked up w h e r e C a r t i e r h a d left off sixty years earlier, f o u n d e d p e r m a n e n t s e t t l e m e n t s in the S t . L a w r e n c e valley, a n d through his a g e n t s a n d followers p u s h e d F r e n c h exploration a s far west as L a k e S u p e r i o r at a time w h e n the E n g l i s h were still struggling in Virginia a n d N e w E n g l a n d s e t t l e m e n t h a d j u s t b e g u n at P l y m o u t h .

LITERARY C O N S E Q U E N C E S

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T h e period of E u r o p e a n exploration in the N e w W o r l d p r o d u c e d a surprisingly large a n d intriguing body of literature. W h i l e m a n y m a n u s c r i p t s were archived a n d out of r e a c h until the n i n e t e e n t h century, a n u m b e r of texts f o u n d their way into print a n d were widely d i s p e r s e d , t h a n k s to the establishm e n t of printing in the half century before 1 4 9 2 . Shortly after C o l u m b u s ' s return to S p a i n in early 1 4 9 3 , there a p p e a r e d in print his letter to the court official L u i s de S a n t a n g e l , narrating the voyage a n d lushly d e s c r i b i n g the perpetual spring C o l u m b u s h a d f o u n d in the W e s t Indies the previous a u t u m n . F r o m the a p p e a r a n c e of that letter o n , the printing p r e s s a n d the E u r o p e a n e x p a n s i o n into A m e r i c a were reciprocal p a r t s of a single e n g i n e . W i t h o u t the ready d i s p e r s a l of texts rich with imagery that stirred individual i m a g i n a t i o n a n d national a m b i t i o n in regard to the W e s t I n d i e s , E u r o p e ' s m o v e m e n t westward would have b e e n b l u n t e d a n d p e r h a p s thwarted. T h e sword of c o n q u e s t found in the p e n , a n d in the printing p r e s s , a n i n d i s p e n s a b l e ally. T h e great m a s s of early A m e r i c a n writings c a m e from the h a n d s of Euro p e a n s rather than the native p e o p l e s of the N e w W o r l d . I m p o r t a n t exceptions happily exist. T h e natives h a d a lively oral c u l t u r e that v a l u e d m e m o r y over m e c h a n i c s as a m e a n s of preserving texts, a l t h o u g h a m o n g s o m e g r o u p s s u c h as the Aztecs written traditions existed (in N o r t h A m e r i c a t h e s e r e c o r d s included shellwork belts a n d p a i n t e d a n i m a l h i d e s , t e p e e s , a n d shields) a n d m a n y m o r e g r o u p s u s e d visual r e c o r d s in s u b t l e a n d s o p h i s t i c a t e d ways. S u c h c a t a c l y s m s a s the C o n q u e s t of M e x i c o p r o d u c e d not only the S p a n i s h narratives of C o r t e s , Bernal Diaz del C a s t i l l o , a n d o t h e r s b u t a l s o native r e s p o n s e s , m a n y of which p e r i s h e d with t h o s e w h o knew t h e m . T h o s e that survived in original native c h a r a c t e r s or in transliterated form have inestim a b l e e t h n o g r a p h i c a n d literary v a l u e . F o r i n s t a n c e , a n o n y m o u s native writers working in the N a h u a t l l a n g u a g e of the Aztecs in 1 5 2 8 s i g n i f i c a n t l y , they u s e d the R o m a n a l p h a b e t i n t r o d u c e d by the S p a n i s h l a m e n t e d the fall of their capital to C o r t e s in the following lines: Rroken s p e a r s lie in the r o a d s ; we have torn o u r hair in our grief. T h e h o u s e s are roofless now, a n d their walls are red with blood. N o o n e r e a d i n g t h e s e four lines will easily glorify the C o n q u e s t of M e x i c o or of the A m e r i c a s m o r e generally. T h e story of the t r a n s o c e a n i c e n c o u n t e r , however, c e a s e s to be a m a t t e r of e a s y c o n t r a s t s o n c e o n e r e a d s widely in

INTRODUCTION

the texts on either s i d e . A l t h o u g h E u r o p e a n s c o m m i t t e d atrocities in the N e w World, often they did s o a s a result of b l u n d e r i n g a n d m i s c o m m u n i c a t i o n rather than cool, deliberate policy. In fact, the split b e t w e e n policy a n d action g o e s to the heart of the infant Atlantic world of the sixteenth century a n d is mirrored in a n d influenced by the c h a r a c t e r of the writing that survives from the period. T h e great d i s t a n c e s e p a r a t i n g the h e m i s p h e r e s m a d e the coordination of intention a n d p e r f o r m a n c e extremely difficult. T h e authorities at h o m e lacked the k n o w l e d g e to form p r u d e n t or practical policy; a s a result m a n y texts written by explorers or colonists were i n t e n d e d a s " b r i e f s " m e a n t to inform or influence policy d e c i s i o n s m a d e at a d i s t a n c e . T o cite a s i m p l e e x a m p l e , C o l u m b u s h i m s e l f wrote a point-by-point description of his s e c o n d voyage in 1 4 9 5 , a d d r e s s e d to F e r d i n a n d a n d Isabella in a series of " i t e m s " to which the specific r e s p o n s e s of the sovereigns were a d d e d by a court s c r i b e . M o r e complexly, C o r t e s s o u g h t to justify his patently illegal invasion of Mexico in 1 5 1 9 by s e n d i n g several long letters to C h a r l e s V d e f e n d i n g his a c t i o n s a n d p r o m i s i n g lavish returns if his c o n q u e s t c o u l d p r o c e e d . M o s t d o c u m e n t s sent from A m e r i c a to the E u r o p e a n p o w e r s reveal s u c h generally political intentions. E u r o p e r e s p o n d e d by i s s u i n g directives a i m e d at controlling events a c r o s s the s e a . Even w h e n g o o d policies were a r t i c u l a t e d in E u r o p e , however, applying t h e m in the N e w World entailed further p r o b l e m s . By the time instructions arrived in H i s p a n i o l a , M e x i c o , J a m e s t o w n , or Q u e b e c , new events in the colony might have r e n d e r e d t h e m p o i n t l e s s . Dist a n c e m a d e control both crucial a n d difficult. W h e r e a s formal authority typically resided in E u r o p e , power a s a n informal fact of life a n d e x p e r i e n c e a n d c i r c u m s t a n c e b e l o n g e d to A m e r i c a , to t h o s e w h o c o u l d seize a n d u s e it or w h o a c q u i r e d it by virtue of what they did rather than the official investitures they bore. M u t i n y b e c a m e s o pervasive a fact or fear in A m e r i c a precisely b e c a u s e individuals a n d g r o u p s h a d , morally a n d geographically, great latitude in the thinly p o p u l a t e d colonial e n c l a v e s . If writing served in this a m b i g u o u s universe as a m e a n s to influence official policy at h o m e , it a l s o e m e r g e d as a m e a n s of justifying a c t i o n s (as with C o r t e s ) that violated or ignored E u r o p e a n directives.

fluid,

Early A m e r i c a n writing h a d , t h o u g h , a third a n d m o r e c o m p e l l i n g p u r p o s e as a literature of w i t n e s s . T h a t we know so m u c h a b o u t the E u r o p e a n devastation of the W e s t Indies c o m e s from the fact that s o m e E u r o p e a n s r e s p o n d e d powerfully to that devastation in writing. A l t h o u g h no o n e typifies this m o o d better than B a r t o l o m e de las C a s a s , w h o a s s a i l e d S p a i n ' s r u t h l e s s destruction of whole p e o p l e s in A m e r i c a , it is the rare E u r o p e a n d o c u m e n t that d o e s not reveal the bloody truths of E u r o p e ' s colonial d r e a m s . S t a r t i n g on the C o l u m b i a n voyages t h e m s e l v e s a n d flowering in the S p a n i s h W e s t Indies, especially in the 1 5 4 0 s a n d 1 5 5 0 s w h e n d e b a t e s a b o u t the mistreatm e n t of the natives earnestly m o v e d the clerics a n d g o v e r n m e n t officials at h o m e , the N e w World inspired an o u t p o u r i n g of written e x p r e s s i o n . N o t all the literature of witness s p e a k s to specific i s s u e s of policy, or particular p u b lic d e b a t e s , but in m a n y of the texts o n e s e n s e s a critical eye, a point of view not likely to be swayed by the s l o g a n s of e m p i r e or faith or even wealth. Writers s u c h as D i a z del C a s t i l l o , the chronicler of C o r t e s , a n d E n g l a n d ' s J o h n S m i t h c a m e from the u n d e r c l a s s of their native c o u n t r i e s , where but for the opportunities r e p r e s e n t e d by A m e r i c a they might well have s p e n t their days in s i l e n c e . As a result, their writing c o u l d be subversive, even m u t i n o u s ,

10

LITERATURE TO

1700

achieving its g r e a t e s t d e p t h w h e n it c a p t u r e d a vision of A m e r i c a a s m o r e than a d e p e n d e n t province of the O l d W o r l d , rather a s a p l a c e w h e r e m u c h that w a s genuinely new might b e l e a r n e d .

PILGRIM

A N D

PURITAN

T h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of P l y m o u t h P l a n t a t i o n on the s o u t h s h o r e of M a s s a c h u s e t t s in 1 6 2 0 b r o u g h t to N o r t h A m e r i c a a n e w kind of E n g l i s h settler. T h e f o u n d e r s of the colony (later called Pilgrims by their l e a d e r a n d historian William B r a d f o r d ) s h a r e d with their allies, the P u r i t a n s , a wish to purify C h r i s t i a n belief a n d p r a c t i c e . W h e r e a s the P u r i t a n s initially were willing to work within the confines of the e s t a b l i s h e d C h u r c h of E n g l a n d , the Pilgrims t h o u g h t it so c o r r u p t that they w i s h e d to s e p a r a t e t h e m s e l v e s from it completely. W h i l e still in E n g l a n d , they set u p their own secret congregation in the village of S c r o o b y in N o t t i n g h a m s h i r e . Often s u b j e c t to p e r s e c u t i o n a n d i m p r i s o n m e n t , the S c r o o b y S e p a r a t i s t s (as they were also called) saw little c h a n c e for r e m a i n i n g true to their faith a s long a s they r e m a i n e d in E n g l a n d . In 1 6 0 8 , five years after Q u e e n Elizabeth h a d b e e n s u c c e e d e d by J a m e s S t u a r t , a n e n e m y of all s u c h r e f o r m e r s , the S c r o o b y c o n g r e g a t i o n left E n g l a n d a n d settled in T h e N e t h e r l a n d s , w h e r e , William B r a d f o r d tells u s , they saw "fair a n d beautiful c i t i e s " b u t , a s foreigners, they were c o n f r o n t e d by the "grisly f a c e of poverty." I s o l a t e d by their lang u a g e a n d u n a b l e to farm, they took u p t r a d e s like weaving, Bradford's c h o i c e , that p r o m i s e d a living. Eventually, fearing that they m i g h t l o s e their religious identity a s their children were s w a l l o w e d u p in D u t c h c u l t u r e , they petitioned for the right to settle in the vast A m e r i c a n territories of E n g l a n d ' s Virginia C o m p a n y . B a c k e d by E n g l i s h investors, the v e n t u r e w a s c o m m e r cial as well a s religious in n a t u r e . A m o n g the h u n d r e d p e o p l e on the Mayflower there were a l m o s t three t i m e s a s m a n y s e c u l a r settlers a s S e p a r a t i s t s . T h i s initial g r o u p , set d o w n on the raw M a s s a c h u s e t t s s h o r e in N o v e m b e r 1 6 2 0 , m a d e hasty a r r a n g e m e n t s to f a c e the winter. T h e colonists were h e l p e d over this "starving t i m e " by their own fortitude a n d the essential aid of the nearby W a m p a n o a g I n d i a n s a n d their leader, M a s s a s o i t . F r o m t h e s e " s m a l l b e g i n n i n g s , " a s B r a d f o r d w a s e a g e r to d e c l a r e , grew a c o m m u n i t y of mythical import to the later n a t i o n . M u c h larger at the start w a s the well-financed effort that b r o u g h t a contingent of P u r i t a n s u n d e r J o h n W i n t h r o p to M a s s a c h u s e t t s B a y , not far north of P l y m o u t h , in 1 6 3 0 . A l t h o u g h t h e s e settlers initially e x p r e s s e d no overt intention to sever their ties with the C h u r c h of E n g l a n d , a n d they are generally r e g a r d e d a s n o n s e p a r a t i n g d i s s e n t e r s , the d i s t a n c e they p u t b e t w e e n t h e m s e l v e s a n d that c h u r c h ' s hierarchy w a s e l o q u e n t t e s t i m o n y of a different p u r p o s e . O n other i s s u e s , they s h a r e d with the Pilgrims the s a m e b a s i c beliefs: both a g r e e d with M a r t i n L u t h e r that no p o p e or b i s h o p h a d a right to i m p o s e any law on a C h r i s t i a n without c o n s e n t a n d both a c c e p t e d J o h n Calvin's view that G o d freely c h o s e (or " e l e c t e d " ) t h o s e he w o u l d save a n d t h o s e h e would d a m n eternally. By 1 6 9 1 , w h e n a n e w c h a r t e r s u b s u m e d P l y m o u t h a s a n i n d e p e n d e n t colony u n d e r M a s s a c h u s e t t s B a y , the Pilgrims a n d P u r i t a n s h a d m e r g e d in all b u t m e m o r y . T o o m u c h c a n b e m a d e of the Calvinist doctrine of e l e c t i o n ; t h o s e w h o have not read the a c t u a l Puritan s e r m o n s often c o m e away from s e c o n d a r y

INTRODUCTION

11

s o u r c e s with the m i s t a k e n notion that Puritans talked a b o u t n o t h i n g but d a m n a t i o n . P u r i t a n s did indeed hold that G o d h a d c h o s e n , before their birth, t h o s e w h o m he w i s h e d to s a v e ; but it d o e s not follow that P u r i t a n s c o n s i d e r e d m o s t of u s to be born d a m n e d . P u r i t a n s a r g u e d that A d a m broke the " C o v e n a n t of W o r k s " (the p r o m i s e G o d m a d e to A d a m that he w a s i m m o r t a l a n d c o u l d live in P a r a d i s e forever a s long as he obeyed G o d ' s c o m m a n d m e n t s ) when he disobeyed a n d a t e of the tree of knowledge of g o o d a n d evil, thereby bringing sin a n d d e a t h into the world. T h e i r central d o c t r i n e , however, w a s the n e w " C o v e n a n t of G r a c e , " a b i n d i n g a g r e e m e n t that C h r i s t m a d e with all p e o p l e who believed in him a n d that he s e a l e d with his Crucifixion, p r o m ising t h e m eternal life. P u r i t a n s t h u s a d d r e s s e d t h e m s e l v e s not to the h o p e lessly u n r e g e n e r a t e but to the indifferent, a n d they a d d r e s s e d the heart m o r e often than the m i n d , always d i s t i n g u i s h i n g b e t w e e n " h i s t o r i c a l " or rational u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d heartfelt "saving f a i t h . " T h e r e is m o r e joy in Puritan life a n d t h o u g h t than we often credit, a n d this joy is the direct result of m e d i tation on the doctrine of Christ's r e d e e m i n g power. E d w a r d Taylor is not a l o n e in m a k i n g his r a p t u r o u s litany of Christ's a t t r i b u t e s : " H e is altogether lovely in everything, lovely in His p e r s o n , lovely in H i s n a t u r e s , lovely in H i s properties, lovely in His offices, lovely in His titles, lovely in His p r a c t i c e , lovely in His p u r c h a s e s a n d lovely in His r e l a t i o n s . " All of Taylor's art is a meditation on the m i r a c u l o u s gift of the I n c a r n a t i o n , a n d in this r e s p e c t his sensibility is typically P u r i t a n . A n n e B r a d s t r e e t , w h o is remarkably frank a b o u t c o n f e s s i n g her religious d o u b t s , told her children that it w a s " u p o n this rock C h r i s t J e s u s " that s h e built her faith. N o t surprisingly, the P u r i t a n s held to the strictest r e q u i r e m e n t s regarding c o m m u n i o n , or, a s they preferred to call it, the Lord's S u p p e r . It w a s the m o r e i m p o r t a n t of the two s a c r a m e n t s they recognized ( b a p t i s m b e i n g the o t h e r ) , a n d they g u a r d e d it with a zeal that set t h e m apart from all other d i s s e n t e r s . In the b e g i n n i n g c o m m u n i o n w a s r e g a r d e d as a sign of election, to be taken only by t h o s e w h o h a d b e c o m e c h u r c h m e m b e r s by s t a n d i n g before their minister a n d elders a n d giving a n a c c o u n t of their conversion. T h i s i n s i s t e n c e on c h a l l e n g i n g their m e m b e r s m a d e t h e s e N e w E n g l a n d c h u r c h e s m o r e rigorous than any others a n d c o n f i r m e d the feeling that they were a special few. T h u s w h e n J o h n W i n t h r o p a d d r e s s e d the i m m i g r a n t s to the Bay C o l o n y a b o a r d the flagship Arbella in 1 6 3 0 , he told t h e m that the eyes of the world were on t h e m a n d that they would be a n e x a m p l e for all, a "city u p o n a hill." Like William B r a d f o r d for the Pilgrims, W i n t h r o p in his history of the P u r i t a n s w i s h e d to record the a c t u alization of that d r e a m .

W R I T I N G

IN

T O N G U E S

While the N e w E n g l a n d c o l o n i e s have conventionally b e e n r e g a r d e d a s the c e n t e r p i e c e of early A m e r i c a n literature, the first N o r t h A m e r i c a n settlem e n t s h a d b e e n f o u n d e d e l s e w h e r e years, even d e c a d e s , earlier. S t . A u g u s tine, J a m e s t o w n , S a n t a F e , Albany, a n d N e w York, for i n s t a n c e , are all older than B o s t o n . M o r e important, E n g l i s h w a s not the only l a n g u a g e in which early N o r t h A m e r i c a n texts were written. I n d e e d , it w a s a tardy arrival in A m e r i c a , a n d its eventual e m e r g e n c e as the d o m i n a n t l a n g u a g e of c l a s s i c A m e r i c a n literature hardly w a s inevitable. T o s o m e extent, the large initial

12

LITERATURE

TO

1700

immigration to B o s t o n in the 1 6 3 0 s , the high articulation of Puritan cultural ideals, a n d the early e s t a b l i s h m e n t of a college a n d a printing p r e s s in C a m bridge all gave N e w E n g l a n d a s u b s t a n t i a l e d g e . L a t e r political events w o u l d m a k e E n g l i s h a useful lingua f r a n c a for the c o l o n i e s at large a n d , in t i m e , the literary m e d i u m of c h o i c e . B e f o r e 1 7 0 0 , however, a n d often long after it, other l a n g u a g e s r e m a i n e d actively in u s e not only for m u n d a n e p u r p o s e s but a l s o a s expressive vehicles. Particularly beyond the v a g u e b o r d e r s of the E n g l i s h colonial world (the shifting lines b e t w e e n F r e n c h C a n a d a a n d N e w E n g l a n d a n d the s o u t h e r n colonies a n d S p a n i s h Florida, for e x a m p l e ) , t h o s e other l a n g u a g e s were c o m pletely d o m i n a n t . Even within the limits of the eventual thirteen c o l o n i e s , however, large e n c l a v e s of s p e a k e r s of other l a n g u a g e s existed, especially in the m i d d l e c o l o n i e s . A m o n g the noteworthy settlers of N e w N e t h e r l a n d , for i n s t a n c e , were B e l g i a n W a l l o o n s , near n e i g h b o r s of the D u t c h in E u r o p e b u t s p e a k e r s of a radically different l a n g u a g e . T h e mix of " f o r e i g n e r s " in Albany, b e g u n a s a fur trade p o s t by N e t h e r l a n d e r m e r c h a n t s o n the u p p e r H u d s o n , m a d e it a minority D u t c h town, its p o p u l a t i o n m a d e u p of settlers of S c a n dinavian, F r e n c h , P o r t u g u e s e , E n g l i s h , Irish, S c o t s , G e r m a n , A f r i c a n , a n d W e s t Indian d e r i v a t i o n e v e n p e o p l e from S p a i n , then the e n e m y of the N e t h e r l a n d e r s , a n d from faraway C r o a t i a . F o r two c e n t u r i e s after N e w N e t h erland w a s c o n q u e r e d by the E n g l i s h in 1 6 6 4 a n d r e n a m e d N e w York, D u t c h a n d other l a n g u a g e s were widely u s e d there in public a n d private life before eventually dying out. S i m i l a r linguistic t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s , with the social a n d personal losses they bring, o c c u r r e d in other E n g l i s h - c o n t r o l l e d regions that would eventually form the U n i t e d S t a t e s . In P e n n s y l v a n i a , w h e r e large g r o u p s of P r o t e s t a n t s from continental E u r o p e w e r e w e l c o m e d by William P e n n , G e r m a n in particular r e m a i n s a vital l a n g u a g e to this day, a l t h o u g h the friction b e t w e e n G e r m a n c o m m u n i t i e s there a n d "the E n g l i s h " r e m i n d s u s that l a n g u a g e is a g r o u n d of c o n t e s t b e t w e e n e t h n i c g r o u p s , not j u s t of self-expression within e a c h . In fact, the first item printed in P e n n s y l v a n i a , a l t h o u g h it i s s u e d from the p r e s s e s t a b l i s h e d by a n i m m i g r a n t E n g l i s h m a n , was in G e r m a n , a n d the largest b o o k printed in any of the c o l o n i e s before the Revolution w a s in the s a m e l a n g u a g e . W h e n we read A m e r i c a n history b a c k w a r d , looking for early p r e c e d e n t s of national institutions, p r a c t i c e s , a n d v a l u e s , we are likely to m i s s the radical linguistic a n d cultural diversity of the colonial world. R e a d e r s of the colonial record n e e d to a t t e n d to the m a n y t o n g u e s t h r o u g h which the c o l o n i s t s articulated their e x p e r i e n c e s , vision, a n d v a l u e s . It is to this e n d that t r a n s l a t e d s e l e c t i o n s from works written by n o n - E n g l i s h colonists are i n c l u d e d a l o n g with E n g l i s h texts to represent the first full century of N o r t h A m e r i c a n writing. Part of the u s e f u l n e s s of s u c h a b r o a d survey is the insight it offers into the t h e m e s , f o r m s , a n d c o n c e r n s s h a r e d by many p e o p l e s involved in the cultural a n d territorial e x p a n s i o n of E u r o p e a n p e o p l e s at the t i m e .

AMERICAN

LITERATURE

IN

1700

Along the e a s t e r n s e a b o a r d by 1 7 0 0 , m o s t of the c o l o n i e s that were to unite in s e e k i n g i n d e p e n d e n c e from Britain toward the e n d of the e i g h t e e n t h century h a d b e e n f o u n d e d G e o r g i a w a s to follow in the 1 7 3 0 s . As Britain

INTRODUCTION

13

s o u g h t to c o n s o l i d a t e a n d unify its overseas p o s s e s s i o n s , the m a p b e g a n to r e s e m b l e that of 1 7 7 6 , a n d E n g l i s h had already e m e r g e d a s a powerful intercolonial tool. B u t up a n d d o w n the c o a s t , a s u r p r i s i n g variety of p e o p l e s w a s in e v i d e n c e , m o s t of w h o m h a d b e c o m e a c c u s t o m e d to the transatlantic or local publication of their writings. At the e n d of the first full century of E u r o p e a n colonization, the printing p r e s s w a s active in m a n y a r e a s , from C a m b r i d g e a n d B o s t o n to N e w York, Philadelphia, a n d A n n a p o l i s . F r o m 1 6 9 6 to 1 7 0 0 , to be s u r e , only a b o u t 2 5 0 s e p a r a t e i t e m s were i s s u e d in all these p l a c e s c o m b i n e d . Although this is a small n u m b e r c o m p a r e d to the o u t p u t of the printers of L o n d o n at the t i m e , it m u s t be r e m e m b e r e d that printing w a s e s t a b l i s h e d in the A m e r i c a n c o l o n i e s before it w a s allowed in m o s t of E n g l a n d , where restrictive laws, the last of t h e m r e p e a l e d a s late a s 1 6 9 3 , had long confined printing to four locations: L o n d o n , York, Oxford, a n d C a m b r i d g e . In this regard, if only b e c a u s e of the isolation of the American provinces by the o c e a n , they ventured into the m o d e r n world earlier than their provincial E n g l i s h c o u n t e r p a r t s . T h e literary situation in A m e r i c a three c e n t u r i e s a g o is s u g g e s t e d by a brief examination of the p r o d u c t s of the p r e s s e s then in o p e r a t i o n . A m o n g t h o s e 2 5 0 items p u b l i s h e d at the century's e n d w a s a whole library of texts by the m o s t prolific colonial a u t h o r , C o t t o n M a t h e r . In this period, he p u b l i s h e d m o r e than three dozen titles, i n c l u d i n g s u c h things a s his a c c o u n t of the "tearful d e c a d e " (168898) of warfare b e t w e e n N e w E n g l a n d a n d N e w F r a n c e a n d the latter's Indian allies, which incorporated his f a m o u s narrative of the bloody e s c a p e of H a n n a h D u s t a n from her c a p t o r s . M a t h e r also p u b lished several b i o g r a p h i e s of N e w E n g l a n d ' s f o u n d i n g ministers a n d p e n n e d treatises on the p r o p e r behavior of servants toward their m a s t e r s , on the "well-ordered family," a n d on the spiritual risks run by s e a m e n . H e a l s o i s s u e d a w a r n i n g a g a i n s t " i m p o s t o r s p r e t e n d i n g to be m i n i s t e r s . " A n d he wrote Pillars of Salt, a venture into criminal biography that had religious origins but that also reflected the i m p o r t a n c e of an e m e r g e n t p o p u l a r (as o p p o s e d to elite) literary c u l t u r e on both sides of the Atlantic. D e s p i t e their t e n d e n c y to mirror the self-regarding a s p e c t of Puritan t h o u g h t , even M a t h e r ' s works remind u s that A m e r i c a in 1 7 0 0 w a s o p e n i n g o u t w a r d . In the Magnalia Christi Americana, p u b l i s h e d j u s t after the start of the new century, M a t h e r himself told a n a n e c d o t e that conveys the c h a n g e at h a n d . A newly trained minister w h o h a d j o u r n e y e d north from M a s s a c h u setts Bay to M a i n e was p r e a c h i n g to a g r o u p of h a r d e n e d fishermen. H e w a s urging his listeners not to " c o n t r a d i c t the m a i n end of Planting this Wildern e s s , " the service of G o d a n d G o d ' s p u r p o s e s , w h e n a m e m b e r of the m a k e shift gathering h a d the effrontery to contradict him: "Sir, you are m i s t a k e n , you think you are P r e a c h i n g to the P e o p l e at the Bay; our m a i n e n d w a s to c a t c h F i s h . " Even in N e w E n g l a n d , M a t h e r s u g g e s t s , m a i n e n d s differed profoundly from p l a c e to p l a c e a n d from c o m m u n i t y to c o m m u n i t y . E l s e where, the rich array of p u r p o s e s w a s reflected in the diverse items i s s u e d by A m e r i c a n printers at the time when M a t h e r ' s Magnalia w a s j u s t a p p e a r i n g (this large book w a s first p u b l i s h e d in L o n d o n , not in B o s t o n , it might be n o t e d ) . T h e r e was a pair of texts, for i n s t a n c e , d e a l i n g with the Native Ameri c a n s of N e w York that s u g g e s t how colonialism was altered by the drive toward cross-cultural interaction. O n e reported on a c o n f e r e n c e held in 1 6 9 6 between the governor of that " p r o v i n c e , " a s all the c o l o n i e s were then b e i n g

14

LITERATURE

TO

1700

called, a n d the "Five . . . N a t i o n s of I n d i a n s , " the I r o q u o i s , a d y n a m i c confederacy of p e o p l e s who h a d long controlled m u c h of N e w York's territory a n d exacted tribute from far distant native p e o p l e s a s well. T h i s w a s a kind of text that proliferated t h r o u g h o u t N e w York's colonial era, w h e n the governor a n d his a g e n t s m a d e regular visits to the important Iroquois capital at O n o n d a g a to listen to the c o n c e r n s of t h e s e E n g l i s h allies. T h e s e c o n d text c o n c e r n i n g native p e o p l e s in N e w York a l s o reflected this u n i q u e c r o s s cultural pattern. In the 1 6 9 0 s , w h e n the F r e n c h a n d E n g l i s h e m p i r e s were c o m i n g into s e r i o u s conflict in A m e r i c a , native p e o p l e s were frequently swept up in the fray. T h e " P r o p o s i t i o n s M a d e by the Five N a t i o n s of I n d i a n s " to N e w York's governor in 1 6 9 8 accordingly e n t r e a t e d him to protect the Iroq u o i s from h a r a s s m e n t by N e w F r a n c e ' s Indian allies, w h o were moving e a s t w a r d into Iroquoia a n d fiercely raiding the villages t h e r e . S u c h texts, r e a c h i n g a c r o s s the b o u n d a r i e s b e t w e e n the I n d i a n nations a n d colonial p o w e r s , c a t c h the d i p l o m a t i c t o n e of c r o s s - c u l t u r a l relations in the M i d a t l a n t i c region. T h e complexity of the political c u l t u r e in early America is b o r n e out in other texts of the era a s well, s u c h a s God's Protecting Providence ( 1 6 9 9 ) , P h i l a d e l p h i a n J o n a t h a n D i c k i n s o n ' s m u c h reprinted a c c o u n t of his shipwreck a n d Indian captivity in S p a n i s h F l o r i d a , which c o m b i n e d piety, a d v e n t u r e , a n d e x o t i c i s m . Similarly exotic w a s Barbarian Cruelties ( 1 7 0 0 ) , which told of E u r o p e a n c a p t i v e s in N o r t h Africa, a n a r e a of the g l o b e that w a s long to be the f o c u s of W e s t e r n e r s ' anxieties a n d , in the post-Revolutionary era, an A m e r i c a n war or two. B u t s u c h a d v e n t u r o u s narratives were not all sited in exotic a n d d i s t a n t l o c a l e s . S o m e , like the seemingly m u n d a n e textbook in the E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e written by F r a n c i s D a n i e l P a s t o r i u s a n d a i m e d not only at y o u n g A m e r i c a n s but a l s o (as the author's own G e r m a n i c - s o u n d i n g E n g l i s h s u g g e s t e d ) at " t h o s e w h o from foreign c o u n t r i e s a n d nations c o m e to settle a m o n g s t u s , " s u g g e s t less d r a m a t i c but still i m p o r t a n t cross-cultural c o n c e r n s . Religion, a d o m i n a n t t h e m e in the A m e r i c a n p r e s s in 1 7 0 0 , w a s itself linked to strong social i s s u e s , a s was d e m o n s t r a t e d by D a n i e l G o u l d ' s a c c o u n t of the e x e c u t i o n of Quaker diss e n t e r s in B o s t o n fifty years earlier, a work that a p p e a r e d in N e w York in 1 7 0 0 . T h e printer of G o u l d ' s book, in fact, a l s o i s s u e d a pair of d i s s e n t i n g tracts by Quaker a n d S a l e m m e r c h a n t T h o m a s M a u l e , i n c l u d i n g o n e called New England's Persecutors Mauled with Their Own Weapons. M a u l e ' s n a m e b e c a m e f a m o u s to later g e n e r a t i o n s of r e a d e r s t h r o u g h N a t h a n i e l Hawthorne's n o n e too a c c u r a t e a s s o c i a t i o n of it with the c u r s e d o o m i n g the Pync h e o n family in his S a l e m novel The House of the Seven Gables. Finally, r o u n d i n g out the century, c a m e The Selling of Joseph by S a m u e l Sewall, a m o n g the earliest antislavery tracts written a n d p u b l i s h e d in A m e r i c a a n d t h u s a work of growing i m p o r t a n c e in the future. A l t h o u g h the p u b l i s h e d items from this half d e c a d e of the s e v e n t e e n t h century also c o m p r i s e d a l m a n a c s a n d g o v e r n m e n t a l p u b l i c a t i o n s , s u c h i t e m s c o n t r i b u t e d a s well to the e s t a b l i s h m e n t of print c u l t u r e a n d , ultimately, of literary traditions in British A m e r i c a . It w a s to be the a l m a n a c , o n e recalls, that h e l p e d m a k e B e n j a m i n Franklin's fortune a s a printer, a n d it w a s Franklin w h o c o n v e r t e d that everyday form into a vehicle of rare wit a n d sturdy E n g l i s h .

LITERATURE TO TEXTS
Peoples indigenous to the Americas orally perform and transmit a variety of "literary" genres that include, among others, speeches, songs, and stories

1700 CONTEXTS

10001300 Anasazi communities inhabit southwestern regions. 1492 Christopher Columbus arrives in the Bahamas between 4 and 7 million Native Americans estimated in present-day United States, including Alaska 1493 Columbus, "Letter to Luis de Santangel Regarding the First Voyage" 1500 Native American populations begin to be ravaged by European diseases 1514 Bartolome de las Casas petitions Spanish crown to treat Native American peoples like other human (subject) populations 151921 Cortes conquers Aztecs in Mexico I 526 Spanish explorers bringfirstAfrican slaves to South Carolina 1539 First printing press in the Americas set up in Mexico City Hernando de Soto invades Florida 1542 Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, The
Relation of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca

1552 Bartolome de las Casas, The Very

Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies

1558-1603 c. 1 568 Bernal Diaz del Castillo composes

The True History of the Conquest of New Spain (pub. 1632)

Reign of Elizabeth I

1 584 Walter Ralegh lands on "island" of Roanoke; names it "Virginia" for Queen Elizabeth 1588 Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True
Report of the New Found Land of Virginia

160313 Samuel de Champlain explores the St. Lawrence River; founds Quebec 1605 Garcilaso de la Vega, The Florida of
the Inca

Boldface titles indicateworks in the anthology.

1 5

TEXTS

CONTEXTS
1607 Jamestown is established in Virginia Powhatan confederacy prevents colonists from starving; teaches them to plant tobacco

1613 Samuel de Champlain, The Voyages

of Sietir de Champlain

1619 Twenty Africans arrive in Jamestown on a Dutch vessel as indentured servants 1620 Mayflower drops anchor in Plymouth Harbor 1621 First Thanksgiving, at Plymouth 1624 John Smith, The General History of
Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles

1630 John Winthrop delivers his sermon

A Model of Christian Charity (pub. 1838)

1630-43 Immigration of English Puritans to Massachusetts Bay

1630-50 William Bradford writes Of

Plymouth Plantation (pub. 1856)

1637 Thomas Morton, New England

Canaan

1637 PequotWar 1638 Anne Hutchinson banished from Bay Colony for challenging Puritan beliefs.

1643 Roger Williams, A Key into the

Langitage of America

1650 Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse 1655 Adriaen Van der Donck, A
Description of New Netherland

1661 Jacob Steendam, "The Praise of New Netherland" 1662 Michael Wigglesworth, Tlte Day of
Doom

1673-1729 Samuel Sewall keeps his Diary (pub. 1878-82) 167578 King Philip's War destroys power of Native American tribes in New England 1681 William Penn founds Pennsylvania 1682 Mar) Rowlandson's Narrative of the
Captivity and Restoration

16821 725 Edward Taylor continues his

Preparatory Meditations (pub. 1939, 1960)

1684 Francis Daniel Pastorius, Positive

Information from America

1692 Salem witch trials 1702 Cotton Mather, Magtialia Christi

Americana

American Literature 1700-1820

AN E X P A N D I N G W O R L D A N D U N I V E R S E By t h e time of C o t t o n M a t h e r ' s d e a t h in 1 7 2 8 , which symbolically m a r k s t h e p a s s i n g o f P u r i t a n i s m a s t h e colonists h a d e x p e r i e n c e d it, t h e imaginative world h e a n d other clerical writers strove to m a i n t a i n w a s c h a l l e n g e d in a variety of ways. T h e eighteenth century s a w e n o r m o u s c h a n g e s e c o n o m i c , social, p h i l o s o p h i c a l , a n d scientificthat inevitably affected the influence a n d authority of clergymen like M a t h e r a n d t r a n s f o r m e d t h e ways in which they u n d e r s t o o d t h e world. M o s t important, m a n y intellectuals now believed in the power o f the h u m a n m i n d to c o m p r e h e n d t h e universe a s never b e f o r e , particularly through t h e laws o f physics a s they recently h a d b e e n d e s c r i b e d by t h e great I s a a c N e w t o n ( 1 6 4 2 1 7 2 7 ) . Inevitably, t h e n , s c r i p t u r e b e c a m e more a h a n d m a i d e n than a g u i d e to m e t a p h y s i c s . S e c o n d , a n d of e q u a l i m p o r t a n c e , through t h e influence of the E n g l i s h m e t a p h y s i c i a n John L o c k e ( 1 6 3 2 1 7 0 4 ) there a r o s e j p w p s y r h n l o c r i r a l p a r a d i g m s that p r o m u l g a t e d h u m a n sympatriyTTatherlhan s u p e r n a t u r a l g r a c e , a s t h e b a s i s for t h e moral HfeTAs e l a b o r a t e d by A d a m S m i t h a n d other thinkers, this reliance on h u m a n sympathy or " s e n t i m e n t " a s t h e catalyst for moral c h o i c e a n d action c o n c o m itantly e n c o u r a g e d t h e belief that e a c h individual h a d t h e power to control his or her spiritual destiny. S u c h c h a l l e n g e s to t h e t h e o c e n t r i c world of t h e colonial clergy were part o f the i m m e n s e c h a n g e s in W e s t e r n t h o u g h t d e s c r i b e d by historians a s t h e E n l i g h t e n m e n t . T h e E n l i g h t e n m e n t h a d political a s well a s scientific a n d religious implic a t i o n s . By the e n d of the century, colonists were in t h e p r o c e s s of e s t a b lishing a polity t h e likes of which the world h a d not yet s e e n . T h e r e w o u l d be a religious e l e m e n t to this n e w nation, but it would b e only o n e c o m p o n e n t of a state w h o s e destiny, while still thought o f a s divinely g u a r a n t e e d , w a s u n d e r s t o o d to b e a c h i e v a b l e on earth through t h e s p r e a d o f d e m o c r a t i c principles. T h e literature of this century reflected a n d e x t e n d e d t h e s e a n d other new e m p h a s e s in W e s t e r n thought a n d c u l t u r e . T h e eighteenth century b r o u g h t a n e w world into b e i n g in t h e m o s t b a s i c a n d striking ways. T h e i n c r e a s e in p o p u l a t i o n a l o n e helps a c c o u n t for t h e greater diversity o f opinion in religious a s well a s in political life that m a r k e d it a n d its literature. In 1 6 7 0 , for e x a m p l e , t h e p o p u l a t i o n o f t h e colonies n u m b e r e d approximately 1 1 1 , 0 0 0 . Thirty years later it w a s m o r e than 2 5 0 , 0 0 0 ; by 1 7 6 0 , if o n e i n c l u d e s G e o r g i a , it r e a c h e d 1 , 6 0 0 , 0 0 0 a n d the settled a r e a h a d tripled. T h e d e m a n d for a n d price o f colonial g o o d s i n c r e a s e d in E n g l a n d , a n d vast fortunes were to b e m a d e in N e w E n g l a n d with any b u s i n e s s c o n n e c t e d with shipbuilding: especially timber, tar, a n d 171

172

AMERICAN

LITERATURE

1 7 0 0 - 1 8 2 0

pitch. Virginia planters b e c a m e rich through t o b a c c o ; a n d rice a n d indigo from the C a r o l i n a s were in c o n s t a n t d e m a n d . Further, c o m p a r e d with s u c h c r o w d e d cities as L o n d o n , the colonies were healthier a n d c h e a p e r , a n d promotional literature as well as p e r s o n a l testimony p a i n t e d British N o r t h America a s a region in which o n e c o u l d take c h a r g e of a n d t r a n s f o r m one's life. T h u s t h o s e w h o c o u l d a r r a n g e their p a s s a g e , either by paying for it outright or m o r t g a g i n g it through i n d e n t u r e d service, arrived in great n u m b e r s : B o s ton, for e x a m p l e , a l m o s t d o u b l e d in size from 1 7 0 0 to 1 7 2 0 . T h e c o l o n i e s were ethnically diverse; the great migration during the first half of the eighteenth century w a s not primarily E n g l i s h . D u t c h a n d G e r m a n s c a m e in large n u m b e r s a n d so did F r e n c h P r o t e s t a n t s . By this t i m e , too, J e w i s h m e r c h a n t s a n d c r a f t s m e n e s t a b l i s h e d t h e m s e l v e s in N e w York a n d P h i l a d e l p h i a . T h i s rapidly e x p a n d i n g t r a d e h a l l m a r k of what we now recognize as the b e g i n n i n g of m o d e r n c o n s u m e r i s m l i n k e d the c o l o n i e s to other a r e a s in what historians call the Atlantic R i m , a region e n c o m p a s s i n g E u r o p e , Africa, a n d the C a r i b b e a n basin a s well a s N o r t h a n d S o u t h A m e r i c a . T h e rim h a d a complex, m u l t i e t h n i c , multiracial p o p u l a t i o n u n i t e d by their status a s laborers. T h u s even a s the new a n d s e e m i n g l y insatiable d e s i r e for g o o d s brought great wealth to planters a n d m e r c h a n t s , it c r e a t e d at the other e n d of the social s p e c t r u m the world's first multiethnic working c l a s s , o n e w h o s e m e m b e r s often had to e n d u r e great cruelty. T h e n u m b e r s of e n s l a v e d Afric a n s i n c r e a s e d in this p e r i o d , for e x a m p l e , even a s s o m e of t h e m , typified here by O l a u d a h E q u i a n o , b e g a n to s p e a k o u t a b o u t their e x p e r i e n c e s a n d condition. O t h e r g r o u p s like the N e w E n g l a n d I n d i a n s suffered in different ways. E s t i m a t e d to n u m b e r 2 5 , 0 0 0 in 1 6 0 0 , they already h a d b e e n r e d u c e d by one-third d u r i n g the p l a g u e of 161618 a n d d e c l i n e d steadily thereafter; m a n y Native A m e r i c a n c o m m u n i t i e s d i s a p p e a r e d entirely d u r i n g this period of e x p a n s i o n in the N o r t h e a s t . T h e i r fate in the s o u t h e r n c o l o n i e s a n d the C a r i b b e a n i s l a n d s , often linked to p l a n t a t i o n slavery, w a s no better. T h i s e c o n o m i c take-off affected the very warp a n d w o o f of social organization. N e w E n g l a n d towns, for e x a m p l e , long viewed a s pillars of stability, often were full of a c r i m o n i o u s d e b a t e b e t w e e n first settlers a n d n e w c o m e r s as they bickered over d i m i n i s h i n g land or the p r o p e r form a n d s u b s t a n c e of worship. W h e n the c o l o n i e s ' first towns were f o r m e d , for e x a m p l e , a c r e a g e w a s a p p o r t i o n e d to settlers a n d allotted free; b u t by 1 7 1 3 s p e c u l a t o r s in land were hard at work, buying a s m u c h a s p o s s i b l e for a s little a s p o s s i b l e a n d selling high. M a n y a town history r e c o r d s the wrangling of splinter g r o u p s a n d the e s t a b l i s h m e n t of a " s e c o n d " c h u r c h a n d the inevitable removal of families a n d g r o u p s w h o s o u g h t richer farm l a n d s . U n d e r n e w e c o n o m i c a n d religious p r e s s u r e s , the idea of a " c o m m u n i t y " of m u t u a l l y helpful s o u l s w a s fast d i s a p p e a r i n g , a n d the c o l o n i s t s ' g r a d u a l a w a k e n i n g to the incongruity of the slavery that they tolerated or e n c o u r a g e d only further s t r e t c h e d the c a p a c i t y of their rhetoric of C h r i s t i a n charity. W h i l e life in m a n y parts of the c o l o n i e s r e m a i n e d difficult, the h a r d s h i p s a n d d a n g e r s the first settlers f a c e d were mostly o v e r c o m e , a n d m o r e a n d m o r e c o l o n i s t s , particularly t h o s e a l o n g the c o a s t , e m u l a t e d the c u l t u r e of m e t r o p o l i t a n L o n d o n . C o n c o m i t a n t l y , o n c e c o l o n i s t s b e g a n to expect the refinements m a d e available by their extensive trading n e t w o r k s , they better u n d e r s t o o d what w a s special or u n i q u e a b o u t their e x p e r i e n c e in the N e w W o r l d . U n i t e d by the c o m m o n e x p e r i e n c e of o c e a n p a s s a g e a n d the desire

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to m a k e new lives for t h e m s e l v e s , t h e s e t h o u s a n d s of e m i g r a n t s slowly but inexorably b e g a n to realize that they had m o r e in c o m m o n a s i n h a b i t a n t s of A m e r i c a than they did a s citizens of a E u r o p e that rapidly r e c e d e d into m e m ory. In 1 7 0 2 no o n e would have d r e a m e d of an i n d e p e n d e n t union of colonies, but by the 1 7 5 0 s it w a s a distinct possibility.

ENLIGHTENMENT

IDEALS

By the early eighteenth century, scientists a n d p h i l o s o p h e r s had p o s e d great c h a l l e n g e s to seventeenth-century beliefs, a n d the " m o d e r n " period a s we u n d e r s t a n d it e m e r g e d from their efforts to c o n c e i v e h u m a n s a n d their universe in new t e r m s , even a s they struggled to yoke this brave new world to what they learned in s c r i p t u r e . I n d e e d , scientists like N e w t o n a n d philosophers like L o c k e s o u g h t to resolve implicit conflicts b e t w e e n their discoveries a n d traditionally held C h r i s t i a n truths. B e c a u s e they believed that G o d worked in r e a s o n a b l e , c o m p r e h e n s i b l e ways with h u m a n k i n d u p p e r m o s t , they saw nothing heretical in a r g u i n g that the universe w a s an orderly s y s t e m s u c h that by the application of r e a s o n h u m a n i t y would c o m p r e h e n d its laws, or that one's s u p r e m e obligation w a s to relate to one's fellows through an innate a n d thus natural power of sympathy. B u t the inevitable result of s u c h inquiries m a d e the universe s e e m m o r e rational a n d benevolent than it had b e e n r e p r e s e n t e d in Puritan doctrine. Similarly, p e o p l e increasingly defined their highest duties in social rather than in spiritual t e r m s . B e c a u s e s c i e n c e m a d e the world s e e m m o r e c o m p r e h e n s i b l e , m a n y put less s t o c k in revealed religion. Often t h e s e new scientists a n d p h i l o s o p h e r s were avowedly, or were called, D e i s t s ; they d e d u c e d the existence of a s u p r e m e b e i n g from the c o n s t r u c t i o n of the universe itself rather than from the Bible. "A c r e a t i o n , " as o n e d i s t i n g u i s h e d historian has put it, " p r e s u p p o s e s a c r e a t o r . " A h a r m o n i o u s universe p r o c l a i m e d the b e n e f i c e n c e of G o d . A n u m b e r of seventeenth-century m o d e s of t h o u g h t B r a d f o r d ' s a n d Winthrop's p e n c h a n t for the allegorical a n d e m b l e m a t i c , s e e i n g every natural and h u m a n event as a m e s s a g e from G o d , for i n s t a n c e s e e m e d a n a c h r o nistic a n d q u a i n t . P e o p l e were less interested in the m e t a p h y s i c a l w i s d o m of introspective divines than in the p r o g r e s s of ordinary individuals, relating now to their fellow beings t h r o u g h e m o t i o n s a n d e x p e r i e n c e s they s h a r e d a s colonists. T h i s no d o u b t a c c o u n t s for the popularity of B e n j a m i n Franklin's Autobiography. M a n y now a s s u m e d that h u m a n k i n d was naturally g o o d a n d thus dwelt on neither the Fall nor the I n c a r n a t i o n , but rather on how thinking, feeling p e o p l e s h a r e d the b o n d s of their c o m m o n h u m a n i t y . T h e y were not interested in theology but in h u m a n k i n d ' s own n a t u r e , a n d frequently cited Alexander P o p e ' s f a m o u s c o u p l e t : Know then thyself, p r e s u m e not G o d to s c a n , T h e p r o p e r study of m a n k i n d is m a n . L o c k e said that " o u r b u s i n e s s " here o n earth "is not to know all things, but t h o s e which c o n c e r n our c o n d u c t . " In s u g g e s t i n g that we are not born with a set of innate i d e a s of good or evil a n d that the mind is rather like a blank wax tablet (a tabula rasa) on which e x p e r i e n c e s are inscribed, L o c k e qualified traditional belief a n d s u g g e s t e d that the m o r e that we u n d e r s t o o d

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a n d s y m p a t h i z e d with our fellow m e n a n d w o m e n , the richer our social a n d spiritual lives would b e .

R E A S O N

AND

RELIGION:

T H E

G R E A T

A W A K E N I N G

B u t the old beliefs did not die easily, a n d a s early as the 1 7 3 0 s a conservative reaction a g a i n s t the worldview of the n e w s c i e n c e a n d psychology followed a s s o m e intellectuals, a w a r e of the n e w t h o u g h t but intent on m a i n t a i n i n g the final truth of revealed religion, resisted the religious i m p l i c a t i o n s of E n l i g h t e n m e n t principles. B u t the g e n i e h a d e s c a p e d from the bottle, a n d this reaction w a s indelibly m a r k e d by the new t h o u g h t it o p p o s e d . O n e unexp e c t e d result, for e x a m p l e , w a s that the first half of the e i g h t e e n t h century w i t n e s s e d a n u m b e r of religious revivals in both E n g l a n d a n d A m e r i c a that in part were fueled by the new e m p h a s i s on e m o t i o n a s a c o m p o n e n t of h u m a n e x p e r i e n c e . A l t h o u g h s o m e historians view the revivals a s d e s p e r a t e efforts to r e a s s e r t o u t m o d e d Puritan v a l u e s in the f a c e of the new, in fact the religious fires that b u r n e d so intensely b e t w e e n 1 7 3 5 a n d 1 7 5 0 were t h e m s e l v e s the direct p r o d u c t of the n e w cult of feeling w h o s e f o u n d a t i o n L o c k e h a d laid. N o w ministers a s well a s p h i l o s o p h e r s a r g u e d that our greatest p l e a s u r e w a s derived from the g o o d we did for o t h e r s , a n d that our s y m p a t h e t i c e m o t i o n s (our joys as well a s our tears) were not signs of h u m a n kind's fallen state but rather a g u a r a n t e e of our glorious f u t u r e . T h e African A m e r i c a n p o e t Phillis Wheatley, for e x a m p l e , w h o s e p o e m o n the d e a t h of the itinerant M e t h o d i s t G e o r g e Whitefield ( 1 7 1 4 1 7 7 0 ) m a d e her f a m o u s , said that Whitefield prayed that " g r a c e in every heart might dwell" a n d longed to s e e " A m e r i c a excell." Following his m a n y s u c c e s s f u l religious revivals in E n g l a n d , Whitefield e m b a r k e d on a p r e a c h i n g tour a l o n g the Atlantic seab o a r d colonies in 173940, a visit that w a s p u n c t u a t e d by great e m o t i o n a l i s m . B u t in this he only followed the similarly "extraordinary c i r c u m s t a n c e s " that h a d o c c u r r e d in N o r t h a m p t o n , M a s s a c h u s e t t s , u n d e r the l e a d e r s h i p of J o n a t h a n E d w a r d s in the 1 7 3 0 s a n d that have c o m e to be s y n o n y m o u s with the " G r e a t A w a k e n i n g . " E d w a r d s a l s o h a d read his L o c k e a n d u n d e r s t o o d that if his p a r i s h i o n e r s were to b e a w a k e n e d from their spiritual s l u m b e r s they h a d to e x p e r i e n c e religion in a m o r e heartfelt way, not j u s t strive to c o m p r e h e n d it intellectually. T h u s , from his time a s a y o u n g minister u n d e r the t u t e l a g e of his eminent g r a n d f a t h e r , the Reverend S o l o m o n S t o d d a r d , E d w a r d s b e g a n to rejuvenate the b a s i c tenets of C a l v i n i s m , i n c l u d i n g that of u n c o n d i t i o n a l election, the o n e doctrine m o s t difficult for e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y m i n d s to a c c e p t . E d w a r d s insisted that s u c h d o c t r i n e s m a d e s e n s e in t e r m s of Enlighte n m e n t s c i e n c e . H a m m e r i n g at his a u d i e n c e t h r o u g h what o n e historian h a s called a "rhetoric of s e n s a t i o n , " he p e r s u a d e d his c o n g r e g a t i o n that G o d ' s sovereignty w a s not only a m o s t r e a s o n a b l e d o c t r i n e but a l s o the m o s t "delightful," a n d a p p e a r e d to him in a n a l m o s t s e n s u o u s way a s " e x c e e d i n g p l e a s a n t , bright, a n d s w e e t . " In carefully r e a s o n e d , calmly a r g u e d p r o s e , a s h a r m o n i o u s a n d a s ordered a s anything the a g e p r o d u c e d , E d w a r d s brought m a n y in his a u d i e n c e to u n d e r s t a n d that "if the great things of religion a r e rightly u n d e r s t o o d , they will affect the h e a r t . " T h u s , while m o s t p e o p l e r e m e m b e r E d w a r d s for his frightening s e r m o n Sinners in the Hands of an

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Angry God, he w a s m u c h m o r e m o v e d by the experience of j o y that his faith b r o u g h t h i m . M o r e typical is his " P e r s o n a l N a r r a t i v e " or his a p o s t r o p h e to S a r a Pierpont ( w h o m he would marry), for both testify to how experientially moving h e f o u n d true religious feeling. T h e s e are f o u n d a t i o n a l texts for u n d e r s t a n d i n g the rise of the s e n t i m e n t a l in literature a n d W e s t e r n c u l t u r e generally. T h e A w a k e n i n g in turn e n g e n d e r e d a s m a n y critics a s s u p p o r t e r s , for m a n y believed that revivalists were too given over to " e n t h u s i a s m " at the e x p e n s e of their r e a s o n . T h u s E d w a r d s a n d others w h o believed in the new light that G o d h a d s h e d over t h e m h a d to expend m u c h time a n d energy in p a m p h l e t wars with p r o m i n e n t clergy s u c h a s B o s t o n ' s C h a r l e s C h a u n c y w h o , from his pulpit in that city's First C h u r c h , c o m p a r e d the antics of the revived to the hysteria that A n n e H u t c h i n s o n earlier h a d instigated. H e i r s to a rapid expansion of print c u l t u r e that fueled the controversies over revival, o p p o n e n t s like E d w a r d s a n d C h a u n c y , a n d others on both sides of the religious q u e s t i o n , u s e d the p r e s s e s a s never before to win over public opinion. Inevitably, the fires of revival b u r n e d lower; w h e n E d w a r d s h i m s e l f tried to c o n s o l i d a t e his s u c c e s s in N o r t h a m p t o n a n d in 1 7 4 9 d e m a n d e d from a p p l i c a n t s p e r s o n a l a c c o u n t s of conversion before admitting t h e m to c h u r c h m e m b e r s h i p , he w a s a c c u s e d of b e i n g a reactionary, removed from his pulpit, a n d effectively s i l e n c e d . H e spent the next few years a s a m i s s i o n a r y to the A m e r i c a n I n d i a n s in S t o c k b r i d g e , M a s s a c h u s e t t s , a town forty miles west of N o r t h a m p t o n , imitating the call of the Reverend David B r a i n a r d , a y o u n g m a n who, h a d he lived, would have married E d w a r d s ' s d a u g h t e r J e r u s h a . T h e r e E d w a r d s r e m a i n e d until invited to b e c o m e p r e s i d e n t of the C o l l e g e of N e w J e r s e y . H i s d e a t h in Princeton w a s the direct result of his b e i n g i n o c u l a t e d a g a i n s t smallpox, which he h a d d o n e to set a n e x a m p l e for his frightened a n d s u p e r s t i t i o u s s t u d e n t s ; it serves a s a vivid r e m i n d e r of how c o m p l i c a t e d in any o n e individual the r e s p o n s e to the " n e w s c i e n c e " c o u l d b e c o m e .

IMPERIAL

POLITICS

If religion o c c u p i e d m a n y colonists in the first half of the e i g h t e e n t h century, after 1 7 6 3 , w h e n G r e a t Britain h a d c o n s o l i d a t e d its e m p i r e in the N e w W o r l d with victory over the F r e n c h in C a n a d a , politics d o m i n a t e d its s e c o n d half. O n J u n e 7, 1 7 7 6 , at the s e c o n d C o n t i n e n t a l C o n g r e s s , R i c h a r d H e n r y L e e of Virginia m o v e d that " t h e s e united c o l o n i e s a r e , a n d of a right o u g h t to b e , free a n d i n d e p e n d e n t s t a t e s . " A c o m m i t t e e w a s duly a p p o i n t e d to p r e p a r e a declaration of i n d e p e n d e n c e , a n d it w a s i s s u e d o n J u l y 4. A l t h o u g h t h e s e m o t i o n s a n d their swiftness took s o m e d e l e g a t e s by s u r p r i s e t h e p u r p o s e of the c o n g r e s s h a d , after all, not b e e n to d e c l a r e i n d e p e n d e n c e but to protest the u s u r p a t i o n of rights by king a n d P a r l i a m e n t a n d to effect a c o m p r o m i s e with the h o m e l a n d o t h e r s s a w t h e m a s the inevitable c o n s e q u e n c e of the events of the p r e c e d i n g d e c a d e . T h e S t a m p Act of 1 7 6 4 , taxing all n e w s p a p e r s , legal d o c u m e n t s , a n d l i c e n s e s , h a d infuriated B o s t o n i a n s a n d r e s u l t e d in the b u r n i n g of the governor's p a l a c e ; the Virginian Patrick H e n r y h a d taken the o c c a s i o n to s p e a k with p a s s i o n a g a i n s t taxation without r e p r e s e n tation. In 1 7 7 0 a B o s t o n m o b h a d b e e n fired on by British soldiers. T h r e e years later w a s the f a m o u s " T e a Party," w h e n colonists d r e s s e d a s N a t i v e

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LITERATURE

1700-1820

A m e r i c a n s a n d d u m p e d E n g l i s h tea into B o s t o n h a r b o r a s a protest a g a i n s t paying taxes on it. T h i s event tested the limits of British rule. In a d o p t i n g the c o s t u m e of Native A m e r i c a n s , t h e s e protesters d e c l a r e d t h e m s e l v e s antithetical to everything British. T h e news of the April 1 7 7 5 c o n f r o n t a t i o n with the British in C o n c o r d a n d L e x i n g t o n , M a s s a c h u s e t t s , w a s still o n everyone's t o n g u e in Philadelphia w h e n the S e c o n d C o n t i n e n t a l C o n g r e s s c o n v e n e d that M a y . Although the d r a m a of t h e s e events a n d the p e r s o n a l suffering they c a u s e d c a n n o t be u n d e r e s t i m a t e d , colonists a l s o were t r a n s f o r m e d into revolutionaries through the power of the word. T h o m a s Paine's p a m p h l e t Common Sense, p u b l i s h e d in J a n u a r y 1 7 7 6 , has b e e n credited with tipping the s c a l e s toward revolution; but it w a s p r e c e d e d by a vast literature that took to heart the a r g u m e n t s of the W h i g opposition in E n g l a n d . T h e W h i g s , the so-called country a s o p p o s e d to court party, inveighed a g a i n s t luxury a n d tyranny in t e r m s that r e s o n a t e d a c r o s s the Atlantic. W e s e e W h i g party principles applied to the A m e r i c a n strand in Royall Tyler's play The Contrast ( 1 7 8 7 ) . In a r g u i n g that s e p a r a t i o n from E n g l a n d w a s the only r e a s o n a b l e c o u r s e a n d that "the A l m i g h t y " h a d p l a n t e d t h e s e feelings in us "for g o o d a n d wise purp o s e s , " P a i n e a p p e a l e d to b a s i c t e n e t s of the E n l i g h t e n m e n t . His clarion call to t h o s e that "love m a n k i n d , " t h o s e "that d a r e o p p o s e not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!" did not g o u n h e e d e d . A m e r i c a n s n e e d e d an apologist for the Revolution, a n d in D e c e m b e r 1 7 7 6 , w h e n W a s h i n g t o n ' s troops were at their m o s t d e m o r a l i z e d , it w a s , a g a i n , P a i n e ' s first Crisis p a p e r p o p u l a r l y called The American Crisisthat w a s read to all the regim e n t s a n d w a s said to have inspired their future s u c c e s s . P a i n e first c a m e to A m e r i c a in 1 7 7 4 with a note from B e n j a m i n Franklin r e c o m m e n d i n g him to p u b l i s h e r s a n d editors. H e w a s only o n e of a n u m b e r of y o u n g writers w h o took a d v a n t a g e of the revolution in print c u l t u r e that w a s to m a k e a u t h o r s h i p a s we know it p o s s i b l e . T h i s w a s , in fact, the great a g e of the n e w s p a p e r a n d the moral e s s a y ; Franklin tells us that he m o d e l e d his own style o n the clarity, g o o d s e n s e , a n d simplicity of the E n g l i s h essayists J o s e p h Addison a n d Richard S t e e l e . T h e first n e w s p a p e r in the colonies a p p e a r e d in 1 7 0 4 , a n d by the time of the Revolution there were a l m o s t fifty p a p e r s a n d forty m a g a z i n e s . T h e great cry w a s for a " n a t i o n a l literature" ( m e a n i n g anti-British), a n d the political events of the 1 7 7 0 s were advantag e o u s for a c a r e e r in letters. Even w o m e n like J u d i t h S a r g e n t M u r r a y , S a r a h W e n t w o r t h M o r t o n , a n d o t h e r s got into the act, a n d all f o u n d e a g e r audie n c e s for their work in periodicals like Isaiah T h o m a s ' s Massachusetts Magazine. A l t h o u g h the c o n v e n t i o n s of the day r e q u i r e d anonymity, the w o m e n u s e d f e m i n i n e p e n - n a m e s , t h u s p r o c l a i m i n g the right of all w o m e n to o p i n e in print on public events. Actually, the identity of t h e s e w o m e n writers w a s generally known; their literary efforts a d d e d to the c a m p a i g n for a true realization of the principle of equality. Similarly, other writers p u b l i s h e d utilitarian political a n d p o l i t e a e s t h e t ically e n j o y a b l e l i t e r a t u r e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y . Philip F r e n e a u , for e x a m p l e , s u c c e e d e d first a s a writer of satires of the British; after p u b l i s h i n g his Poems Written Chiefly during the Late War ( 1 7 8 6 ) h e t u r n e d to n e w s p a p e r work, editing the New York Daily Advertiser a n d writing antiFederalist Party e s s a y s , m a k i n g himself a n e n e m y of Alexander H a m i l t o n in the p r o c e s s . O t h e r a u t h o r s , A n n i s B o u d i n o t S t o c k t o n a m o n g t h e m , c u t a different profile,

INTRODUCTION

177

p u b l i s h i n g in local periodicals a n d n e w s p a p e r s but also c o n t r i b u t i n g significantly to a n extensive m a n u s c r i p t culture in which literary efforts were s h a r e d with a coterie of like-minded p e o p l e . B u t , as the c a r e e r of F r e n e a u s u g g e s t s , d e s p i t e the a m o u n t of belletristic writing extant from the late eighteenth century, the m o s t significant writings of the period are political, like the e s s a y s H a m i l t o n , J o h n J a y , a n d J a m e s M a d i s o n wrote for N e w York newsp a p e r s in 1 7 8 7 a n d 1 7 8 8 in s u p p o r t of the new federal c o n s t i t u t i o n , collectively known a s The Federalist Papers. T h e y provided a n e l o q u e n t d e f e n s e of the framework of the republic a n d remind u s that in g o o d m e a s u r e the u n i q u e n e s s of the new U n i t e d S t a t e s of A m e r i c a resided in the l a n g u a g e of the d o c u m e n t s , the very w o r d s , on which the nation w a s b a s e d . T o g e t h e r with s u c h self-consciously A m e r i c a n works a s B e n j a m i n Franklin's Autobiography a n d H e c t o r S t . J o h n d e C r e v e c o e u r ' s Letters from an American Farmer, they m a r k the b e g i n n i n g of a new s e n s e of national identity a s colonists from greatly different b a c k g r o u n d s a n d of varied nationalities now f o u n d r e a s o n s to call t h e m s e l v e s " A m e r i c a n s . " T h i s t r a n s f o r m a t i o n w a s not easy. W a s h i n g t o n Irving's fictional c h a r a c t e r Rip V a n Winkle f o u n d the world radically different w h e n , finally a w a k e n e d from his s l u m b e r s , he tried to m a k e s e n s e of what he had m i s s e d , the A m e r i c a n Revolution: " G o d k n o w s , I'm not myselfI'm s o m e b o d y e l s e t h a t ' s m e y o n d e r n o t h a t ' s s o m e b o d y else got into my s h o e s I w a s myself last night, but I fell a s l e e p o n the m o u n t a i n . . . a n d everything's c h a n g e d , a n d I'm c h a n g e d , a n d I can't tell what's my n a m e , or w h o I a m ! " B e c a u s e neither the technological nor the e c o n o m i c infrastructure w a s yet in p l a c e to s u p p o r t a national a u d i e n c e , b e c a u s e p e o p l e lived in widely s e p a r a t e d a n d poorly c o n n e c t e d villages or on r e m o t e f a r m s , n o n e of these early A m e r i c a n writers, i n c l u d i n g s u c h p o p u l a r novelists a s S u s a n n a R o w s o n a n d C h a r l e s B r o c k d e n Brown, c o u l d live by their p e n s a l o n e . T h e crisis in A m e r i c a n life c a u s e d by the Revolution h a d m a d e artists s e l f - c o n s c i o u s a b o u t A m e r i c a n s u b j e c t s , but it w a s W a s h i n g t o n Irving who b e s t learned how to exploit this n a s c e n t s e l f - c o n s c i o u s n e s s , w h o h a d the distinction of being the first A m e r i c a n writer to live on the i n c o m e p r o d u c e d by his p u b l i c a t i o n s . H i s generation discovered ways of b e i n g A m e r i c a n without c o m p r o m i s i n g their integrity, a n d they s u c c e s s f u l l y h a r n e s s e d the world of print to their a m b i t i o n to s p e a k through the p r o f e s s i o n of a u t h o r s h i p .

PURSUING

HAPPINESS

W h e n J o h n W i n t h r o p d e s c r i b e d his " m o d e l " for a C h r i s t i a n c o m m u n i t y , he envisioned a g r o u p of m e n a n d w o m e n working together for the c o m m o n g o o d , e a c h of w h o m knew his or her p l a c e in the s t a b l e social s t r u c t u r e d e c r e e d by G o d . At all t i m e s , he said, " s o m e m u s t be rich, s o m e poor, s o m e high a n d e m i n e n t in power a n d dignity," others low a n d "in s u b j e c t i o n . " Ideally, it w a s to be a c o m m u n i t y of love, all m a d e e q u a l by their fallen n a t u r e a n d their c o n c e r n for the salvation of their s o u l s , but it w a s to b e a s t a b l e c o m m u n i t y . B u t President J o h n A d a m s w i t n e s s e d social mobility of a kind a n d to an extent that W i n t h r o p would not have d r e a m e d p o s s i b l e . A s historians have observed, E u r o p e a n critics of A m e r i c a in the e i g h t e e n t h a n d nineteenth centuries never u n d e r s t o o d that great social c h a n g e w a s p o s s i b l e

178

AMERICAN LITERATURE

1700-1820

without social u p h e a v a l primarily b e c a u s e there w a s n o feudal hierarchy to overthrow. W h e n C r e v e c o e u r w a n t e d to distinguish A m e r i c a from E u r o p e , it w a s the medievalism of t h e latter that he wished to s t r e s s . T h e visitor to A m e r i c a , he said, "views not the hostile c a s t l e , a n d the h a u g h t y m a n s i o n , c o n t r a s t e d with the clay-built h u t a n d m i s e r a b l e c a b i n , w h e r e cattle a n d m e n help to k e e p e a c h other w a r m , a n d dwell in m e a n n e s s , s m o k e a n d i n d i g e n c e . " O f course, in 1 8 2 0 , m a n y A m e r i c a n s were still n o t free. S o m e of the F o u n d i n g F a t h e r s , like G e o r g e W a s h i n g t o n a n d T h o m a s J e f f e r s o n , were slave owners t h e m s e l v e s . M e n c o u l d not vote u n l e s s they o w n e d property; w o m e n c o u l d not vote at all. W o m e n wgre^vards o f their fathers until marriage, u p o n which their legal identity w a s m e r g e d with their h u s b a n d s , s o that they c o u l d not o w h ^ r o p e r W l j r j e e p a n y wagesThev might earnTEduc a t e d at h o m e for d o m e s t i c d u t i e s , y o u n g w o m e n were supposed" to b e e x c l u d e d from p u b l i c , intellectual life. B u t , by_the e n d o f the e i g h t e e n t h century, a m o v e m e n t to e d u c a t e w o m e n like m e n s o that they coTjTJprope j l y n m l j u e t h e i r y o u n g children vyTfrTpatriotic i d e a l s h a d g a i n e d consiHerahle_strength. Every liteTary w o m a n testifiecfin h e r own way t o t h e l i s e f u l n e s s of all w o m e n in the public s p h e r e . Fired by E n l i g h t e n m e n t ideals of r e a s o n a n d equality, w o m e n like J u d i t h S a r g e n t M u r r a y a n d H a n n a h F o s t e r b e g a n to s p e a k a n d write o n public s u b j e c t s a n d to agitate for their rights a s citizens. T h e condition of Native A m e r i c a n s c o n t i n u e d to deteriorate t h r o u g h o u t the nineteenth century. Well u n d e r s t a n d i n g their vulnerability to colonial expansionist drives, m a n y e a s t e r n tribes s i d e d with the British d u r i n g the Revolution. After the British d e f e a t , they were exposed both to white veng e a n c e a n d white g r e e d . E n t i r e tribes were systematically d i s p l a c e d from their traditional territories, p u s h e d ever farther a n d farther west. N e v e r t h e l e s s , the s a m e forces that earlier h a d u n d e r m i n e d c h u r c h authority in N e w E n g l a n d gradually affected the A m e r i c a n s ' u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f w h a t constituted the g o o d society. If, a s R u s s e l N y e o n c e p u t it, t h e two a s s u m p t i o n s held to b e true by m o s t eighteenth-century A m e r i c a n s were "the perfectibility of m a n , a n d t h e p r o s p e c t of his future p r o g r e s s , " A m e r i c a n citizens h a d to g r o u n d t h o s e a s s u m p t i o n s in t h e reality o f their day-to-day relations with others w h o s e plight h a d not yet b e e n t o u c h e d by t h e c o n t a g i o n o f liberty. T h u s m u c h imaginative energy in the late e i g h t e e n t h a n d early n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r i e s w a s e x p e n d e d in b e g i n n i n g to correct institutional a n d social injustices: the tyranny o f m o n a r c h y , the t o l e r a n c e o f slavery, the m i s u s e of priso n s , the p l a c e o f w o m e n . E v e n a s they a g i t a t e d for a n extension o f the principles o f liberty codified by the Revolutionary g e n e r a t i o n , few d o u b t e d that with the application of intelligence the h u m a n lot c o u l d b e i m p r o v e d . Writers like F r e n e a u , Franklin, a n d C r e v e c o e u r a r g u e d that, if it w a s n o t too late, the t r a n s p l a n t e d E u r o p e a n m i g h t learn s o m e t h i n g a b o u t fellowship a n d m a n n e r s from " t h e n o b l e s a v a g e s " rather t h a n from r u d e white settlers, slave owners, and backwoods pioneers. F o r m a n y , Franklin b e s t r e p r e s e n t s the p r o m i s e o f the E n l i g h t e n m e n t in A m e r i c a , even a s his long a n d fruitful life a l s o testified to the pitfalls that a c c o m p a n i e d a n uncritical a d o p t i o n of principles that e n s h r i n e d t h e individual's c o n c e r n s above t h o s e of the c o m m u n i t y . Franklin w a s s e l f - e d u c a t e d , social, a s s u r e d , a m a n of the world, a m b i t i o u s a n d public-spirited, s p e c u l a tive a b o u t the n a t u r e o f the universe, a n d in m a t t e r s o f religion c o n t e n t " t o observe the actual c o n d u c t of h u m a n i t y rather than to d e b a t e s u p e r n a t u r a l

INTRODUCTION

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m a t t e r s that are u n p r o v a b l e . " W h e n Ezra Stiles a s k e d him a b o u t his religion, he said h e believed in the "creator of the u n i v e r s e " but he d o u b t e d the "divinity of J e s u s . " H e would never be d o g m a t i c a b o u t it, however, b e c a u s e a s he wryly put i t h e expected s o o n "an opportunity of k n o w i n g the truth with less t r o u b l e . " Franklin always p r e s e n t s himself as a m a n d e p e n d i n g on firsth a n d e x p e r i e n c e , too worldly-wise to be c a u g h t off g u a r d , a n d always m i n d i n g " t h e m a i n c h a n c e , " a s o n e c h a r a c t e r in Tyler's The Contrast c o u n s e l s . T h i s a s p e c t of Franklin's p e r s o n a , however, belies a n o t h e r s i d e of him a n d of the eighteenth century: t h o s e idealistic a s s u m p t i o n s in which the great public d o c u m e n t s of the A m e r i c a n Revolution, especially the D e c l a r a t i o n of Indep e n d e n c e , are g r o u n d e d . Given the representative n a t u r e of Franklin's character, it s e e m s right that of the d o c u m e n t s m o s t closely a s s o c i a t e d with the formation of the A m e r i c a n r e p u b l i c t h e D e c l a r a t i o n of I n d e p e n d e n c e , the treaty of alliance with F r a n c e , the Treaty of Paris, a n d the C o n s t i t u t i o n only he s i g n e d all four. T h e fact that A m e r i c a n s in the last quarter of the e i g h t e e n t h century held that "certain truths are self-evident, that all m e n are c r e a t e d e q u a l , that they are e n d o w e d by their C r e a t o r with certain u n a l i e n a b l e R i g h t s , that a m o n g these are Life, Liberty a n d the p u r s u i t of H a p p i n e s s " w a s the result of their reading the S c o t t i s h p h i l o s o p h e r s , particularly F r a n c i s H u t c h e s o n a n d L o r d Karnes (Henry H o m e ) , w h o a r g u e d that all p e o p l e in all p l a c e s p o s s e s s a s e n s e c o m m o n to a l l a m o r a l s e n s e t h a t c o n t r a d i c t e d the notion of the m i n d a s an e m p t y vessel awaiting experience. T h i s i d e a l i s m p a v e d the way for writers like Bryant, E m e r s o n , T h o r e a u , a n d W h i t m a n , b u t in the 1 7 7 0 s its p r e s e n c e is f o u n d chiefly in politics a n d e t h i c s . T h e a s s u r a n c e of a universal s e n s e of right a n d w r o n g m a d e p o s s i b l e both the overthrow of tyrants a n d the restoration of order, a n d it allowed h u m a n k i n d to m a k e n e w earthly c o v e n a n t s , not, a s w a s the c a s e with Bradford a n d W i n t h r o p , for the glory of G o d , b u t , a s T h o m a s J e f f e r s o n a r g u e d , for an individual's right to happin e s s on e a r t h . H o w A m e r i c a n s u s e d a n d a b u s e d that right in the service of self-interest would b e c o m e the t h e m e of c o u n t l e s s writers after 1 8 2 0 , a s a market revolution p e r m a n e n t l y e n s h r i n e d liberal principles over t h o s e of the civic r e p u b l i c a n i s m that h a d informed the previous g e n e r a t i o n ' s behavior.

AMERICAN LITERATURE TEXTS

170405 Sarah Kemhle Knight keeps Tlie of a journey from Boston to 1718

1700-1820 CONTEXTS

Private Journal

New York (pub. 1825) French found New Orleans T h e "Great Awakening"

172656 1728 William Byrd writes his History-of

the Dividing Line (pub. 1841) 1735 "The Speech of Moses Bon S a a m " 1741 Vitus Bering discovers Alaska

published in London periodical 1741 Hands Jonathan Edwards, Sinners of an Angry God 175563 1760 Briton H a m m o n , Narrative Sufferings, and of the French and Indian Wars in the

Uncommon Deliverance 1764 1768

Surprizing

J a m e s Grainger, Tlte Sugar S a m s o n O c c o m , A Short

Cane Narrative

of My Life 177190 Benjamin Franklin continues his (Part 1 pub. 1818) Various 1773 Boston Tea Party

Autobiography 1773 Subjects 1 774

Phillis Wheatlcy, Poems on

John Woolman, rYhe Journal

of John

Woolnutn I 774-83 John and Abigail Adams 1 77583 1776 1780s T h o m a s Paine, Common Sense 1776 War for American Independence

exchange letters (pub. 1840, 1875)

Declaration of Independence

Annis Boudinot Stockton publishes

p o e m s in magazines and newspapers 1782 J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, an American Farmer 1783 Britain opens "Old Northwest" to United States after Treaty of Paris ends American Revolution 1786 1787 Contrast 178788 Tl\e Federalist papers Philip Freneau, Poems T h o m a s Jefferson, Notes on the Royal! Tyler, The 1787 U.S. Constitution adopted

Letters from

State of Virginia

Boldface title indicate works in the anthology.

8 0

TEXTS
1789 Olaudah Equiano, The of the Life of Olaudah Interesting Equiano 1789 Narrative president

CONTEXTS
George Washington elected first

Sarah Went worth Morton publishes her first poem; pub. My Mind and Its Thoughts 1823 1790 Judith Sargent Murray, On the

Equality of the Sexes 1791 of Truth 1798 Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland 1803 United States buys Louisiana S u s a n n a Rowson, Charlotte: A Tale 1791 Washington D . C . established as

U.S. capital

Territory from France 1812 14 1819 S e c o n d war against England

Spain exchanges Florida for U . S .

assumption of $5 million in claims

181

American Literature 1820-1865

THE LITERARY HERITAGE OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC

E d u c a t e d A m e r i c a n s in the new R e p u b l i c were m o r e familiar with G r e e k a n d R o m a n history, a n d E u r o p e a n history a n d literature, than with A m e r i c a n writers of the colonial a n d Revolutionary e r a s . M a n y now-familiar works of early A m e r i c a n literature were not a c c e s s i b l e s o m e still u n p u b l i s h e d ( E d w a r d Taylor's p o e m s ) , s o m e available only in i n c o m p l e t e texts ( B e n j a m i n Franklin's a u t o b i o g r a p h y ) , s o m e extremely rare ( C o t t o n M a t h e r ' s Magnalia Christi Americana, printed in L o n d o n in 1 7 0 2 , first printed in the U n i t e d S t a t e s in a s m a l l edition at Hartford in 1 8 2 0 , a n d not generally available until 1 8 5 3 ) . E d u c a t e d A m e r i c a n boys a n d s o m e girls l e a r n e d G r e e k a n d Latin literature in c h i l d h o o d e p i c s , t r a g e d i e s , c o m e d i e s , p a s t o r a l p o e m s , histories, satires. T h e E n g l i s h - l a n g u a g e tradition that A m e r i c a n s s h a r e d , w h e t h e r N o r t h e r n e r s or S o u t h e r n e r s , w a s B r i t k k r j m s t i t i i t e d hy S p e n s e r V T j i e J ^ T i p Oweene.__Shakespeare's p l a y s ^ a n d Midori's Paradise Lost a s wglL_as eighteenth-centurv literature^includinp; e s s a y s by J o s e p h A d d i s o n , R i c h a r d Steele, S a m u e l Johnson, andtJfive?~GoTdsmith, and m u c h now-neglected poetry s u c h a s P o p e ' s The Dunciad, J a m e s T h o m s o n ' s The Seasons, a n d G o l d smith's The Deserted Village. D e s p i t e their political i n d e p e n d e n c e , A m e r i c a n s from M a i n e to G e o r g i a (the s o u t h e r n m o s t Atlantic s t a t e until Florida was a d m i t t e d to the union in 1 8 4 5 ) a c k n o w l e d g e d m u c h the s a m e literary c a n o n , a l t h o u g h the i n h a b i t a n t s ( r t t h e regions settled hv P u r i t a n s t e n d e d t n c h e r i s h the d i s s e n t e r J o h n B u n y a n ' s Pilgrim's Progress m o r e than literarym i n d e d S o u t h e r n e r s , w h o s e Colonial a n c e s t o r s r n " " n f t p n had hplnngpd tn the C h u r c h of E n g l a n d . F u r t h e r m o r e , by the s e c o n d q u a r t e r of the n i n e t e e n t h century, after the w a r t i m e d i s r u p t i o n s to trade were over, A m e r i c a n s h a d q u i c k a c c e s s to c o n temporary British literature a n d criticism. C r o s s i n g the Atlantic o n sailing ships or s t e a m e r s , any b o o k or m a g a z i n e c o u l d be r e p u b l i s h e d , a m o n t h or less after its a p p e a r a n c e in L o n d o n , in the larger c o a s t a l c i t i e s B o s t o n , N e w York, P h i l a d e l p h i a , a n d C h a r l e s t o n . V o l u m e s of poetry by the well-loved S c o t s poet Robert B u r n s a n d by the E n g l i s h R o m a n t i c s ( W o r d s w o r t h , C o l e ridge, Byron, M o o r e , Shelley, a n d K e a t s ) , then T e n n y s o n , a n d a little later Elizabeth Barrett a n d Robert B r o w n i n g were reprinted in the U n i t e d S t a t e s a l m o s t a s soon a s they a p p e a r e d in E n g l a n d . T h e great British quarterly reviews (which m a d e a point of j u d g i n g new literary works by fixed literary principles, thereby e x p o s i n g their readers to literary criticism written from a theoretical s t a n c e ) were reprinted even in s u c h inland cities a s Albany a n d 425

426

AMERICAN

LITERATURE

18 2 0 - 1 865

C i n c i n n a t i in t h e 1 8 4 0 s . T h e better n e w s p a p e r s o f the s e a c o a s t cities h a d c o r r e s p o n d e n t s in E u r o p e a n c a p i t a l s s u c h a s L o n d o n a n d Paris, a n d the p o s t office initiated c h e a p m a i l i n g rates for printed m a t e r i a l . F r o m t h e 1 8 4 0 s o n w a r d , t h e network of railroads t r a n s p o r t e d b o o k s over the A p p a l a c h i a n s to the M i d w e s t . With g o o d r e a s o n , E m i l y D i c k i n s o n in her h o m e in A m h e r s t or William G i l m o r e S i m m s in h i s h o m e o u t s i d e C h a r l e s t o n c o u l d feel in t o u c h with the latest L o n d o n literary n e w s . G e n d e r differences in literary k n o w l e d g e were m o r e o b v i o u s than regional differences, for a t least into the m i d d l e o f the c e n t u r y efforts were m a d e to c e n s o r the r e a d i n g o f girls a n d y o u n g w o m e n . O n e s i m p l e way w a s to deny t h e m c l a s s i c a l e d u c a t i o n a n d thereby p r o t e c t t h e m J T o m _ s e x u a H y frank writings in G r e e k a n d L a t i n . S o m e w o m e n writers in this p e r i o d , notably C a r o l i n e KirkJand a n d M a r g a r e t Fuller, d i d receive informal c l a s s i c a l e d u c a t i o n s t h r o u g h t h e a i d o f fathers or b r o t h e r s ; s o m e m e n , i n c l u d i n g t h e workingc l a s s W a l t W h i t m a n a n d the well-born b u t i m p o v e r i s h e d H e r m a n Melville, received little formal e d u c a t i o n F r e d e r i c k D o u g l a s s least o f all. W i t h i n e a c h social c l a s s , in g e n e r a l , however, fewer girls w e r e e d j j c ^ t e ^ t l i a r ^ b o y s , a n d c a r e w a s t a k e n to k e e p all y o u n g w o m e n away from E n g l i s h novels o f t h g j r e v i o u s c e n t u r y t h a t m i g h t p o l l u t e their m i n d s . A t thg_beginning o f the p e r i o d , fiction w a s generally held to i n f l a m e the i m a g i n a t i o n a n d p a s s i o n s of susceptihle_young r e a d e r s , especially_young w o m e n . In fact, m o v e m e n t s for w o m e n ' s e d u c a t i o n often s t r e s s e d that s e r i o u s l e a r n i n g w o u l d k e e p y o u n g girls away from novels. In h e r N e w E n g l a n d novels H a r r i e t B e e c h e r S t o w e e n u m e r a t e d t h e few b o o k s that a y o u n g w o m a n m i g h t have in her r o o m in the first d e c a d e s of the century: S a m u e l R i c h a r d s o n ' s S i r Charles Grandison, a b o u t a m o d e l g e n t l e m a n , w a s allowed, b u t not his s e d u c t i o n novel Clarissa. M a r g a r e t Fuller's conflicting feelings toward S i r W a l t e r S c o t t s p r a n g from her father's o p p o s i t i o n to her r e a d i n g novels a n d t a l e s , a n d even in the next generation E m i l y D i c k i n s o n r e a d fiction a g a i n s t h e r father's w i s h e s . Y o u n g m e n like D i c k i n s o n ' s brother were a l s o w a r n e d o f t h e evil effects novels might have o n their m o r a l s , b u t with less u r g e n c y . Still, in this p e r i o d even s u c h a n o w - s t a n d a r d British work a s J o n a t h a n Swift's Gulliver's Travels w a s available only in e x p u r g a t e d e d i t i o n s . M o r a l opposition t o fiction w a n e d r>iiei^tJw -dwM4 ^ .JWLjiAzac -nfH" dparFpyen at the o u t b r e a k of the Civil
l

War. O t h e r s p e c i e s of writing were t h o u g h t to i n c u l c a t e the h i g h e s t civic virtues. F r o m the early years of the r e p u b l i c , m a n y w e l l - e d u c a t e d A m e r i c a n s believed that the n e w nation m u s t have its own national p o e m , a n d d o z e n s o f p o e m s of great length a n d s u r p a s s i n g d u l l n e s s were p u b l i s h e d . J o e l B a r l o w , o n e of the g r o u p of p o e t s k n o w n a s " t h e C o n n e c t i c u t W i t s " in p o s t - R e v o l u t i o n a r y A m e r i c a , in 1 8 0 7 p u b l i s h e d The Columhiad, m e a n t a s t h e epic p o e m of C o l u m b i a , t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , w h e r e h e might t e a c h t h e love o f national liberty a n d the d e p e n d e n c e o f g o o d m o r a l s a n d g o o d g o v e r n m e n t o n r e p u b lican p r i n c i p l e s . S i g n i n g h i s p r e f a c e in G r e a t C r o s s i n g , K e n t u c k y , in 1 8 2 7 , R i c h a r d E m m o n s n a m e d h i s f o u r - v o l u m e Fredoniad; or, Independence Preserved, an Epick Poem on the Late War of 1812 in h o n o r of h i s A m e r i c a n m u s e , t h e G o d d e s s o f F r e e d o m . T h r o u g h o u t t h e first h a l f o f the century, critics called for writers to c e l e b r a t e t h e n e w c o u n t r y in poetry or p r o s e , repeatedly g o i n g s o far a s to a d v i s e w o u l d - b e writers o n potentially fruitful s u b j e c t s s u c h a s A m e r i c a n Indian l e g e n d s , stories o f colonial b a t t l e s , a n d

INTRODUCTION

427

c e l e b r a t i o n s of the A m e r i c a n Revolution ( a l t h o u g h o n e r e s p e c t e d literary theory held that writers would be better setting their works in a r e m o t e r p a s t , rather than a period s o n e a r to the p r e s e n t ) . Early calls for the e x i s t e n c e of an A m e r i c a n literature were altered by the popularity in the U n i t e d S t a t e s of Sir W a l t e r S c o t t , first a s the a u t h o r of widely read p o e m s s u c h a s The Lady of the Lake, t h e n , decisively, a s a historical novelist. After 1 8 1 4 , w h e n he p u b l i s h e d Waverley a n o n y m o u s l y , S c o t t p r o d u c e d a n e w novel a l m o s t every year. Until the secret of his a u t h o r s h i p w a s revealed in 1 8 2 6 , the novels were a s c r i b e d to " T h e a u t h o r of Waverley" or, by reviewers, to "the G r e a t U n k n o w n . " In the U n i t e d S t a t e s , w h e r e a n e w novel by the a u t h o r of Waverley w a s a l m o s t a national event, literary critics a n d aspiring novelists instantly s a w the a p p e a l of S c o t t ' s u s e of historical settings a n d his c r e a t i n g i m a g i n e d s c e n e s in which real historical p e o p l e intermingled with fictional c h a r a c t e r s . S c o t t ' s e x a m p l e not only m a d e the novel a r e s p e c t a b l e , even elevated, g e n r e , it h a d m u c h to d o with redirecting the literary efforts of a m b i t i o u s A m e r i c a n s from epic poetry toward p r o s e fiction. J a m e s F e n i m o r e C o o p e r h a d already written a novel in imitation of J a n e A u s t e n , b u t his s u c c e s s c a m e in the historical novel, after h e imitated S c o t t ' s The Pirate in The Spy ( 1 8 2 1 ) , w h e r e G e o r g e W a s h i n g t o n w a s a character. Lydia M a r i a F r a n c i s (later C h i l d ) b e g a n to write Hobomok ( 1 8 2 4 ) after r e a d i n g J . G . Palfrey's review of Yamoyden, " a metrical tale in six c a n t o s , after the m a n n e r of S c o t t " m e a n i n g the poetry of S c o t t . B u t s h e h a d read the S c o t t novels a s they a p p e a r e d , a n d set Hobomok in s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y M a s s a c h u s e t t s , her equivalent of S c o t t ' s S c o t l a n d of a p r e v i o u s century. Following S c o t t a n d C o o p e r , C a t h a r i n e M a r i a S e d g w i c k in The Linwoods ( 1 8 3 5 ) b r o u g h t Revolutionary h e r o e s , i n c l u d i n g W a s h i n g t o n , into her plot a l o n g with fictional c h a r a c t e r s . F r o m a d o l e s c e n c e H a w t h o r n e w a s s t e e p e d in S c o t t , a n d Melville's r e a d i n g of S c o t t e m e r g e d as late a s his 1 8 7 6 epic p o e m , Clarel. In old a g e W a l t W h i t m a n lovingly d e s c r i b e d a b o o k he h a d c h e r i s h e d for fifty years, S c o t t ' s p o e m s , c o m p l e t e in o n e v o l u m e . B e f o r e the mid-century, w h e n every up-to-date A m e r i c a n read D i c k e n s , every literate A m e r i c a n read S c o t t , a n d all a p p e a l s for the creation of a great A m e r i c a n literature were infused with the k n o w l e d g e that S c o t t h a d invented a n infinitely a d a p t a b l e g e n r e of historical fiction. A n o t h e r a d a p t a b l e g e n r e w a s the p e r s o n a l travel book. T h e y o u n g American W a s h i n g t o n Irving h a d b e c o m e friends with the great W a l t e r S c o t t through his C e r v a n t e s - i n f l u e n c e d p a r o d i c History of New York ( 1 8 0 9 ) . Irving's The Sketch Book ( 1 8 1 9 - 2 0 ) w a s a p e c u l i a r intermingling of tales a n d highly p e r s o n a l e s s a y s in which the narrator, " G e o f f r e y C r a y o n , " w a s c o m p a r e d to a n idiosyncratic l a n d s c a p e p a i n t e r w h o travels E u r o p e s k e t c h i n g "in n o o k s , a n d c o r n e r s , a n d b y - p l a c e s , " but n e g l e c t i n g "to paint S t . Peter's, or the C o l i s e u m ; the c a s c a d e of T e r n i , or the bay of N a p l e s . " C a p t i v a t e d by the genial sensibility t h u s displayed, A m e r i c a n r e a d e r s a c k n o w l e d g e d Irving a s the first great writer of the U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d c h e r i s h e d The Sketch Book for d e c a d e s . H e n r y T . T u c k e r m a n ' s Italian Sketch Book ( 1 8 3 5 ) frankly imitated it, a n d N a t h a n i e l Parker Willis's Pencillings by the Way (183536) w a s m o d eled on it. In tone a n d s t r u c t u r e H e r m a n Melville's Redburn ( 1 8 4 9 ) w a s deeply i n d e b t e d to it. K n o w i n g that Willis h a d financed his travels in part by s e n d i n g letters h o m e to n e w s p a p e r s , the p e n n i l e s s y o u n g B a y a r d Taylor imitated his strategy in w h a t b e c a m e Views A-foot ( 1 8 4 6 ) ; a n d Willis w a s a l s o a

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m o d e l for C a r o l i n e Kirkland's Holidays Abroad ( 1 8 4 9 ) a n d L o u i s e C l a p p e ' s Residence in the Mines (the " D a m e S h i r l e y " letters, 1 8 5 4 ) . Melville's first two b o o k s , Typee ( 1 8 4 6 ) a n d Omoo ( 1 8 4 7 ) , p u r p o r t e d to b e a c c u r a t e a c c o u n t s of e x p e r i e n c e s in the M a r q u e s a s a n d Tahiti a n d were valued primarily a s s u c h . Similarly, C a r o l i n e Kirkland's two b o o k s on frontier M i c h i g a n , A New HomeWho'll Follow? ( 1 8 3 9 ) a n d Western Clearings (1845), were not only entertaining, but were v a l u e d a s useful s o u r c e s of general information for potential e m i g r a n t s . B a y a r d Taylor's letters h o m e from California in 1 8 4 9 a n d 1 8 5 0 , c o l l e c t e d in Eldorado ( 1 8 5 0 ) , were infused with b u o y a n t c h a r m , b u t his p u r p o s e w a s d o c u m e n t a r y : to let E a s t e r n e r s know what life w a s already like for the forty-niners a n d what they might experience if they t h e m s e l v e s s o u g h t their f o r t u n e s in C a l i f o r n i a . At W a l d e n P o n d outside C o n c o r d , M a s s a c h u s e t t s , Henry David T h o r e a u read Melville's first book, Typee, very soberly, a s a s o u r c e of a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t natives in the S o u t h S e a I s l a n d s . T h e n , in Walden, h e t u r n e d the travel g e n r e on its h e a d , a n n o u n c i n g that he w a s writing a travel b o o k himself, having traveled a g o o d deal in C o n c o r d . Exploring himself, T h o r e a u wrote the classic A m e r i c a n travel book.

THE SHIFTING

CANON

OF AMERICAN

WRITERS

A p a i n t i n g p o p u l a r d u r i n g the late n i n e t e e n t h century w a s C h r i s t i a n S c h u s sele's reverential Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside. W o r k i n g in 1 8 6 3 , four years after Irving's d e a t h , S c h u s s e l e portrayed a n u m b e r of elegantly clad n o t a b l e s in Irving's small study in his G o t h i c c o t t a g e - c a s t l e o n the H u d s o n River, north of N e w York City. A m o n g t h e m were several writers w h o s e works a p p e a r in this anthology: Irving himself, N a t h a n i e l H a w t h o r n e , Henry W a d s w o r t h Longfellow, R a l p h W a l d o E m e r s o n , William C u l l e n Bryant, a n d J a m e s F e n i m o r e C o o p e r . Intermingled with t h e s e m e n were p o e t s a n d novelists now s e l d o m read: William G i l m o r e S i m m s , F i t z - G r e e n e H a l l e c k , N a t h a n i e l Parker Willis, J a m e s Kirke Paulding, J o h n P e n d l e t o n K e n n e d y , a n d Henry T . T u c k e r m a n , a l o n g with the historians William H . P r e s c o t t a n d G e o r g e B a n c r o f t . T h e p a i n t i n g w a s a p i o u s hoax, for t h e s e g u e s t s never a s s e m b l e d together at o n e t i m e , at S u n nyside or a n y w h e r e e l s e ; a n d while a few of t h o s e d e p i c t e d were i n d e e d Irving's friends, he barely knew s o m e of t h e m a n d never m e t others at all. Yet the p a i n t i n g s u g g e s t s that W a s h i n g t o n Irving, beloved by ordinary readers a n d by m o s t of his fellow writers, w a s the central A m e r i c a n literary figu r e b e t w e e n 1 8 0 9 (the year of his parody History of New York) a n d his d e a t h in 1 8 5 9 , j u s t before the Civil W a r . H e h a d d e m o n s t r a t e d in The Sketch Book (181920) that m e m o r a b l e fictionRip Van Winkle a n d The Legend of Sleepy Hollowcould be set in the villages or rural a r e a s of the U n i t e d S t a t e s (thereby initiating what b e c a m e b a c k w o o d s h u m o r a n d later the local-color m o v e m e n t ) ; he a l s o s e e m e d to prove, by the book's international s u c c e s s , that a n A m e r i c a n writer c o u l d win a British a n d C o n t i n e n t a l a u d i ence. Irving's legion of imitators i n c l u d e d several of the m e n in the painting; a n d a m o n g his fellow writers, Irving's r e p u t a t i o n w a s e n h a n c e d by his generosity, as in his gallantly r e l i n q u i s h i n g the s u b j e c t of the c o n q u e s t of M e x i c o

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to Prescott or in urging the p u b l i s h e r G e o r g e P. P u t n a m to bring o u t an A m e r i c a n edition of the first b o o k by the u n k n o w n H e r m a n Melville. Although J a m e s F e n i m o r e C o o p e r ' s Leather-Stocking novels h a d a great v o g u e in E u r o p e (where they b e c a m e a m a j o r s o u r c e of i n f o r m a t i o n a n d m i s i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t the U n i t e d S t a t e s ) , a n d his f a m e a s a fiction writer rivaled Irving's in this country, his influence on A m e r i c a n writers never a p p r o a c h e d the b r e a d t h of Irving's. Irving a n d C o o p e r both s p e n t years a b r o a d , Irving in E n g l a n d a n d S p a i n , C o o p e r in F r a n c e . A m e r i c a n s never held Irving's a b s e n c e a g a i n s t him, for his w i n n i n g the friendship of great foreigners ( s u c h a s S i r W a l t e r S c o t t ) s e e m e d to reflect glory on his country; a n d for years he w a s honorably r e p r e s e n t i n g his country, a s secretary of the legation in L o n d o n , a s minister to S p a i n . F u r t h e r m o r e , he h a d a way of d e m o n s t r a t i n g his A m e r i c a n i s m , a s in 1 8 3 2 , w h e n on r e t u r n i n g from E u r o p e he c a u g h t the public's i m a g i n a t i o n with his a r d u o u s trip to p r e s e n t - d a y O k l a h o m a . W h e n C o o p e r returned to the U n i t e d S t a t e s in 1 8 3 3 after a l m o s t a d e c a d e a b r o a d , h e w a s a p p a l l e d at the s p r e a d of excessively d e m o c r a t i c attitudes a n d lectured his fellow citizens in A Letter to His Countrymen ( 1 8 3 4 ) a n d a satirical novel, The Monikins ( 1 8 3 5 ) . C o o p e r e m b r o i l e d h i m s e l f in lawsuits, a n d public opinion t u r n e d a g a i n s t him a s p a p e r s , i n c l u d i n g Hora c e Greeley's N e w York Tribune, w a g e d a c a m p a i g n a g a i n s t him, literally d e f a m i n g him a s a would-be aristocrat. Irving's p e r s o n a l popularity w a s s u c h that late in 1 8 4 9 , w h e n h e w a s c h a r g e d with plagiarizing his biography of G o l d s m i t h from two recent British b i o g r a p h i e s , n e w s p a p e r s from M a i n e to L o u i s i a n a d e n o u n c e d his a c c u s e r without even e x a m i n i n g the e v i d e n c e . N o r did the influence of R a l p h W a l d o E m e r s o n rival Irving's, d e s p i t e his profoundly provocative effects on s u c h writers a s M a r g a r e t Fuller, Henry David T h o r e a u , W a l t W h i t m a n , H e r m a n Melville, a n d Emily D i c k i n s o n e f f e c t s that m a k e m o d e r n literary historians s e e him a s the s e m i n a l writer of the century. T h e S c h u s s e l e p a i n t i n g tells m o r e than the artist c o u l d have i n t e n d e d a b o u t the fragile s t a t u s of literary r e p u t a t i o n s , for while i n c l u d i n g m a n y writers now all but forgotten, it e x c l u d e s m a n y o t h e r s in this anthology. T o begin with, it e x c l u d e s all w o m e n , even t h o s e w h o h a d d o n e s u b s t a n t i a l work already, s u c h a s C a t h a r i n e M a r i a S e d g w i c k , C a r o l i n e Kirkland, Lydia M a r i a C h i l d , F a n n y F e r n , M a r g a r e t Fuller, a n d m o s t f a m o u s of all, Harriet B e e c h e r S t o w e (Emily D i c k i n s o n ' s g r e a t e s t burst of poetic c r e a t i o n h a d already o c c u r r e d by 1 8 6 3 , but s h e r e m a i n e d an u n p u b l i s h e d p o e t ) . T h e p a i n t i n g a l s o e x c l u d e s several m a l e writers w h o now s e e m a m o n g the m o s t i m p o r t a n t of the century: J o h n G r e e n l e a f Whittier ( w h o s e militant a b o l i t i o n i s m ruled him out of s u c h g o o d c o m p a n y ) , E d g a r Allan P o e , Henry David T h o r e a u , W a l t W h i t m a n , a n d H e r m a n Melville. F u r t h e r m o r e , while the M a r y l a n d e r Kennedy w a s i n c l u d e d , all other S o u t h e r n e r s were e x c l u d e d , a m o n g t h e m writers s u c h a s A u g u s t u s Baldwin L o n g s t r e e t ( w h o s e i m p u l s e to record d i s a p p e a r i n g p h a s e s of G e o r g i a life parallels a recurrent i m p u l s e in S e d g w i c k ' s writing) and George Washington Harris (whose exuberant prose has drawn readers for a century a n d a half). S c h u s s e l e ' s arraying of literary n o t a b l e s offers a powerful lesson in the c o n s t a n t shifting of literary r e p u t a t i o n s . T h i s edition of the anthology d o e s not offer s e l e c t i o n s f r o m , for a few e x a m p l e s , the S o u t h e r n e r s L o n g s t r e e t a n d Harris or from a northern writer of striking psychological fiction, Elizabeth B a r s t o w S t o d d a r d . It a l s o o m i t s two of the

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m o s t f a m o u s n a m e s of the n i n e t e e n t h century: the M a s s a c h u s e t t s writers Oliver W e n d e l l H o l m e s a n d J a m e s R u s s e l l Lowell, neither of w h o m s p e a k s powerfully to m a n y r e a d e r s at the p r e s e n t m o m e n t . Yet a s taste c h a n g e s they m a y b e valued a g a i n , a n d p e r h a p s in new ways. H o l m e s , for i n s t a n c e , m a y be read for what he called his " m e d i c a t e d n o v e l s " (realistic p s y c h o l o g i c a l fictions), p e r h a p s in a n era w h e n attention a l s o shifts to S t o w e ' s N e w E n g l a n d novels, which s o m e think have never b e e n sufficiently p r a i s e d for their own merits or a c k n o w l e d g e d for their influence o n later w o m e n ' s fiction. It s e e m s s a f e to say that d e s p i t e his historical i m p o r t a n c e Lowell will not s o o n b e given ninety p a g e s , a s h e w a s in s o m e a n t h o l o g i e s of the 1 9 6 0 s , but any writers o m i t t e d n o w may b e called b a c k in later e d i t i o n s , a l o n g with others never before i n c l u d e d .

T H E S M A L L W O R L D OF A M E R I C A N

WRITERS

T h e writers in S c h u s s e l e ' s p a i n t i n g would never have fitted into Irving's s n u g r o o m ; b u t the A m e r i c a n literary world w a s very s m a l l i n d e e d , s o small that m a n y of the writers in this period knew e a c h other, often intimately, or else knew m u c h a b o u t e a c h other. At Litchfield, C o n n e c t i c u t , the y o u n g G e o r gian L o n g s t r e e t greatly a d m i r e d o n e of the minister L y m a n B e e c h e r ' s d a u g h ters (not Harriet, then a s m a l l c h i l d ) . O t h e r writers lived, if not in e a c h other's p o c k e t s , at least in e a c h other's h o u s e s , or b o a r d i n g h o u s e s : L e m u e l S h a w , from 1 8 3 0 to 1 8 6 0 chief j u s t i c e of the M a s s a c h u s e t t s S u p r e m e C o u r t a n d H e r m a n Melville's father-in-law after 1 8 4 7 , for a t i m e stayed in a B o s t o n b o a r d i n g h o u s e run by R a l p h W a l d o E m e r s o n ' s widowed m o t h e r ; the L o n g fellows s u m m e r e d in the 1 8 4 0 s at the Pittsfield b o a r d i n g h o u s e run by M e l ville's c o u s i n , a h o u s e in which Melville h a d stayed in his early t e e n s . Lydia M a r i a Child's h u s b a n d owed m o n e y to Melville's B o s t o n g r a n d f a t h e r ; a n d the e x e c u t o r of the e s t a t e , L e m u e l S h a w , called to collect the debt, m u c h to M r s . C h i l d ' s c h a g r i n . In N e w York, the S e d g w i c k family (which i n c l u d e d C a t h a r i n e M a r i a S e d g w i c k part of the year) w a s o n i n t i m a t e t e r m s with a n o t h e r native of w e s t e r n M a s s a c h u s e t t s , William C u l l e n Bryant; a n d J a m e s F e n i m o r e C o o p e r b o r r o w e d m o n e y from a S e d g w i c k . T h e g u a r d i a n of the o r p h a n e d L o u i s e A m e l i a S m i t h (later " D a m e Shirley") w a s a c l a s s m a t e of E m i l y D i c k i n s o n ' s father. In the 1 8 4 0 s the n e w s p a p e r editor Bryant s o m e times took walks with a n o t h e r editor, y o u n g W a l t W h i t m a n . In Pittsfield in the early 1 8 5 0 s Melville a n d his family e x c h a n g e d visits with C h a r l e s a n d Elizabeth S e d g w i c k of Lenox, in w h o s e h o u s e C a t h a r i n e M a r i a S e d g w i c k spent part of the year; until his d e a t h C h a r l e s w a s the clerk of c o u r t w h e n J u d g e S h a w held his s e s s i o n in L e n o x e a c h S e p t e m b e r ; a n d E l i z a b e t h S e d g wick h a d t a u g h t Melville's older sister H e l e n at her s c h o o l . In Pittsfield a n d L e n o x , H a w t h o r n e a n d Melville paid e a c h other overnight visits; in C o n c o r d the H a w t h o r n e s rented the O l d M a n s e , the E m e r s o n a n c e s t r a l h o m e , a n d later b o u g h t a h o u s e there from the e d u c a t o r B r o n s o n Alcott a n d m a d e it f a m o u s a s the W a y s i d e ; in C o n c o r d the E m e r s o n s w e l c o m e d m a n y g u e s t s , i n c l u d i n g M a r g a r e t Fuller (who a l s o visited with the H a w t h o r n e s ) ; a n d w h e n E m e r s o n w a s away, T h o r e a u , a native of C o n c o r d , s o m e t i m e s stayed in the h o u s e to help M r s . E m e r s o n . E m e r s o n r e p e a t e d l y r e s c u e d B r o n s o n Alcott

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from financial disaster, a n d B r o n s o n ' s d a u g h t e r L o u i s a M a y Alcott took less o n s in E m e r s o n ' s h o u s e (and revered her n a t u r e g u i d e , T h o r e a u ) . F a n n y Fern's brother, N a t h a n i e l Parker Willis, w h o m s h e satirically d e p i c t e d a s " H y a c i n t h " in Ruth Hall, w a s a c l o s e friend of Melville for a t i m e ; in the winter of 1 8 4 7 , Willis a n d Melville's friend, editor Evert A. D u y c k i n c k , t o o k the train u p to F o r d h a m together to a t t e n d the funeral of Virginia P o e , the wife of E d g a r P o e , w h o , like Melville a n d H a w t h o r n e , w a s o n e of D u y c k i n c k ' s a u t h o r s in his Wiley & P u t n a m series, Library of A m e r i c a n B o o k s . T h e p o p ular M a n h a t t a n h o s t e s s A n n e L y n c h a s s i g n e d the y o u n g travel writer B a y a r d Taylor to write a valentine for a slightly older travel writer, H e r m a n Melville, in 1 8 4 8 ; a n d three years later, a p p a r e n t l y with m a t c h m a k i n g in m i n d , b r o u g h t together Taylor's i n t i m a t e friend R. H. S t o d d a r d a n d Elizabeth Barstow, a d i s t a n t relative of H a w t h o r n e . Melville took C a r o l i n e Kirkland's Holidays Abroad on s h i p b o a r d with him in 1 8 4 9 , a n d the next year s h e w a s delighted with his White-Jacket; they probably were a c q u a i n t e d . E m e r s o n s h a r e d his e n t h u s i a s m for Leaves of Grass with B r o n s o n Alcott a n d H e n r y David T h o r e a u , w h o , d u r i n g a stay in N e w York, took the Brooklyn ferry to call on W h i t m a n . Lydia M a r i a C h i l d a n d J o h n G r e e n l e a f Whittier were longtime friends, v e t e r a n s in the great c a u s e of abolition. O n a visit to W a s h i n g ton after the Civil W a r h a d broken o u t , the still r e c l u s i v e , a n d ailing, H a w t h o r n e seriously c o n s i d e r e d m a k i n g the h a z a r d o u s trip to W h e e l i n g to m e e t the extraordinary n e w c o n t r i b u t o r to the Atlantic Monthly, R e b e c c a H a r d i n g ; later he w e l c o m e d her at W a y s i d e . M a n y of the m a l e writers of this period c a m e together c a s u a l l y for d i n i n g a n d drinking, the hospitality at Evert D u y c k i n c k ' s h o u s e in N e w York b e i n g f a m o u s , o p e n to S o u t h e r n e r s like William G i l m o r e S i m m s a s well a s N e w Yorkers like Melville a n d B o s t o n i a n s like the elder R i c h a r d H e n r y D a n a , the father of the a u t h o r of the p o p u l a r Two Years before the Mast. O f the c l u b s f o r m e d by m a l e writers, artists, a n d other n o t a b l e s , the two m o s t m e m o r a b l e are the B r e a d a n d C h e e s e C l u b , which C o o p e r organized in 1 8 2 4 in the b a c k r o o m of his publisher's M a n h a t t a n b o o k s t o r e , a n d the S a t u r d a y C l u b , a c o n vivial B o s t o n g r o u p f o r m e d in 1 8 5 6 a n d especially a s s o c i a t e d with the Atlantic Monthly a n d the p u b l i s h i n g h o u s e of T i c k n o r a n d F i e l d s . M e m b e r s of the B r e a d a n d C h e e s e C l u b i n c l u d e d the poet W i l l i a m C u l l e n Bryant, S a m u e l F. B . M o r s e (the painter w h o later invented the t e l e g r a p h ) , the p o e t FitzG r e e n e H a l l e c k , a n d T h o m a s C o l e (the E n g l i s h - b o r n p a i n t e r of the A m e r i c a n l a n d s c a p e ) . E m e r s o n w a s a m o n g the m e m b e r s of the S a t u r d a y C l u b , a l o n g with J a m e s R u s s e l l Lowell, H e n r y W a d s w o r t h Longfellow, Oliver W e n d e l l H o l m e s , a n d the historians J o h n L o t h r o p Motley a n d William H . P r e s c o t t ; N a t h a n i e l H a w t h o r n e a t t e n d e d s o m e m e e t i n g s . A l o n g with m o r e formal organizations, informal a s s o c i a t i o n s flourished. In 1 8 3 6 a small g r o u p of B o s t o n - b a s e d U n i t a r i a n s b e g a n to m e e t to study G e r m a n p h i l o s o p h y ; at first simply called H e d g e ' s c l u b , from the organizer, F r e d e r i c H e d g e , the g r o u p p a s s e d into literary history a s the " T r a n s c e n d e n t a l C l u b . " M a r g a r e t Fuller c o n d u c t e d a series of " c o n v e r s a t i o n s " in the late 1 8 3 0 s a n d early 1 8 4 0 s that f o r e s h a d o w e d m a n y w o m e n ' s c l u b s of the f u t u r e . In the late 1 8 5 0 s a B o h e m i a n g r o u p of n e w s p a p e r a n d theater p e o p l e a n d writers d r a n k together at P f a f f s s a l o o n on B r o a d w a y a b o v e B l e e c k e r S t r e e t ; for a time W h i t m a n w a s a fixture there.

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T H E

S M A L L B U T

E X P A N D I N G C O U N T R Y

S u c h intimacy w a s inevitable in a country that h a d only a few literary a n d p u b l i s h i n g c e n t e r s , a l m o s t all of t h e m a l o n g the Atlantic s e a b o a r d . D e s p i t e the a c q u i s i t i o n of the L o u i s i a n a Territory from F r a n c e in 1 8 0 3 a n d the vast s o u t h w e s t from M e x i c o in 1 8 4 8 , m o s t of the writers w e still read lived all their lives in the original thirteen s t a t e s , except for trips a b r o a d , a n d their practical e x p e r i e n c e w a s of a c o m p a c t country: in 1 8 4 0 the " n o r t h w e s t e r n " s t a t e s were t h o s e c o v e r e d by the N o r t h w e s t O r d i n a n c e of 1 7 8 7 ( O h i o , India n a , Illinois, a n d M i c h i g a n ; W i s c o n s i n w a s still a territory), while the " s o u t h w e s t e r n " h u m o r writers s u c h a s G e o r g e W a s h i n g t o n H a r r i s , T h o m a s B a n g s T h o r p e , a n d J o h n s o n J o n e s H o o p e r wrote in the region b o u n d e d by G e o r g i a , Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. I m p r o v e m e n t s in transportation were shrinking the c o u n t r y e v e n while territorial g a i n s were enlarging it. W h e n Irving went from M a n h a t t a n to Albany in 1 8 0 0 , s t e a m b o a t s h a d not yet b e e n invented; the H u d s o n voyage was slow a n d d a n g e r o u s , a n d in 1 8 0 3 the w a g o n s of Irving's C a n a d a - b o u n d party barely m a d e it t h r o u g h the b o g s b e y o n d U t i c a . T h e Erie C a n a l , c o m pleted in 1 8 2 5 , c h a n g e d t h i n g s : in the 1 8 3 0 s a n d 1 8 4 0 s H a w t h o r n e , Melville, a n d Fuller took the c a n a l b o a t s in safety, suffering only from c r o w d e d a n d stuffy s l e e p i n g c o n d i t i o n s . W h e n Irving went buffalo h u n t i n g in Indian territory (now O k l a h o m a ) in 1 8 3 2 , h e left the s t e a m b o a t at S t . L o u i s a n d went on h o r s e b a c k , c a m p i n g out at night except w h e n his party r e a c h e d o n e of the line of m i s s i o n s built to a c c o m m o d a t e whites w h o were Christianizing the Plains I n d i a n s . A r o u n d the first of O c t o b e r 1 8 3 2 , L y m a n B e e c h e r of B o s t o n , having a c c e p t e d the p r e s i d e n c y of L a n e T h e o l o g i c a l S e m inary in C i n c i n n a t i , set out in at least o n e s t a g e c o a c h with several m e m b e r s of his family, i n c l u d i n g Harriet, later the a u t h o r of Uncle Tom's Cabin. T h e y s t o p p e d in N e w York City a n d P h i l a d e l p h i a (apparently l e a d i n g a milk c o w ) , then had to leave the s t a g e c o a c h for w a g o n s w h e n they r e a c h e d the Alleg h e n i e s , west of H a r r i s b u r g . I n t e n d i n g to take a s t e a m b o a t from W h e e l i n g (then in Virginia), they delayed b e c a u s e of c h o l e r a in C i n c i n n a t i a n d ultimately took a s t a g e c o a c h , arriving in m i d - N o v e m b e r . By the 1 8 4 0 s railroads h a d r e p l a c e d s t a g e c o a c h e s b e t w e e n m a n y e a s t e r n towns, a l t h o u g h to get to N e w O r l e a n s in 1 8 4 8 W h i t m a n h a d to c h a n g e from railroad to s t a g e c o a c h to s t e a m b o a t . D e s p i t e f r e q u e n t train w r e c k s , s t e a m b o a t e x p l o s i o n s , a n d Atlantic s h i p w r e c k s , by the 1 8 5 0 s travel b e t w e e n m a j o r cities h a d c e a s e d to be the h a z a r d o u s a d v e n t u r e it h a d b e e n at the b e g i n n i n g of the p e r i o d . T h e exception w a s travel to a n d from S a n F r a n c i s c o . T h a t old S p a n i s h M e x i c a n port b e c a m e an a l m o s t instant m e t r o p o l i s in the G o l d R u s h of 1 8 4 9 , w h e n t h o u s a n d s of gold s e e k e r s a n d o t h e r s p o u r e d in from all over the world. A m e r i c a n s a n d E u r o p e a n s often took the long a n d p e r i l o u s voyage a r o u n d C a p e H o r n , a s L o u i s e C l a p p e ( " D a m e Shirley") a n d her d o c t o r - h u s b a n d did in 184950. M u c h faster w a s the route by ship from a n e a s t e r n port to C h a g r e s , then a c r o s s the i s t h m u s by h o r s e b a c k a n d c a n o e to P a n a m a City ( t o u g h , y o u n g B a y a r d Taylor m a d e it in five days in 1 8 5 0 ) , a n d by s h i p to S a n F r a n c i s c o . T h o u s a n d s set off for California from M i s s o u r i or T e x a s in w a g o n s , on h o r s e b a c k , or simply on foot, walking b e s i d e w a g o n s , c r o s s i n g the central p l a i n s , the Rocky M o u n t a i n s , a n d w e s t e r n d e s e r t s .

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T h e e a s t e r n c i t i e s N e w York, P h i l a d e l p h i a , a n d B o s t o n t h o u g h the largest in the nation, were tiny in c o m p a r i s o n to their m o d e r n size. T h e site of B r o o k F a r m , now long s i n c e a b s o r b e d by B o s t o n , w a s c h o s e n b e c a u s e it w a s nine miles r e m o t e from the S t a t e H o u s e a n d two miles a w a y from the n e a r e s t farm. T h e p o p u l a t i o n of N e w York City at the start o f the 1 8 4 0 s w a s only a third of a million ( a b o u t 5 p e r c e n t of its c u r r e n t size) a n d w a s c o n c e n t r a t e d in lower M a n h a t t a n : U n i o n S q u a r e w a s the n o r t h e r n e d g e of town. H o r a c e Greeley, the editor of the N e w York Tribune, e s c a p e d the b u s t l e of the city by living on a ten-acre farm u p the E a s t River on T u r t l e Bay, w h e r e the E a s t Fifties a r e now; there he a n d his wife provided a b u c o l i c retreat for M a r g a r e t Fuller w h e n s h e w a s his literary critic a n d metropolitan reporter. In 1 8 5 3 the Crystal P a l a c e , a n exposition of arts, crafts, a n d scie n c e s c r e a t e d in imitation of the great Crystal P a l a c e at the L o n d o n World's Fair of 1 8 5 1 , failedlargely b e c a u s e it w a s too far out of town, u p west of the C r o t o n W a t e r Reservoir (which h a d m a d e p u r e r u n n i n g water available for a d e c a d e , already). T h e reservoir was on the s p o t w h e r e the N e w York Public Library now s t a n d s , at Forty-second S t r e e t a n d Fifth A v e n u e , a n d the Crystal P a l a c e w a s on the site of the m o d e r n Bryant Park (for d e c a d e s a n ironic p l a c e to be n a m e d for the n a t u r e p o e t , it has b e e n r e c l a i m e d for s a f e public e n j o y m e n t ) . T h e writers in this period t e n d e d to look east for their a u d i e n c e s s o m e of the writers, in earlier d e c a d e s , to E n g l a n d , all of t h e m to the p u b l i s h i n g c e n t e r s on the e a s t c o a s t , even t h o s e w h o had lived in what w a s called the west (Kirkland in M i c h i g a n , S t o w e in O h i o ) . Several of the writers c o u l d r e m e m b e r clearly w h e n news c a m e in 1 8 0 3 that P r e s i d e n t J e f f e r s o n h a d b o u g h t an e n o r m o u s territory, i m p o s s i b l e to visualize; all of t h e m knew that a c q u i r i n g O r e g o n might have c o s t a third war with G r e a t Britain in the mid1 8 4 0 s ; a n d all of t h e m lived through the a c q u i s i t i o n of the S o u t h w e s t , i n c l u d i n g C a l i f o r n i a , in 1 8 4 8 . In varying ways, m a n y of the writers were affected by the e x p a n s i o n w e s t w a r d . C o o p e r propelled his a g e d h e r o L e a t h e r stocking a c r o s s the M i s s i s s i p p i in The Prairie ( 1 8 2 7 ) before Irving outdid C o o p e r by g o i n g a c r o s s the M i s s i s s i p p i himself. T h r o u g h m u c h of her childhood, Harriet Prescott's father w a s away, trying to m a k e his fortune in O r e g o n . In The Oregon Trail, a series of articles in the N e w York Knickerbocker ( 1 8 4 7 ) , F r a n c i s P a r k m a n r e c o u n t e d his j o u r n e y w e s t w a r d a s far a s W y o m i n g ; in 1 8 4 9 , he capitalized on the a c q u i s i t i o n of the S o u t h w e s t by p u b l i s h i n g it a s a b o o k with an e x p a n d e d , m i s l e a d i n g title, The California and Oregon Trail. Melville, w h o h a d traveled a s far west a s the M i s s i s s i p p i before g o i n g whaling a n d w h o h a d s e e n native p e o p l e s m i s t r e a t e d in the Pacific islands a n d a l o n g the Pacific c o a s t of S o u t h A m e r i c a , r e a c t e d hostilely to P a r k m a n ' s disdain for the A m e r i c a n Indians he e n c o u n t e r e d : " W h o c a n swear that a m o n g the n a k e d British b a r b a r i a n s sent to R o m e to b e stared at m o r e than 1 5 0 0 years a g o , the a n c e s t o r of B a c o n might not have b e e n f o u n d ? W h y , a m o n g the very T h u g s of India, or the bloody D y a k s of Born e o , exists the g e r m of all that is intellectually elevated a n d g r a n d . W e a r e all of u s A n g l o - S a x o n s , Dyaks a n d I n d i a n s s p r u n g from o n e h e a d a n d m a d e in o n e i m a g e . " F r o m northern California the y o u n g B a y a r d Taylor sent h o m e reports on the G o l d R u s h to the N e w York Tribune a n d p u b l i s h e d t h e m early in 1 8 5 0 a s Eldorado. Apparently not trying to find an e a s t e r n outlet, L o u i s e C l a p p e ( " D a m e Shirley") p u b l i s h e d her letters a b o u t her

434

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LITERATURE

1820-1865

" R e s i d e n c e in the M i n e s " ( 1 8 5 1 - 5 2 ) only belatedly, in 1 8 5 4 , in a friend's short-lived S a n F r a n c i s c o literary m a g a z i n e , The Pioneer; c o n s e q u e n t l y , her f a m e w a s never truly national in her lifetime. L o n g f e l l o w relied o n b o o k s for his d e s c r i p t i o n s of the M i s s i s s i p p i region in Evangeline ( 1 8 4 7 ) , b u t if the E a s t h a d cried o u t to b e p u t into literature early in the century, n o w the M i s s i s s i p p i cried out to b e put into literature by s o m e o n e w h o knew it. At mid-century the boy-printer S a m u e l C l e m e n s in H a n n i b a l , M i s s o u r i , on the great river, set into type m a n y stories by writers of the old S o u t h w e s t . W h e n the Civil W a r c a m e , C l e m e n s f o u n d r e a s o n for g o i n g west to N e v a d a a n d C a l i f o r n i a , then to H a w a i i ; a n d in 1 8 7 2 h e b r o u g h t a version of his adventures into print in the E a s t , in H a r t f o r d , C o n n e c t i c u t , a s Roughing It. S o o n , in 1 8 7 5 , he would write the s p l e n d i d " O l d T i m e s on the M i s s i s s i p p i " for the Atlantic Monthly a n d at least o n e great b o o k set o n the river, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ( 1 8 8 4 ) .

T H E

E C O N O M I C S

O F

A M E R I C A N

L E T T E R S

G e o g r a p h y a n d m o d e s of t r a n s p o r t a t i o n b o r e directly o n p u b l i s h i n g p r o c e d u r e s in the U n i t e d S t a t e s of this p e r i o d . F o r a l o n g time writers w h o w a n t e d to p u b l i s h a b o o k carried the m a n u s c r i p t to a local printer, p a i d j o b rates to have it printed a n d b o u n d , a n d m a d e their own a r r a n g e m e n t s for distribution a n d s a l e s . Longfellow w o r k e d in this f a s h i o n with a firm in B r u n s w i c k , M a i n e , w h e n he printed his translation of Elements of French Grammar a n d other textbooks d u r i n g his first years a s a t e a c h e r . Over the y e a r s , however, true p u b l i s h i n g c e n t e r s d e v e l o p e d in the m a j o r s e a p o r t s that c o u l d receive the latest British b o o k s by the fastest s h i p s a n d , hastily reprinting t h e m , distribute t h e m inland by river traffic a s well a s in c o a s t a l cities. After 1 8 2 0 the l e a d i n g p u b l i s h i n g towns were N e w York a n d P h i l a d e l p h i a , with the Erie C a n a l s o o n giving N e w York a n a d v a n t a g e in the O h i o t r a d e . B o s t o n r e m a i n e d only a provincial p u b l i s h i n g c e n t e r until after 1 8 5 0 , w h e n publishers realized the value of the d e c a d e - o l d railroad c o n n e c t i o n s to the W e s t . ( S h i p p e d by s e a , c o p i e s of Melville's early b o o k s r e a c h e d N e w O r l e a n s two w e e k s or so after p u b l i c a t i o n in N e w York.) D e s p i t e the a g g r e s s i v e m e r c h a n dising t e c h n i q u e s of a few firms, the c r e a t i o n of a national b o o k - b u y i n g market for literature, especially A m e r i c a n literature, w a s l o n g d e l a y e d . T h e p r o b l e m w a s that the e c o n o m i c interests of A m e r i c a n p u b l i s h e r b o o k s e l l e r s were antithetical to the interests of A m e r i c a n writers. A n a t i o n a l copyright law b e c a m e effective in the U n i t e d S t a t e s in 1 7 9 0 , b u t it w a s 1 8 9 1 before A m e r i c a n writers h a d international p r o t e c t i o n a n d foreign writers received p r o t e c t i o n in the U n i t e d S t a t e s . T h r o u g h a l m o s t all the century, A m e r i c a n printers routinely pirated E n g l i s h writers, p a y i n g n o t h i n g to Sir W a l t e r S c o t t or C h a r l e s D i c k e n s or later writers for their novels, w h i c h were r u s h e d into print a n d sold very c h e a p l y in N e w York, P h i l a d e l p h i a , a n d other cities. A m e r i c a n r e a d e r s benefited from the s i t u a t i o n , for they c o u l d b u y the b e s t British a n d C o n t i n e n t a l writings c h e a p l y ; b u t A m e r i c a n writers s u f f e r e d , b e c a u s e if they were to receive royalties, their b o o k s h a d to b e p r i c e d a b o v e the p r i c e s c h a r g e d for works of the m o s t f a m o u s British writers. A m e r i c a n p u b l i s h e r s were willing to carry a few native novelists a n d p o e t s a s p r e s t i g e i t e m s for a while, but they were b u s i n e s s p e o p l e , not p h i l a n t h r o p i s t s .

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T o c o m p o u n d the p r o b l e m , Irving's a p p a r e n t c o n q u e s t of the British p u b lishing s y s t e m , by which he received large s u m s for The S k e t c h Book a n d s u c c e e d i n g v o l u m e s , proved delusory. C o o p e r a n d o t h e r s followed in Irving's track for a time a n d were paid by m a g n a n i m o u s British p u b l i s h e r s u n d e r a system whereby works first printed in G r e a t Britain were p r e s u m e d to hold a British copyright. B u t this p r a c t i c e w a s ruled illegal by a British j u d g e in 1 8 4 9 , a n d the British m a r k e t dried u p for A m e r i c a n writers. T h r o u g h o u t this period, like our own, m a k i n g a serious A m e r i c a n contribution to the literature of the world w a s n o g u a r a n t e e at all of m o n e t a r y r e w a r d s . E x c e p t for the few a u t h o r s of best-sellers like S t o w e a n d , later, Alcott (both p u b l i s h i n g after mid-century), the U n i t e d S t a t e s w a s not a c o u n try in which o n e c o u l d m a k e a living by writing fiction a n d poetry: F a n n y Fern's financial t r i u m p h (also after 1 8 5 0 ) w a s a s a c o l u m n i s t ; a n d a l t h o u g h he p u b l i s h e d poetry a n d fiction, B a y a r d Taylor's m a i n i n c o m e c a m e from his n e w s p a p e r articles written h o m e from exotic l o c a t i o n s (then c o l l e c t e d into travel b o o k s ) a n d , later, from his very p o p u l a r l e c t u r e s . S e r i o u s a u t h o r s c o u l d not always find p u b l i s h e r s for their work. Unlike m o s t other m a l e writers, Irving c o u l d always find a p u b l i s h e r , a n d in 1 8 4 9 his c a r e e r w a s revived by P u t n a m ' s lavish p r o m o t i o n of his life of Oliver G o l d s m i t h ; C o o p e r c o u l d a l s o get his n e w b o o k s p u b l i s h e d , a n d the r e i s s u e of s o m e of his earlier s u c c e s s e s restored s o m e of his popularity before his d e a t h late in 1 8 5 1 . O t h e r writers for periods of time b e c a m e editors of m a g a z i n e s or n e w s p a p e r s (there were d o z e n s of n e w s p a p e r s in M a n h a t t a n in the 1 8 4 0 s ) , w h e r e they c o u l d p u b l i s h t h e m s e l v e s . T h e s e editors i n c l u d e d P o e , L o n g s t r e e t , H a r r i s , T h o r p e , J o h n s o n J o n e s H o o p e r of A l a b a m a , Lowell, a n d other n o t a b l e e x a m p l e s : Fuller, w h o for several years reported for the N e w York Tribune at h o m e a n d from E u r o p e ; W h i t m a n , w h o for m u c h of the 1 8 4 0 s a n d 1 8 5 0 s w a s free to editorialize in o n e Brooklyn or M a n h a t t a n n e w s p a p e r or a n o t h e r ; Whittier, w h o for m o r e t h a n two d e c a d e s before the Civil W a r w a s c o r r e s p o n d i n g editor of the W a s h i n g t o n National Era; C h i l d , w h o edited the N e w York Anti-Slavery Standard a n d wrote letters to the B o s t o n Courier; Kirkland, w h o e d i t e d the N e w York Union a n d wrote for other m a g a z i n e s ; a n d , m o s t c o n s p i c u o u s , Bryant, long-time owner of the N e w York Evening Post. F a n n y Fern's brother N a t h a n i e l Willis Parker w a s a celebrity writer of poetry, fiction, a n d travel s k e t c h e s ; but he e a r n e d his living d u r i n g this period a s the editor of the N e w York Home Journal. W h i t m a n w a s his own p u b l i s h e r for m o s t editions of Leaves of Grass a n d filled mail orders himself, a s T h o r e a u a l s o did w h e n an o c c a s i o n a l r e q u e s t c a m e for o n e of the seven h u n d r e d c o p i e s of his first book, which the p u b l i s h e r h a d returned to h i m . At crucial m o m e n t s in his career, Melville felt c o n s t r a i n e d not to write what h e w a n t e d to write, a s w h e n h e sacrificed his literary a s p i r a t i o n s after the failure of Mardi a n d wrote Redburn a n d White-Jacket, which he r e g a r d e d a s m e r e drudgery; a n d at other times h e w a s "prevented from p u b l i s h i n g " works he h a d c o m p l e t e d , i n c l u d i n g The Isle of the Cross, which he p r o b a b l y destroyed. Ironically, the writer freest to p u r s u e literary g r e a t n e s s in this period w a s probably Emily D i c k i n s o n , w h o s e "letter to the w o r l d " r e m a i n e d u n m a i l e d d u r i n g her lifetime. F a n n y F e r n broke all the rules by b e i n g paid lavishly for her c o l u m n s in the N e w York Ledger.

436

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CONFORMITY,

MATERIALISM, AND THE

ECONOMY

T h e eccentricity of A m e r i c a n s , especially in rural a r e a s a n d s m a l l e r towns, w a s n o t o r i o u s a m o n g visitors from a b r o a d a n d w a s r e c o r d e d in s o m e of its a s p e c t s by diverse writers. In Stowe's N e w E n g l a n d novels of the late 1 8 5 0 s a n d early 1 8 6 0 s , there is a gallery of portraits of mentally a n g u l a r or gnarled c h a r a c t e r s . In A m h e r s t , Emily D i c k i n s o n o u t - T h o r e a u e d T h o r e a u in her reso l u t e privacy, i d i o s y n c r a c i e s , a n d individuality. B u t s h e c o u l d b e u n d e r s t o o d in relation to real a n d fictional c h a r a c t e r s . T h e night her c o r r e s p o n d e n t T h o m a s W e n t w o r t h H i g g i n s o n m e t her in 1 8 7 0 , he strove to convey her chara c t e r in a letter to his wife: "if you h a d read M r s . S t o d d a r d ' s novels you c o u l d u n d e r s t a n d a h o u s e w h e r e e a c h m e m b e r runs his or h e r own s e l v e s . " D e s p i t e s u c h powerful individualists, it s e e m e d to s o m e of the writers that A m e r i c a n s , even while d e l u d i n g t h e m s e l v e s that they were the m o s t selfreliant p o p u l a c e in t h e world, were systematically selling o u t their individualities. E m e r s o n s o u n d e d the a l a r m : " S o c i e t y everywhere is in c o n s p i r a c y a g a i n s t the m a n h o o d of every o n e of its m e m b e r s . S o c i e t y is a j o i n t - s t o c k c o m p a n y which the m e m b e r s a g r e e for the better s e c u r i n g of his b r e a d to e a c h s h a r e h o l d e r , to s u r r e n d e r the liberty a n d c u l t u r e of t h e eater. T h e virtue in m o s t r e q u e s t is c o n f o r m i t y . " In Tlw Celestial Railroad H a w t h o r n e satirically d e s c r i b e d the condition at the Vanity Fair of m o d e r n A m e r i c a , w h e r e there w a s a " s p e c i e s of m a c h i n e for the w h o l e s a l e m a n u f a c t u r e of individual morality." H e went o n : " T h i s excellent result is effected by s o c i e t i e s for all m a n n e r of virtuous p u r p o s e s ; with which a m a n h a s merely to c o n n e c t himself, throwing, a s it w e r e , his q u o t a of virtue into the c o m m o n stock; a n d the p r e s i d e n t a n d directors will take c a r e that the a g g r e g a t e a m o u n t b e well a p p l i e d . " T h o r e a u repeatedly satirized A m e r i c a a s a nation of j o i n e r s that tried to force every n e w c o m e r "to b e l o n g to their d e s p e r a t e odd-fellow society": to T h o r e a u , m e m b e r s of the O d d Fellows a n d other social organizations were simply not o d d e n o u g h , not individual e n o u g h . B u t n o n e of the writers f o u n d anything c o m i c a l in the w h o l e s a l e loss of Yankee individualism a s both m e n a n d w o m e n d e s e r t e d w o r n o u t f a r m s for factories, w h e r e m a n y b e g a n to feel what E m e r s o n called " t h e disproportion b e t w e e n their faculties a n d the work offered t h e m . " F a r too often, the s e a r c h for a better life had d e g e n e r a t e d into a desire to p o s s e s s f a c t o r y - m a d e o b j e c t s . " T h i n g s are in the s a d d l e , " E m e r s o n said sweepingly, " a n d ride m a n k i n d . " In elaboration of that a c c u s a t i o n , T h o r e a u wrote Walden a s a treatise o n e x p a n d i n g the spiritual life by simplifying material w a n t s . Informing T h o reau's o u t r a g e at the m a t e r i a l i s m of his time w a s the bitter k n o w l e d g e that even t h e m o s t i m p o v e r i s h e d were b e i n g led to w a s t e their m o n e y ( a n d , therefore, their lives) o n trumpery. In a v o c a b u l a r y e c h o i n g B e n j a m i n F r a n k lin, he c o n d e m n e d the e m e r g i n g c o n s u m e r e c o n o m y that w a s d e v o t e d , even in the infancy of advertising, to the creation of "artificial w a n t s " for things that were u n n e e d e d or outright p e r n i c i o u s . A n d to c o u n t e r the loss of a n archetypal Y a n k e e virtue, he m a d e h i m s e l f into a jack-of-all-trades a n d s t r o n g m a s t e r of o n e , the art of writing. T h e difference in the social s t a t u s (and the e a r n i n g power) of m e n a n d w o m e n did not p e n e t r a t e the c o n s c i o u s n e s s of all writers, even all w o m e n writers, but C h i l d p r o d u c e d the c o m p r e h e n s i v e , p i o n e e r i n g History of the

INTRODUCTION

437

Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations, a n d after her own h a r s h e x p e r i e n c e at trying to s u p p o r t herself a n d her d a u g h t e r s by the c o n v e n t i o n a l f e m i n i n e skill of sewing, F a n n y Fern m i s s e d no c h a n c e to e x p o s e the cruel myth that any i n d u s t r i o u s w o m a n c o u l d earn a d e c e n t living. After his own failure to earn a living in A m e r i c a w a s painfully o b v i o u s to h i m , Melville m e d i t a t e d on the exploitation of f e m a l e millworkers in The Tartarus of Maids. D o u g l a s s portrayed h i m s e l f a s never b e i n g without h o p e , a l t h o u g h a slave; H a r d i n g portrayed wage-slaves in the iron mills, m a l e a n d f e m a l e , a s utterly without r e a s o n a b l e h o p e . In strangely different ways the writers to s p e a k out m o s t profoundly a b o u t the e m e r g i n g A m e r i c a n e c o n o m i c s y s t e m were C h i l d , S t o w e , F e r n , T h o r e a u , D o u g l a s s , Melville, W h i t m a n , a n d D a v i s .

ORTHODOX RELIGION AND

TRANSCENDENTALISM

All the m a j o r writers f o u n d t h e m s e l v e s at o d d s with the d o m i n a n t religion of their t i m e , a P r o t e s t a n t Christianity that exerted practical control over what c o u l d be printed in b o o k s a n d m a g a z i n e s . S e d g w i c k , a U n i t a r i a n , a s befitted her high social s t a t u s , w a s a p p a l l e d at the u n s e e m l i n e s s of backw o o d s M e t h o d i s t revivals; m o r e often, writers, even n o m i n a l U n i t a r i a n s , were a p p a l l e d at the c o l d n e s s of c h u r c h e s , not the w i l d n e s s . T h i s c h u r c h , E m e r s o n said, a c t e d " a s if G o d were d e a d . " W h i t m a n , bred a s a Quaker, w a s even m o r e bitter toward all P r o t e s t a n t c h u r c h e s : " T h e c h u r c h e s a r e o n e vast lie; the p e o p l e do not believe t h e m , a n d they do not believe t h e m s e l v e s . " Still, the writers all c a m e from P r o t e s t a n t b a c k g r o u n d s in which C a l v i n i s m w a s m o r e or less w a t e r e d d o w n (less s o in the c a s e s of Melville a n d Dicki n s o n ) , a n d they knew their theology. E m e r s o n , T h o r e a u , a n d C h i l d (who p u b l i s h e d a history of all religions in 1 8 5 1 ) , regularly tried to p l a c e P r o t e s t a n t Christianity in relation to other religions, while Melville t e n d e d to j u d g e c o n t e m p o r a r y Christianity by the a b s o l u t e s t a n d a r d s of the N e w T e s t a m e n t . In The Celestial Railroad H a w t h o r n e m e m o r a b l y satirized the A m e r i c a n urge to be progressive a n d liberal in theology as well as in politics, a n d Melville extended the satire t h r o u g h o u t an entire book, The Confidence-Man. A w a r e n e s s of the fact of religious e c s t a s y w a s not at i s s u e . E m e r s o n , for i n s t a n c e , s h o w e d in The Over-Soul a clinical s e n s e of the varieties of religious experience, the "varying f o r m s of that s h u d d e r of a w e a n d delight with which the individual soul always m i n g l e s with the universal s o u l . " Similarly, T h o reau a c k n o w l e d g e d the validity of the " s e c o n d birth a n d p e c u l i a r religious e x p e r i e n c e " available to the "solitary hired m a n on a farm in the outskirts of C o n c o r d " but felt that any religious d e n o m i n a t i o n in A m e r i c a w o u l d pervert that mystical experience into s o m e t h i n g available only u n d e r its a u s p i c e s a n d in a c c o r d a n c e with its particular d o c t r i n e s . L i k e T h o r e a u , W h i t m a n s a w all religious e c s t a s y as equally valid a n d c a m e forth in S o n g o / M y s e l / o u t b i d d i n g "the old c a u t i o u s h u c k s t e r s " like J e h o v a h , K r o n o s , Z e u s , a n d H e r c u l e s , g o d s w h o held too low a n e s t i m a t e of the value of m e n a n d w o m e n . A m o n g t h e s e writers Melville w a s a l o n e in his a n g u i s h i n g conviction that true Christianity w a s i m p r a c t i c a b l e . Melville a l s o felt the brutal power of the Calvinistic J e h o vah with special k e e n n e s s : h u m a n beings were " g o d - b u l l i e d " even a s the hull of the Pequod was in Moby-Dick, a n d the b e s t way p e o p l e h a d of d e m o n strating their own divinity lay in defying the o m n i p o t e n t tyrant. T o D i c k i n s o n

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a l s o , G o d w a s often a b u l l y a " M a s t i f f , " w h o m s u b s e r v i e n c e might, or might not, a p p e a s e . In a series of novels Harriet B e e c h e r S t o w e compellingly d e s c r i b e d the way rigid C a l v i n i s m c o u l d cripple y o u n g m i n d s . T r a n s c e n d e n t a l i s m in the late 1 8 3 0 s a n d early 1 8 4 0 s w a s treated in m o s t m a i n s t r e a m n e w s p a p e r s a n d m a g a z i n e s a s s o m e t h i n g b e t w e e n a national l a u g h i n g s t o c k a n d a clear m e n a c e to organized religion. T h e r u n n i n g journalistic j o k e , which H a w t h o r n e e c h o e d in The Celestial Railroad, was that no o n e c o u l d define the t e r m , other than that it w a s highfalutin, foreign, a n d o b s c u r e l y d a n g e r o u s . T h e conservative C h r i s t i a n view is well r e p r e s e n t e d by a p a s s a g e that a p p e a r e d in S t o w e ' s n e w s p a p e r serialization of Uncle Tom's Cabin ( 1 8 5 1 ) but w a s o m i t t e d from the book version, a s a r c a s t i c i n d i c t m e n t of the r e a d e r w h o might find it hard to believe that T o m c o u l d b e stirred by a p a s s a g e in the Bible: "I m e n t i o n this, of c o u r s e , p h i l o s o p h i c friend, a s a psychological p h e n o m e n o n . Very likely it would d o n o s u c h a thing for y o u , b e c a u s e you are an e n l i g h t e n e d m a n , a n d have out-grown the old myths of p a s t c e n t u r i e s . B u t then you have E m e r s o n ' s E s s a y s a n d Carlyle's M i s c e l l a n i e s , a n d other p r o d u c t i o n s of the latter day, s u i t e d to your a d v a n c e d d e v e l o p m e n t . " S u c h early observers u n d e r s t o o d well e n o u g h that T r a n s c e n d e n t a l i s m w a s m o r e p a n t h e i s t i c than C h r i s t i a n . T h e "defiant P a n t h e i s m " infusing T h o r e a u ' s shorter p i e c e s helped keep t h e m out of the m a g a z i n e s , a n d J a m e s Russell Lowell for the Atlantic Monthly p u b l i c a t i o n of a section of The Maine Woods c e n s o r e d a s e n t e n c e in which T h o r e a u d e c l a r e d that a pine tree w a s a s i m m o r t a l a s he w a s a n d p e r c h a n c e would " g o to a s high a heaven." Melville a l s o w a s at least o n c e kept from p u b l i c a t i o n by the religious scruples of the m a g a z i n e s , a n d often he w a s harshly c o n d e m n e d for what he h a d m a n a g e d to p u b l i s h . F o r years he bore the wrath of reviewers s u c h as the o n e w h o d e n o u n c e d him for writing Moby-Dick a n d the H a r p e r s for p u b lishing it: " T h e J u d g m e n t day will hold him liable for not t u r n i n g his talents to better a c c o u n t , w h e n , too, both a u t h o r s a n d p u b l i s h e r s of injurious books will be cojointly a n s w e r a b l e for the influence of t h o s e b o o k s u p o n the wide circle of immortal m i n d s on which they have written their mark. T h e bookm a k e r a n d the b o o k - p u b l i s h e r h a d better d o their work with a view to the trial it m u s t u n d e r g o at the bar of G o d . " T h e ultimate result w a s that Melville w a s s i l e n c e d . T h i s w a s e x t r e m e , but E m e r s o n , T h o r e a u , a n d W h i t m a n all suffered for t r a n s g r e s s i n g the c o d e of the D o c t o r s of Divinity ( T h o r e a u s a i d he w i s h e d it were not the D . D . ' s but the c h i c k a d e e - d e e s w h o a c t e d a s c e n s o r s ) . T h o r e a u , W h i t m a n , a n d S t o d d a r d all h a d works c e n s o r e d before p u b lication in the Atlantic Monthly.

I M M I G R A T I O N

A N D

X E N O P H O B I A

H o w e v e r t h r e a t e n e d conservative P r o t e s t a n t s felt by T r a n s c e n d e n t a l i s m a n d by religious s p e c u l a t i o n s like Melville's, they felt far m o r e t h r e a t e n e d by C a t h o l i c i s m when refugees from the N a p o l e o n i c W a r s were followed by refu g e e s from o p p r e s s e d a n d f a m i n e - s t r u c k Ireland. In B o s t o n , L y m a n B e e c h e r , father of Harriet B e e c h e r S t o w e , t h u n d e r e d o u t a n t i p a p i s t s e r m o n s , then p r o f e s s e d d i s m a y when in 1 8 3 4 a m o b in C h a r l e s t o w n , a c r o s s the Charles River from B o s t o n , b u r n e d the U r s u l i n e C o n v e n t S c h o o l where d a u g h t e r s

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of m a n y wealthy families were e d u c a t e d . F o r a time L o u i s a M a y Alcott's m o t h e r devoted herself to n e e d y Irish i m m i g r a n t s in B o s t o n , in effect defining the j o b of social worker, all the time a p p a l l e d at the u n s t o p p a b l e tide of popery. T h r o u g h the 1 8 3 0 s a n d 1 8 4 0 s a n d long afterward, the U n i t e d S t a t e s was s a t u r a t e d with lurid books a n d p a m p h l e t s p u r p o r t i n g to reveal the truth a b o u t sexual p r a c t i c e s in n u n n e r i e s a n d m o n a s t e r i e s ( a c c o u n t s of how priests a n d n u n s d i s p o s e d of their b a b i e s were specially prized) a n d a b o u t the p o p e ' s s c h e m e s to take over the M i s s i s s i p p i Valley ( S a m u e l F. B. M o r s e a n d others warned that J e s u i t s were prowling the O h i o Valley, in d i s g u i s e ) . An e x t r e m e of x e n o p h o b i a w a s r e a c h e d in the s u m m e r of 1 8 4 4 , w h e n rioters in Philadelphia (the City, everyone p o i n t e d out, of Brotherly Love) b u r n e d C a t h o l i c c h u r c h e s a n d a s e m i n a r y . S c h o o l e d in cultural relativism by his S o u t h S e a e x p e r i e n c e s , Melville was r e s p o n d i n g to the c u r r e n t hostility w h e n he described the pestilent c o n d i t i o n s of s t e e r a g e p a s s e n g e r s in e m i g r a n t s h i p s and then m a d e this plea: " L e t u s waive that agitated national t o p i c , a s to whether s u c h m u l t i t u d e s of foreign p o o r s h o u l d be l a n d e d on our A m e r i c a n s h o r e s ; let u s waive it, with the o n e only t h o u g h t , that if they c a n get h e r e , they have G o d ' s right to c o m e ; t h o u g h they bring all Ireland a n d her m i s e r i e s with t h e m . F o r the whole world is the p a t r i m o n y of the w h o l e world; there is no telling w h o d o e s not own a s t o n e in the G r e a t Wall of C h i n a . " S o m e j o b s by definition were d e e m e d unfit for m o s t native-born Americ a n s . In Moiry-Dicfe ( c h a p t e r 2 7 ) Melville said that fewer than half the m e n on whaling s h i p s were A m e r i c a n - b o r n , a l t h o u g h a l m o s t all the officers were. T h e n he a d d e d : " H e r e i n it is the s a m e with the A m e r i c a n w h a l e fishery a s with the A m e r i c a n army a n d military a n d m e r c h a n t navies, a n d the engineering forces e m p l o y e d in the c o n s t r u c t i o n of the A m e r i c a n C a n a l s a n d R a i l r o a d s , " the "native A m e r i c a n " providing the brains, the "rest of the w o r l d " supplying the m u s c l e s . T h e P a n a m a Railroad w a s c o m p l e t e d in 1 8 5 5 at the cost of t h o u s a n d s of lives of c h e a p laborers from the O r i e n t , E u r o p e ( e s p e cially Ireland), a n d the C a r i b b e a n . An article on the railroad in the J a n u a r y 1 8 5 9 Harper's New MowtWy Magazine m e n t i o n e d m a n y " C o o l i e s from Hind o s t a n " a n d recalled that a t h o u s a n d C h i n a m e n had b e c o m e "affected with a m e l a n c h o l i c , suicidal t e n d e n c y , a n d s c o r e s of t h e m e n d e d their u n h a p p y existence by their own h a n d s , " while m a n y others died of d i s e a s e s . T h i s article treated workers a s d i s p o s a b l e p r o d u c t s , saying that the n u m b e r of t h o s e w h o died c o u l d b e r e p l e n i s h e d with, for i n s t a n c e , "freshly i m p o r t e d Irishmen a n d F r e n c h m e n . " F o r the first t r a n s c o n t i n e n t a l railroad in the United S t a t e s , c o m p l e t e d at P r o m o n t o r y Point, U t a h , on M a y 10, 1 8 6 9 , the Union P a c i f i c w o r k i n g w e s t w a r d d r e w laborers from Ireland, G e r m a n y , a n d the S c a n d i n a v i a n c o u n t r i e s , a m o n g other E u r o p e a n s o u r c e s ; the C e n t r a l Pacificworking e a s t w a r d i m p o r t e d p e r h a p s 1 5 , 0 0 0 C h i n e s e for the m o s t h a z a r d o u s j o b s . W h a t w a s to b e c o m e of t h o s e still alive w h e n the work w a s c o m p l e t e d ? A n d , now that t h e s e A s i a n s were h e r e , what was to k e e p others from following t h e m ? T h o s e of E u r o p e a n ancestry c o u l d not i m a g i n e how the C h i n e s e might be integrated into the national public life. C o n t r a d i c t o r y efforts both to u s e i m m i g r a n t labor a n d to pretend the i m m i g r a n t s were not here c h a l l e n g e d the thinking a n d the ethics of native-born white A m e r i c a n s , p r o d u c i n g waves of anti-immigrant p r o p a g a n d a a n d violence t h r o u g h o u t the period. F o r all his h u m a n i t a r i a n e l o q u e n c e , Melville, like the other writers,

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realized that the new i m m i g r a n t s were c h a n g i n g the country from the cozy, h o m o g e n e o u s l a n d it h a d s e e m e d to b e to the m o r e fortunate whites. In fact, the country h a d never b e e n h o m o g e n e o u s ; even before the great Irish migration of the 1 8 4 0 s , p e o p l e had arrived from m a n y E u r o p e a n c o u n t r i e s , a n d the idea of s t o p p i n g i m m i g r a t i o n selectively a n d s h i p p i n g b a c k s o m e i m m i g r a n t s proved a s i m p r a c t i c a b l e a s the p r e w a r " s o l u t i o n " of colonizing black A m e r i c a n s " b a c k " to Africa. B u t the p a c e of i m m i g r a t i o n had i n c r e a s e d radically after the Civil W a r , a s did the p e r c e n t a g e of i m m i g r a n t s arriving from s o u t h e r n a n d e a s t e r n E u r o p e a n c o u n t r i e s . M a n y native-born white p e o p l e s h a r e d Harriet B e e c h e r S t o w e ' s postCivil W a r nostalgia for the days b e f o r e railroads, C a t h o l i c s , a n d e a s t e r n E u r o p e a n i m m i g r a t i o n . In the early 1 8 8 0 s , p o g r o m s in R u s s i a drove t h o u s a n d s of J e w s into exile, m a n y to w e s t e r n E u r o p e , m a n y to the U n i t e d S t a t e s , w h e r e immigration officials d e t a i n e d a large n u m b e r of t h e m at W a r d ' s Island in the E a s t River, d e e m i n g t h e m unfit to be d i s e m b a r k e d at C a s t l e G a r d e n , on the Battery, with m o s t other i m m i g r a n t s . In r e s p o n s e , E m m a L a z a r u s in I88i founded the Society for the I m p r o v e m e n t a n d C o l o n i z a t i o n of E a s t e r n E u r o p e a n J e w s .

N A T I O N A L

SINS

S o m e of the writers of thjsj>eriod lived with the a n g u i s h i n g p a r a d o x that the rrijjsiJdjiaTistic nation in the world w a s implicated in c o n t i n u i n g national sins: the n e a r - g e n o c i d e of the A m e r i c a n I n d i a n s (whole tribes in colonial t i m e s T i a d a l r e a d y - b e c o m e T T n Melvitte ^^rToneous p h r a s e for the P e q u o t s , a s extinct as the a n c i e n t M e d e s ) , the e n s l a v e m e n t of b l a c k s , a n d (partly a by-product of slavery) the s t a g e d " E x e c u t i v e ' s W a r " a g a i n s t M e x i c o , started by P r e s i d e n t Polk before b e i n g d e c l a r e d by C o n g r e s s . T h e imperialistic Mexican W a r s e e m e d s o gaudily e x o t i c a n d s o d i s t a n t t h a t only a s m a l l minority of A m e r i c a n writers v o i c e d m o r e than perfunctory o p p o s i t i o n ; a n exception w a s T h o r e a u , w h o s p e n t a night in the C o n c o r d jail in symbolic protest a g a i n s t b e i n g taxed to s u p p o r t the war. E m e r s o n w a s a n exception, earlier, w h e n m o s t writers were silent a b o u t the s u c c e s s i v e removal of eastern Indian tribes to less d e s i r a b l e lands west of the M i s s i s s i p p i River, a s legislated by the Indian R e m o v a l Act of 1 8 3 0 . A m e r i c a n destiny plainly required a \itt\e p r a c t i c a l c a l l o u s n e s s , m o s t whites felt, in a s e c u l a r version of the colonial notion that G o d h a d willed the extirpation of the A m e r i c a n Indian. Henry W . B e l l o w s , the very p o p u l a r U n i t a r i a n minister of the C h u r c h of All S o u l s in N e w York City (pastoral adviser of W i l l i a m C u l l e n Bryant a n d M r s . H e r m a n Melville), h a d b e e n p r e s i d e n t of the U n i t e d S t a t e s Sanitary C o m m i s s i o n , the a g e n c y c h a r g e d with the welfare of the U n i o n volunteer army. In The Old World in Its New Face ( 1 8 6 8 ) , Bellows told of m e e t i n g a C a l i f o r n i a n on s h i p b o a r d in the M e d i t e r r a n e a n w h o h a d "just e s c a p e d s c a l p ing on the p l a i n s " in 1 8 6 7 a n d w h o t h o u g h t "extermination the only h u m a n e r e m e d y for Indian t r o u b l e s . " Bellows a d d e d : "It is a s t o n i s h i n g how bloodthirsty a little p e r s o n a l e x p e r i e n c e of the I n d i a n s m a k e s m o s t A m e r i c a n s ! I have never known any body c r o s s i n g the P l a i n s w h o s e h u m a n i t y survived the p a s s a g e . " L a t e r , he c a s u a l l y a l l u d e d to the "American Indian p a s s i o n for blood a n d extinction of their e n e m i e s . " It w a s black slavery, w h a t Melville called " m a n ' s foulest c r i m e , " which m o s t stirred the c o n s c i e n c e s of the white writers, a n d in describing his own

INTRODUCTION

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e n s l a v e m e n t , the fugitive F r e d e r i c k D o u g l a s s d e v e l o p e d a n o t a b l e capacity to stir readers a s well a s a u d i e n c e s in the lecture halls. W h e n the Fugitive Slave L a w w a s e n f o r c e d in B o s t o n in 1 8 5 1 (by Melville's father-in-law, C h i e f J u s t i c e S h a w ) , T h o r e a u worked his o u t r a g e into his j o u r n a l s ; then after a n o t h e r f a m o u s c a s e in 1 8 5 4 h e c o m b i n e d the e x p e r i e n c e s into his m o s t s c a t h i n g s p e e c h , Slavery in Massachusetts, for delivery at a F o u r t h of J u l y c o u n t e r c e r e m o n y at which a c o p y of the C o n s t i t u t i o n w a s b u r n e d b e c a u s e slavery w a s written into it. In that s p e e c h T h o r e a u s u m m e d u p the disillus i o n m e n t that m a n y of his g e n e r a t i o n s h a r e d . H e h a d felt a vast b u t indefinite loss after the 1 8 5 4 c a s e , h e s a i d : "I did not k n o w at first w h a t ailed m e . At last it o c c u r r e d to m e that what I h a d lost w a s a c o u n t r y . " O n the very eve of the Civil W a r , Harriet J a c o b s r e c o r d e d the a n g u i s h of a fugitive slave m o t h e r w h o s e " o w n e r s " were always on the prowl to find her a n d turn her into the hard c a s h they n e e d e d . M o r e obliquely than T h o r e a u , Melville explored b l a c k slavery in B e n i t o C e r e n o as an index to the e m e r g i n g national character. At his bitterest, h e felt in the m i d - 1 8 5 0 s that "free A m e r i k y " w a s "intrepid, u n p r i n c i p l e d , r e c k l e s s , predatory, with b o u n d l e s s a m b i t i o n , civilized in externals b u t a s a v a g e at h e a r t . " J o h n Brown's raid o n H a r p e r s Ferry in 1 8 5 9 , i m m e d i a t e l y r e p u d i a t e d by the n e w R e p u b l i c a n Party, drew from the now t u b e r c u l a r T h o r e a u a p a s sionate d e f e n s e . D u r i n g the Civil W a r itself, L i n c o l n f o u n d the g e n i u s to suit diverse o c c a s i o n s with right l a n g u a g e a n d length of u t t e r a n c e , but the major writers fell silent. W h e n the war b e g a n on April 12, 1 8 6 1 , with the firing of C o n f e d e r a t e g u n s o n Fort S u m t e r , in C h a r l e s t o n harbor, Irving, C o o p e r , P o e , a n d Fuller were d e a d (the y o u n g e r two earlier t h a n the older two), a n d before Robert E . L e e ' s s u r r e n d e r to U l y s s e s S . G r a n t at A p p o m a t tox, Virginia, on April 9, 1 8 6 5 , T h o r e a u a n d H a w t h o r n e h a d also died. S o m e writers in this anthology h a d in their way, directly a n d indirectly, h e l p e d to bring the war on: L i n c o l n w a s not wholly t e a s i n g if in fact h e c a l l e d S t o w e "the little w o m a n w h o h a d started the big war"; C h i l d a n d Whittier h a d by 1 8 6 1 devoted d e c a d e s of their lives to the struggle a g a i n s t slavery, a r o u s i n g furious r e s i s t a n c e to t h e m both in the N o r t h a n d in the S o u t h ; a n d D o u g lass's oratory h a d revealed to m a n y white N o r t h e r n e r s a s e n s e of the evils of slavery a n d the h u m a n n e s s of t h o s e of a n o t h e r r a c e (or of mixed r a c e s ) . F i r e b r a n d Y a n k e e s s u c h a s T h o r e a u a n d firebrand S o u t h e r n e r s s u c h a s G . W . Harris h a d r o u s e d the p a s s i o n s of at least s o m e m e m b e r s of their own c o m munities a n d regions. W h e n the war c a m e , m o s t northern writers were slow to have a s e n s e of its reality a n d , like S o u t h e r n e r s , e r r o n e o u s l y e x p e c t e d it to last only a few m o n t h s . Visiting B o s t o n a n d C o n c o r d in 1 8 6 2 , fresh from the newly f o r m e d W e s t Virginia (the portion of a slave s t a t e that h a d c h o s e n to stay with the U n i o n ) , R e b e c c a H a r d i n g Davis s a w that E m e r s o n h a d n o notion what suffering w a s involved. H a w t h o r n e , w h o received her with e n t h u s i a s m , h a d f a c e d the start of the war a s a s o u t h e r n sympathizer in a village that had w e l c o m e d J o h n B r o w n , then h a d s e e n W a s h i n g t o n in wartime, a n d retained, a s he always did, a practical politician's s e n s e of t h i n g s . A m o n g the a n t e b e l l u m writers the war did not evoke great fiction, but Melville's u n e v e n Battie-Pieces ( 1 8 6 6 ) i n c l u d e d s o m e r e m a r k a b l e meditative p o e m s as well a s the technically interesting Doneison, in which he conveyed vividly the anxiety of civilians awaiting news during a p r o l o n g e d a n d d u b i o u s battle a n d eagerly r e a d i n g aloud the latest bulletins p o s t e d o u t s i d e the telegraph office. W h i t m a n ' s Drum-Taps ( 1 8 6 5 ) a l s o is u n e v e n b u t c o n t a i n s

442

AMERICAN LITERATURE

\820-\865

several great p o e m s . After a few c o p i e s h a d b e e n d i s p e r s e d , W h i t m a n held b a c k the edition for a s e q u e l mainly c o n s i s t i n g of newly written poems on L i n c o l n , among them When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, the g r e a t e s t literary work to c o m e out of the war a n d o n e of the world's great e l e g i e s . Both volumes summed u p the national e x p e r i e n c e . B o t h writers looked a h e a d a s well a s b a c k w a r d , W h i t m a n calling " r e c o n c i l i a t i o n " the "word over a l l , " a n d Melville urging in his Supplement to Battle-Pieces that the victorious N o r t h "be C h r i s t i a n s toward our fellow-whites, a s well a s p h i l a n t h r o p i s t s toward the b l a c k s , o u r f e l l o w - m e n . " L a t e r in Specimen Days Whitman m a d e a m e m o r a b l e a t t e m p t to d o the i m p o s s i b l e t o put the real war realistically into a book. B e f o r e s h e died, Child saw how little R e c o n s t r u c t i o n h a d d o n e to a c h i e v e her h o p e s for e d u c a t i o n a n d financial uplifting of former slaves. B o t h Whitm a n a n d Melville, especially in their later years, saw A m e r i c a n politics c e a s e to be c o n c e r n e d with great national s t r u g g l e s over m o m e n t o u s i s s u e s ; rather, politics m e a n t c o r r u p t i o n , on a petty or a grand s c a l e . Melville lived out the G i l d e d A g e a s an e m p l o y e e at the notoriously c o r r u p t c u s t o m h o u s e in N e w York City. In Clarel, foreseeing a d e s c e n t from the p r e s e n t "civic b a r b a r i s m " to "the D a r k Ages of D e m o c r a c y , " h e portrayed his A m e r i c a n pilgrims to the Holy Land a s recognizing sadly that the time might c o m e to h o n o r the g o d of limitations in what h a d b e e n the land of opportunity, a time w h e n Ameri c a n s might cry: " T o T e r m i n u s build f a n e s ! / C o l u m b u s e n d e d earth's r o m a n c e : / N o N e w W o r l d to m a n k i n d r e m a i n s ! " Written self-consciously a s a c o u n t e r c e n t e n n i a l p o e m , Clarel w a s p u b l i s h e d early in J u n e 1 8 7 6 ( G e o r g e C u s t e r a n d his m e n were riding toward M o n t a n a Territory; o n e of the first reviews of Clarel ran in the N e w York World on J u n e 2 6 , the day after the battle at Little Big H o r n ) . N o o n e would have t h o u g h t to invite Melville to c o m p o s e the public C e n t e n n i a l O d e for the great celebration in P h i l a d e l p h i a on J u l y 4, but there were s o m e w h o knew that Walt Whitman, a true national poet, might well have b e e n invited i n s t e a d of B a y a r d Taylor, w h o so long before had written a valentine for Melville.

T H E

C H A N C E

FOR

G R E A T N E S S

T h e A m e r i c a n Revolution h a d h e l p e d to incite the F r e n c h Revolution a n d , a s it s e e m e d to m a n y A m e r i c a n s , its d i s a s t r o u s c o n s e q u e n c e s , a n d in the p o s t - N a p o l e o n i c era A m e r i c a n s struggled to m a k e s s e n s e of p r o f o u n d political a n d social c h a n g e s in E u r o p e a s well a s a new scientific k n o w l e d g e . In 1 7 9 9 N a p o l e o n ' s soldiers in Egypt h a d taken p o s s e s s i o n of a large p i e c e of basalt, the R o s e t t a S t o n e ; a F r e n c h civilian h a d d e c i p h e r e d its hieroglyphics, thereby initating m o d e r n Egyptology a n d influencing the study of the Bible by s u b j e c t i n g it to historical principles. Archaeological excavations in Italy a n d e l s e w h e r e were t r a n s f o r m i n g historical a n d a e s t h e t i c k n o w l e d g e of classical G r e e c e a n d R o m e . T h e G e r m a n aristocrat B a r o n Alexander von H u m boldt (17691859), on his voyage to C e n t r a l a n d S o u t h A m e r i c a in 1799 1 8 0 4 , h a d m a d e s t u n n i n g d i s c o v e r i e s in botany, biology, geology, physical g e o g r a p h y , meteorology, climatology, a n d even a s t r o n o m y ; he p u b l i s h e d his discoveries in m a n y v o l u m e s , starting in 1 8 0 7 . L o n g before Darwin published his On t /ie Origin of Species ( 1 8 S 9 ) , biologists were p u b l i s h i n g evidence of

INTRODUCTION

443

plant a n d a n i m a l evolution, a n d geologists were c h a l l e n g i n g religious chronologies that set the creation of the world a r o u n d 5 0 0 0 B . C . E . K n o w l e d g e of the physical universe w a s i n c r e a s i n g explosively. At the s a m e t i m e , vast parts of the earth were b e i n g seized, not s t u d i e d , a s E u r o p e a n s t a t e s e m b a r k e d on a f e r o c i o u s q u e s t for n e w c o l o n i e s . O n e A m e r i c a n writer, H e r m a n Melville, h a d b e e n on the spot w h e n the F r e n c h seized the M a r q u e s a s a n d had arrived in Tahiti j u s t after the F r e n c h in their warships extended the benefits of their protection to that island. Melville w a s in H o n o l u l u w h e n E n g l a n d relinquished its brief control of the H a w a i i a n I s l a n d s . H e then sailed u n d e r the c o m m a n d of the m a n w h o h a d seized California for the U n i t e d S t a t e s in 1 8 4 3 , only to relinquish it the next day, when he received c o r r e c t e d reports of British i n t e n t i o n s . T h e R u s s i a n s h a d control of an e n o r m o u s h u n k of the N o r t h A m e r i c a n c o n t i n e n t A l a s k a . G r e a t Britain, F r a n c e , the N e t h e r l a n d s , B u s s i a a n y n u m b e r of E u r o p e a n powers might at any m o m e n t seize any part of the Pacific, Africa, A s i a , or even C e n t r a l or S o u t h A m e r i c a . E n g l a n d was already c h a l l e n g i n g B o s t o n a n d N e w York m e r c h a n t s for m a s t e r y of trade with C h i n a , a n d any o n e of several other c o u n t r i e s might force J a p a n to o p e n its h a r b o r s to t h e m , not the U n i t e d S t a t e s . T h e seizure of land after the M e x i c a n W a r h a d s e e m e d , to a few A m e r i c a n s , d e p l o r a b l e , but within m o n t h s gold h a d b e e n d i s c o v e r e d in C a l ifornia, clear e v i d e n c e of divine b l e s s i n g on the war. After C a l i f o r n i a , what s h o u l d the U n i t e d S t a t e s seize next? Writing Mofcy-Dicfe d u r i n g the G o l d R u s h , drawing on his p e r s o n a l experiences with i m p e r i a l i s m in the Pacific, Melville defined A m e r i c a ' s o p p o r t u n i t i e s in whaling t e r m s ( c h a p t e r 8 9 ) : " W h a t to that apostolic lancer, B r o t h e r J o n a t h a n [the U n i t e d S t a t e s ] , is T e x a s but a F a s t - F i s h ? " Melville foresaw (chapter 14) the time w h e n A m e r i c a would " a d d M e x i c o to T e x a s , a n d pile C u b a u p o n C a n a d a " in its piratical acquisitiveness. At mid-century Irving w a s a n old m a n a n d s o m e d a r e d to think a n overrated writer. Most of the writers in this period did their b e s t work a s y o u n g m e n a n d w o m e n , fiercely a m b i t i o u s , a n d in spirit "essentially w e s t e r n " (as Melville said in c h a p t e r 2 2 of Israel Potter). Literary g r e a t n e s s in A m e r i c a was u p for g r a b s , there for the seizing a s m u c h a s the M a r q u e s a s I s l a n d s a n d California had been. In his whaling book, Melville h o p e d to m a k e literary g r e a t n e s s a " F a s t - F i s h " forever. W a l t W h i t m a n a few years later m a d e the s a m e gigantic attempt to b e c o m e the poet for A m e r i c a . In the early 1 8 6 0 s , Emily D i c k i n s o n , to w h o m the gold of g e n i u s h a d b e e n given in c h i l d h o o d (poem 4 5 4 [ 4 5 5 ] ) , a n d who h a d m a d e her farewells to friends b o u n d for the G o l d e n S t a t e , knew that she w a s not only the Queen of Calvary ( p o e m 3 4 8 [ 3 4 7 ] ) , but also the Queen of California in literary g r e a t n e s s a " S o v r e i g n on a M i n e " (poem 8 0 1 [ 8 5 6 ] ) , the " P r i n c e of M i n e s " ( p o e m 4 6 6 [ 5 9 7 ] ) . T h o r e a u , in Life without Principle, characteristically d e n o u n c e d the " r u s h to California," preferring to m i n e the " a u r i f e r o u s " regions within. T h e critic Sydney S m i t h h a d a s k e d c o n t e m p t u o u s l y in the E d i n b u r g h Review ( 1 8 2 0 ) : "In the four q u a r t e r s of the g l o b e , who r e a d s an A m e r i c a n b o o k ? " ; T h o r e a u , who had b e g u n so m o d e s t l y by a d d r e s s i n g his neighbors in C o n c o r d , at the end of Walden a d d r e s s e d the b o o k to both J o h n Bull a n d B r o t h e r J o n a t h a n to a n y o n e in the four q u a r t e r s of the g l o b e w h o c o u l d read the E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e . T h a t was exuberant " w e s t e r n " a m b i t i o u s n e s s w h a t Melville called the "true A m e r i c a n " spirit.

AMERICAN LITERATURE
TEXTS
1820 1821 Washington Irving, The Sketch William Cullen Bryant, Book 1821 Sequoyah

1820-IS65
CONTEXTS

(George

Guess)

invents

"Thanatopsis"

syllabary in which Cherokee language can be written 1821-22 Santa Fe Trail Monroe Doctrine opens warns all

\S2i Pioneers

James

Fenimore

Cooper,

The

1823

European powers not to establish new colonies on either American continent 1825 Erie Canal opens, connecting Great

Lakes region with the Atlantic 1827 David Cusick, Sketches of Ancient Nations 1827 railroad 182728 Phoenix 182S30 Memorials 1829 William Apess. A Son of the Forest 182937 encourages population 1830 Congress passes Indian Removal President westward Andrew movement Jackson of white David Walker, Appeal Cherokee Council composes Cherokee founded Nation ratifies its new constitution T h e newspaper the Cherokee Baltimore and Ohio, nrst U . S .

History of the Six

Act, allowing J a c k s o n to relocate eastern Indians west of the Mississippi 1831 William Lloyd Garrison journal starts The

Liberator, antislavery 1834 Catharine Maria Sedgwick, "A 1836

Reminiscence 1836

of Federalism" Nature Transcendentalists meet informally in Boston and Concord 1838 escaping 1838-39 troops Underground Railroad aids north, often to Canada Cherokees by federal slaves

Ralph Waldo Emerson,

"Trail of Tears':

forced from their homelands

\S39

Caroline

Stanshury Follow?

Kirkland, A New

HomeWho'll 1841

T. B. Thorpe,

"The Big Bear of

Arkansas" \S4i Lawsuit" 1844 1845 Frederick Edgar Allan Poe, " T h e R a v e n " of the Life of Douglass 184648 United States wages war against 1845 Samuel Morse invents telegraph Margaret Fuller, ,lThe Great

United States annexes Texas

Frederick Douglass, Narrative

Mexico; Treaty of G u a d a l u p e Hidalgo cedes entire southwest to United States

Boldface

lilies indicate works

in the anthology.

444

TEXTS
1847 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1847 Evangeline

CONTEXTS
Brigham Young leads Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake, Utah Territory 1848 S e n e c a Falls Convention

inaugurates campaign for women's rights 1848-^9 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Eldorado Scarlet 1850 Letter Bayard Taylor, California Gold Rush

Fugitive Slave Act compromise of

1850 obliges free states to return escaped slaves to slaveholders

1851 1852 Tom's 1854

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Cabin Henry David Thoreau, Walden 1854 Republican Party formed,

consolidating antislavery factions 1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Louise Amelia Smith Clappe, " C a l i f o r n i a , in 1 8 5 1 a n d 1 8 5 2 . R e s i d e n c e in the Mines" 1857 Fresh 1858 Fanny Fern (Sarah Willis Parton), Leaves Abraham Lincoln, "A House 1857 S u p r e m e Court Dred Scott decision

denies citizenship to African Americans 1858 Transatlantic cable fails after twenty-

Divided" 1859 Lydia Maria Child, "Letter to Mrs.

seven days 1859 First successful U.S. oil well drilled,

Margaretta M a s o n " 1860 Harriet Prescott Spofford,

in Pennsylvania I860 Short-lived Pony Express runs from

"Circumstance" 186065 Emily Dickinson writes several

Missouri to California

hundred p o e m s 1861 Harriet J a c o b s , Incidents in the Life 1861 South Carolina batteries fire on U . S .

of a Slave Girl Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills

fort, initiating the Civil War; Southern states secede from the Union and found the Confederate States of America 1861-65 1863 1866 1869 Civil War

Emancipation Proclamation Battle Completion of two successful First transcontinental railroad

of Gettysburg 1866 John Greenleaf Whittier, S n o w -

Bound: A Winter Idyl

transatlantic cables completed; Central Pacific construction crews composed largely of C h i n e s e laborers

1873

Louisa May Alcott, "Transcendental

Wild O a t s " 1883 E m m a Lazarus, " T h e N e w C o l o s s u s "

445

American Literature 1865-1914

THE TRANSFORMATION OF A NATION In the s e c o n d half of the n i n e t e e n t h century, the fertile, mineral-rich American c o n t i n e n t west of the A p p a l a c h i a n s a n d A l l e g h e n i e s w a s o c c u p i e d , often by force, largely by E u r o p e a n s , who exploited its r e s o u r c e s freely. T h e s e new A m e r i c a n s , their n u m b e r s d o u b l e d by a c o n t i n u o u s flow of i m m i g r a n t s , p u s h e d westward to the Pacific c o a s t , d i s p l a c i n g N a t i v e A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e s a n d S p a n i s h s e t t l e m e n t s w h e n they s t o o d in the way. V a s t s t a n d s of t i m b e r were c o n s u m e d ; n u m b e r l e s s h e r d s of buffalo a n d other wild g a m e g a v e way to cattle, s h e e p , f a r m s , villages, a n d cities a n d the railroads that linked t h e m to m a r k e t s b a c k e a s t ; various t e c h n o l o g i e s converted the country's i m m e n s e natural r e s o u r c e s into industrial p r o d u c t s both for its own b u r g e o n i n g p o p ulation a n d for foreign m a r k e t s . T h e Civil W a r , the s e e m i n g l y inevitable result of growing e c o n o m i c , political, social, a n d cultural divisions b e t w e e n N o r t h a n d S o u t h , l a s t e d four years, c o s t s o m e eight billion dollars, a n d c l a i m e d m o r e t h a n six h u n d r e d t h o u s a n d lives. Its savagery s e e m s a l s o to have left the country morally e x h a u s t e d . N e v e r t h e l e s s , in spite of the a s t o n i s h i n g loss of life a n d ruin of property, especially in the S o u t h , the c o u n t r y p r o s p e r e d materially over the five following d e c a d e s . T h e war effort s t i m u l a t e d t e c h n o l o g i c a l innovations a n d developed n e w m e t h o d s of efficiently organizing a n d m a n a g i n g the m o v e m e n t of large n u m b e r s of p e o p l e , raw m a t e r i a l s , a n d g o o d s . After the war t h e s e a c c o m p l i s h m e n t s were a d a p t e d to industrial m o d e r n i z a t i o n o n a m a s s i v e s c a l e . T h e first t r a n s c o n t i n e n t a l railroad w a s c o m p l e t e d in 1 8 6 9 ; industrial o u t p u t grew exponentially; agricultural productivity i n c r e a s e d dramatically; electricity w a s i n t r o d u c e d on a large s c a l e ; n e w m e a n s of c o m m u n i c a t i o n , s u c h a s the t e l e p h o n e , revolutionized m a n y a s p e c t s of daily life; coal, oil, iron, gold, silver, a n d other kinds of mineral wealth were d i s c o v e r e d and extracted, p r o d u c i n g large n u m b e r s of vast individual f o r t u n e s a n d making the nation a s a w h o l e rich e n o u g h , for the first t i m e , to capitalize its own further d e v e l o p m e n t . Ry the e n d of the century, n o longer a colony politically or e c o n o m i c a l l y , the U n i t e d S t a t e s c o u l d begin its own o v e r s e a s imperialist e x p a n s i o n (of which the S p a n i s h - A m e r i c a n W a r in 1 8 9 8 w a s only o n e s i g n ) . T h e central material fact of the period w a s industrialization on a s c a l e u n p r e c e d e n t e d in the earlier e x p e r i e n c e s of G r e a t Britain a n d E u r o p e . B e t w e e n 1 8 5 0 a n d 1 8 8 0 capital invested in m a n u f a c t u r i n g i n d u s t r i e s m o r e than q u a d r u p l e d , while factory e m p l o y m e n t nearly d o u b l e d . By 1 8 8 5 four transcontinental railroad lines were c o m p l e t e d , u s i n g in their own c o n s t r u c tion a n d carrying to m a n u f a c t u r i n g c e n t e r s in C l e v e l a n d a n d Detroit the
1223

1224

A M E R I C A N

L I T E R A T U R E

1 8 6 5 - 1 9

14

nation's q u i n t u p l e d o u t p u t of steel from Pittsburgh a n d C h i c a g o . As m a j o r industries were c o n s o l i d a t e d into m o n o p o l i e s by increasingly powerful ( a n d r u t h l e s s ) individuals a very small n u m b e r of m e n c a m e to control s u c h enorm o u s l y profitable e n t e r p r i s e s a s steel, oil, railroads, m e a t p a c k i n g , b a n k i n g , a n d finance. A m o n g t h e s e m e n were J a y G o u l d , J i m Hill, L e l a n d S t a n f o r d , C o r n e l i u s Vanderbilt, A n d r e w C a r n e g i e , J . P. M o r g a n , a n d J o h n D . R o c k e feller. R o b b e r b a r o n s to s o m e , c a p t a i n s of industry to o t h e r s , they s u c c e s s fully s q u e e z e d out their c o m p e t i t o r s a n d a c c u m u l a t e d vast wealth a n d p o w e r s o c i a l a n d political a s well a s e c o n o m i c . In 1 8 6 5 the U n i t e d S t a t e s , except for the m a n u f a c t u r i n g c e n t e r s of the n o r t h e a s t e r n s e a b o a r d , w a s a country of f a r m s , villages, a n d small t o w n s . M o s t of its citizens were involved in a g r i c u l t u r e or small family b u s i n e s s e s . In 1 8 7 0 the U . S . p o p u l a t i o n w a s 3 8 . 5 million; by 1 9 1 0 it h a d grown to 9 2 million a n d by 1 9 2 0 , to 123 million. T h i s i n c r e a s e in p o p u l a t i o n c a m e a b o u t a l m o s t entirely on a c c o u n t of i m m i g r a t i o n , a s did the p o p u l a t i o n shift from country to city. P e r h a p s 2 5 million p e o p l e , mostly E u r o p e a n s , entered the U n i t e d S t a t e s b e t w e e n the Civil W a r a n d W o r l d W a r I. S o m e of the newc o m e r s tried f a r m i n g ; but m o s t settled in the c i t i e s e v e n in the cities in which they h a d d i s e m b a r k e d s o that, for e x a m p l e , the p o p u l a t i o n of N e w York City grew from 0 . 5 million to nearly 3.5 million b e t w e e n 1 8 6 5 a n d the turn of the twentieth century, w h e r e a s C h i c a g o , with a p o p u l a t i o n of 2 9 , 0 0 0 in 1 8 5 0 , h a d m o r e than 2 million i n h a b i t a n t s by 1 9 1 0 . (Yet, to k e e p things in p e r s p e c t i v e , it s h o u l d be n o t e d that in 1 9 0 0 only N e w York, C h i c a g o , a n d Philadelphia h a d m o r e than 1 million i n h a b i t a n t s e a c h . ) T h e new A m e r i c a n s , a l o n g with their children a n d their children's children, e n a b l e d the U n i t e d S t a t e s eventually to b e c o m e the u r b a n , industrial, international power we recognize today; they a l s o irrevocably altered the e t h n i c c o m p o s i t i o n of the p o p u l a t i o n a n d c o n t r i b u t e d i m m e a s u r a b l y to the d e m o c r a t i z a t i o n of the nation's cultural life. In 1 8 9 0 m o s t white A m e r i c a n s ( i n c l u d i n g the Irish w h o h a d b e g u n to c o m e in the 1 8 4 0 s ) either lived in N e w E n g l a n d or h a d N e w E n g l a n d a n c e s t o r s . B u t by 1 9 0 0 N e w E n g l a n d e r s were n o longer n u m e r i c a l l y d o m i n a n t . L o n g - s e t t l e d a n d newly arrived white p e o p l e f a c e d e a c h other a c r o s s divides of power, i n c o m e , a n d privilegeworker a g a i n s t owner, f a r m a g a i n s t city, i m m i g r a n t a g a i n s t native born, c r e a t i n g s u s p i c i o n a n d social t u r b u l e n c e on a s c a l e that the nation h a d never s e e n before. T h i s t r a n s f o r m a t i o n of an entire c o n t i n e n t involved i n c a l c u l a b l e suffering for millions of p e o p l e even a s others p r o s p e r e d . In the c o u n t r y s i d e i n c r e a s i n g n u m b e r s of f a r m e r s , d e p e n d e n t for t r a n s p o r t a t i o n of their c r o p s o n the m o n o p o l i s t i c railroads, were s q u e e z e d off the land by what novelist F r a n k Norris c h a r a c t e r i z e d a s the giant " o c t o p u s " that c r i s s c r o s s e d the c o n t i n e n t . Everywhere i n d e p e n d e n t f a r m e r s were p l a c e d " u n d e r the lion's p a w " of land s p e c u l a t o r s a n d a b s e n t e e landlords that H a m l i n G a r l a n d ' s story m a d e infam o u s . L a r g e - s c a l e farminginitially in K a n s a s a n d N e b r a s k a , for e x a m p l e a l s o s q u e e z e d family f a r m e r s even a s s u c h p r a c t i c e s i n c r e a s e d g r o s s agricultural yields. F o r m a n y , the great cities were a l s o , a s the socialist novelist U p t o n S i n c l a i r s e n s e d , j u n g l e s w h e r e only the s t r o n g e s t , the most ruthless, a n d the luckiest survived. An oversupply of labor kept w a g e s d o w n a n d allowed industrialists to m a i n t a i n i n h u m a n e a n d d a n g e r o u s working c o n d i tions for m e n , w o m e n , a n d children w h o c o m p e t e d for j o b s . N e i t h e r farmers nor u r b a n laborers were effectively organized to p u r s u e

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their own interests, a n d neither g r o u p h a d any significant political leverage until the 1 8 8 0 s , w h e n the A m e r i c a n F e d e r a t i o n of L a b o r , an a s s o c i a t i o n of national u n i o n s of skilled workers, e m e r g e d a s the first unified national voice of organized labor. B e f o r e then legislators a l m o s t exclusively served the interests of b u s i n e s s a n d industry, a n d the s c a n d a l s of P r e s i d e n t G r a n t ' s a d m i n istration, the looting of the N e w York City treasury by William M a r c y ( " B o s s " ) T w e e d in the 1 8 7 0 s , a n d the later horrors of m u n i c i p a l corruption exposed by j o u r n a l i s t L i n c o l n S t e f f e n s a n d other " m u c k r a k e r s " were sympt o m a t i c of what m a n y writers of the time took to be the a g e of the " G r e a t B a r b e c u e . " Early a t t e m p t s by labor to organize were c r u d e a n d often violent, a n d s u c h g r o u p s a s the "Molly M a g u i r e s , " which p e r f o r m e d a c t s of terrorism in the c o a l - m i n i n g a r e a of n o r t h e a s t e r n Pennsylvania, c o n f i r m e d middlec l a s s fears that labor organizations were "illegal c o n s p i r a c i e s " a n d t h u s public e n e m i e s . Direct violence w a s probably, as y o u n g radical writer E m m a G o l d m a n believed, a n e c e s s a r y step toward e s t a b l i s h i n g m e a n i n g f u l ways of negotiating d i s p u t e s b e t w e e n industrial workers a n d their e m p l o y e r s ; it w a s , in any event, not until collective b a r g a i n i n g legislation w a s e n a c t e d in the 1 9 3 0 s that labor effectively a c q u i r e d the right to strike.

THE LITEBABY

MABKETPLACE

T h e rapid t r a n s c o n t i n e n t a l s e t t l e m e n t a n d new u r b a n industrial c i r c u m s t a n c e s s u m m a r i z e d a b o v e were a c c o m p a n i e d by the d e v e l o p m e n t of a national literature of great a b u n d a n c e a n d variety. N e w t h e m e s , new f o r m s , new s u b j e c t s , new r e g i o n s , n e w a u t h o r s , new a u d i e n c e s all e m e r g e d in the literature of this half century. In fiction, c h a r a c t e r s rarely r e p r e s e n t e d before the Civil W a r b e c a m e familiar figures: industrial workers a n d the rural poor, a m b i t i o u s b u s i n e s s l e a d e r s a n d v a g r a n t s , prostitutes a n d u n h e r o i c soldiers. W o m e n from m a n y social g r o u p s , African A m e r i c a n s , Native A m e r i c a n s ; ethnic minorities, i m m i g r a n t s : all b e g a n to write for p u b l i c a t i o n , a n d a rapidly b u r g e o n i n g market for printed work h e l p e d establish a u t h o r s h i p a s a p o s s i b l e career. S o m e a c c o u n t , however brief, of the growth of this market may be helpful in u n d e r s t a n d i n g the e c o n o m i c s of A m e r i c a n cultural d e v e l o p m e n t . S i n c e colonial times n e w s p a p e r s h a d b e e n i m p o r t a n t to the political, social, a n d cultural life of A m e r i c a , but in the d e c a d e s after the Civil W a r their n u m b e r s a n d influence grew. J o s e p h Pulitzer e s t a b l i s h e d the S t . L o u i s Post-Dispatch in 1 8 7 8 , a n d in 1 8 8 3 he b o u g h t the N e w York World; both p a p e r s were hugely s u c c e s s f u l . William R a n d o l p h H e a r s t h a d already m a d e the S a n F r a n c i s c o Examiner the d o m i n a n t n e w s p a p e r in the far west, a n d in 1 8 9 5 he bought the N e w York Journal to c o m p e t e with Pulitzer's World. In 1 8 9 7 The Jewish Daily Forward w a s f o u n d e d ; its circulation eventually r e a c h e d 2 5 0 , 0 0 0 a n d was read by three or four times that n u m b e r . M a n y of the "writers" w h o went on to b e c o m e " a u t h o r s " got their start as n e w s p a p e r j o u r n a l i s t s ( B i e r c e , C a h a n , C r a n e , Dreiser, S u i S i n F a r , Harris, William D e a n H o w e l l s , F r a n k Norris, a n d T w a i n a m o n g t h e m ) . P e r h a p s of e q u a l i m p o r t a n c e to the d e v e l o p m e n t of literary c a r e e r s a n d literature a s a n institution was the e s t a b l i s h m e n t of n e w s p a p e r s y n d i c a t e s in the 1 8 8 0 s by Irving Bachellor a n d S. S . M c C l u r e . T h e s e s y n d i c a t e s p u b l i s h e d h u m o r , n e w s , car-

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t o o n s , a n d c o m i c strips (by the 1 8 9 0 s ) , b u t they a l s o printed both short fiction a n d n o v e l s C r a n e ' s The Red Badge of Courage, for e x a m p l e i n installments. In the m i d d l e of the e i g h t e e n t h century B e n j a m i n Franklin a n d A n d r e w B r a d f o r d were a m o n g the first to p u b l i s h m o n t h l y m a g a z i n e s , in n o s m a l l part to d e m o n s t r a t e that a distinctively A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e w a s f o r m i n g on the N o r t h A m e r i c a n c o n t i n e n t . By the early years of the n i n e t e e n t h century weekly m a g a z i n e s s u c h a s the Saturday Evening Post ( f o u n d e d in 1 8 2 1 ) , the Saturday Press ( 1 8 3 8 ) , a n d the New York Ledger ( 1 8 4 7 ) p u b l i s h e d m a n y writers of fiction, i n c l u d i n g M a r k T w a i n . E a s t C o a s t m a g a z i n e s s u c h a s Harper's New Monthly Magazine ( 1 8 5 0 ) , Scribner's Monthly ( 1 8 7 0 ) , Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine ( 1 8 8 1 ) , the Atlantic Monthly ( 1 8 5 7 ) , a n d the Galaxy ( 1 8 6 6 ) all provided o u t l e t s for s u c h figures a s K a t e C h o p i n , S a r a h O r n e J e w e t t , H e n r y J a m e s , William D e a n H o w e l l s , S a r a h Piatt, S u i S i n F a r , M a r k T w a i n , a n d C o n s t a n c e F e n i m o r e W o o l s o n . O n the W e s t C o a s t , the Overland Monthly ( 1 8 6 8 ) e m e r g e d a s the l e a d i n g literary p e r i o d i c a l , p u b lishing Bret H a r t e , A m b r o s e B i e r c e , J a c k L o n d o n , a n d M a r k T w a i n a m o n g o t h e r s . T h i s b a r e listing of m a g a z i n e s a n d literary c o n t r i b u t o r s is i n t e n d e d only to s u g g e s t the i m p o r t a n c e of p e r i o d i c a l s in providing s o u r c e s of i n c o m e a n d a u d i e n c e s crucial to the further f o r m a t i o n of a c o m p l e x A m e r i c a n literary tradition. M a n y of t h e s e p e r i o d i c a l s a l s o played a part in the e m e r g e n c e toward the end of the n i n e t e e n t h century of w h a t the critic W a r n e r Berthoff aptly designates " t h e literature of a r g u m e n t " p o w e r f u l works in sociology, philosophy, a n d psychology, m a n y of t h e m i m p e l l e d by the spirit of e x p o s u r e a n d reform. It would be hard to e x a g g e r a t e the i n f l u e n c e o n other writers a s well a s on the e d u c a t e d p u b l i c o f H e n r y G e o r g e ' s Progress and Poverty ( 1 8 7 9 ) , L e s t e r F r a n k W a r d ' s The Psychic Factors in Civilization (1893), Henry D e m a r e s t Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth ( 1 8 9 4 ) , Brooks A d a m s ' s The Law of Civilization and Decay ( 1 8 9 5 ) , C h a r l o t t e Perkins Gilm a n ' s Women and Economics ( 1 8 9 8 ) , T h o r s t e i n Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class ( 1 8 9 9 ) , William J a m e s ' s The Varieties of Religious Experience ( 1 9 0 2 ) , a n d Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company ( 1 9 0 4 ) . In short, a s the U n i t e d S t a t e s b e c a m e a n international political, e c o n o m i c , a n d military p o w e r d u r i n g this half century, the quantity a n d quality of its literary p r o d u c t i o n kept p a c e . In its n e w security, moreover, it w e l c o m e d (in translation) the l e a d i n g E u r o p e a n figures of the t i m e L e o T o l s t o y , H e n r i k I b s e n , A n t o n C h e k h o v , E m i l e Zola, B e n i t o P e r e s G a l d o s , G i o v a n n i V e r g a often in the c o l u m n s of H e n r y J a m e s a n d W i l l i a m D e a n H o w e l l s , w h o reviewed their works e n t h u s i a s t i c a l l y in Harper's Weekly a n d Harper's Monthly, the North American Review, a n d other l e a d i n g j o u r n a l s of the e r a . A m e r i c a n writers in this p e r i o d , like m o s t writers of other t i m e s a n d p l a c e s , wrote to earn m o n e y , gain f a m e , c h a n g e the world, a n d o u t of that mysterious c o m p u l s i o n to find the b e s t order for the b e s t w o r d s t o express t h e m s e l v e s in a p e r m a n e n t f o r m . T h e n a t u r e of that f o r m w h a t might b e called the "realistic international art s t o r y " w a s itself, of c o u r s e , a p r o d u c t of the c o m p l e x interplay of historical forces a n d a e s t h e t i c d e v e l o p m e n t s a p p a r e n t , in r e t r o s p e c t , from the time of the p u b l i c a t i o n of F r e n c h writer G u s t a v e F l a u b e r t ' s Madame Bovary ( 1 8 5 6 ) a n d , especially, his Three Tales ( 1 8 7 7 ) . A m o n g the l e a d i n g A m e r i c a n realists of the period w e r e M a r k T w a i n ,

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Henry J a m e s , Edith W h a r t o n , a n d William D e a n H o w e l l s , w h o together e n c o m p a s s e d literary style from the c o m i c v e r n a c u l a r t h r o u g h ordinary disc o u r s e to i m p r e s s i o n i s t i c subjectivity. A m o n g t h e m t h e s e writers r e c o r d e d life on the v a n i s h i n g frontier, in the village, small town, a n d turbulent m e t r o p o l i s , a s well a s in E u r o p e a n resorts a n d c a p i t a l s . T h e y e s t a b l i s h e d the literary identity of distinctively A m e r i c a n p r o t a g o n i s t s , specifically the vern a c u l a r boy hero a n d the " A m e r i c a n G i r l , " the baffled a n d strained m i d d l e c l a s s family, the b u s i n e s s m a n , the psychologically c o m p l i c a t e d citizens of a new international c u l t u r e . T o g e t h e r , in short, they set the e x a m p l e a n d c h a r t e d the future c o u r s e for the s u b j e c t s , t h e m e s , t e c h n i q u e s , a n d styles of fiction we still call m o d e r n .

F O R M S OF

REALISM

Rroadly s p e a k i n g , realism is u s e d to label a m o v e m e n t in E n g l i s h , E u r o p e a n , a n d A m e r i c a n literature that g a t h e r e d force from the 1 8 3 0 s to the e n d of the century. It w a s , ultimately, n o t h i n g m o r e or less t h a n the a t t e m p t to write a literature that r e c o r d e d life as it w a s lived rather than life a s it o u g h t to b e lived or h a d b e e n lived in times p a s t . A s defined by William D e a n Howells ( 1 8 3 7 - 1 9 2 0 ) , the m a g a z i n e editor w h o w a s for s o m e d e c a d e s the chief A m e r i c a n a d v o c a t e of realistic a e s t h e t i c s a s well a s a u t h o r of over thirty novels that strove for r e a l i s m , realism "is n o t h i n g m o r e a n d n o t h i n g less than the truthful t r e a t m e n t of m a t e r i a l . " A l t h o u g h this definition d o e s not a n s w e r every q u e s t i o n that may b e raised a b o u t truth, t r e a t m e n t , or even a b o u t material, it offers a useful point of d e p a r t u r e . Henry J a m e s s p o k e of the " d o c u m e n t a r y " value of Howells's work, thereby calling a t t e n t i o n t h r o u g h Howells to realism's p r e o c c u p a t i o n with the physical s u r f a c e s , the particularities of the s e n s a t e world in which fictional c h a r a c t e r s lived. T h e s e characters were " r e p r e s e n t a t i v e " or ordinary c h a r a c t e r s c h a r a c t e r s o n e might p a s s on the street without noticing. Unlike their r o m a n t i c c o u n t e r p a r t s , they don't walk with a limp, their eyes don't blaze, they don't e m a n a t e diabolical power. R e a l i s m , as p r a c t i c e d by H o w e l l s , particularly in The Rise of Silas Lapham ( 1 8 8 5 ) , the novel m a n y literary historians have identified a s quintessentially realistic in the A m e r i c a n tradition, s e e k s to c r e a t e the illusion of everyday life b e i n g lived by ordinary p e o p l e in familiar s u r r o u n d i n g s l i f e s e e n through a clear g l a s s window (though partly o p e n e d to allow for the full range of s e n s e e x p e r i e n c e ) . Edith W h a r t o n ' s p r a c t i c e of realism s h o w s it at its m o s t technically adroit. In her early story " S o u l s B e l a t e d " ( i n c l u d e d here) setting is r e n d e r e d with the fine precision we a s s o c i a t e with r e a l i s m : o n e of the belated s o u l s , the recently divorced Lydia T i l l o t s o n , returns to her hotel sitting r o o m now uncomfortably s h a r e d with her lover: " S h e sat g l a n c i n g vaguely a b o u t the little sitting r o o m , dimly lit by the pallid-globed l a m p , which left in twilight the outlines of the furniture, of his writing table h e a p e d with b o o k s a n d p a p e r s , of the tea r o s e s a n d j a s m i n e d r o o p i n g on the m a n t e l p i e c e . H o w like h o m e it h a d all g r o w n h o w like h o m e ! " W h a r t o n h a d a portrait-painter's eye for detail a n d especially for the subtle ways light m a d e the physical world plastic. T h e c h a r a c t e r s in the story, while they b e l o n g to a higher social c l a s s than the L a p h a m s of Howells's f a m o u s novel, are all r e c o g n i z a b l e a s m e m -

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bers of that c l a s s . I n d e e d , a n o t h e r p a s s a g e from the story s u g g e s t s that it is the aspiration of the wealthy to be a s m u c h like e a c h other a s p o s s i b l e t o live a life without s u r p r i s e s or d r a m a : T h e moral a t m o s p h e r e of the T i l l o t s o n interior w a s a s carefully s c r e e n e d a n d c u r t a i n e d a s the h o u s e itself: M r s Tillotson senior d r e a d e d ideas a s m u c h a s a draft in her b a c k . P r u d e n t p e o p l e like a n even t e m p e r a t u r e ; a n d to do anything u n e x p e c t e d w a s a s foolish a s g o i n g o u t in the rain. O n e of the c h i e f a d v a n t a g e s of b e i n g rich w a s that o n e n e e d not b e e x p o s e d to u n f o r e s e e n c o n t i n g e n c i e s : by the u s e of ordinary f i r m n e s s a n d c o m m o n s e n s e o n e c o u l d m a k e s u r e of d o i n g exactly the s a m e thing every day at the s a m e h o u r . W h a r t o n c r e a t e s a physical setting of great particularity a n d familiar character types; but her c o n c l u d i n g s e n t e n c e reveals a satirical intent a s d e l i c i o u s a s it is authorially intrusive. I n d e e d , while it is true that in her b e s t novels W h a r t o n holds a mirror up to N e w York high society s h e is m o r e interested in the p s y c h o l o g i c a l a n d moral reality of the d r a m a of h u m a n c o n s c i o u s n e s s than s h e is in the s c e n e r y that furnishes the s t a g e on which the d r a m a is e n a c t e d . Even in s u c h centrally realistic novels of m a n n e r s s u c h a s The House of Mirth ( 1 9 0 5 ) , The Custom of the Country ( 1 9 1 3 ) , a n d The Age of Innocence ( 1 9 2 0 ) W h a r t o n ' s primary c o n c e r n s a r e m o r e nearly with the i n t a n g i b l e t h w a r t e d d e s i r e , self-betrayal, m u r d e r o u s e m o t i o n , r e p r e s s e d v o i c e s t h a n with the interior d e c o r a t i o n of m a n s i o n s or the f a s h i o n a b l e d r e s s of her c h a r a c t e r s . In fact, it proved i m p o s s i b l e for any realist to r e p r e s e n t things exactly a s they w e r e ; literature d e m a n d s s h a p i n g narratives w h e r e life is m e s s y a n d calls for narrators w h e r e life is not n a r r a t e d . P r e s e n t - d a y literary theorists a r e m u c h m o r e a w a r e of what is called " t h e crisis of r e p r e s e n t a t i o n " b y w h i c h is m e a n t the difference b e t w e e n the r e p r e s e n t a t i o n a n d the thing r e p r e s e n t e d t h a n were this g e n e r a t i o n of realists t h e m s e l v e s . B u t if they h a d b e e n a w a r e of this p r o b l e m , they would likely have insisted on the value a n d significance of their work in calling a t t e n t i o n to a r e a s of e x p e r i e n c e that writers h a d never dealt with b e f o r e . It c o u l d b e plausibly a r g u e d that all literature after realism h a s b e e n , to s o m e d e g r e e , " r e a l i s t i c " in its a i m s . W o r k i n g with great s e l f - a w a r e n e s s at the very b o u n d a r i e s of r e a l i s m , the two greatest artists of the e r a H e n r y J a m e s a n d M a r k T w a i n u n d e r s t o o d quite well that l a n g u a g e w a s an interpretation of the real rather than the real thing itself. T w a i n ' s work w a s realistic in its u s e of colloquial a n d v e r n a c u l a r s p e e c h a s o p p o s e d to high-flown rhetoric a n d in its p a r a d e of c h a r a c t e r s drawn from ordinary walks of life. F o r m a n y later writers, the s i m p l e l a n g u a g e of Huckleberry Finn signified the b e g i n n i n g of a truly A m e r i c a n style. B u t T w a i n ' s work also e m b o d i e d a r e m a r k a b l e c o m i c g e n i u s t h e a u t h o r of Huckleberry Finn is funny in ways that H u c k h i m s e l f c o u l d never a c h i e v e and resembled performance comedy. Indeed, Twain achieved enormous succ e s s a s a public r e a d e r of his own work. At the other e x t r e m e , over a long c a r e e r Henry J a m e s worked his way from recognizably realistic fiction, with a large c a s t of socially specified ( a l t h o u g h typically u p p e r - c l a s s ) c h a r a c t e r s d e s c r i b e d by an all-knowing a n d c o m p l e t e l y a c c u r a t e narrator, o n toward increasingly s u b t l e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of the flow of a c h a r a c t e r ' s inner t h o u g h t , s u c h that his elaborately m e t a p h o r i c a l work b e c a m e the starting point for p s y c h o l o g i c a l , s t r e a m - o f - c o n s c i o u s n e s s fiction.

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N a t u r a l i s m is c o m m o n l y u n d e r s t o o d a s a n extension or intensification of realism. T h e intensification involves the introduction of c h a r a c t e r s of a kind only o c c a s i o n a l l y to be f o u n d in the fiction of H o w e l l s , J a m e s , or W h a r t o n c h a r a c t e r s from the fringes a n d lower d e p t h s of c o n t e m p o r a r y society, characters w h o s e fates are the p r o d u c t of d e g e n e r a t e heredity, a sordid environm e n t , a n d a g o o d deal of b a d luck. B i e r c e , C r a n e , Dreiser, L o n d o n , a n d Norris are usually the figures identified a s the l e a d i n g A m e r i c a n naturalists of this period, b u t before we turn to their work the p h i l o s o p h i c a n d scientific b a c k g r o u n d s of n a t u r a l i s m require s o m e attention. O n e of the m o s t far-reaching intellectual events of the last half of the nineteenth century w a s the publication in 1 8 5 9 of C h a r l e s Darwin's Origin of Species. T h i s book, together with his Descent of Man ( 1 8 7 0 ) , hypothesized on the b a s i s of m a s s i v e physical evidence that over the millennia h u m a n s h a d evolved from " l o w e r " f o r m s of life. H u m a n s were s p e c i a l , n o t a s the Bible t a u g h t b e c a u s e G o d h a d c r e a t e d t h e m in His i m a g e , but b e c a u s e they h a d s u c c e s s f u l l y a d a p t e d to c h a n g i n g e n v i r o n m e n t a l c o n d i t i o n s a n d h a d p a s s e d on their survival-making c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s . In the 1 8 7 0 s E n g l i s h phil o s o p h e r H e r b e r t S p e n c e r ' s a p p l i c a t i o n of Darwin's theory of evolution to social relations w a s enthusiastically w e l c o m e d by m a n y l e a d i n g A m e r i c a n b u s i n e s s m e n . A n d r e w C a r n e g i e w a s only o n e s u c c e s s f u l industrialist w h o a r g u e d that u n r e s t r a i n e d c o m p e t i t i o n w a s the equivalent of a law of n a t u r e d e s i g n e d to eliminate t h o s e unfit for the new e c o n o m i c order. A n o t h e r r e s p o n s e to Darwin w a s to a c c e p t the deterministic i m p l i c a t i o n s of evolutionary theory a n d to u s e t h e m to a c c o u n t for the behavior of characters in literary works. T h a t is, c h a r a c t e r s were c o n c e i v e d as m o r e or less c o m p l e x c o m b i n a t i o n s of inherited attributes a n d habits ingrained by social and e c o n o m i c forces. As E m i l e Zola ( 1 8 4 0 1 9 0 2 ) , the influential F r e n c h theorist a n d novelist, p u t the matter in his e s s a y " T h e E x p e r i m e n t a l N o v e l " (1880): In short, we m u s t o p e r a t e with c h a r a c t e r s , p a s s i o n s , h u m a n a n d social d a t a a s the c h e m i s t a n d the physicist work on inert b o d i e s , a s the physiologist works on living b o d i e s . D e t e r m i n i s m governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental r e a s o n i n g that c o m b a t s o n e by o n e the h y p o t h e s e s of the idealists a n d will r e p l a c e novels of p u r e i m a g ination by novels of observation a n d e x p e r i m e n t . A n u m b e r of A m e r i c a n writers a d o p t e d a s p e c t s of this p e s s i m i s t i c form of realism, this so-called naturalistic view of h u m a n k i n d , t h o u g h e a c h writer incorporated s u c h n a t u r a l i s m into his or her work in individual ways, to different d e g r e e s , a n d c o m b i n e d with other p e r s p e c t i v e s . It would be a mistake in short to believe that A m e r i c a n writers simply c o b b l e d their unders t a n d i n g s of Darwin, S p e n c e r , or Zola into s o m e rigid, a b s o l u t i s t , d o g m a t i c position s h a r e d by all of t h e m . Rather, writers r e s p o n d e d to t h e s e c h a l l e n g e s to traditional belief s y s t e m s in diverse a n d innovative ways. T h e y were all c o n c e r n e d on the o n e h a n d to explore n e w t e r r i t o r i e s t h e p r e s s u r e s of biology, e n v i r o n m e n t , a n d other material f o r c e s i n m a k i n g p e o p l e , particularly lower-class p e o p l e , w h o they were. O n the other h a n d , B i e r c e , C r a n e , Dreiser, L o n d o n , a n d Norris all allowed in different d e g r e e s for the value of h u m a n b e i n g s , for their potential to m a k e s o m e m e a s u r e of s e n s e o u t of their experience a n d for their capacity to act c o m p a s s i o n a t e l y e v e n altruistic a l l y u n d e r the m o s t a d v e r s e c i r c u m s t a n c e s . Even t h o u g h , therefore, they

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were c h a l l e n g i n g c o n v e n t i o n a l w i s d o m a b o u t h u m a n motivation a n d c a u sality in the natural world, the b l e a k n e s s a n d p e s s i m i s m s o m e t i m e s f o u n d in their fiction are not the s a m e a s d e s p a i r a n d c y n i c i s m . Critic C a t h y D a v i d s o n c h a r a c t e r i z e s A m b r o s e B i e r c e a s "a literary hippogryph w h o c o m b i n e s e l e m e n t s that by s t a n d a r d literary historiography s h o u l d not b e c o n j o i n e d : realism a n d i m p r e s s i o n i s m , n a t u r a l i s m a n d s u r r e a l i s m . " S o while in s o m e r e s p e c t s a n d in s o m e stories B i e r c e might be s a i d to be " n a t u r a l i s t i c , " a careful r e a d i n g of any of his b e s t short s t o r i e s " C h i c a m a u g a , " "An O c c u r r e n c e at Owl C r e e k B r i d g e , " a n d " T h e M a n a n d the S n a k e " to n a m e t h r e e m a k e s clear the i n a d e q u a c y of n a t u r a l i s m a s a way of explaining or interpreting B i e r c e . U n d u e attention to the s e n s a t i o n a l a n d g r o t e s q u e , D a v i d s o n a r g u e s , c a n blind r e a d e r s to the p o s t m o d e r n selfreflexiveness of B i e r c e . S t e p h e n C r a n e is a n o t h e r c a s e in point. C r a n e believed, a s h e said of Maggie, that e n v i r o n m e n t c o u n t s for a great deal in d e t e r m i n i n g h u m a n fate. B u t not every p e r s o n born in a s l u m e n d s u p a s a h o o d l u m , drunk, or s u i c i d e . "A great d e a l , " moreover, is not the s a m e a s everything. N a t u r e is not hostile, he o b s e r v e s in " T h e O p e n B o a t , " only "indifferent, flatly indifferent." I n d e e d , the earth in " T h e B l u e H o t e l " is d e s c r i b e d in o n e of the m o s t f a m o u s p a s s a g e s in naturalistic fiction a s a "whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, d i s e a s e - s t r i c k e n , s p a c e - l o s t b u l b . " At the e n d of the story, however, the q u e s t i o n s of r e s p o n sibility a n d a g e n c y are still alive. In C r a n e ' s The Red Badge of Courage Henry F l e m i n g r e s p o n d s to the very e n d to the world of c h a o s a n d violence that s u r r o u n d s him with a l t e r n a t i n g s u r g e s of p a n i c a n d s e l f - c o n g r a t u l a t i o n s , not a s a m a n w h o h a s fully u n d e r s t o o d h i m s e l f a n d his p l a c e in the world. All the s a m e , Henry h a s l e a r n e d s o m e t h i n g o r at least h e seems to have d o n e s o . C r a n e , like m o s t n a t u r a l i s t s , is m o r e a m b i g u o u s , m o r e a c c e p t i n g of para d o x e s than a reductive notion of n a t u r a l i s m would s e e m to allow for. Biology, e n v i r o n m e n t , p s y c h o l o g i c a l drives, a n d c h a n c e , that is to say, play a large part in s h a p i n g h u m a n e n d s in C r a n e ' s fiction. B u t after we have g r a n t e d this ostensibly naturalistic p e r s p e c t i v e to C r a n e , we a r e still left with his distinctiveness a s a writer, with his p e r s o n a l h o n e s t y in reporting what he s a w (and his c o n c o m i t a n t rejection of a c c e p t e d literary c o n v e n t i o n s ) , a n d with his u s e of i m p r e s s i o n i s t i c literary t e c h n i q u e s to p r e s e n t i n c o m p l e t e c h a r a c t e r s a n d a broken w o r l d a world m o r e r a n d o m t h a n scientifically p r e d i c t a b l e . W e are a l s o left, however, with the hardly p e s s i m i s t i c implication of " T h e O p e n B o a t " : that precisely b e c a u s e h u m a n b e i n g s a r e e x p o s e d to a s a v a g e world of c h a n c e w h e r e d e a t h is always i m m i n e n t , they would d o well to learn the art of s y m p a t h e t i c identification with others a n d h o w to p r a c t i c e solidarity, a n art often learned at the price of d e a t h . W i t h o u t this deeply felt h u m a n c o n n e c t i o n , h u m a n e x p e r i e n c e is a s m e a n i n g l e s s a s wind, s h a r k s , a n d w a v e s a n d this is not, finally, w h a t C r a n e believed. T h e o d o r e D r e i s e r certainly did not s h a r e C r a n e ' s t e n d e n c y to u s e words a n d i m a g e s a s if h e were a c o m p o s e r or a p a i n t e r . B u t h e did s h a r e , at least early in his career, C r a n e ' s s k e p t i c i s m a b o u t h u m a n b e i n g s ; like C r a n e he w a s m o r e inclined to s e e m e n a n d w o m e n a s m o r e like m o t h s drawn to flame than lords of c r e a t i o n . B u t , a g a i n , it is not Dreiser's beliefs that m a k e him a significant figure in A m e r i c a n letters: it is w h a t his i m a g i n a t i o n a n d literary t e c h n i q u e d o with a n extremely rich set of i d e a s , e x p e r i e n c e s , a n d e m o t i o n s to c r e a t e the "color of life" in his fiction that m a k e him a writer worth o u r attention. If C r a n e gave A m e r i c a n r e a d e r s t h r o u g h the p e r s o n a l h o n e s t y of

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his vision a n e w s e n s e of the h u m a n c o n s c i o u s n e s s u n d e r c o n d i t i o n s of extreme p r e s s u r e , D r e i s e r gave t h e m for the first time in his unwieldy novels s u c h as Sister Carrie ( 1 9 0 0 ) a n d Jennie Gerhardt ( 1 9 1 1 ) a s e n s e of the fumbling, yearning, c o n f u s e d r e s p o n s e to the s i m u l t a n e o u s l y e n c h a n t i n g , exciting, ugly, a n d d a n g e r o u s metropolis that h a d b e c o m e the familiar r e s i d e n c e for s u c h large n u m b e r s of A m e r i c a n s by the turn of the century. A b r a h a m C a h a n , like Dreiser, wrote a b o u t city-dwellers, in p a r t i c u l a r a b o u t e a s t e r n E u r o p e a n J e w s w h o , starting in 1 8 8 2 , b e g a n migrating in large n u m b e r s to A m e r i c a . M a n y of t h e s e Yiddish-speaking i m m i g r a n t s settled in the L o w e r E a s t S i d e ghetto of M a n h a t t a n . C a h a n ' s m a j o r novel The Rise of David Levinsky ( 1 9 1 7 ) brilliantly explores the t e n s i o n s entailed in the c o u r s e of reconciling traditional v a l u e s a n d ways of living with A m e r i c a n modernity. Exclusive f o c u s o n atavistic i m p u l s e s in L o n d o n ' s Call of the Wild ( 1 9 0 3 ) a n d The Sea-Wolf ( 1 9 0 4 ) may keep r e a d e r s from r e s p o n d i n g to the c o m plexities of t h e s e a n d other of L o n d o n ' s b e s t fiction. " T h e L a w of L i f e " m a y be cited in s u p p o r t of critic Earl L a b o r ' s c o n t e n t i o n that " t h e e s s e n t i a l creative tension for [ L o n d o n ' s ] literary artistry, is the o p p o s i t i o n of m a t e r i a l i s m versus s p i r i t u a l i s m t h a t is, the tension b e t w e e n the logical a n d the scientific on the o n e h a n d a n d the irrational a n d mystical on the o t h e r . " In the " L a w of L i f e " O l d K o s k o o s h , a b o u t to be left to die by his tribe, thinks: " N a t u r e did not c a r e . T o life s h e set o n e task, g a v e o n e law. T o p e r p e t u a t e w a s the t a s k of life, its law is d e a t h . " T h e rather a b s t r a c t reflection would s e e m to s u g g e s t that the story is driven by a deterministic view of lifethat n o t h i n g individuals did w a s of any real s i g n i f i c a n c e . Yet the b u l k of the story is given over to O l d K o s k o o s h ' s m e m o r i e s of his life a n d particularly to the re-creation of a formative m o m e n t from his youth a s h e a n d a c o m p a n i o n c o m e u p o n the s c e n e of an old m o o s e struggling in vain a g a i n s t the circle of wolves that have w o u n d e d a n d will s o o n d e v o u r h i m . In re-creating this extraordinary m o m e n t in all of its vivid, d r a m a t i c power, a n d in identifying with the t o t e m i c figure of the m o o s e , K o s k o o s h , it might b e a r g u e d , has e r a s e d his earlier generalization a b o u t evolutionary necessity a n d the m e a n i n g l e s s n e s s of the individual. Acts of i m a g i n a t i o n a n d identification d o lend m e a n i n g a n d dignity to h u m a n e x i s t e n c e . In s u m , d e s p i t e residual prohibitions that insisted on h u m a n i t y ' s elevated p l a c e in the universe a n d a m i d d l e - c l a s s r e a d e r s h i p that disliked u g l i n e s s a n d " i m m o r a l i t y , " u r b a n A m e r i c a a n d the d e p o p u l a t e d h i n t e r l a n d s proved to b e fertile g r o u n d for realistic literary t e c h n i q u e s a n d naturalistic i d e a s , t h o u g h the ideas were inconsistently applied a n d the d o c u m e n t a r y t e c h n i q u e s were cross-cut by other literary strategies. O u t s i d e of literature, the nation's f o u n d i n g principle of equality c o n t r a s t e d to the h a r s h realities of c o u n t r y and urban life, to the lives of African A m e r i c a n s , A s i a n A m e r i c a n s , N a t i v e A m e r i c a n s , w o m e n , a n d minorities, for e x a m p l e , a n d m a d e for i n c r e a s i n g r e c e p t i v e n e s s to narratives that held a looking g l a s s up to the m i d d l e c l a s s a n d obliged t h e m to s e e how the other h a l f o f t h e m s e l v e s a n d o t h e r s lived.

REGIONAL

WRITING

Regional writing, a n o t h e r expression of the realistic i m p u l s e , r e s u l t e d from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization

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d i s p e r s e d or h o m o g e n i z e d t h e m a n d to c o m e to terms with the harsh realities that s e e m e d to r e p l a c e t h e s e early a n d allegedly h a p p i e r t i m e s . At a m o r e practical level, m u c h of the writing w a s a r e s p o n s e to the rapid growth of m a g a z i n e s , which c r e a t e d a new, largely f e m a l e m a r k e t for short fiction a l o n g with correlated o p p o r t u n i t i e s for w o m e n writers. By the e n d of the century, in any c a s e , virtually every region of the country, from M a i n e to C a l i f o r n i a , from the northern plains to the L o u i s i a n a b a y o u s , h a d its "local c o l o r i s t " (the implied c o m p a r i s o n is to p a i n t e r s of so-called genre s c e n e s ) to immortalize its distinctive natural, social, a n d linguistic f e a t u r e s . T h o u g h often s u f f u s e d with nostalgia, the b e s t work of the regionalists both renders a c o n v i n c i n g s u r f a c e of a particular time a n d location a n d investigates psychological chara c t e r traits from a m o r e universal p e r s p e c t i v e . T h i s m e l a n g e m a y be s e e n in s u c h an early e x a m p l e of regional, a l s o called local-color, writing a s Bret Harte's " T h e L u c k of R o a r i n g C a m p , " which m a d e H a r t e a national celebrity in 1 8 6 8 . T h e story is locally specific ( t h o u g h it lacked true verisimilitude) a s well a s entertaining, a n d it c r e a t e d mythic types a s well a s d e p i c t i o n s of frontier c h a r a c t e r that were later called into q u e s t i o n by Piatt a n d W o o l s o n , a m o n g others. H a m l i n G a r l a n d , rather than c r e a t i n g a myth, set out to destroy o n e . L i k e s o m a n y other writers of the t i m e , G a r l a n d w a s e n c o u r a g e d by H o w e l l s to write a b o u t what he knew b e s t i n this c a s e the bleak a n d e x h a u s t i n g life of farmers of the u p p e r M i d w e s t . As he later said, his p u r p o s e in writing his early stories w a s to s h o w that the "mystic quality c o n n e c t e d with free land . . . w a s a m y t h . " G a r l a n d ' s f a r m e r s are n o longer the v i g o r o u s , s e n s u o u s , a n d thoughtful y e o m e n d e p i c t e d in C r e v e c o e u r ' s Letters from an American Farmer ( 1 7 8 2 ) but b e n t , drab figures r e m i n i s c e n t of the protest p o e t Edwin M a r k h a m ' s " M a n with a H o e " ( 1 8 9 9 ) . In " U n d e r the Lion's P a w , " from the collection Main-Travelled Roads ( 1 8 9 1 ) , we s e e local color not a s nostalgia but a s realism in the service of social protest. T h e work of Harriet B e e c h e r S t o w e , S a r a h O r n e J e w e t t , M a r y E . Wilkins F r e e m a n , S u i S i n Far, a n d C o n s t a n c e F e n i m o r e W o o l s o n may be s e e n a s a n invitation to c o n s i d e r the world from the p e r s p e c t i v e of w o m e n a w a k e n i n g to, p r o t e s t i n g a g a i n s t , a n d offering alternatives for a world d o m i n a t e d by m e n a n d m a l e interests a n d v a l u e s . Mary Austin w a s a l s o a feminist a n d m u c h of her writing, i n c l u d i n g her c l a s s i c Land of Little Rain ( 1 9 0 3 ) , invites readers to s e e the world from a w o m a n ' s p e r s p e c t i v e . B u t Austin's larger claim on literary history is that she m a d e the d e s e r t s of s o u t h e r n California p a l p a b l e for the first time in literature. T h e marginal c h a r a c t e r s w h o p e o p l e this inhospitable terrain c a n n o t be i m a g i n e d a s existing anywhere e l s e . S t o w e , J e w e t t , F r e e m a n , a n d W o o l s o n do m o r e than l a m e n t the postwar e c o n o m i c a n d spiritual decline of N e w E n g l a n d ; their f e m a l e c h a r a c t e r s s u g g e s t the c a p a c ity of h u m a n beings to live i n d e p e n d e n t l y a n d with dignity in the f a c e of c o m m u n i t y p r e s s u r e s , patriarchal power over w o m e n , i n c l u d i n g w o m e n artists a n d writers, a n d material deprivation. T o g e t h e r with Alice Brown of N e w H a m p s h i r e a n d R o s e Terry C o o k of C o n n e c t i c u t t o m e n t i o n only two othe r s t h e s e regional writers c r e a t e d not only p l a c e s but t h e m e s that have a s s u m e d i n c r e a s i n g i m p o r t a n c e in the twentieth century. K a t e C h o p i n , not unlike M a r k T w a i n , m a y be t h o u g h t of a s a regional writer interested in preserving the c u s t o m s , l a n g u a g e , a n d l a n d s c a p e s of a region of the S o u t h . Certainly we have no better record of the a n t e b e l l u m

I N T R O D U C T I O N

1233

lower M i s s i s s i p p i River Valley than T w a i n provided in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a n d Life on the Mississippi, a n d C h o p i n ' s short stories a n d her novel The Awakening pick u p , a l m o s t literally, w h e r e T w a i n ' s books leave offin the northern L o u i s i a n a countryside a n d , downriver, in N e w O r l e a n s . C h o p i n b e g a n her writing c a r e e r only after s h e returned to S t . L o u i s from her long sojourn in L o u i s i a n a , a n d in s o m e m e a s u r e her narratives are tinged with personal nostalgia for a m o r e relaxed a n d s e n s u o u s way of life than p e o p l e in A m e r i c a ' s rapidly growing cities c o u l d any longer provide. As a n urban outsider, C h o p i n w a s p e r h a p s all the m o r e sensitive to the n u a n c e s of L o u i s i a n a country life in particular. P e r h a p s , too, a s a w o m a n , a way of life that c e n t e r e d a r o u n d families a n d small c o m m u n i t i e s lent itself to her distinctive form of r e g i o n a l i s m . In any c a s e , her t r e a t m e n t of the C r e o l e s , C a j u n s , a n d b l a c k s of N e w O r l e a n s a n d N a t c h i t o c h e s ( N a k i t u s h ) Parish provide fine e x a m p l e s of the literary portrayal of a distinctive r e g i o n o n e less severe a n d less r e p r e s s e d than the towns a n d villages portrayed by her N e w E n g l a n d sister regionalists. A n d j u s t a s T w a i n in Huck Finn offers t h e m a t i c r i c h n e s s beyond the visual a n d aural d o c u m e n t a t i o n of a t i m e , a p l a c e a n d varied society, so too d o e s C h o p i n , in The Awakening, give u s u n i q u e a c c e s s to the interior life a P r o t e s t a n t w o m a n w a k e n i n g to her o p p r e s s i o n s a n d r e p r e s s i o n s in the context of a C a t h o l i c c o m m u n i t y still m a r k e d by less c o n science-stricken O l d W o r l d a t t i t u d e s . T h a t Tlie Awakening also h a s served to crystallize m a n y w o m e n ' s i s s u e s of the turn of the c e n t u r y a n d s i n c e is testimony to the potential for regional realism to give the lie to a t t e m p t s to d e r o g a t e it as a g e n r e .

R E A L I S M AS

ARGUMENT

D u r i n g t h e s e fifty years a vast body of nonfictional p r o s e w a s devoted to the description, analysis, a n d critique of social, e c o n o m i c , a n d political institutions a n d to the unsolved social p r o b l e m s that were o n e c o n s e q u e n c e of the rapid growth a n d c h a n g e of the t i m e . W o m e n ' s rights, political c o r r u p t i o n , the d e g r a d a t i o n of the natural world, e c o n o m i c inequity, b u s i n e s s d e c e p tions, the exploitation of l a b o r t h e s e b e c a m e the s u b j e c t s of articles a n d books by a long list of j o u r n a l i s t s , historians, social critics, a n d e c o n o m i s t s . M u c h of this writing h a d literary a m b i t i o n s , survives a s literature, a n d continues to have g e n u i n e power. C h a r l o t t e Perkins G i l m a n ' s " T h e Yellow Wallp a p e r , " for e x a m p l e , m a y have b e e n written to k e e p w o m e n from going crazy under the suffocating c o n d i t i o n s that would disallow w o m e n full equality a n d full participation in the creative, e c o n o m i c , a n d political life of the nation; but unlike m e r e p r o p a g a n d a it has resisted all a t t e m p t s to turn it into a single W e s t e r n U n i o n m e s s a g e . In fact, the m o r e it has b e e n read the m o r e m e a n i n g s it has yielded. Similarly, in o n e of the m o s t a m b i t i o u s A m e r i c a n works of moral instruction, The Education of Henry Adams ( 1 9 1 8 ) , A d a m s registers t h r o u g h a literary sensibility a s o p h i s t i c a t e d historian's s e n s e of what we now recognize a s the disorientation that a c c o m p a n i e s rapid a n d c o n t i n u o u s c h a n g e . T o p u t the c a s e for A d a m s ' s b o o k in c o n t e m p o r a r y t e r m s , A d a m s invented the idea of future s h o c k . T h e result is o n e of the m o s t essential books of a n d a b o u t the whole period. O f all the i s s u e s of the day, p e r h a p s the m o s t persistent a n d resistant to

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A M E R I C A N

L I T E R A T U R E

1 8 6 5 - 1 9 1 4

solution w a s the fact of racial inequality. S e v e r a l s e l e c t i o n s in this anthology a d d r e s s the long, s h a m e f u l history of white injustices to b l a c k A m e r i c a n s , but two works by b l a c k writers a n d l e a d e r s from the turn of the c e n t u r y have a special claim o n our attention: the widely a d m i r e d a u t o b i o g r a p h y of B o o k e r T . W a s h i n g t o n , Upfront Slavery ( 1 9 0 0 ) a n d the richly i m a g i n e d The Souls of Black Folk ( 1 9 0 3 ) by W . E . B . D u B o i s , with its brilliantly a r g u e d rejection of W a s h i n g t o n ' s philosophy. T h e W a s h i n g t o n - D u B o i s controversy set the m a j o r t e r m s of the c o n t i n u i n g d e b a t e b e t w e e n b l a c k l e a d e r s a n d in the black c o m m u n i t y : which strategies will m o s t effectively h a s t e n c o m p l e t e equality for b l a c k s educationally, socially, politically, a n d e c o n o m i c a l l y ? It is a l s o fair to say that in very different ways W a s h i n g t o n ' s Upfront Slavery a n d D u Bois's Souls of Black Folkadmirable literary a c h i e v e m e n t s in themselves-antic i p a t e d a tide of b l a c k literary p r o d u c t i o n that c o n t i n u e s with great force to the p r e s e n t day. O n e c o u l d a l s o a r g u e that the t h o u g h t a n d l a n g u a g e of W a s h i n g t o n a n d D u B o i s a r e everywhere to b e felt in the t h o u g h t a n d lang u a g e of the d i s t i n g u i s h e d line of b l a c k thinkers, writers, a n d artists w h o followed t h e m . T w o other m a j o r writers of the time a r e W a l t W h i t m a n a n d Emily Dicki n s o n . T h e s e p o e t s , w h o s e roots are in the a n t e b e l l u m p e r i o d , c o n t i n u e d their work into the 1 8 8 0 s . T h o u g h their influence w o u l d b e felt m o s t strongly after W o r l d W a r II, in hindsight they c a n be s e e n a s the f o u n t a i n h e a d s of two m a j o r strains in m o d e r n poetry: the e x p a n s i v e , g r e g a r i o u s form of the self-celebratory W h i t m a n a n d the c o n c i s e , c o m p a c t e x p r e s s i o n s of the radically private D i c k i n s o n . In the half century we have b e e n c o n s i d e r i n g , m a t e r i a l , intellectual, social, a n d p s y c h o l o g i c a l c h a n g e s in the lives of m a n y A m e r i c a n s went forward at s u c h extreme s p e e d a n d o n s u c h a m a s s i v e s c a l e t h a t the e n o r m o u s l y diverse writing of the time registers, at its c o r e , d e g r e e s of s h o c k e d recognition o f the h u m a n c o n s e q u e n c e s of t h e s e radical t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s . S o m e t i m e s the s h o c k is e x p r e s s e d in recoil a n d d e n i a l t h u s the p e r s i s t e n c e , in the f a c e of the o s t e n s i b l e t r i u m p h of r e a l i s m , of the literature of diversion: nostalgic poetry, s e n t i m e n t a l a n d m e l o d r a m a t i c d r a m a , a n d s w a s h b u c k l i n g historical novels. T h e m o r e e n d u r i n g fictional a n d nonfictional p r o s e f o r m s of the era, however, c o m e to t e r m s imaginatively with the individual a n d collective disl o c a t i o n s a n d d i s c o n t i n u i t i e s a s s o c i a t e d with the c l o s i n g o u t of the frontier, u r b a n i z a t i o n , intensified s e c u l a r i s m , u n p r e c e d e n t e d i m m i g r a t i o n , the s u r g e of national wealth u n e q u a l l y d i s t r i b u t e d , revised c o n c e p t i o n s of h u m a n n a t u r e a n d destiny, the reordering of family a n d civil life, a n d the pervasive s p r e a d of m e c h a n i c a l a n d organizational t e c h n o l o g i e s .

AMERICAN LITERATURE TEXTS

1855 W a l t W h i t m a n , Leaves of Grass 1865

1865-1914 CONTEXTS

186065 E m i l y h u n d r e d poems

Dickinson writes several

Thirteenth Amendment

abolishes

slavery Lincoln a s s a s s i n a t e d Reconstruction begins 1867 Russia 1868 Fourteenth Amendment grants United States purchases Alaska from

African Americans citizenship

1869 Flat"

Bret Harte,

"The Outcasts of Poker

1869

National W o m a n

Suffrage

A s s o c i a t i o n f o u n d e d first t r a n s c o n t i n e n t a l railroad completed; Central Pacific

construction crews c o m p o s e d largely of Chinese laborers 1871 Poems S a r a h M o r g a n Piatt, A Woman's

1872

C o c h i s e , "[I am alone]"

1872

Y e l l o w s t o n e , first U . S . n a t i o n a l p a r k ,

established

1876 C h a r i o t , "[He has filled our bones]"

graves

with

1876

G e n e r a l C u s t e r defeated by Sioux

a n d C h e y e n n e at Little B i g h o r n River Alexander G r a h a m Bell invents the telephone 1877 Reconstruction ends; segregationist

J i m C r o w laws instituted 1878 H e n r y J a m e s , Daisy Miller 1879 T h o m a s Edison invents the electric

lightbulb 1880-1910 Vast immigration from is f o u r t e e n

E u r o p e ; U . S . p o p u l a t i o n i n 1900 t i m e s g r e a t e r t h a n in 1880 Constance Fenimore Woolson, 1800

"Miss G r i e f
1881 Joel Chandler Harris, "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story" 1882 J. D. Rockefeller organizes Standard

Oil T r u s t C h i n e s e Exclusion Act 1884 Adventures H o w e l l s , The M a r k T w a i n ( S a m u e l L. C l e m e n s ) , of Huckleberry Rise of Silas Finn Lapham W. D.

1886 S a r a h Heron"

Orne Jewett, " A

White

1886

Statue of Liberty dedicated

1887

General Allotment Act (Dawes Act)

p a s s e d to redistribute tribady held land b a s e 1889 Paw" Hamlin Garland, " U n d e r the Lion's 1889 Wovoka (Jack Wilson), a Paiute, has

vision that inspires G h o s t D a n c e religion

Boldface titles indicate works in the anthology.

1235

TEXTS
1890 Ambrose Bierce, "An O c c u r r e n c e at Bridge" 1890

CONTEXTS
C e n s u s Bureau declares frontier

Owl Creek

" c l o s e d " S e v e n t h Cavalry m a s s a c r e at W o u n d e d Knee ends Native American a r m e d resistance to U . S . g o v e r n m e n t Ellis Island Immigration Station opens

1891

M a r y E. Wilkins F r e e m a n , " A

New

E n g l a n d N u n " VVovoka, " T h e Letter: Cheyenne 1892 Yellow 1893 Version"

Messiah

Charlotte Perkins Oilman, " T h e Wall-paper" Frederick Jackson Turner, of the Frontier Ghost Tlie 1893 World's C o l u m b i a n Exposition held

Significance 1896 Dance 1897 1898

in C h i c a g o 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson upholds

J a m e s Mooney publishes Songs

segregated Boat" 1898 New

transportation

Stephen Crane, "The O p e n A b r a h a m C a h a n , "The and Other Stories

Imported of the

United States annexes

Hawaii

Bridegroom" York Ghetto

1898-99 1899 K a t e C h o p i n , The Awakening

Spanish-American War

Charles W. Chesnutt, "The Wife of His Y o u t h " Edith Wharton, " S o u l s Belated" 1900 million 1901 Childhood Z i t k a l a 5 a , Impressions of an Indian Rogaum Law from 1901 J . P. M o r g a n f o u n d s U . S . S t e e l U.S. population exceeds seventy-five

Theodore Dreiser, "Old

C o r p o r a t i o n first t r a n s a t l a n t i c r a d i o

and His T h e r e s a " J a c k L o n d o n , " T h e o f L i f e " B o o k e r T . W a s h i n g t o n , Up Slavery 1903 Black The W . E . B . D u B o i s , The Folk Night Souls of

\90i

Henry Ford founds Ford Motor C o . first successful Robbery is

Washington M a t t h e w s edits Chant: A Navajo Ceremony

Wright brothers make the a i r p l a n e f l i g h t Tlie first Great

Train

U . S . cinematic narrative Industrial W o r k e r s of the World

1905 founded 1907 J o h n M. Oskison, "The Problem of Education

O l d H a r j o " H e n r y A d a m s , Tlie of Henry Adams

1909

N a t i o n a l A s s o c i a t i o n for t h e (NAACP)

A d v a n c e m e n t of C o l o r e d People founded 1910 Songs Frances Densmore, Sui Sin Far, " M r s . Chippewa Spring

Fragrance" 1914 1916 Charles Alexander the Deep Eastman Woods to Panama Canal open

( O h i y e s a ) , From Civilization

1236

694

EDGAR ALLAN POE 1809-1849

T h e life of E d g a r Allan P o e is the m o s t m e l o d r a m a t i c of a n y of t h e m a j o r A m e r i c a n writers of his g e n e r a t i o n . D e t e r m i n i n g the facts h a s p r o v e d difficult, a s lurid l e g e n d b e c a m e e n t w i n e d with fact even before he d i e d . S o m e l e g e n d s w e r e s p r e a d by P o e himself. G i v e n to c l a i m i n g that h e w a s born in 1 8 1 1 or 1 8 1 3 a n d h a d written c e r t a i n p o e m s far earlier t h a n he h a d , P o e a l s o e x a g g e r a t e d t h e l e n g t h of his a t t e n d a n c e a t t h e University of Virginia a n d , in i m i t a t i o n of L o r d B y r o n , f a b r i c a t e d a " q u i x o t i c e x p e d i t i o n to j o i n the G r e e k s , t h e n s t r u g g l i n g for liberty." T w o d a y s after P o e ' s d e a t h his s u p p o s e d friend R u f u s G r i s w o l d , a p r o m i n e n t a n t h o l o g i z e r of A m e r i c a n l i t e r a t u r e , b e g a n a c a m p a i g n of c h a r a c t e r a s s a s s i n a t i o n in which h e ultimately rewrote P o e ' s c o r r e s p o n d e n c e s o a s to a l i e n a t e m a n y of his friends w h o c o u l d only a s s u m e t h a t P o e h a d t r e a c h e r o u s l y m a l i g n e d t h e m b e h i n d their b a c k s . G r i s w o l d ' s forgeries w e n t unexp o s e d for m a n y y e a r s , p o i s o n i n g every b i o g r a p h e r ' s i m a g e of P o e , a n d l e g e n d still f e e d s on half-truth in m u c h writing o n h i m . Yet b i o g r a p h e r s n o w p o s s e s s a g r e a t d e a l of f a c t u a l e v i d e n c e a b o u t m o s t p e r i o d s of P o e ' s life. H i s m o t h e r , E l i z a b e t h A r n o l d , h a d b e e n a n a c t r e s s , p r o m i n e n t a m o n g the w a n d e r i n g s e a p o r t players in a p r o f e s s i o n that w a s t h e n c o n s i d e r e d d i s r e p u t a b l e . S h e w a s a t e e n a g e w i d o w w h e n s h e m a r r i e d D a v i d P o e Jr. in 1 8 0 6 . P o e , a l s o an a c t o r , worked u p to c h o i c e s u p p o r t i n g roles b e f o r e l i q u o r d e s t r o y e d his c a r e e r . E d g a r , the P o e s ' s e c o n d child, was born in B o s t o n on J a n u a r y 19, 1 8 0 9 ; a y e a r later D a v i d P o e d e s e r t e d the family. In D e c e m b e r 1 8 1 1 , E l i z a b e t h P o e died at twenty-four while a c t i n g in R i c h m o n d , Virginia; a n d h e r h u s b a n d d i s a p p e a r e d c o m p l e t e l y , p r o b a b l y dying s o o n afterward at the a g e of twenty-seven. T h e d i s r u p t i o n s of P o e ' s first two y e a r s w e r e followed by a p p a r e n t security, for J o h n Allan, a y o u n g R i c h m o n d m e r c h a n t , t o o k h i m in a s t h e c h i l d r e n w e r e p a r c e l e d out. A s " M a s t e r A l l a n , " P o e a c c o m p a n i e d the family to E n g l a n d in 1 8 1 5 , w h e r e h e a t t e n d e d g o o d s c h o o l s . O n their return in 1 8 2 0 t h e boy c o n t i n u e d in s c h o o l , b u t u n d e r his own last n a m e . P o e s p e n t m o s t of 1 8 2 6 at the n e w University of Virginia, d o i n g well in his s t u d i e s , a l t h o u g h he w a s a l r e a d y drinking. After a q u a r r e l with Allan in M a r c h 1 8 2 7 , P o e l o o k e d u p his father's relatives in B a l t i m o r e a n d t h e n went o n and Other Poems, "By to his b i r t h p l a c e , w h e r e he paid for the p r i n t i n g of Tamerlane a B o s t o n i a n . " B e f o r e its p u b l i c a t i o n , " E d g a r A. P e r r y " h a d j o i n e d t h e a r m y . P o e w a s partially r e c o n c i l e d with Allan in M a r c h 1 8 2 9 , j u s t after M r s . Allan d i e d . R e l e a s e d from t h e a r m y with t h e r a n k of s e r g e a n t m a j o r , P o e s o u g h t Allan's i n f l u e n c e to g a i n him an a p p o i n t m e n t to W e s t P o i n t , a l t h o u g h he w a s p a s t t h e a g e limit for a d m i s s i o n . W h i l e he w a s w a i t i n g for t h e a p p o i n t m e n t , P o e s h o r t e n e d Tamerlane, revised other p o e m s , a n d a d d e d new o n e s to m a k e u p a s e c o n d v o l u m e , Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, p u b l i s h e d in B a l t i m o r e in D e c e m b e r 1 8 2 9 . H e e n t e r e d W e s t Point in J u n e 1 8 3 0 , but l o s i n g a n y r e m a i n i n g h o p e that if he dutifully p u r s u e d a military c a r e e r he m i g h t b e c o m e Allan's heir, P o e got h i m s e l f e x p e l l e d by m i s s i n g c l a s s e s a n d roll c a l l s . S u p p o r t i v e friends a m o n g the c a d e t s m a d e u p a s u b s c r i p t i o n for his Poems, p u b l i s h e d in M a y 1 8 3 1 . In this third v o l u m e P o e revised s o m e earlier p o e m s a n d for t h e first time i n c l u d e d v e r s i o n s of b o t h " T o H e l e n " (the f a m o u s " H e l e n , thy b e a u t y is to m e " ) a n d " I s r a f e l . " P o e ' s m a t u r e c a r e e r f r o m his twenty-first year to his d e a t h in his fortieth y e a r w a s s p e n t in four literary c e n t e r s : B a l t i m o r e , R i c h m o n d , P h i l a d e l p h i a , a n d N e w York. T h e B a l t i m o r e y e a r s m i d - 1 8 3 1 to late 1 8 3 5 w e r e m a r k e d by g r e a t i n d u s t r y a n d c o m p a r a t i v e sobriety. P o e lived in s o r d i d poverty a m o n g his o n c e - p r o s p e r o u s relatives, i n c l u d i n g his a u n t M a r i a P o e C l e m m a n d her d a u g h t e r V i r g i n i a , w h o m P o e s e c r e t l y m a r r i e d in 1 8 3 5 , w h e n s h e w a s t h i r t e e n . P o e ' s first story, " M e t z e n g e r s t e i n " (later Saturday s u b t i t l e d " I n I m i t a t i o n of the G e r m a n " ) , w a s p u b l i s h e d in t h e P h i l a d e l p h i a Courier, a n o n y m o u s l y , in J a n u a r y 1 8 3 2 , a n d other s t o r i e s a p p e a r e d in t h e s a m e p a p e r

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t h r o u g h the year. P o e r e t u r n e d to R i c h m o n d in 1 8 3 5 , twenty-six years o l d , a s a s s i s t a n t editor of T . L. W h i t e ' s n e w Southern Literary Messenger, at a salary o f $ 5 4 0 a year, s u b s i s t e n c e w a g e s even in the 1 8 3 0 s . T h e Messenger p u b l i s h e d s t o r i e s by P o e , hut it w a s t h r o u g h his critical p i e c e s that h e g a i n e d a n a t i o n a l r e p u t a t i o n a s a reviewer in t h e virulently s a r c a s t i c B r i t i s h m a n n e r a literary h a t c h e t m a n . F i r e d from t h e Messenger early in 1 8 3 7 , P o e took his a u n t a n d his wife ( w h o m h e h a d publicly r e m a r r i e d in M a y 1 8 3 6 ) to N e w York City, w h e r e for two years h e lived h a n d to m o u t h o n the fringes of the p u b l i s h i n g world, s e l l i n g a few s t o r i e s a n d reviews. H e h a d written a short novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in R i c h m o n d , w h e r e W h i t e ran two i n s t a l l m e n t s in the Messenger early in 1 8 3 7 . Harper's finally b r o u g h t it o u t in J u l y 1 8 3 8 , b u t it e a r n e d him n o m o n e y a n d , b e c a u s e it p u r p o r t e d only to b e e d i t e d by P o e , not m u c h r e p u t a t i o n either. In 1 8 3 8 P o e m o v e d to Philad e l p h i a , w h e r e for w e e k s t h e family survived o n b r e a d a n d m o l a s s e s . B u t h e c o n t i n u e d writing, a n d " L i g e i a " a p p e a r e d in the B a l t i m o r e American Museum in S e p t e m b e r 1 8 3 8 , w h e r e o t h e r s t o r i e s a n d p o e m s followed. In M a y 1 8 3 9 h e got his first s t e a d y j o b in m o r e t h a n two y e a r s , a s c o e d i t o r of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. T h e r e he p u b l i s h e d b o o k reviews a n d s t o r i e s , a m o n g t h e m " T h e Fall of t h e H o u s e of U s h e r " a n d " W i l l i a m W i l s o n . " L a t e in 1 8 3 9 , a P h i l a d e l p h i a firm p u b l i s h e d Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, b u t it s o l d badly. P o e w a s n o w at t h e h e i g h t of his p o w e r s a s a writer of t a l e s , t h o u g h his p e r s o n a l life c o n t i n u e d u n s t a b l e , a s d i d his c a r e e r a s a n editor. W i l l i a m B u r t o n fired h i m for d r i n k i n g in M a y 1 8 4 0 b u t r e c o m m e n d e d h i m to G e o r g e G r a h a m , w h o c a r r i e d o n B u r t o n ' s m a g a z i n e a s Graham's. Throughout 1841, P o e w a s with Graham's a s c o e d i t o r , c o u r t i n g s u b s c r i b e r s by a r t i c l e s o n c r y p t o g r a p h y a n d on c h a r a c t e r a s revealed in h a n d w r i t i n g . In J a n u a r y 1 8 4 2 , Virginia P o e , n o t yet twenty, b u r s t a b l o o d v e s s e l in her throat ( s h e lived only five m o r e y e a r s ) . L e a v i n g Graham's in s o m e u n h a p p i n e s s , P o e revived a p r o j e c t for his o w n m a g a z i n e , n o w to b e c a l l e d The Stylus. In April 1 8 4 4 P o e m o v e d his family to N e w York City, w h e r e h e w r o t e for n e w s p a p e r s a n d w o r k e d a s s u b e d i t o r o n the Sunday Times. P o e ' s m o s t s u c c e s s f u l year w a s 1 8 4 5 . T h e F e b r u a r y i s s u e of Graham's c o n t a i n e d J a m e s R u s s e l l Lowell's c o m p l i m e n tary article on P o e , a n d " T h e R a v e n " a p p e a r e d in t h e F e b r u a r y American Beview after a d v a n c e p u b l i c a t i o n in the N e w York Evening Mirror. Capitalizing on the sensation t h e p o e m c r e a t e d , P o e l e c t u r e d on p o e t s of A m e r i c a a n d b e c a m e a p r i n c i p a l reviewer for the n e w weekly, the Broadway Journal. " T h e R a v e n " w o n h i m e n t r e e into the literary life of N e w York. O n e new literary a c q u a i n t a n c e , E v e r t A. D u y c k i n c k , s o o n to b e Melville's friend a l s o , s e l e c t e d a d o z e n of P o e ' s s t o r i e s for a c o l l e c t i o n b r o u g h t o u t by Wiley & P u t n a m in J u n e a n d a r r a n g e d for the s a m e firm to p u b l i s h The Baven and Other Poems in N o v e m b e r . H a v i n g a c q u i r e d critical c l o u t d e s p i t e a g r o w i n g n u m ber of e n e m i e s , P o e h a d g r e a t h o p e s for the Broadway Journal, of w h i c h h e b e c a m e s o l e o w n e r ; b u t it failed early in 1 8 4 6 . M e a n w h i l e P o e w a s m a r r i n g his n e w o p p o r t u n i t i e s by drinking. W i t h f a m e , the t e m p o of P o e ' s life s p u n into a blur of literary f e u d s , flirtations with literary l a d i e s , a n d d r i n k i n g b o u t s that e n d e d in q u a r r e l s . Virginia's d e a t h in J a n u a r y 1 8 4 7 s l o w e d the t e m p o : d u r i n g m u c h of that year P o e w a s s e r i o u s l y ill h i m s e l f p e r h a p s with a brain l e s i o n a n d d r i n k i n g steadily. H e w o r k e d a w a y at " E u r e k a , " a p r o s e s t a t e m e n t of a theory of t h e u n i v e r s e , a n d s o o n after Virginia's d e a t h h e w r o t e " U l a l u m e . " W h i l e visiting R i c h m o n d in 1 8 4 9 h e w a s offered a h u n d r e d d o l l a r s to edit the p o e m s of a P h i l a d e l p h i a w o m a n . S t o p p i n g off in B a l t i m o r e , P o e b r o k e his t e m p e r a n c e p l e d g e a n d w a s f o u n d s e n s e l e s s n e a r a p o l l i n g p l a c e on E l e c t i o n D a y ( O c t o b e r 3 ) . T a k e n to a h o s p i t a l , h e d i e d on O c t o b e r 7, 1 8 4 9 , " o f c o n g e s t i o n of t h e b r a i n . " T h e h a n d f u l of p o e m s that P o e w r o t e in t h e 1 8 4 0 s m a d e h i m f a m o u s a s a p o e t . " T h e R a v e n " b r o u g h t h i m i n t e r n a t i o n a l celebrity, a n d p o e m s like " U l a l u m e " a n d " T h e B e l l s " s o o n e n h a n c e d that f a m e a m o n g P o e ' s c o n s t a n t l y e n l a r g i n g p o s t h u m o u s a u d i e n c e . T h e bulk of P o e ' s c o l l e c t e d writings c o n s i s t s of his c r i t i c i s m , a n d his m o s t a b i d i n g a m b i t i o n w a s to b e c o m e a powerful critic. J u s t a s h e h a d m o d e l e d his p o e m s

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a n d first t a l e s on B r i t i s h e x a m p l e s (or B r i t i s h i m i t a t i o n s of t h e G e r m a n ) , h e t o o k h i s critical c o n c e p t s f r o m t r e a t i s e s o n a e s t h e t i c s by l a t e - e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y Scottish C o m m o n S e n s e p h i l o s o p h e r s (later m o d i f i e d by h i s b o r r o w i n g s f r o m A . W . S c h l e g e l a n d C o l e r i d g e ) a n d t o o k his s t a n c e a s a reviewer f r o m t h e s l a s h i n g c r i t i c s o f t h e B r i t i s h q u a r t e r l i e s . P o e ' s e m p l o y e r s w e r e often u n e a s y a b o u t their reviewer, b o t h b e c a u s e h i s v i r u l e n c e b r o u g h t r e p r o a c h e s ( t h o u g h it w a s g o o d for b u s i n e s s ) a n d b e c a u s e they s u s p e c t e d that for all his s t r e s s o n a e s t h e t i c p r i n c i p l e s , P o e ' s r e v i e w s w e r e a p t to b e u n j u s t to writers h e w a s j e a l o u s o f a n d l a u d a t o r y t o w a r d o t h e r s h e w i s h e d to curry favor with. B u t P o e ' s b a s i c critical p r i n c i p l e s w e r e c o n s i s t e n t e n o u g h . H e t h o u g h t poetry s h o u l d a p p e a l only t o t h e s e n s e o f b e a u t y , n o t t r u t h ; i n f o r m a t i o n a l poetry, poetry o f i d e a s , or a n y sort o f d i d a c t i c poetry w a s i l l e g i t i m a t e . H o l d i n g that t h e true p o e t i c e m o t i o n w a s a v a g u e s e n s o r y s t a t e , h e s e t h i m s e l f a g a i n s t realistic d e t a i l s in poetry, a l t h o u g h t h e p r o s e t a l e , with truth a s o n e o b j e c t , c o u l d profit from t h e d i s c r e e t u s e o f s p e c i f i c s . B o t h p o e m s a n d t a l e s s h o u l d b e short e n o u g h to b e r e a d in o n e sitting; o t h e r w i s e t h e unity o f effect w o u l d b e d i s s i p a t e d . P o e ' s first t a l e s h a v e p r o v e d h a r d t o c l a s s i f y a r e they b u r l e s q u e s o f p o p u l a r k i n d s of fiction or s e r i o u s a t t e m p t s a t c o n t r i b u t i n g to o r s o m e h o w a l t e r i n g t h o s e g e n r e s ? P o e ' s o w n c o m m e n t s t e n d to b e c l o u d h i s i n t e n t i o n s r a t h e r t h a n t o clarify t h e m . In 1 8 3 6 his b e n e f a c t o r J o h n P. K e n n e d y w r o t e h i m : " S o m e o f y o u r bizarreries m i s t a k e n for s a t i r e a n d a d m i r e d t o o in that c h a r a c t e r . They have been d e s e r v e d it, b u t you d i d

not, for y o u did n o t i n t e n d t h e m s o . I like y o u r g r o t e s q u e i t is o f t h e very best s t a m p ; a n d I a m s u r e you will d o w o n d e r s for y o u r s e l f in t h e c o m i c I m e a n t h e seriotragic o m i c . " P o e ' s reply is t a n t a l i z i n g : " Y o u a r e nearly, b u t n o t a l t o g e t h e r right in r e l a t i o n to t h e s a t i r e o f s o m e o f m y T a l e s . M o s t o f t h e m w e r e intended for half b a n t e r , half s a t i r e a l t h o u g h I m i g h t n o t h a v e fully a c k n o w l e d g e d this t o b e their a i m even to myself." T h e p r o b l e m o f d e t e r m i n i n g t h e n a t u r e o f a given w o r k i m i t a t i o n ? s a t i r e ? s p o o f ? h o a x ? i s c r u c i a l in P o e c r i t i c i s m . At t h e c o r e of P o e ' s d e f e n s e s o f his s t o r i e s is t h e h a r d h e a d e d n e s s o f a p r o f e s s i o n a l writer w h o w a n t e d t o c r a c k t h e p o p u l a r m a r k e t . H e w o r k e d h a r d a t s t r u c t u r i n g h i s tales of aristocratic m a d m e n , self-tormented murderers, n e u r a s t h e n i c necrophiliacs, a n d o t h e r d e v i a n t types s o a s to p r o d u c e t h e g r e a t e s t p o s s i b l e horrific e f f e c t s o n t h e r e a d e r . In t h e d e t e c t i v e story, w h i c h P o e c r e a t e d w h e n h e w a s thirty-two, with all its major conventions complete, the structuring w a s equally contrived, although the effect d e s i r e d w a s o n e o f a w e a t t h e b r i l l i a n c e of h i s p r e t e r n a t u r a l l o g i c i a n - h e r o . S e r i o u s l y a s h e t o o k t h e writing of h i s t a l e s , P o e n e v e r c l a i m e d t h a t p r o s e writing w a s for h i m , a s h e s a i d poetry w a s , a " p a s s i o n , " n o t m e r e l y a " p u r p o s e . "

SonnetTo Science 1
S C I E N C E ! m e e t d a u g h t e r o f old T i m e t h o u a r t

W h o alterest all things with thy p e e r i n g eyes! Why prey'st t h o u t h u s u p o n the p o e t ' s h e a r t , Vulture! w h o s e wings a r e dull realities! H o w s h o u l d h e love t h e e o r how d e e m t h e e wise W h o woulds't not leave h i m , in his w a n d e r i n g , T o s e e k for t r e a s u r e in t h e jewell'd skies Albeit, h e s o a r with a n u n d a u n t e d wing?
1. T h e t e x t i s f r o m The Raven ami Other Poems ( 1 8 4 5 ) . B o t h in 1 8 2 9 a n d in 1 8 3 1 t h e s o n n e t , untit l e d , w a s p r i n t e d a s a p r o e m t o Al Aaraaf; i n 1 8 4 5 t h e p o e m r e t a i n e d i t s p l a c e b u t c a r r i e d t h e t i t l e first u s e d in a n 1 8 4 3 reprinting. " S o n n e t T o S c i e n c e " is b u i l t o n t h e R o m a n t i c c o m m o n p l a c e t h a t t h e scientific spirit destroys beauty, a notion well

exemplified by W o r d s w o r t h ' s "The T a b l e s T u r n e d " ( " S w e e t is t h e lore w h i c h N a t u r e brings; / O u r medling intellect / M i s s h a p e s the b e a u t e o u s forms of t h i n g s ; / W e m u r d e r to d i s s e c t " ) a n d by K e a t s ' s " L a m i a " ( " P h i l o s o p h y will c l i p a n a n g e l ' s wings").

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The Raven Presently my soul grew stronger: hesitating then no longer, "Sir, " said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore: But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you"-- here I opened wide the door-Darkness there and nothing more. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. " 'T is some visitor, " I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-Only this and nothing more." Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow -- vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore-For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore-Nameless here for evermore. And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before: So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating. " 'T is some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door-Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door-That it is and nothing more." Open here i flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-Perched upon a bust of Pallas just a bove my chamber door-Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. "Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore-Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore-'T is the wind an nothing more!" Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering fearing. Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before: But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?" This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word "Lenore!"-Merely this and nothing more.

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Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore-Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning -- little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door-Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as "Nevermore." But the Raven sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpoor. Nothing further then he uttered, not a feather then he fluttered-Till I scarcely more then muttered, "Other friends have flown before -On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before." Then the bird said, "Nevermore." Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, "Doubtless," said I, "what it utteres is it only stock and store Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Then methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. "Wretch," I cried, "thy God has lent thee -- by these angels he hath sent thee Respite -- respite the nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh, quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl, whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er But whose velvet-violet lining with lamp-light gloating o'er She shall press, ah, nevermore! But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door, Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore-What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking, "Nevermore." Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -Till the dirges of his Hope the melancholy burden bore Of 'Never - nevermore.'"

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"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird of devil! Whether Tempter sent, or whatever tempest tossed thee ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -On this home by Horror haunted -- tell me truly, I implore -Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird of devil! By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore-Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore -Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." "Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting -"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor, And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor SOME YEARS ago, I engaged passage from Charleston, S. C, to the city of New York, in the fine packet-ship "Independence," Captain Hardy. We were to sail on the fifteenth of the month (June), weather permitting; and on the fourteenth, I went on board to arrange some matters in my stateroom. I found that we were to have a great many passengers, including a more than usual number of ladies. On the list were several of my acquaintances, and among other names, I was rejoiced to see that of Mr. Cornelius Wyatt, a young artist, for whom I entertained feelings of warm friendship. He had been with me a fellow-student at C- University, where we were very much together. He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm. To these qualities he united the warmest and truest heart which ever beat in a human bosom. I observed that his name was carded upon three state-rooms; and, upon again referring to the list of passengers, I found that he had engaged passage for himself, wife, and two sisters- his own. The state-rooms were sufficiently roomy, and each had two berths, one above the other. These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three state-rooms for these four persons. I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about THE OBLONG BOX Edgar Allan Poe, 1850 Shall be lifted -- nevermore!

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trifles: and I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of illbred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary state-room. It was no business of mine, to be sure, but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts to resolve the enigma. At last I reached a conclusion which wrought in me great wonder why I had not arrived at it before. "It is a servant of course," I said; "what a fool I am, not sooner to have thought of so obvious a solution!" And then I again repaired to the list- but here I saw distinctly that no servant was to come with the party, although, in fact, it had been the original design to bring one- for the words "and servant" had been first written and then overscored. "Oh, extra baggage, to be sure," I now said to myself- "something he wishes not to be put in the hold- something to be kept under his own eye- ah, I have it- a painting or so- and this is what he has been bargaining about with Nicolino, the Italian Jew." This idea satisfied me, and I dismissed my curiosity for the nonce. Wyatt's two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever girls they were. His wife he had newly married, and I had never yet seen her. He had often talked about her in my presence, however, and in his usual style of enthusiasm. He described her as of surpassing beauty, wit, and accomplishment. I was, therefore, quite anxious to make her acquaintance. On the day in which I visited the ship (the fourteenth), Wyatt and party were also to visit it- so the captain informed me- and I waited on board an hour longer than I had designed, in hope of being presented to the bride, but then an apology came. "Mrs. W. was a little indisposed, and would decline coming on board until to-morrow, at the hour of sailing." The morrow having arrived, I was going from my hotel to the wharf, when Captain Hardy met me and said that, "owing to circumstances" (a stupid but convenient phrase), "he rather thought the 'Independence' would not sail for a day or two, and that when all was ready, he would send up and let me know." This I thought strange, for there was a stiff southerly breeze; but as "the circumstances" were not forthcoming, although I pumped for them with much perseverance, I had nothing to do but to return home and digest my impatience at leisure. I did not receive the expected message from the captain for nearly a week. It came at length, however, and I immediately went on board. The ship was crowded with passengers, and every thing was in the bustle attendant upon making sail. Wyatt's party arrived in about ten minutes after myself. There were the two sisters, the bride, and the artist- the latter in one of his customary fits of moody misanthropy. I was too well used to these, however, to pay them any special attention. He did not even introduce me to his wife- this courtesy devolving, per force, upon his sister Marian- a very sweet and intelligent girl, who, in a few hurried words, made us acquainted. Mrs. Wyatt had been closely veiled; and when she raised her veil, in acknowledging my bow, I confess that I was very profoundly astonished. I should have been much more so, however, had not long experience advised me not to trust, with too implicit a reliance, the enthusiastic descriptions of my friend, the artist, when indulging in comments upon the loveliness of woman. When beauty was the theme, I well knew with what facility he soared into the regions of the purely ideal. The truth is, I could not help regarding Mrs. Wyatt as a decidedly plainlooking woman. If not positively ugly, she was not, I think, very far from it. She was dressed, however, in exquisite taste- and then I had no doubt that she had captivated my friend's heart by the more enduring graces of the intellect and soul. She said very few words, and passed at once into her state-room with Mr. W. My old inquisitiveness now returned. There was no servant- that was a settled point. I looked, therefore, for the extra baggage. After some delay, a cart arrived at the wharf, with an oblong pine box, which was every thing

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that seemed to be expected. Immediately upon its arrival we made sail, and in a short time were safely over the bar and standing out to sea. The box in question was, as I say, oblong. It was about six feet in length by two and a half in breadth; I observed it attentively, and like to be precise. Now this shape was peculiar; and no sooner had I seen it, than I took credit to myself for the accuracy of my guessing. I had reached the conclusion, it will be remembered, that the extra baggage of my friend, the artist, would prove to be pictures, or at least a picture; for I knew he had been for several weeks in conference with Nicolino:- and now here was a box, which, from its shape, could possibly contain nothing in the world but a copy of Leonardo's "Last Supper;" and a copy of this very "Last Supper," done by Rubini the younger, at Florence, I had known, for some time, to be in the possession of Nicolino. This point, therefore, I considered as sufficiently settled. I chuckled excessively when I thought of my acumen. It was the first time I had ever known Wyatt to keep from me any of his artistical secrets; but here he evidently intended to steal a march upon me, and smuggle a fine picture to New York, under my very nose; expecting me to know nothing of the matter. I resolved to quiz him well, now and hereafter. One thing, however, annoyed me not a little. The box did not go into the extra state-room. It was deposited in Wyatt's own; and there, too, it remained, occupying very nearly the whole of the floor- no doubt to the exceeding discomfort of the artist and his wife;- this the more especially as the tar or paint with which it was lettered in sprawling capitals, emitted a strong, disagreeable, and, to my fancy, a peculiarly disgusting odor. On the lid were painted the words- "Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, Albany, New York. Charge of Cornelius Wyatt, Esq. This side up. To be handled with care." Now, I was aware that Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, of Albany, was the artist's wife's mother,- but then I looked upon the whole address as a mystification, intended especially for myself. I made up my mind, of course, that the box and contents would never get farther north than the studio of my misanthropic friend, in Chambers Street, New York. For the first three or four days we had fine weather, although the wind was dead ahead; having chopped round to the northward, immediately upon our losing sight of the coast. The passengers were, consequently, in high spirits and disposed to be social. I must except, however, Wyatt and his sisters, who behaved stiffly, and, I could not help thinking, uncourteously to the rest of the party. Wyatt's conduct I did not so much regard. He was gloomy, even beyond his usual habit- in fact he was morose- but in him I was prepared for eccentricity. For the sisters, however, I could make no excuse. They secluded themselves in their staterooms during the greater part of the passage, and absolutely refused, although I repeatedly urged them, to hold communication with any person on board. Mrs. Wyatt herself was far more agreeable. That is to say, she was chatty; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea. She became excessively intimate with most of the ladies; and, to my profound astonishment, evinced no equivocal disposition to coquet with the men. She amused us all very much. I say "amused"- and scarcely know how to explain myself. The truth is, I soon found that Mrs. W. was far oftener laughed at than with. The gentlemen said little about her; but the ladies, in a little while, pronounced her "a good-hearted thing, rather indifferent looking, totally uneducated, and decidedly vulgar." The great wonder was, how Wyatt had been entrapped into such a match. Wealth was the general solution- but this I knew to be no solution at all; for Wyatt had told me that she neither brought him a dollar nor had any expectations from any source whatever. "He had married," he said, "for love, and for love only; and his bride was far more than worthy of his love." When I thought of these expressions, on the part of my friend, I confess that I felt indescribably puzzled. Could it be possible that he was taking leave of his senses? What else could I think? He, so refined, so intellectual, so fastidious, with so

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exquisite a perception of the faulty, and so keen an appreciation of the beautiful! To be sure, the lady seemed especially fond of him- particularly so in his absence- when she made herself ridiculous by frequent quotations of what had been said by her "beloved husband, Mr. Wyatt." The word "husband" seemed forever- to use one of her own delicate expressionsforever "on the tip of her tongue." In the meantime, it was observed by all on board, that he avoided her in the most pointed manner, and, for the most part, shut himself up alone in his state-room, where, in fact, he might have been said to live altogether, leaving his wife at full liberty to amuse herself as she thought best, in the public society of the main cabin. My conclusion, from what I saw and heard, was, that, the artist, by some unaccountable freak of fate, or perhaps in some fit of enthusiastic and fanciful passion, had been induced to unite himself with a person altogether beneath him, and that the natural result, entire and speedy disgust, had ensued. I pitied him from the bottom of my heart- but could not, for that reason, quite forgive his incommunicativeness in the matter of the "Last Supper." For this I resolved to have my revenge. One day he came upon deck, and, taking his arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward. His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated. He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort. I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile. Poor fellow!- as I thought of his wife, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, about the oblong box- just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was not altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification. My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery. I said something about the "peculiar shape of that box-," and, as I spoke the words, I smiled knowingly, winked, and touched him gently with my forefinger in the ribs. The manner in which Wyatt received this harmless pleasantry convinced me, at once, that he was mad. At first he stared at me as if he found it impossible to comprehend the witticism of my remark; but as its point seemed slowly to make its way into his brain, his eyes, in the same proportion, seemed protruding from their sockets. Then he grew very redthen hideously pale- then, as if highly amused with what I had insinuated, he began a loud and boisterous laugh, which, to my astonishment, he kept up, with gradually increasing vigor, for ten minutes or more. In conclusion, he fell flat and heavily upon the deck. When I ran to uplift him, to all appearance he was dead. I called assistance, and, with much difficulty, we brought him to himself. Upon reviving he spoke incoherently for some time. At length we bled him and put him to bed. The next morning he was quite recovered, so far as regarded his mere bodily health. Of his mind I say nothing, of course. I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to any person on board. Several circumstances occurred immediately after this fit of Wyatt which contributed to heighten the curiosity with which I was already possessed. Among other things, this: I had been nervous- drank too much strong green tea, and slept ill at night- in fact, for two nights I could not be properly said to sleep at all. Now, my state-room opened into the main cabin, or diningroom, as did those of all the single men on board. Wyatt's three rooms were in the after-cabin, which was separated from the main one by a slight sliding door, never locked even at night. As we were almost constantly on a wind, and the breeze was not a little stiff, the ship heeled to leeward very considerably; and whenever her starboard side was to leeward, the sliding door between the cabins slid open, and so remained, nobody taking the trouble to get up and shut it. But my berth was in such a position, that when my own state-room door was open, as well as the sliding door in

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question (and my own door was always open on account of the heat,) I could see into the after-cabin quite distinctly, and just at that portion of it, too, where were situated the state-rooms of Mr. Wyatt. Well, during two nights (not consecutive) while I lay awake, I clearly saw Mrs. W., about eleven o'clock upon each night, steal cautiously from the state-room of Mr. W., and enter the extra room, where she remained until daybreak, when she was called by her husband and went back. That they were virtually separated was clear. They had separate apartments- no doubt in contemplation of a more permanent divorce; and here, after all I thought was the mystery of the extra state-room. There was another circumstance, too, which interested me much. During the two wakeful nights in question, and immediately after the disappearance of Mrs. Wyatt into the extra state-room, I was attracted by certain singular cautious, subdued noises in that of her husband. After listening to them for some time, with thoughtful attention, I at length succeeded perfectly in translating their import. They were sounds occasioned by the artist in prying open the oblong box, by means of a chisel and mallet- the latter being apparently muffled, or deadened, by some soft woollen or cotton substance in which its head was enveloped. In this manner I fancied I could distinguish the precise moment when he fairly disengaged the lid- also, that I could determine when he removed it altogether, and when he deposited it upon the lower berth in his room; this latter point I knew, for example, by certain slight taps which the lid made in striking against the wooden edges of the berth, as he endeavored to lay it down very gently- there being no room for it on the floor. After this there was a dead stillness, and I heard nothing more, upon either occasion, until nearly daybreak; unless, perhaps, I may mention a low sobbing, or murmuring sound, so very much suppressed as to be nearly inaudible- if, indeed, the whole of this latter noise were not rather produced by my own imagination. I say it seemed to resemble sobbing or sighing- but, of course, it could not have been either. I rather think it was a ringing in my own ears. Mr. Wyatt, no doubt, according to custom, was merely giving the rein to one of his hobbies- indulging in one of his fits of artistic enthusiasm. He had opened his oblong box, in order to feast his eyes on the pictorial treasure within. There was nothing in this, however, to make him sob. I repeat, therefore, that it must have been simply a freak of my own fancy, distempered by good Captain Hardy's green tea. just before dawn, on each of the two nights of which I speak, I distinctly heard Mr. Wyatt replace the lid upon the oblong box, and force the nails into their old places by means of the muffled mallet. Having done this, he issued from his state-room, fully dressed, and proceeded to call Mrs. W. from hers. We had been at sea seven days, and were now off Cape Hatteras, when there came a tremendously heavy blow from the southwest. We were, in a measure, prepared for it, however, as the weather had been holding out threats for some time. Every thing was made snug, alow and aloft; and as the wind steadily freshened, we lay to, at length, under spanker and foretopsail, both double-reefed. In this trim we rode safely enough for forty-eight hours- the ship proving herself an excellent sea-boat in many respects, and shipping no water of any consequence. At the end of this period, however, the gale had freshened into a hurricane, and our after- sail split into ribbons, bringing us so much in the trough of the water that we shipped several prodigious seas, one immediately after the other. By this accident we lost three men overboard with the caboose, and nearly the whole of the larboard bulwarks. Scarcely had we recovered our senses, before the foretopsail went into shreds, when we got up a storm stay- sail and with this did pretty well for some hours, the ship heading the sea much more steadily than before. The gale still held on, however, and we saw no signs of its abating. The rigging was found to be ill-fitted, and greatly strained; and on the third day of the blow, about five in the afternoon, our mizzen-mast, in a heavy lurch

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to windward, went by the board. For an hour or more, we tried in vain to get rid of it, on account of the prodigious rolling of the ship; and, before we had succeeded, the carpenter came aft and announced four feet of water in the hold. To add to our dilemma, we found the pumps choked and nearly useless. All was now confusion and despair- but an effort was made to lighten the ship by throwing overboard as much of her cargo as could be reached, and by cutting away the two masts that remained. This we at last accomplished- but we were still unable to do any thing at the pumps; and, in the meantime, the leak gained on us very fast. At sundown, the gale had sensibly diminished in violence, and as the sea went down with it, we still entertained faint hopes of saving ourselves in the boats. At eight P. M., the clouds broke away to windward, and we had the advantage of a full moon- a piece of good fortune which served wonderfully to cheer our drooping spirits. After incredible labor we succeeded, at length, in getting the longboat over the side without material accident, and into this we crowded the whole of the crew and most of the passengers. This party made off immediately, and, after undergoing much suffering, finally arrived, in safety, at Ocracoke Inlet, on the third day after the wreck. Fourteen passengers, with the captain, remained on board, resolving to trust their fortunes to the jolly-boat at the stern. We lowered it without difficulty, although it was only by a miracle that we prevented it from swamping as it touched the water. It contained, when afloat, the captain and his wife, Mr. Wyatt and party, a Mexican officer, wife, four children, and myself, with a negro valet. We had no room, of course, for any thing except a few positively necessary instruments, some provisions, and the clothes upon our backs. No one had thought of even attempting to save any thing more. What must have been the astonishment of all, then, when having proceeded a few fathoms from the ship, Mr. Wyatt stood up in the stern-sheets, and coolly demanded of Captain Hardy that the boat should be put back for the purpose of taking in his oblong box! "Sit down, Mr. Wyatt," replied the captain, somewhat sternly, "you will capsize us if you do not sit quite still. Our gunwhale is almost in the water now." "The box!" vociferated Mr. Wyatt, still standing- "the box, I say! Captain Hardy, you cannot, you will not refuse me. Its weight will be but a trifle- it is nothing- mere nothing. By the mother who bore you- for the love of Heaven- by your hope of salvation, I implore you to put back for the box!" The captain, for a moment, seemed touched by the earnest appeal of the artist, but he regained his stern composure, and merely said: "Mr. Wyatt, you are mad. I cannot listen to you. Sit down, I say, or you will swamp the boat. Stay- hold him- seize him!- he is about to spring overboard! There- I knew it- he is over!" As the captain said this, Mr. Wyatt, in fact, sprang from the boat, and, as we were yet in the lee of the wreck, succeeded, by almost superhuman exertion, in getting hold of a rope which hung from the fore-chains. In another moment he was on board, and rushing frantically down into the cabin. In the meantime, we had been swept astern of the ship, and being quite out of her lee, were at the mercy of the tremendous sea which was still running. We made a determined effort to put back, but our little boat was like a feather in the breath of the tempest. We saw at a glance that the doom of the unfortunate artist was sealed. As our distance from the wreck rapidly increased, the madman (for as such only could we regard him) was seen to emerge from the companion- way, up which by dint of strength that appeared gigantic, he dragged, bodily, the oblong box. While we gazed in the extremity of astonishment, he passed,

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rapidly, several turns of a three-inch rope, first around the box and then around his body. In another instant both body and box were in the seadisappearing suddenly, at once and forever. We lingered awhile sadly upon our oars, with our eyes riveted upon the spot. At length we pulled away. The silence remained unbroken for an hour. Finally, I hazarded a remark. "Did you observe, captain, how suddenly they sank? Was not that an exceedingly singular thing? I confess that I entertained some feeble hope of his final deliverance, when I saw him lash himself to the box, and commit himself to the sea." "They sank as a matter of course," replied the captain, "and that like a shot. They will soon rise again, however- but not till the salt melts." "The salt!" I ejaculated. "Hush!" said the captain, pointing to the wife and sisters of the deceased. "We must talk of these things at some more appropriate time." We suffered much, and made a narrow escape, but fortune befriended us, as well as our mates in the long-boat. We landed, in fine, more dead than alive, after four days of intense distress, upon the beach opposite Roanoke Island. We remained here a week, were not ill-treated by the wreckers, and at length obtained a passage to New York. About a month after the loss of the "Independence," I happened to meet Captain Hardy in Broadway. Our conversation turned, naturally, upon the disaster, and especially upon the sad fate of poor Wyatt. I thus learned the following particulars. The artist had engaged passage for himself, wife, two sisters and a servant. His wife was, indeed, as she had been represented, a most lovely, and most accomplished woman. On the morning of the fourteenth of June (the day in which I first visited the ship), the lady suddenly sickened and died. The young husband was frantic with grief- but circumstances imperatively forbade the deferring his voyage to New York. It was necessary to take to her mother the corpse of his adored wife, and, on the other hand, the universal prejudice which would prevent his doing so openly was well known. Nine-tenths of the passengers would have abandoned the ship rather than take passage with a dead body. In this dilemma, Captain Hardy arranged that the corpse, being first partially embalmed, and packed, with a large quantity of salt, in a box of suitable dimensions, should be conveyed on board as merchandise. Nothing was to be said of the lady's decease; and, as it was well understood that Mr. Wyatt had engaged passage for his wife, it became necessary that some person should personate her during the voyage. This the deceased lady's-maid was easily prevailed on to do. The extra state-room, originally engaged for this girl during her mistress' life, was now merely retained. In this state-room the pseudo-wife, slept, of course, every night. In the daytime she performed, to the best of her ability, the part of her mistresswhose person, it had been carefully ascertained, was unknown to any of the passengers on board. My own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament. But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night. There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will. There is an hysterical laugh which will forever ring within my ears.

Edgar Allan Poe

MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE by Edgar Allan Poe, 1833 Qui n'a plus qu'un moment a vivre N'a plus rien a dissimuler. --Quinault --Atys. OF my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. --Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age --I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity. After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18--, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I went as passenger --having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend. Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copperfastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank. We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound. One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N.W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heat iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, an more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately

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upon deck. I went below --not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed, every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears; but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. --As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a millwheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern. The extreme fury of the blast proved, in a great measure, the salvation of the ship. Although completely water-logged, yet, as her masts had gone by the board, she rose, after a minute, heavily from the sea, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense pressure of the tempest, finally righted. By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say. Stunned by the shock of the water, I found myself, upon recovery, jammed in between the stern-post and rudder. With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was, at first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed. After a while, I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had shipped with us at the moment of our leaving port. I hallooed to him with all my strength, and presently he came reeling aft. We soon discovered that we were the sole survivors of the accident. All on deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept overboard; --the captain and mates must have perished as they slept, for the cabins were deluged with water. Without assistance, we could expect to do little for the security of the ship, and our exertions were at first paralyzed by the momentary expectation of going down. Our cable had, of course, parted like pack-thread, at the first breath of the hurricane, or we should have been instantaneously overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful velocity before the sea, and the water made clear breaches over us. The frame-work of our stern was shattered excessively, and, in almost every respect, we had received considerable injury; but to our extreme Joy we found the pumps unchoked, and that we had made no great shifting of our ballast. The main fury of the blast had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the violence of the wind; but we looked forward to its total cessation with dismay; well believing, that, in our shattered condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell which would ensue. But this very just apprehension seemed by no means likely to be soon verified. For five entire days and nights --during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle --the hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equalling the first violence of the Simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest I had before encountered. Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S.E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. --On the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. --The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon --emitting no decisive light. --There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, sliver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean. We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day --that day to me has not arrived --to the Swede, never did arrive. Thenceforward we were

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enshrouded in patchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phosphoric sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed in the tropics. We observed too, that, although the tempest continued to rage with unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual appearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. --Superstitious terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless, and securing ourselves, as well as possible, to the stump of the mizen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of ocean. We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation. We were, however, well aware of having made farther to the southward than any previous navigators, and felt great amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In the meantime every moment threatened to be our last --every mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm us. The swell surpassed anything I had imagined possible, and that we were not instantly buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the lightness of our cargo, and reminded me of the excellent qualities of our ship; but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot of way the ship made, the swelling of the black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross --at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken. We were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when a quick scream from my companion broke fearfully upon the night. "See! see!" cried he, shrieking in my ears, "Almighty God! see! see!" As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship of, perhaps, four thousand tons. Although upreared upon the summit of a wave more than a hundred times her own altitude, her apparent size exceeded that of any ship of the line or East Indiaman in existence. Her huge hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the customary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass cannon protruded from her open ports, and dashed from their polished surfaces the fires of innumerable battle-lanterns, which swung to and fro about her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane. When we first discovered her, her bows were alone to be seen, as she rose slowly from the dim and horrible gulf beyond her. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled and tottered, and --came down. At this instant, I know not what sudden self-possession came over my spirit. Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea. The shock of the descending mass struck her, consequently, in that portion of her frame which was already under water, and the inevitable result was to hurl me, with irresistible violence, upon the rigging of the stranger. As I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about; and to the confusion ensuing I attributed my escape from the notice of the crew. With little difficulty I made my way unperceived to the main hatchway, which was partially open, and soon found an opportunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so I can hardly tell. An indefinite sense of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the ship had taken hold of my mind, was

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perhaps the principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to trust myself with a race of people who had offered, to the cursory glance I had taken, so many points of vague novelty, doubt, and apprehension. I therefore thought proper to contrive a hiding-place in the hold. This I did by removing a small portion of the shifting-boards, in such a manner as to afford me a convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the ship. I had scarcely completed my work, when a footstep in the hold forced me to make use of it. A man passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait. I could not see his face, but had an opportunity of observing his general appearance. There was about it an evidence of great age and infirmity. His knees tottered beneath a load of years, and his entire frame quivered under the burthen. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of navigation. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more. A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul --a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never --I know that I shall never --be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense --a new entity is added to my soul. It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus. Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate -it was no long while ago that I ventured into the captain's own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall from time to time continue this Journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fall to make the endeavour. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea. An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned Chance? I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word DISCOVERY. I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive --what she is I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago. I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat over-

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curious, but this wood would have every, characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by any unnatural means. In reading the above sentence a curious apothegm of an old weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. "It is as sure," he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of his veracity, "as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman." About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction. I mentioned some time ago the bending of a studding-sail. From that period the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has continued her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvas packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail booms, and rolling every moment her topgallant yard-arms into the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind of a man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only natural cause which can account for such effect. --I must suppose the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or impetuous under-tow. I have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin --but, as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or less than manstill a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In stature he is nearly my own height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkably otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon the face --it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense --a sentiment ineffable. His forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the stamp of a myriad of years. --His gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself, as did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue, and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile. The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows

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of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. When I look around me I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any idea of which the words tornado and simoom are trivial and ineffective? All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe. As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current; if that appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract. To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge --some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor. The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of hope than of the apathy of despair. In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a crowd of canvas, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the sea --Oh, horror upon horror! the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny --the circles rapidly grow small --we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool --and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and --going down. NOTE.--The "MS. Found in a Bottle," was originally published in 1831 [1833], and it was not until many years afterwards that I became acquainted with the maps of Mercator, in which the ocean is represented as rushing, by four mouths, into the (northern) Polar Gulf, to be absorbed into the bowels of the earth; the Pole itself being represented by a black rock, towering to a prodigious height. -THE END-

WILLIAM WILSON Edgar Allan Poe, 1839 What say of it? what say (of) CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path? Chamberlayne's Pharronida. LET me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn --for the horror --for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! --to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? --and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?

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I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This epoch --these later years --took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What chance --what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy --I had nearly said for the pity --of my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have them allow --what they cannot refrain from allowing --that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before --certainly, never thus fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions? I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions. Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and illdirected efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions. My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep. It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. Steeped in misery as I am --misery, alas! only too real --I shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in the weakness of a few rambling details. These, moreover, utterly trivial, and even ridiculous in themselves, assume, to my fancy, adventitious importance, as connected with a period and a locality when and where I recognise the first ambiguous monitions of the destiny which afterwards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then remember. The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week --once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the neighbouring fields --and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this

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church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast, ---could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution! At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions already mentioned; then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery -a world of matter for solemn remark, or for more solemn meditation. The extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many capacious recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted the play-ground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well remember it had no trees, nor benches, nor anything similar within it. Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small parterre, planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred division we passed only upon rare occasions indeed --such as a first advent to school or final departure thence, or perhaps, when a parent or friend having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the Christmas or Midsummer holy-days. But the house! --how quaint an old building was this! --to me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings --to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable --inconceivable --and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity. During the five years of my residence here, I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars. The school-room was the largest in the house --I could not help thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and a celling of oak. In a remote and terror-inspiring angle was a square enclosure of eight or ten feet, comprising the sanctum, "during hours," of our principal, the Reverend Dr. Bransby. It was a solid structure, with massy door, sooner than open which in the absence of the "Dominic," we would all have willingly perished by the peine forte et dure. In other angles were two other similar boxes, far less reverenced, indeed, but still greatly matters of awe. One of these was the pulpit of the "classical" usher, one of the "English and mathematical." Interspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions at the other. Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my first mental development had in it much of the uncommon --even much of the

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outre. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray shadow --a weak and irregular remembrance --an indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals. Yet in fact --in the fact of the world's view --how little was there to remember! The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its intrigues; --these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-stirring. "Oh, le bon temps, que ce siecle de fer!" In truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and by slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself; --over all with a single exception. This exception was found in the person of a scholar, who, although no relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself; --a circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those everyday appellations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson, --a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake alone, of those who in school phraseology constituted "our set," presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class --in the sports and broils of the play-ground --to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will --indeed, to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever. If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the despotism of a master mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits of its companions. Wilson's rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment; --the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I feared him, and could not help thinking the equality which he maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true superiority; since not to be overcome cost me a perpetual struggle. Yet this superiority --even this equality --was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it. Indeed, his competition, his resistance, and especially his impertinent and dogged interference with my purposes, were not more pointed than private. He appeared to be destitute alike of the ambition which urged, and of the passionate energy of mind which enabled me to excel. In his rivalry he might have been supposed actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart, astonish, or mortify myself; although there were times when I could not help observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner. I could only conceive this singular behavior to arise from a consummate self-conceit assuming the vulgar airs of patronage and protection. Perhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson's conduct, conjoined with our identity of name, and the mere accident of our having entered the school upon the same day, which set afloat the notion that we were brothers, among the senior classes in the academy. These do not usually inquire with much strictness into the affairs of their juniors. I have before said, or should have said, that Wilson was not, in the most remote degree, connected with my family. But assuredly if we had been brothers we must have been twins; for, after leaving Dr. Bransby's, I casually learned that my

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namesake was born on the nineteenth of January, 1813 --and this is a somewhat remarkable coincidence; for the day is precisely that of my own nativity. It may seem strange that in spite of the continual anxiety occasioned me by the rivalry of Wilson, and his intolerable spirit of contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate him altogether. We had, to be sure, nearly every day a quarrel in which, yielding me publicly the palm of victory, he, in some manner, contrived to make me feel that it was he who had deserved it; yet a sense of pride on my part, and a veritable dignity on his own, kept us always upon what are called "speaking terms," while there were many points of strong congeniality in our tempers, operating to awake me in a sentiment which our position alone, perhaps, prevented from ripening into friendship. It is difficult, indeed, to define,or even to describe, my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture; --some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity. To the moralist it will be unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson and myself were the most inseparable of companions. It was no doubt the anomalous state of affairs existing between us, which turned all my attacks upon him, (and they were many, either open or covert) into the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavours on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitutional disease, would have been spared by any antagonist less at his wit's end than myself; --my rival had a weakness in the faucal or guttural organs, which precluded him from raising his voice at any time above a very low whisper. Of this defect I did not fall to take what poor advantage lay in my power. Wilson's retaliations in kind were many; and there was one form of his practical wit that disturbed me beyond measure. How his sagacity first discovered at all that so petty a thing would vex me, is a question I never could solve; but, having discovered, he habitually practised the annoyance. I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition, who would be constantly in my presence, and whose concerns, in the ordinary routine of the school business, must inevitably, on account of the detestable coincidence, be often confounded with my own. The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of person and outline of feature. I was galled, too, by the rumor touching a relationship, which had grown current in the upper forms. In a word, nothing could more seriously disturb me, although I scrupulously concealed such disturbance,) than any allusion to a similarity of mind, person, or condition existing between us. But, in truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself,) this similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed at all by our schoolfellows. That he observed it in all its bearings, and as fixedly as I, was apparent; but that he could

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discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance, can only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary penetration. His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own. How greatly this most exquisite portraiture harassed me, (for it could not justly be termed a caricature,) I will not now venture to describe. I had but one consolation --in the fact that the imitation, apparently, was noticed by myself alone, and that I had to endure only the knowing and strangely sarcastic smiles of my namesake himself. Satisfied with having produced in my bosom the intended effect, he seemed to chuckle in secret over the sting he had inflicted, and was characteristically disregardful of the public applause which the success of his witty endeavours might have so easily elicited. That the school, indeed, did not feel his design, perceive its accomplishment, and participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the master air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see,) gave but the full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and chagrin. I have already more than once spoken of the disgusting air of patronage which he assumed toward me, and of his frequent officious interference withy my will. This interference often took the ungracious character of advice; advice not openly given, but hinted or insinuated. I received it with a repugnance which gained strength as I grew in years. Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion when the suggestions of my rival were on the side of those errors or follies so usual to his immature age and seeming inexperience; that his moral sense, at least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom, was far keener than my own; and that I might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised. As it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme under his distasteful supervision, and daily resented more and more openly what I considered his intolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first years of our connexion as schoolmates, my feelings in regard to him might have been easily ripened into friendship: but, in the latter months of my residence at the academy, although the intrusion of his ordinary manner had, beyond doubt, in some measure, abated, my sentiments, in nearly similar proportion, partook very much of positive hatred. Upon one occasion he saw this, I think, and afterwards avoided, or made a show of avoiding me. It was about the same period, if I remember aright, that, in an altercation of violence with him, in which he was more than usually thrown off his guard, and spoke and acted with an openness of demeanor rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied I discovered, in his accent, his air, and general appearance, a something which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions of my earliest infancy -wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me than by saying that I could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago --some point of the past even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded rapidly as it came; and I mention it at all but to define the day of the last conversation I there held with my singular namesake.

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The huge old house, with its countless subdivisions, had several large chambers communicating with each other, where slept the greater number of the students. There were, however, (as must necessarily happen in a building so awkwardly planned,) many little nooks or recesses, the odds and ends of the structure; and these the economic ingenuity of Dr. Bransby had also fitted up as dormitories; although, being the merest closets, they were capable of accommodating but a single individual. One of these small apartments was occupied by Wilson. One night, about the close of my fifth year at the school, and immediately after the altercation just mentioned, finding every one wrapped in sleep, I arose from bed, and, lamp in hand, stole through a wilderness of narrow passages from my own bedroom to that of my rival. I had long been plotting one of those ill-natured pieces of practical wit at his expense in which I had hitherto been so uniformly unsuccessful. It was my intention, now, to put my scheme in operation, and I resolved to make him feel the whole extent of the malice with which I was imbued. Having reached his closet, I noiselessly entered, leaving the lamp, with a shade over it, on the outside. I advanced a step, and listened to the sound of his tranquil breathing. Assured of his being asleep, I returned, took the light, and with it again approached the bed. Close curtains were around it, which, in the prosecution of my plan, I slowly and quietly withdrew, when the bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his countenance. I looked; --and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were these -these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if with a fit of the ague in fancying they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed; --while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared -assuredly not thus --in the vivacity of his waking hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation of my gait, my voice, my habits, and my manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation? Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I extinguished the lamp, passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the halls of that old academy, never to enter them again. After a lapse of some months, spent at home in mere idleness, I found myself a student at Eton. The brief interval had been sufficient to enfeeble my remembrance of the events at Dr. Bransby's, or at least to effect a material change in the nature of the feelings with which I remembered them. The truth --the tragedy --of the drama was no more. I could now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses; and seldom called up the subject at all but with wonder at extent of human credulity, and a smile at the vivid force of the imagination which I hereditarily possessed. Neither was this species of scepticism likely to be diminished by the character of the life I led at Eton. The vortex of thoughtless folly into which I there so immediately and so recklessly plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past hours, engulfed at once every solid or serious impression, and left to memory only the veriest levities of a former existence. I do not wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy here --a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of the night; for our debaucheries were to be faithfully protracted until morning. The wine flowed freely, and there were not wanting other and perhaps more dangerous seductions; so that the gray dawn had already faintly appeared in the east, while our delirious

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extravagance was at its height. Madly flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the act of insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity, when my attention was suddenly diverted by the violent, although partial unclosing of the door of the apartment, and by the eager voice of a servant from without. He said that some person, apparently in great haste, demanded to speak with me in the hall. Wildly excited with wine, the unexpected interruption rather delighted than surprised me. I staggered forward at once, and a few steps brought me to the vestibule of the building. In this low and small room there hung no lamp; and now no light at all was admitted, save that of the exceedingly feeble dawn which made its way through the semi-circular window. As I put my foot over the threshold, I became aware of the figure of a youth about my own height, and habited in a white kerseymere morning frock, cut in the novel fashion of the one I myself wore at the moment. This the faint light enabled me to perceive; but the features of his face I could not distinguish. Upon my entering he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me by. the arm with a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words "William Wilson!" in my ear. I grew perfectly sober in an instant. There was that in the manner of the stranger, and in the tremulous shake of his uplifted finger, as he held it between my eyes and the light, which filled me with unqualified amazement; but it was not this which had so violently moved me. It was the pregnancy of solemn admonition in the singular, low, hissing utterance; and, above all, it was the character, the tone, the key, of those few, simple, and familiar, yet whispered syllables, which came with a thousand thronging memories of bygone days, and struck upon my soul with the shock of a galvanic battery. Ere I could recover the use of my senses he was gone. Although this event failed not of a vivid effect upon my disordered imagination, yet was it evanescent as vivid. For some weeks, indeed, I busied myself in earnest inquiry, or was wrapped in a cloud of morbid speculation. I did not pretend to disguise from my perception the identity of the singular individual who thus perseveringly interfered with my affairs, and harassed me with his insinuated counsel. But who and what was this Wilson? --and whence came he? --and what were his purposes? Upon neither of these points could I be satisfied; merely ascertaining, in regard to him, that a sudden accident in his family had caused his removal from Dr. Bransby's academy on the afternoon of the day in which I myself had eloped. But in a brief period I ceased to think upon the subject; my attention being all absorbed in a contemplated departure for Oxford. Thither I soon went; the uncalculating vanity of my parents furnishing me with an outfit and annual establishment, which would enable me to indulge at will in the luxury already so dear to my heart, --to vie in profuseness of expenditure with the haughtiest heirs of the wealthiest earldoms in Great Britain. Excited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were absurd to pause in the detail of my extravagance. Let it suffice, that among spendthrifts I outHeroded Herod, and that, giving name to a multitude of novel follies, I added no brief appendix to the long catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute university of Europe. It could hardly be credited, however, that I had, even here, so utterly fallen from the gentlemanly estate, as to seek acquaintance with the vilest arts of the gambler by profession, and, having become an adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a means of increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the weak-minded among my fellowcollegians. Such, nevertheless, was the fact. And the very enormity of this offence against all manly and honourable sentiment proved, beyond doubt, the main if not the sole reason of the impunity with which it was

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committed. Who, indeed, among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the clearest evidence of his senses, than have suspected of such courses, the gay, the frank, the generous William Wilson --the noblest and most commoner at Oxford --him whose follies (said his parasites) were but the follies of youth and unbridled fancy --whose errors but inimitable whim --whose darkest vice but a careless and dashing extravagance? I had been now two years successfully busied in this way, when there came to the university a young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning --rich, said report, as Herodes Atticus --his riches, too, as easily acquired. I soon found him of weak intellect, and, of course, marked him as a fitting subject for my skill. I frequently engaged him in play, and contrived, with the gambler's usual art, to let him win considerable sums, the more effectually to entangle him in my snares. At length, my schemes being ripe, I met him (with the full intention that this meeting should be final and decisive) at the chambers of a fellow-commoner, (Mr. Preston,) equally intimate with both, but who, to do him Justice, entertained not even a remote suspicion of my design. To give to this a better colouring, I had contrived to have assembled a party of some eight or ten, and was solicitously careful that the introduction of cards should appear accidental, and originate in the proposal of my contemplated dupe himself. To be brief upon a vile topic, none of the low finesse was omitted, so customary upon similar occasions that it is a just matter for wonder how any are still found so besotted as to fall its victim. We had protracted our sitting far into the night, and I had at length effected the manoeuvre of getting Glendinning as my sole antagonist. The game, too, was my favorite ecarte!. The rest of the company, interested in the extent of our play, had abandoned their own cards, and were standing around us as spectators. The parvenu, who had been induced by my artifices in the early part of the evening, to drink deeply, now shuffled, dealt, or played, with a wild nervousness of manner for which his intoxication, I thought, might partially, but could not altogether account. In a very short period he had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating --he proposed to double our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned show of reluctance, and not until after my repeated refusal had seduced him into some angry words which gave a color of pique to my compliance, did I finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove how entirely the prey was in my toils; in less than an hour he had quadrupled his debt. For some time his countenance had been losing the florid tinge lent it by the wine; but now, to my astonishment, I perceived that it had grown to a pallor truly fearful. I say to my astonishment. Glendinning had been represented to my eager inquiries as immeasurably wealthy; and the sums which he had as yet lost, although in themselves vast, could not, I supposed, very seriously annoy, much less so violently affect him. That he was overcome by the wine just swallowed, was the idea which most readily presented itself; and, rather with a view to the preservation of my own character in the eyes of my associates, than from any less interested motive, I was about to insist, peremptorily, upon a discontinuance of the play, when some expressions at my elbow from among the company, and an ejaculation evincing utter despair on the part of Glendinning, gave me to understand that I had effected his total ruin under circumstances which, rendering him an object for the pity of all, should have protected him from the ill offices even of a fiend. What now might have been my conduct it is difficult to say. The pitiable condition of my dupe had thrown an air of embarrassed gloom over all; and, for some moments, a profound silence was maintained, during which I could not help feeling my cheeks tingle with the many burning glances of scorn or reproach cast upon me by the less abandoned of the party. I will even own that an intolerable weight of anxiety was for a brief instant lifted from my bosom by the sudden and extraordinary interruption which

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ensued. The wide, heavy folding doors of the apartment were all at once thrown open, to their full extent, with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished, as if by magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in dying, enabled us just to perceive that a stranger had entered, about my own height, and closely muffled in a cloak. The darkness, however, was now total; and we could only feel that he was standing in our midst. Before any one of us could recover from the extreme astonishment into which this rudeness had thrown all, we heard the voice of the intruder. "Gentlemen," he said, in a low, distinct, and never-to-be-forgotten whisper which thrilled to the very marrow of my bones, "Gentlemen, I make no apology for this behaviour, because in thus behaving, I am but fulfilling a duty. You are, beyond doubt, uninformed of the true character of the person who has to-night won at ecarte a large sum of money from Lord Glendinning. I will therefore put you upon an expeditious and decisive plan of obtaining this very necessary information. Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper." While he spoke, so profound was the stillness that one might have heard a pin drop upon the floor. In ceasing, he departed at once, and as abruptly as he had entered. Can I --shall I describe my sensations? --must I say that I felt all the horrors of the damned? Most assuredly I had little time given for reflection. Many hands roughly seized me upon the spot, and lights were immediately reprocured. A search ensued. In the lining of my sleeve were found all the court cards essential in ecarte, and, in the pockets of my wrapper, a number of packs, facsimiles of those used at our sittings, with the single exception that mine were of the species called, technically, arrondees; the honours being slightly convex at the ends, the lower cards slightly convex at the sides. In this disposition, the dupe who cuts, as customary, at the length of the pack, will invariably find that he cuts his antagonist an honor; while the gambler, cutting at the breadth, will, as certainly, cut nothing for his victim which may count in the records of the game. Any burst of indignation upon this discovery would have affected me less than the silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure, with which it was received. "Mr. Wilson," said our host, stooping to remove from beneath his feet an exceedingly luxurious cloak of rare furs, "Mr. Wilson, this is your property." (The weather was cold; and, upon quitting my own room, I had thrown a cloak over my dressing wrapper, putting it off upon reaching the scene of play.) "I presume it is supererogatory to seek here (eyeing the folds of the garment with a bitter smile) for any farther evidence of your skill. Indeed, we have had enough. You will see the necessity, I hope, of quitting Oxford --at all events, of quitting instantly my chambers." Abased, humbled to the dust as I then was, it is probable that I should have resented this galling language by immediate personal violence, had not my whole attention been at the moment arrested by a fact of the most startling character. The cloak which I had worn was of a rare description of fur; how rare, how extravagantly costly, I shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic invention; for I was fastidious to an absurd degree of coxcombry, in matters of this frivolous nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached me that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near the folding doors of the apartment, it was with an astonishment nearly bordering upon terror, that I perceived my own already hanging on my arm, (where I had no doubt unwittingly placed it,) and that the one presented me was but its exact counterpart in every, in even the minutest possible particular. The singular being who had so disastrously exposed me, had been muffled, I remembered, in a cloak; and none had been worn at all by any of the members of our party with the exception of myself. Retaining some presence of mind, I took the one offered me by Preston;

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placed it, unnoticed, over my own; left the apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance; and, next morning ere dawn of day, commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and of shame. I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation, and proved, indeed, that the exercise of its mysterious dominion had as yet only begun. Scarcely had I set foot in Paris ere I had fresh evidence of the detestable interest taken by this Wilson in my concerns. Years flew, while I experienced no relief. Villain! --at Rome, with how untimely, yet with how spectral an officiousness, stepped he in between me and my ambition! At Vienna, too --at Berlin --and at Moscow! Where, in truth, had I not bitter cause to curse him within my heart? From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain. And again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions "Who is he? --whence came he? --and what are his objects?" But no answer was there found. And then I scrutinized, with a minute scrutiny, the forms, and the methods, and the leading traits of his impertinent supervision. But even here there was very little upon which to base a conjecture. It was noticeable, indeed, that, in no one of the multiplied instances in which he had of late crossed my path, had he so crossed it except to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb those actions, which, if fully carried out, might have resulted in bitter mischief. Poor justification this, in truth, for an authority so imperiously assumed! Poor indemnity for natural rights of self-agency so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied! I had also been forced to notice that my tormentor, for a very long period of time, (while scrupulously and with miraculous dexterity maintaining his whim of an identity of apparel with myself,) had so contrived it, in the execution of his varied interference with my will, that I saw not, at any moment, the features of his face. Be Wilson what he might, this, at least, was but the veriest of affectation, or of folly. Could he, for an instant, have supposed that, in my admonisher at Eton --in the destroyer of my honor at Oxford, --in him who thwarted my ambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris, my passionate love at Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in Egypt, --that in this, my arch-enemy and evil genius, could fall to recognise the William Wilson of my school boy days, --the namesake, the companion, the rival, --the hated and dreaded rival at Dr. Bransby's? Impossible! --But let me hasten to the last eventful scene of the drama. Thus far I had succumbed supinely to this imperious domination. The sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, with which certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter weakness and helplessness, and to suggest an implicit, although bitterly reluctant submission to his arbitrary will. But, of late days, I had given myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening influence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more and more impatient of control. I began to murmur, --to hesitate, --to resist. And was it only fancy which induced me to believe that, with the increase of my own firmness, that of my tormentor underwent a proportional diminution? Be this as it may, I now began to feel the inspiration of a burning hope, and at length nurtured in my secret thoughts a stern and desperate resolution that I would submit no longer to be enslaved. It was at Rome, during the Carnival of 18--, that I attended a masquerade in the palazzo of the Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio. I had indulged more freely than usual in the excesses of the wine-table; and now the suffocating atmosphere of the crowded rooms irritated me beyond endurance. The difficulty, too, of forcing my way through the mazes of the company

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contributed not a little to the ruffling of my temper; for I was anxiously seeking, (let me not say with what unworthy motive) the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting Di Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she had previously communicated to me the secret of the costume in which she would be habited, and now, having caught a glimpse of her person, I was hurrying to make my way into her presence. --At this moment I felt a light hand placed upon my shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper within my ear. In an absolute phrenzy of wrath, I turned at once upon him who had thus interrupted me, and seized him violently by tile collar. He was attired, as I had expected, in a costume altogether similar to my own; wearing a Spanish cloak of blue velvet, begirt about the waist with a crimson belt sustaining a rapier. A mask of black silk entirely covered his face. "Scoundrel!" I said, in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable I uttered seemed as new fuel to my fury, "scoundrel! impostor! accursed villain! you shall not --you shall not dog me unto death! Follow me, or I stab you where you stand!" --and I broke my way from the ball-room into a small ante-chamber adjoining --dragging him unresistingly with me as I went. Upon entering, I thrust him furiously from me. He staggered against the wall, while I closed the door with an oath, and commanded him to draw. He hesitated but for an instant; then, with a slight sigh, drew in silence, and put himself upon his defence. The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the wainscoting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom. At that instant some person tried the latch of the door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror, --so at first it seemed to me in my confusion --now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait. Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist --it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment --not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own! It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said: "You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead -dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist --and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."

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THE PURLOINED LETTER Edgar Allan Poe, 1845 Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio. Seneca. AT Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33, Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Roget. I looked upon it, therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G--, the Prefect of the Parisian police. We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years. We had been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat down again, without doing so, upon G.'s saying that he had called to consult us, or rather to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business which had occasioned a great deal of trouble. "If it is any point requiring reflection," observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the wick, "we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark." "That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities." "Very true," said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and rolled towards him a comfortable chair. "And what is the difficulty now?" I asked. "Nothing more in the assassination way, I hope?" "Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd." "Simple and odd," said Dupin. "Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether." "Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault," said my friend. "What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily. "Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin. "Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?" "A little too self-evident." "Ha! ha! ha! --ha! ha! ha! --ho! ho! ho!" --roared our visitor, profoundly amused, "oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!" "And what, after all, is the matter on hand?" I asked. "Why, I will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now hold, were it known that I confided it to any one.

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"Proceed," said I. "Or not," said Dupin. "Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain document of the last importance, has been purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is known, also, that it still remains in his possession." "How is this known?" asked Dupin. "It is clearly inferred," replied the Prefect, "from the nature of the document, and from the nonappearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the robber's possession; --that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to employ it." "Be a little more explicit," I said. "Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable." The Prefect was fond of the cant of diplomacy. "Still I do not quite understand," said Dupin. "No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless, would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact gives the holder of the document an ascendancy over the illustrious personage whose honor and peace are so jeopardized." "But this ascendancy," I interposed, "would depend upon the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare--" "The thief," said G., is the Minister D--, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The document in question --a letter, to be frank --had been received by the personage robbed while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of the other exalted personage from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it, open as it was, upon a table. The address, however, was uppermost, and, the contents thus unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture enters the Minister D--. His lynx eye immediately perceives the paper, recognises the handwriting of the address, observes the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a letter somewhat similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses, for some fifteen minutes, upon the public affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table the letter to which he had no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but, of course, dared not call attention to the act, in the presence of the third personage who stood at her elbow. The minister decamped; leaving his own letter --one of no importance -upon the table." "Here, then," said Dupin to me, "you have precisely what you demand to make the ascendancy complete --the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber." "Yes," replied the Prefect; "and the power thus attained has, for some months past, been wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more thoroughly convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. But this, of course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, she has committed the matter to me." "Than whom," said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, "no more sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined." "You flatter me," replied the Prefect; "but it is possible that some such opinion may have been entertained."

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"It is clear," said I, "as you observe, that the letter is still in possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and not any employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With the employment the power departs." "True," said G. "and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first care was to make thorough search of the minister's hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the necessity of searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect our design." "But," said I, "you are quite au fait in these investigations. The Parisian police have done this thing often before." "Oh yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the minister gave me, too, a great advantage. He is frequently absent from home all night. His servants are by no means numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master's apartment, and, being chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with which I can open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, during the greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D-- Hotel. My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a more astute man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed." "But is it not possible," I suggested, "that although the letter may be in possession of the minister, as it unquestionably is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own premises?" "This is barely possible," said Dupin. "The present peculiar condition of affairs at court, and especially of those intrigues in which D-- is known to be involved, would render the instant availability of the document --its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's notice --a point of nearly equal importance with its possession." "Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I. "That is to say, of being destroyed," said Dupin. "True," I observed; "the paper is clearly then upon the premises. As for its being upon the person of the minister, we may consider that as out of the question." "Entirely," said the Prefect. "He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person rigorously searched under my own inspection. "You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. "D--, I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of course." "Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool." "True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself." "Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your search." "Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every where. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a 'secret' drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain amount of bulk --of space --to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the tops." "Why so?"

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"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in the same way." "But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?" I asked. "By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding of cotton be placed around it. Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise." "But you could not have removed --you could not have taken to pieces all articles of furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the chairs?" "Certainly not; but we did better --we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and, indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the glueing --any unusual gaping in the joints --would have sufficed to insure detection." "I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the curtains and carpets." "That of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before." "The two houses adjoining!" I exclaimed; "you must have had a great deal of trouble." "We had; but the reward offered is prodigious. "You include the grounds about the houses?" "All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively little trouble. We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed." "You looked among D--'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?" "Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation. Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed, longitudinally, with the needles." "You explored the floors beneath the carpets?" "Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with the microscope." "And the paper on the walls?" "Yes. "You looked into the cellars?" "We did."

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"Then," I said, "you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter is not upon the premises, as you suppose. "I fear you are right there," said the Prefect. "And now, Dupin, what would you advise me to do?" "To make a thorough re-search of the premises." "That is absolutely needless," replied G--. "I am not more sure that I breathe than I am that the letter is not at the Hotel." "I have no better advice to give you," said Dupin. "You have, of course, an accurate description of the letter?" "Oh yes!" --And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external appearance of the missing document. Soon after finishing the perusal of this description, he took his departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman before. In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found us occupied very nearly as before. He took a pipe and a chair and entered into some ordinary conversation. At length I said,-"Well, but G--, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at last made up your mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the Minister?" "Confound him, say I --yes; I made the reexamination, however, as Dupin suggested --but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be." "How much was the reward offered, did you say?" asked Dupin. "Why, a very great deal --a very liberal reward --I don't like to say how much, precisely; but one thing I will say, that I wouldn't mind giving my individual check for fifty thousand francs to any one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of more and more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If it were trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done." "Why, yes," said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum, "I really --think, G--, you have not exerted yourself--to the utmost in this matter. You might --do a little more, I think, eh?" "How? --In what way?" "Why --puff, puff --you might --puff, puff --employ counsel in the matter, eh? --puff, puff, puff. Do you remember the story they tell of Abernethy?" "No; hang Abernethy!" "To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual. "'We will suppose,' said the miser, 'that his symptoms are such and such; now, doctor, what would you have directed him to take?' "'Take!' said Abernethy, 'why, take advice, to be sure.'" "But," said the Prefect, a little discomposed, "I am perfectly willing to take advice, and to pay for it. I would really give fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the matter." "In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a checkbook, "you may as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter." I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and motionless, less, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently in some measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This

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functionary grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check. When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations. "The Parisian police," he said, "are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand. Thus, when G-- detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at the Hotel D--, I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation --so far as his labors extended." "So far as his labors extended?" said I. "Yes," said Dupin. "The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it." I merely laughed --but he seemed quite serious in all that he said. "The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd'; --he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed "lucky," --what, in its last analysis, is it?" "It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent." "It is," said Dupin;" and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella." "And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect is admeasured."

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"For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; and the Prefect and his cohort fall so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather through nonadmeasurement, of the intellect with which they are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are right in this much --that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very usually when it is below. They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by some unusual emergency --by some extraordinary reward --they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles. What, for example, in this case of D--, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches --what is it all but an exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter, --not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg --but, at least, in some hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do you not see also, that such recherches nooks for concealment are adapted only for ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of concealment, a disposal of the article concealed --a disposal of it in this recherche manner, --is, in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its discovery depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the seekers; and where the case is of importance --or, what amounts to the same thing in the policial eyes, when the reward is of magnitude, --the qualities in question have never been known to fall. You will now understand what I meant in suggesting that, had the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits of the Prefect's examination --in other words, had the principle of its concealment been comprehended within the principles of the Prefect --its discovery would have been a matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools." "But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet." "You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect." "You surprise me," I said, "by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence. "'Il y a a parier,'" replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, "'que toute idee publique, toute convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.' The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' into application to algebra. The French are the originators of this particular deception; but

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if a term is of any importance --if words derive any value from applicability --then 'analysis' conveys 'algebra' about as much as, in Latin, 'ambitus' implies 'ambition,' 'religio' religion or 'homines honesti,' a set of honorable men." "You have a quarrel on hand, I see," said I, "with some of the algebraists of Paris; but proceed." "I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation --of form and quantity --is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom falls. In the consideration of motive it falls; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability --as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and the inferences are made, not so much through lapse of memory, as through an unaccountable addling of the brains. In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x squared + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x squared + px is not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down. I mean to say," continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, "that if the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such a man, I considered, could not fall to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action. He could not have failed to anticipate --and events have proved that he did not fail to anticipate --the waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. His frequent absences from home at night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to impress them with the conviction to which G--, in fact, did finally arrive -the conviction that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought, which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable principle of policial action in searches for articles concealed --I felt that this whole train of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister. It would imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel would be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of course, to simplicity, if not deliberately

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induced to it as a matter of choice. You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its being so very self-evident." "Yes," said I, "I remember his merriment well. I really thought he would have fallen into convulsions." "The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of the street signs, over the shop doors, are the most attractive of attention?" "I have never given the matter a thought," I said. "There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word --the name of town, river, state or empire --any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the Minister had deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it. "But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity of D--; upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not hidden within the limits of that dignitary's ordinary search --the more satisfied I became that, to conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all. "Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D-- at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive --but that is only when nobody sees him. "To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host. "I paid special attention to a large writing-table near which he sat, and upon which lay confusedly, some miscellaneous letters and other papers, with one or two musical instruments and a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I saw nothing to excite particular suspicion. "At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this

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Edgar Allan Poe

rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle --as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D-- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D--, the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the upper divisions of the rack. "No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the D-- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect. "I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, redirected, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table. "The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D-- rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of bread. "The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, Dcame from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay. "But what purpose had you," I asked, in replacing the letter by a facsimile? Would it not have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?" "D--," replied Dupin, "is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I might never have left the Ministerial presence alive.

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Edgar Allan Poe

The good people of Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers; since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy --at least no pity --for him who descends. He is the monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack." "How? did you put any thing particular in it?" "Why --it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank --that would have been insulting. D--, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a clue. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words---Un dessein si funeste, S'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste. They are to be found in Crebillon's 'Atree.'"

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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

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a virtuous, intelligent, a n d C h r i s t i a n nation. T o you they willingly s u b m i t their c a u s e for your righteous decision.

NATHANIEL

HAWTHORNE

1804-1864
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on Independence Day, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of Puritan immigrants; one ancestor had been a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. The family, like the seaport town, was on the decline. When his seacaptain father died in Dutch Guiana in 1808, his mother's brothers took responsibility for his education. In his early teens he lived three years as free as "a bird of the air" at Sebago Lake, in Maine (then still a part of Massachusetts), acquiring a love of tramping, which he always kept. By his mid-teens he was reading eighteenth-century novelists like Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Horace Walpole as well as contemporary writers like William Godwin and Sir Walter Scott and forming an ambition to be a writer himself. At Bowdoin College shyness caused him to try to evade the obligatory public declamations, but in social clubs he formed smoking, card-playing, and drinking friendships; two fellow members of the Democratic literary society, Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce, later president, became lifelong friends; Longfellow, another classmate, belonged to the rival Federalist society. Hawthorne kept outdoors a good deal at the bucolic college but managed, as he later said, to read "desultorily right and left." At the graduation ceremonies in 1825, Longfellow spoke optimistically on the possibility that "Our Native Writers" could achieve lasting fame. Hawthorne went home to Salem and became a writer, but he was agonizingly s I o w t o winning acclaim. Hawthorne's years between 1825 and 1837 have fascinated his biographers and critics. Hawthorne himself took pains to propagate the notion that he had lived as a hermit who left his upstairs room only for nighttime walks and hardly communicated even with his mother and sisters. In fact, Hawthorne had dedicated himself to writing and was steeping himself in colonial history more than the political issues of his time; he socialized in Salem, had several more or less serious flirtations, keptiin touch with Pierce and Bridge, among others, and spent most of the summers knocking about all over New England (an uncle owned stage lines). He even got as far ks Detroit one year. Often called his apprenticeship, these dozen years in fact encompassed as well his period of most intense creativity. The first surviving piece of his ti"ue apprenticework is the historical novel Fanshawe, which Hawthorne paid to hA'e published in 1828 and then quickly suppressed. M Over the next several years Hawthorne tried unsuccessfully to fiJB a publisher for collections of the tales he was writing. In chagrin he burned Seven Wiles of My Native Land (including one or two stories of witchcraft) although at leasj|one of the seven, "Alice Doane's Appeal," survives in an altered form. By 1829 h e v a s negotiating again fruitlesslyfor the publication of a volume called Prov-icial Tales, which included "The Gentle Boy" as well, apparently, as "Roger Malvi J Burial" and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." In tales like these he had found ff^lspecialthough highly unsatisfactoryoutlets for publication: magazines and the literary annuals that were issued each fall as genteel Christmas gifts. For his tales Hawthorne got a few dollars each and no fame at all, since publication in the annuals was anonymous. He continued to strive to interest a bookseller in his tales, offering what c o u \ d have been a remarkable volume called The Story Teller, in which the title characterVwandered

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about New England telling his stories in dramatic settings and circumstances. One story, "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe," reached print in its narrative frame, but the editor of the New-England Magazine scrapped the frame for "Young Goodman Brown" and others that are now known as isolated items instead of interrelated elements in a larger whole. The biographer Randall Stewart plausibly suggests that " The Story Teller would have united in one work Hawthorne's imaginative and reportorial faculties as none of his published writings quite do." In 1836 Hawthorne turned to literary hackwork, making an encyclopedia for the Boston publisher Samuel G. Goodrich, whose annual, The Token, had become the regular market for his tales. In the same year Bridge secretly persuaded Goodrich to publish a collection of Hawthorne's tales by promising to repay any losses. Twice-Told Tales appeared in March 1837, with Hawthorne's name on the title page; the title was a self-deprecating allusion to Shakespeare's King John 3.4: "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale / Vexing the dull eare of a drowsie man." The book was reviewed in England as well as the United States and opened up what Hawthorne called "an intercourse with the world." A notebook entry written sometime in 1836 was only a little premature: "In this dismal and sordid chamber FAME was won." The year 1837 was the start of Hawthorne's public literary career; it also marked the end of his single-minded dedication to his work. In the fall of 1838 Elizabeth Peabody, a Salemite who was to become a major force in American educational reform, sought out the new local celebrity. When Hawthorne met her sister Sophia, twenty-nine and an invalid, his life abruptly changed course. Within a few months he and Sophia were engaged. To save money for marriage, Hawthorne worked as salt and coal measurer in the Boston Custom House during 1839 and 1840, then the next year invested in the U t o p i a n community Brook Farm, more as a business venture than as a philosophical gesture; the only return, however, was the locale he later used for T r i ^ Blithedale Romance (1852). During his engagement, Hawthorne's main literary productions were letters to Sophiafull of ironical self-deprecation, satirical reportage, and romantic effusions. In December 1841, he wrote Evert A. Duyckinck and Corntelius Mathews, New York magazine editors, that his early stories had grown out of quiltude and seclusion, the lack of which would probably prevent him from writing anv more. Marriage, not literature, became Hawthorne's new career long before the Actual ceremony in July 1842. As he rather severely put it, "When a man has taken uipon himself to beget children, he has no longer any right to a life of his own." k The first three years of marriage, spent at the Old Manse in Concord, the home of Emerson's ancestors, seemed idyllic to the Hawthornes, but a hoped-for novel never materialized.\By now comfortably familiar with accounts of the Puritan and Revolutionary past, f i e wrote a child's history of colonial and revolutionary New England, Grandfather's V2hair (1841), and four years later produced a rewriting of Bridge's fournal of an i\frican Cruiser. Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) consisted mainly of new tales, but a m o n g the early ones first collected in it were "Roger Malvin's Burial" and "Young Go J d m a n Brown." His literary earnings were not rising, but his reputation was, partly through his own shrewd creation of a marketable public persona. In the 1851 edition of Wkvice-Told Tales, Hawthorne observed that the author, "on the internal evidence of S% sketches, came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensAXve, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the q u a i n S e s s of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his personal and literjrry traits." While summarizing the image critics had conceived of him, he helped fit ;at image for a century and more as the Hawthorne. Through long i j ^ i c e to the local Democrats, Hawthorne was named surveyor of the Port of Salefm in 1846. The office was something of a sinecure, but his forenoonsalwayy his most productive hourshad to be spent at the Custom House, and he wrote^little. Hawthorne was thrown out of office by the new Whig administration in ] u m \ e 1849, amid a furious controversy in the newspapers. He then spent a

NATHANIEL

HAWTHORNE

583

summer of "great diversity and severity" of emotion climaxed by his mother's death. In September he was at work on The Scarlet Letter, which he planned as a long tale
to make up half a volume called Old Time Legends; together with Sketches, Experi-

mental and Ideal. Besides the long introduction, "The Custom House," which was Hawthorne's means of revenging himself on the Salem Whigs who had ousted him, he planned to include some still-uncollected tales. James Fields, the young associate of the publisher William D. Ticknor, persuaded him that a long piece of fiction would sell better than another collection of stories, and Hawthorne obligingly omitted the stories. (Fields was the source of a false story that he also persuaded Hawthorne to expand The Scarlet Letter from a story to a novel.) Although it was frequently denounced as licentious or morbid, The Scarlet Letter (1850) was nevertheless a literary sensation in the United States and Great Britain, and Hawthorne was proclaimed as the finest American romancer. There had already been many novels set in Puritan New England, and many more followed, but The Scarlet Letter remains the single classic of the group, appealing to tastes of changing generations in different ways; perhaps the most powerful appeal has not changed at all: the remarkable way Hawthorne manages to evoke emotional sympathy for the heroine even when he is condemning her actions. During a year and a half in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where Melville became his neighbor, Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables (1851), assembled The Snow Image, mainly from very early pieces, and wrote for children A Wonder-Book (1852). Escaping from the rigors of the Berkshire winters, he wrote The Blithedale Romance (1852) in West Newton; then in the first home he had owned, the Wayside at Concord, he put together a political biography of his friend Franklin Pierce for the campaign of 1852 and worked up The Tanglewood Tales (1853), prettified stories from mythology. This productivity was broken when President Pierce appointed him American consul at Liverpool. The consulship came as a blessing despite the disruption of his new life at Concord, for his literary income was not enough to support his family, which now included a son and two daughters. At Liverpool ( 1 8 5 3 - 5 7 ) Hawthorne was an uncommonly industrious consul; he had always been more comfortable among businesspeople and politicians than among literary people. A stay in Italystarting in the miserably cold first months of 1858 ate deeply into the more than thirty thousand dollars he had earned at Liverpool, and malaria nearly killed his daughter Una. Except during her illness, he kept up his minutely detailed tourist's account as well as a record of the family's contacts with the English and American colony of painters, sculptors, and writers. Many pages of the notebooks went nearly verbatim into a book that he began in Florence in 1858 and finished late in 1859, after his return to England. This romance, suggested by the statue of a faun attributed to the classical Greek sculptor Praxiteles, was published in London (1860) as Transformation and in the United States under Hawthorne's preferred title, The Marble Faun. The Hawthornes came home in June 1860, during the general acclaim of the new romance, and set about fitting up the Wayside; this project was a considerable drain on Hawthorne's savings, which were already depleted by prolonged residence abroad after resigning his consulship and by generous, though unwise, loans to friends. His literary stature made even his abolitionist neighbors respectful toward him, but Hawthorne was keenly aware that his sympathy for the South ran counter to the mood of neighbors such as Emerson and Thoreau. For the Atlantic Monthly Fields solicited a series of sketches that Hawthorne adapted from his English notebooks. Fields paid well, but he was pressing Hawthorne into overwork. Despite short excursions designed to restore his vigor, Hawthorne's physical and psychic energies waned steadily; apparently he was suffering from an undiagnosed malignancy. Humiliated by his weakness, he intermittently forced himself to work on his literary projects, especially the English sketches, which he published as Our Old Home (1863), loyally dedicating it to Pierce, who because of his Southern sympathies was now anathema to many

584

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HAWTHORNE

Northerners. Hawthorne began four romances, overlapping attempts to grapple with two major themes: an American claimant to an ancestral English estate and the search for an elixir of life. He finished none of them before his death in May 1864, while traveling in New Hampshire with Pierce. He was buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord. Alcott, Emerson, Fields, Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell were among his pallbearers.

My Kinsman, Major Molineux1

After the kings of G r e a t Britain h a d a s s u m e d the right of a p p o i n t i n g t h e colonial g o v e r n o r s , 2 the m e a s u r e s of the latter s e l d o m m e t with the ready a n d general a p p r o b a t i o n , which had b e e n paid to t h o s e of their p r e d e c e s s o r s , u n d e r the original c h a r t e r s . T h e p e o p l e looked with m o s t j e a l o u s scrutiny to the exercise of power, which did not e m a n a t e from t h e m s e l v e s , a n d they usually rewarded the rulers with s l e n d e r g r a t i t u d e , for t h e c o m p l i a n c e s , by w h i c h , in softening their instructions from beyond the s e a , they h a d incurred the r e p r e h e n s i o n of t h o s e w h o gave t h e m . T h e a n n a l s of M a s s a c h u s e t t s B a y will inform u s , that of six governors, in the s p a c e of a b o u t forty years from the s u r r e n d e r of the old charter, u n d e r J a m e s II., two were i m p r i s o n e d by a p o p u l a r i n s u r r e c t i o n ; a third, a s H u t c h i n s o n 3 inclines to believe, w a s driven from the province by the whizzing of a m u s k e t ball; a fourth, in the opinion of the s a m e historian, w a s h a s t e n e d to his grave by c o n t i n u a l bickerings with the h o u s e of r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s ; a n d the r e m a i n i n g two, a s well a s their s u c c e s s o r s , till t h e Revolution, were favored with few a n d brief intervals of p e a c e f u l sway. T h e inferior m e m b e r s of the c o u r t party, 4 in t i m e s of high political e x c i t e m e n t , led scarcely a m o r e d e s i r a b l e life. T h e s e r e m a r k s m a y serve a s p r e f a c e to t h e following a d v e n t u r e s , which c h a n c e d u p o n a s u m m e r night, not far from a h u n d r e d years a g o . T h e reader, in order to avoid a l o n g a n d dry detail of colonial affairs, is r e q u e s t e d to d i s p e n s e with a n a c c o u n t of the train of c i r c u m s t a n c e s , that h a d c a u s e d m u c h t e m p o r a r y i n f l a m m a t i o n of the p o p u l a r m i n d . It w a s near nine o'clock of a m o o n l i g h t evening, w h e n a b o a t c r o s s e d the ferry with a single p a s s e n g e r , w h o h a d o b t a i n e d his c o n v e y a n c e , at that u n u s u a l hour, by the p r o m i s e of a n extra fare. W h i l e h e s t o o d on the landingp l a c e , s e a r c h i n g in either p o c k e t for t h e m e a n s of fulfilling his a g r e e m e n t , the ferryman lifted a lantern, by the aid of w h i c h , a n d t h e newly risen m o o n , he took a very a c c u r a t e survey of t h e stranger's figure. H e w a s a youth of barely e i g h t e e n years, evidently country-bred, a n d now, a s it s h o u l d s e e m , u p o n his first visit to town. H e w a s c l a d in a c o a r s e grey c o a t , well worn, b u t in excellent repair; his u n d e r g a r m e n t s were durably c o n s t r u c t e d of leather, a n d sat tight to a pair of serviceable a n d w e l l - s h a p e d l i m b s ; his stockings of b l u e yarn, were the incontrovertible h a n d i w o r k of a m o t h e r or a sister; a n d on his h e a d w a s a three-cornered h a t , w h i c h in its better days h a d p e r h a p s sheltered the graver brow of the lad's father. U n d e r his left a r m w a s a heavy
1. The text here is that of the first printing in The Token for 1832, where the story is identified as being "By the Author of 'Sights from a Steeple.' " 2. I.e., after 1684, when the British government annulled the M a s s a c h u s e t t s charter. 3. T h o m a s Hutchinson ( 1 7 1 1 - 1 7 8 0 ) , the last royal governor. T h e particular annals, or year-byyear histories, that Hawthorne has in mind are The History of the Colony and Prox'ince of Massachusetts-Bay ( 1 7 6 4 , 1767) by Hutchinson. J a m e s II ( 1 6 3 3 - 1 7 0 1 ) reigned briefly ( 1 6 8 5 - 8 8 ) before being exiled to France in the Glorious Revolution. 4. T h e pro-Crown party.

The Scarlet Letter

By Nathaniel Hawthorne The Custom-House Introductory to The Scarlet Letter It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous "P. P., Clerk of this Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But--as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience--it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent and within these

limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own. It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact,--a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume,--this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one. In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,--but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass,--here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam's government, is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her

beak and eye and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens. careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,--oftener soon than late,--is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows. The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels happen to have arrived at once,--usually from Africa or South America,--or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities, such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here, likewise,-the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant,--we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of

tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying trade. Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would discern--in the entry, if it were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms, if wintry or inclement weather--a row of venerable figures, sitting in oldfashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands--were Custom-House officers. Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height; with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers; around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three woodenbottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and,--not to forget the library,--on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue Laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice. And here, some six months ago,--pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged

stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper,--you might have recognized, honored reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches, on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments. This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,--its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame,--its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other,--such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know. But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces

a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor,-who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace,--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed. Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life,--what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,--may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments bandied between my

great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine. Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a grayheaded shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant-who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the Main Street--might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not

flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away,--as it seemed, permanently,--but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning, I ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President's commission in my pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my weighty responsibility, as chief executive officer of the Custom-House. I doubt greatly--or rather, I do not doubt at all--whether any public functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled, when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier,--New England's most distinguished soldier,--he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive administrations through which he had held office, he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and heart-quake. General Miller was radically conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on every sea, and standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous blast, had finally drifted into this quiet nook; where, with little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of existence. Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men to age and infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that

kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House, during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest from their arduous labors, and soon afterwards--as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for their country's service; as I verily believe it was--withdrew to a better world. It is a pious consolation to me, that, through my interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance of the evil and corrupt practices, into which, as a matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither the front nor the back entrance of the CustomHouse opens on the road to Paradise. The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their venerable brotherhood, that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and, though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his office with any reference to political services. Had it been otherwise,--had an active politician been put into this influential post, to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of his office,--hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life, within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern, that the old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent; to see a furrowed cheek, weatherbeaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another addressed me, the tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days, had been wont to bellow through a speakingtrumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons, that, by all established rule,--and, as regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency for business,--they ought to have given place to younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than

themselves to serve our common Uncle. I knew it too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be pass-words and countersigns among them. The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts, and the happy consciousness of being usefully employed,--in their own behalf, at least, if not for our beloved country,--these good old gentlemen went through the various formalities of office. Sagaciously, under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels! Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever such a mischance occurred,-when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses,--nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and doublelock, and secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution, after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal, the moment that there was no longer any remedy! Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my companion's character, if it have a better part, is that which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognize the man. As most of these old Custom-House officers had good traits, and as my position in reference to them, being paternal and protective, was favorable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all. It was pleasant, in the summer forenoons,--when the fervent heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely communicated a genial warmth to their half-torpid systems,--it was pleasant to hear them chatting in the

back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humor, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood. It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be no wrong done, if I characterize them generally as a set of wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their memories with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or yesterday's, to-day's, or to-morrow's dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world's wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes. The father of the Custom-House--the patriarch, not only of this little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States--was a certain permanent Inspector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or rather, born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the early ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime's search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure smartly arrayed in a

bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether, he seemed--not young, indeed--but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually rechoed through the CustomHouse, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at him merely as an animal,--and there was very little else to look at,--he was a most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at, or conceived of. The careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him. The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few common-place instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew inevitably out of his physical wellbeing, did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity, had likewise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to imbue the sunniest disposition, through and through, with a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector! One brief sigh sufficed to carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next moment, he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant; far readier than the Collector's junior clerk, who, at nineteen years was much the elder and graver man of the two. I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together,

that there was no painful perception of deficiency, but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It might be difficult--and it was so--to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of age. One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast-meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey under one's very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate, that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were continually rising up before him; not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual. A tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race, and all the events that brightened or darkened his individual career, had gone over him with as little permanent effect as the passing breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some twenty or forty years ago; a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough that the carving-knife would make no impression on its carcass; and it could only be divided with an axe and handsaw.

But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be glad to dwell at considerably more length, because, of all men whom I have ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer. Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable of it, and, were he to continue in office to the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with just as good an appetite. There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House portraits would be strangely incomplete; but which my comparatively few opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and honorable life. The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened with infirmities which even the martial music of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards lightening. The step was palsied now, that had been foremost in the charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came and went; amid the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk of the office; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was mild and kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed out upon his features; proving that there was light within him, and that it was only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared. When no longer called upon to speak, or listen, either of which operations cost him an evident effort, his face would briefly subside into its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility of

decaying age. The framework of his nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumbled into ruin. To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds. Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection,--for, slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so,--I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not a mere accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze, but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the expression of his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him, at the period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness,--roused by a trumpet-peal, loud enough to awaken all of his energies that were not dead, but only slumbering,--he was yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment, his demeanour would have still been calm. Such an exhibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him--as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile--were the features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of

benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men with his own hand, for aught I know;-certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its triumphant energy;--but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing. I have not known the man, to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently make an appeal. Many characteristics--and those, too, which contribute not the least forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch--must have vanished, or been obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent; nor does Nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humor, now and then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one, who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe. There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while the Surveyor-though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon himself the difficult task of engaging him in conversation--was fond of standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and touched his own. It might be, that he lived a more real life within his thoughts, than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old, heroic music, heard thirty years before;--such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks, and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of this commercial and Custom-House life

kept up its little murmur round about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an old sword--now rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle's front, and showed still a bright gleam along its blade--would have been, among the inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers, on the Deputy Collector's desk. There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier,--the man of true and simple energy. It was the recollection of those memorable words of his,--"I'll try, Sir!"--spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, this phrase--which it seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory before him, has ever spoken--would be the best and fittest of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms. It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than during my continuance in office. There was one man, especially, the observation of whose character gave me a new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish, as by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity of a perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the CustomHouse in himself; or, at all events, the main-spring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the

difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity,--which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime,--would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate as his, to be honest and regular in the administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to any thing that came within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account, or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word,--and it is a rare instance in my life,--I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the situation which he held. Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes, with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearth-stone;--it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change. Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart from me. Nature,--except it were human nature,--the nature that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one

sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not been departed, was suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had been, without transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would come. Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, and, so far as I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and sensibility, (had he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of those qualities,) may, at any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson-though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but, at any rate, I learned it thoroughly; nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer--an excellent fellow, who came into office with me, and went out only a little later--would often engage me in a discussion about one or the other of his favorite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector's junior clerk, too,--a young gentleman who, it was whispered, occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle

Sam's letter-paper with what, (at the distance of a few yards,) looked very much like poetry,--used now and then to speak to me of books, as matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities. No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazoned abroad on titlepages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope, will never go again. But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now writing. In the second story of the Custom-House, there is a large room, in which the brickwork and naked rafters have never been covered with panelling and plaster. The edifice--originally projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized-contains far more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector's apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears still to await the labor of the carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil, had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But, then, what reams of other manuscripts--filled, not with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts--had gone equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without

serving a purpose in their day, as these heaped-up papers had, and--saddest of all-without purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen! Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants,--old King Derby,--old Billy Gray,--old Simon Forrester,-and many another magnate in his day; whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain-pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon as long-established rank. Prior to the Revolution, there is a dearth of records; the earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the King's officials accompanied the British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse. But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner; unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity,--and exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither,--I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present. There was something about it that quickened

an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of his Majesty's Customs for the port of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read (probably in Felt's Annals) a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little grave-yard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle; which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the papers which the parchment commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull itself. They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or, at least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only by the fact, that Mr. Pue's death had happened suddenly; and that these papers, which he probably kept in his official desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened. The ancient Surveyor--being little molested, I suppose, at that early day, with business pertaining to his office--seems to have devoted some of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable, hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they

shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined, and competent, to take the unprofitable labor off my hands. As a final disposition, I contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package, was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced; so that none, or very little, of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth,-for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, had reduced it to little other than a rag,--on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in bypast times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind. While thus perplexed,--and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians,--I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me,--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word,--it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor. In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find, recorded by the old Surveyor's pen, a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair. There were several foolscap

sheets, containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors. She had flourished during a period between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century. Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart; by which means, as a person of such propensities inevitably must, she gained from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying farther into the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story entitled "THE SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne carefully in mind, that the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself,--a most curious relic,--are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be understood as affirming, that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly or altogether as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline. This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig,--which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave,--had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one who had borne his Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendor that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike, alas! the hang-dog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself less

than the least, and below the lowest, of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him,--who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor,--to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. "Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig, "do this, and the profit shall be all your own! You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a lifelease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But, I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the credit which will be rightfully its due!" And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue,--"I will!" On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long extent from the front-door of the Custom-House to the side-entrance, and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that my sole object--and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could ever put himself into voluntary motion--was, to get an appetite for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east-wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-House to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable, by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What have you to do with us?" that expression seemed to say. "The

little power you might have once possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages!" In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion. It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country, whenever-which was seldom and reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature, which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued description. If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall;--all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;--whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts

might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside. The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snowimages into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold--deep within its haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances. But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of fire-light, were just alike in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them,--of no great richness or value, but the best I had,--was gone from me. It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous coloring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me,

to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. At some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page. These perceptions have come too late. At the instant, I was only conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position--is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of selfsupport. If he possesses an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer--fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world--may return to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity,--that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,--he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope--a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death--is, that, finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than any thing else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold--meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman--has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character. Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly undone, either by continuance in office, or ejectment. Yet my reflections were not the most

comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension,--as it would never be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself, and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign,--it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend,--to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities! But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself. A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to adopt the tone of "P. P."--was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good, on either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency--which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours--to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief, that the active members of the victorious party were sufficiently

excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me--who have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat--that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off. In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than the triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of partisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and shame, that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell! The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years; a term long enough to rest a weary brain; long enough to break off old intellectual habits, and make room for new ones; long enough, and too long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being, and withholding

myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognized by the Whigs as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs,--his tendency to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same household must diverge from one another,--had sometimes made it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom, (though with no longer a head to wear it on,) the point might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he had been content to stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many worthier men were falling; and, at last, after subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly one. Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a political dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion, that every thing was for the best; and, making an investment in ink, paper, and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused writing-desk, and was again a literary man. Now it was, that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr. Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's mind; for he was happier, while straying through the

gloom of these sunless fantasies, than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such antique date that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again. * Keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the "POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR"; and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet! *"At the time of writing this article, the author intended to publish, along with The Scarlet Letter, several shorter tales and sketches. These it has been thought advisable to defer." [Author's note] The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old Inspector,-who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have lived for ever,--he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view; white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever. The merchants,--Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,--these, and many other names, which had such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world,--how little time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me; for--though it has been as dear an object as

any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers--there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me. It may be, however,--O, transporting and triumphant thought!--that the greatgrandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among the sites memorable in the town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN-PUMP!

Chapter 1 - The Prison-Door A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house, somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burialground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old church-yard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and

the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself. It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women, who were now standing about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these

Chapter 2 - The Market-Place The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was

matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone. "Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not!" "People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation." "The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,--that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron. "At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she,--the naughty baggage,--little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!" "Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart." "What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there no law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!" "Mercy on us, goodwife," exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips; for the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself." The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of

the town-beadle, with a sword by his side and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free-will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison. When the young woman--the mother of this child--stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony. The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique

interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,--was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself. "She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one of the female spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?" "It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, "if we stripped Madam Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the red letter, which she hath stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel, to make a fitter one!" "O, peace, neighbours, peace!" whispered their youngest companion. "Do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her heart." The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. "Make way, good people, make way, in the King's name," cried he. "Open a passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel, from this time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!"

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly-visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for, haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there. In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature,--whatever be the delinquencies of the individual,--no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore, that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she ascended a

flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man's shoulders above the street. Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne. The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering, at it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town; all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had

a roar of laughter burst from the multitude,--each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts,--Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once. Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality. Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's face, with its bold brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with

eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding itself on timeworn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prynne,--yes, at herself,--who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom! Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast, that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes!--these were her realities,--all else had vanished!

evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume. He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself, and become manifest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne, that one of this man's shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom, with so convulsive a force that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to hear it. At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly, at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips. Then, touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him, he addressed him in a formal and courteous manner. "I pray you, good Sir," said he, "who is this woman?--and wherefore is she here set up to public shame?" "You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend," answered the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion; "else you would

Chapter 3 - The Recognition From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native garb, was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements, that one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian's side, and

surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne, and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale's church." "You say truly," replied the other. "I am a stranger, and have been a wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk, to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian, to be redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne's,--have I her name rightly?--of this woman's offences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?" "Truly, friend, and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to find yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt in Amsterdam, whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose, he sent his wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance----" "Ah!--aha!--I conceive you," said the stranger with a bitter smile. "So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his books. And who, by your favor, Sir, may be the father of yonder babe--it is some three or four months old, I should judge--which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?" "Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the townsman. "Madam Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him." "The learned man," observed the stranger, with another smile, "should come himself to look into the mystery." "It behooves him well, if he be still in life," responded the townsman. "Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall;--and that,

moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea;--they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But, in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom." "A wise sentence!" remarked the stranger, gravely bowing his head. "Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not, at least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be known!--he will be known!--he will be known!" He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and, whispering a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the crowd. While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal, still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger; so fixed a gaze, that, at moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with the hot, midday sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only in the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath a matronly veil, at church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him and her, than to greet him, face to face, they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her name more than once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude. "Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the voice. It has already been noticed, that directly over the platform on which Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to the meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an assemblage

of the magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself, with four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honor. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath; a gentleman advanced in years, and with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a community, which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood, and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was surrounded, were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should he less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale and trembled. The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap; while his gray eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking, like those of Hester's infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of those portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish. "Hester Prynne," said the clergyman, "I have striven with my young brother here, under whose preaching of the word you have been privileged to sit,"--here Mr.

Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a pale young man beside him,--"I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over your hardness and obstinacy; insomuch that you should no longer hide the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes to me, (with a young man's over-softness, albeit wise beyond his years,) that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What say you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou or I that shall deal with this poor sinner's soul?" There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport, speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed. "Good Master Dimmesdale," said he, "the responsibility of this woman's soul lies greatly with you. It behooves you, therefore, to exhort her to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof." The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale; a young clergyman, who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild forest-land. His eloquence and religious fervor had already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint. Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air about this young minister,--an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened look,--as of a being who felt himself quite astray and at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he

trode in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple and childlike; coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel. Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman's soul, so sacred even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous. "Speak to the woman, my brother," said Mr. Wilson. "It is of moment to her soul, and therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!" The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed, and then came forward. "Hester Prynne," said he, leaning over the balcony, and looking down steadfastly into her eyes, "thou hearest what this good man says, and seest the accountability under which I labor. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul's peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him--yea, compel him, as it were--to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him--who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself--the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!" The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby, at Hester's bosom, was affected by the same influence; for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms, with a half pleased, half plaintive murmur. So powerful seemed the minister's appeal, that the people could not believe but that Hester

Prynne would speak out the guilty name; or else that the guilty one himself, in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the scaffold. Hester shook her head. "Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy!" cried the Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. "That little babe hath been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast." "Never!" replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. "It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine!" "Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold. "Speak; and give your child a father!" "I will not speak!" answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. "And my child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one!" "She will not speak!" murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. "Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman's heart! She will not speak!" Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind, the elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion, addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods were rolling over the people's heads, that it assumed new terrors in their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference. She had borne, that morning, all that nature could endure; and as her temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher thundered

remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she strove to hush it, mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathize with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered, by those who peered after her, that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior.

ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to moan. "Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the practitioner. "Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more amenable to just authority than you may have found her heretofore." "Nay, if your worship can accomplish that," answered Master Brackett, "I shall own you for a man of skill indeed! Verily, the woman hath been like a possessed one; and there lacks little, that I should take in hand to drive Satan out of her with stripes." The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his demeanour change, when the withdrawal of the prison-keeper left him face to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His first care was given to the child; whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he took from beneath his dress. It appeared to contain certain medical preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of water. "My old studies in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours,--she is none of mine,--neither will she recognize my voice or aspect as a father's. Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand." Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with strongly marked apprehension into his face. "Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?" whispered she. "Foolish woman!" responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly. "What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The medicine is

Chapter 4 - The Interview After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a state of nervous excitement that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could teach, in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest. To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the child; who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish, and despair, which pervaded the mother's system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day. Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that individual, of singular aspect, whose presence in the crowd had been of such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged in the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom. His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer, after

potent for good; and were it my child,--yea, mine own, as well as thine!--I could do no better for it." As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught. It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech's pledge. The moans of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased; and in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her pulse, looked into her eyes,-a gaze that made her heart shrink and shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold,--and, finally, satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught. "I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe," remarked he; "but I have learned many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them,--a recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea." He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and questioning, as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her slumbering child. "I have thought of death," said she,--"have wished for it,--would even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for any thing. Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it. See! It is even now at my lips." "Drink, then," replied he, still with the same cold composure. "Dost thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object than to let thee live,--than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life,--so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?"--As he spoke, he laid his long forefinger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester's breast, as if it had been red-hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture, and smiled.-"Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes of men and

women,--in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy husband,--in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take off this draught." Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt that-having now done all that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty, impelled him to do, for the relief of physical suffering--he was next to treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured. "Hester," said he, "I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,--a man of thought,--the book-worm of great libraries,--a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,--what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl's fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!" "Thou knowest," said Hester,--for, depressed as she was, she could not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame,--"thou knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any." "True!" replied he. "It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless! My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream,--old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was,--that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so,

Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!" "I have greatly wronged thee," murmured Hester. "We have wronged each other," answered he. "Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophized in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?" "Ask me not!" replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. "That thou shalt never know!" "Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a smile of dark and self-relying intelligence. "Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there are few things,--whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought,-few things hidden from the man, who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude. Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!" The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that Hester Prynne clasped her hands over her heart, dreading lest he should read the secret there at once. "Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine," resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. "He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven's own method of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame; if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!"

"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled. "But thy words interpret thee as a terror!" "One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee," continued the scholar. "Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not, to any human soul, that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where thou art, and where he is. But betray me not!" "Wherefore dost thou desire it?" inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly knew why, from this secret bond. "Why not announce thyself openly, and cast me off at once?" "It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the dishonor that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come. Recognize me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life, will be in my hands. Beware!" "I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said Hester. "Swear it!" rejoined he. And she took the oath. "And now, Mistress Prynne," said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was hereafter to be named, "I leave thee alone; alone with thy infant, and the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?" "Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the expression of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?" "Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. "No, not thine!"

Chapter 5 - Hester at Her Needle Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that condemned her--a giant of stern features, but with vigor to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm--had held her up, through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk from her prison-door, began the daily custom, and she must either sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future, to help her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast,--at her, the child of honorable parents,--at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman,--at her, who had once been innocent,--as the figure, the body, the reality

of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument. It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her,--kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure,--free to return to her birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being,--and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her,--it may seem marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forestland, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth--even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like garments put off long ago--were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but never could be broken. It might be, too,--doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole,--it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union, that, unrecognized on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled

herself to believe,--what, finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive for continuing a resident of New England,--was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom. Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been built by an earlier settler, and abandoned, because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottagewindow, or standing in the door-way, or laboring in her little garden, or coming forth along the pathway that led townward; and, discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off, with a strange, contagious fear. Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art--then, as now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp--of needle-work. She bore on her breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the Puritanic

modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with. Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too,--whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors,--there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labor as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby-linen--for babies then wore robes of state--afforded still another possibility of toil and emolument. By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever relentless vigor with which society frowned upon her sin.

Hester sought not to acquire any thing beyond a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament,--the scarlet letter,--which it was her doom to wear. The child's attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we may rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment, in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic,--a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong beneath. In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world. With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, it could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman's heart than that which branded the brow of Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the

kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her position, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succor them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long and well; she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient,--a martyr, indeed,--but she forebore to pray for enemies; lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse. Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, the everactive sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterance of a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves,--had the summer breeze murmured about it,--had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt

in the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter,-and none ever failed to do so,--they branded it afresh into Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture. But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt an eye-a human eye--upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned alone? Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer moral and intellectual fibre, would have been still more so, by the strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester,--if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted,--she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's? Or, must she receive those intimations-so obscure, yet so distinct--as truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes, the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. "What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to

herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumor of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron's bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne's,--what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric thrill would give her warning,--"Behold, Hester, here is a companion!"-and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks; as if her purity were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?--Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself. The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

Chapter 6 - Pearl We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that became every day more

brilliant, and the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child! Her Pearl!--For so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price,--purchased with all she had,--her mother's only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be for good. Day after day, she looked fearfully into the child's expanding nature; ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity, that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being. Certainly, there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its vigor, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the world's first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not invariably coexist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore, before the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure, when thus arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl's own proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her, on the darksome cottage-floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all,

however, there was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if, in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to be herself;--it would have been no longer Pearl! This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but--or else Hester's fears deceived her--it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered. Hester could only account for the child's character--and even then, most vaguely and imperfectly--by recalling what she herself had been, during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light, of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child's disposition, but, later in the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind. The discipline of the family, in those days, was of a far more rigid kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the lonely mother of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but strict, control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode of

treatment possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside, and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that warned her when it would be labor thrown away to insist, persuade, or plead. It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such moments, whether Pearl was a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage-floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child,--to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began,--to snatch her to her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses,--not so much from overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before. Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, perhaps,--for there was no foreseeing how it might affect her,--Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a stern, unsympathizing look of discontent. Not seldom, she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or--but this more rarely happened--she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness; it passed, as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible

intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until-perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids-little Pearl awoke! How soon--with what strange rapidity, indeed!--did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse, beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and nonsensewords! And then what a happiness would it have been, could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own darling's tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children! But this could never be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children. Never, since her release from prison, had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there; first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the settlement, on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashion as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance; or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham-fight with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue. The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child; and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the

sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value, and even comfort, for her mother; because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child's manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester's heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening influences of maternity. At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from her ever creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials, a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower, were the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted, most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity,--soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life,--and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle. It was

inexpressibly sad--then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause!--to observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause, in the contest that must ensue. Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees, and cried out, with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which made utterance for itself, betwixt speech and a groan,--"O Father in Heaven,--if Thou art still my Father,--what is this being which I have brought into the world!" And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware, through some more subtile channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play. One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be told. The very first thing which she had noticed, in her life, was--what?--not the mother's smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was--shall we say it?--the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom! One day, as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's eyes had been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and, putting up her little hand, she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavouring to tear it away; so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand. Again, as if her mother's agonized gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile! From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment's safety; not a moment's calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl's gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile, and odd expression of the eyes. Once, this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and, suddenly,-for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable

delusions,--she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice, in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion. In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild-flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother's bosom; dancing up and down, like a little elf, whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester's first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But, whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing image of a fiend peeping out--or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it--from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes. "Child, what art thou?" cried the mother. "O, I am your little Pearl!" answered the child. But, while she said it, Pearl laughed and began to dance up and down, with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up the chimney. "Art thou my child, in very truth?" asked Hester. Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl's wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now reveal herself. "Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child, continuing her antics. "Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!" said the mother, half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came over her, in the

midst of her deepest suffering. "Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee hither?" "Tell me, mother!" said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and pressing herself close to her knees. "Do thou tell me!" "Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!" answered Hester Prynne. But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger, and touched the scarlet letter. "He did not send me!" cried she, positively. "I have no Heavenly Father!" "Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!" answered the mother, suppressing a groan. "He sent us all into the world. He sent even me, thy mother. Then, much more, thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come?" "Tell me! Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing, and capering about the floor. "It is thou that must tell me!" But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal labyrinth of doubt. She remembered--betwixt a smile and a shudder--the talk of the neighbouring townspeople; who, seeking vainly elsewhere for the child's paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring; such as, ever since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their mothers' sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned, among the New England Puritans.

Chapter 7 - The Governor's Hall Hester Prynne went, one day, to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with a pair of gloves which she had fringed and embroidered to his order, and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two from the highest

rank, he still held an honorable and influential place among the colonial magistracy. Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of embroidered gloves impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the settlement. It had reached her ears, that there was a design on the part of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her child. On the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the mother's soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed the elements of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's. Among those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which, in later days, would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the selectmen of the town, should then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of property in a pig, not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature. Full of concern, therefore,--but so conscious of her own right, that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public, on the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the other,--Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side, and, constantly in motion from morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to be taken up in arms, but was soon as imperious to be set down again, and frisked

onward before Hester on the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant beauty; a beauty that shone with deep and vivid tints; a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout her; she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play; arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of coloring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth. But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother herself--as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain, that all her conceptions assumed its form--had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the one, as well as the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance. As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of the Puritans looked up from their play,--or what passed for play with those sombre little urchins,--and spake gravely one to another:-"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!" But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence,--the scarlet fever, or some such halffledged angel of judgment,--whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising

generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which doubtless caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked up smiling into her face. Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our elder towns; now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences remembered or forgotten, that have happened, and passed away, within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human habitation into which death had never entered. It had indeed a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslantwise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin's palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age, which had been drawn in the stucco when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after times. Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, began to caper and dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine should be stripped off its front, and given her to play with. "No, my little Pearl!" said her mother. "Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee!" They approached the door; which was of an arched form, and flanked on each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of which were latticewindows, with wooden shutters to close over them at need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was answered by one of the Governor's bond-servants; a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave. During that term he was to be the property of his master, and as much a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf

wore the blue coat, which was the customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before, in the old hereditary halls of England. "Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?" inquired Hester. "Yea, forsooth," replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had never before seen. "Yea, his honorable worship is within. But he hath a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see his worship now." "Nevertheless, I will enter," answered Hester Prynne; and the bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air and the glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land, offered no opposition. So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of entrance. With many variations, suggested by the nature of his building-materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land. Here, then, was a wide and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the whole depth of the house, and forming a medium of general communication, more or less directly, with all the other apartments. At one extremity, this spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers, which formed a small recess on either side of the portal. At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall-windows which we read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be turned over by the casual guest. The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste; the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms, transferred hither from the Governor's paternal home. On the table--in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality had not been left behind--stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale. On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes

of peace. All were characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men. At about the centre of the oaken panels, that lined the hall, was suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic, but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful armorer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget, and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all, and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a statesman and ruler. Little Pearl--who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house--spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate. "Mother," cried she, "I see you here. Look! Look!" Hester looked, by way of humoring the child; and she saw that, owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upward, also, at a similar picture in the head-piece; smiling at her mother, with the elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on her small physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into Pearl's shape.

"Come along, Pearl!" said she, drawing her away, "Come and look into this fair garden. It may be, we shall see flowers there; more beautiful ones than we find in the woods." Pearl, accordingly, ran to the bow-window, at the farther end of the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden-walk, carpeted with closely shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath the hall-windows, as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula; that half mythological personage who rides through our early annals, seated on the back of a bull. Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would not be pacified. "Hush, child, hush!" said her mother earnestly. "Do not cry, dear little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and gentlemen along with him!" In fact, adown the vista of the garden-avenue, a number of persons were seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became silent; not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of those new personages.

Chapter 8 - The Elf-child and the Minister Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap,--such as elderly gentlemen loved to indue themselves with, in their domestic privacy,--walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his gray beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James's reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error to suppose that our great forefathers--though accustomed to speak and think of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest of duty--made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham's shoulders; while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be naturalized in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might possibly be compelled to flourish, against the sunny garden-wall. The old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a long established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable things; and however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial benevolence of his private life had won him warmer affection than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries. Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests; one, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember, as having taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne's disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who, for two or three years past, had been settled in the town. It was understood that this learned man was the physician as well as friend of the young minister, whose health had severely suffered, of late, by his too unreserved selfsacrifice to the labors and duties of the pastoral relation.

The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps, and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall-window, found himself close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne, and partially concealed her. "What have we here?" said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at the scarlet little figure before him. "I profess, I have never seen the like, since my days of vanity, in old King James's time, when I was wont to esteem it a high favor to be admitted to a court mask! There used to be a swarm of these small apparitions, in holiday-time; and we called them children of the Lord of Misrule. But how gat such a guest into my hall?" "Ay, indeed!" cried good old Mr. Wilson. "What little bird of scarlet plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures, when the sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land. Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Christian child,--ha? Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies, whom we thought to have left behind us, with other relics of Papistry, in merry old England?" "I am mother's child," answered the scarlet vision, "and my name is Pearl!" "Pearl?--Ruby, rather!--or Coral!--or Red Rose, at the very least, judging from thy hue!" responded the old minister, putting forth his hand in a vain attempt to pat little Pearl on the cheek. "But where is this mother of thine? Ah! I see," he added; and, turning to Governor Bellingham, whispered,--"This is the selfsame child of whom we have held speech together; and behold here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her mother!" "Sayest thou so?" cried the Governor. "Nay, we might have judged that such a child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of her of Babylon! But she comes at a good time; and we will look into this matter forthwith." Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall, followed by his three guests. "Hester Prynne," said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on the wearer of the scarlet letter, "there hath been much question concerning thee, of late. The point

hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that are of authority and influence, do well discharge our consciences by trusting an immortal soul, such as there is in yonder child, to the guidance of one who hath stumbled and fallen, amid the pitfalls of this world. Speak thou, the child's own mother! Were it not, thinkest thou, for thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare, that she be taken out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and instructed in the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for the child, in this kind?" "I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!" answered Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token. "Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied the stern magistrate. "It is because of the stain which that letter indicates, that we would transfer thy child to other hands." "Nevertheless," said the mother calmly, though growing more pale, "this badge hath taught me,--it daily teaches me,--it is teaching me at this moment,--lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and better, albeit they can profit nothing to myself." "We will judge warily," said Bellingham, "and look well what we are about to do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl,--since that is her name,--and see whether she hath had such Christian nurture as befits a child of her age." The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair, and made an effort to draw Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the touch or familiarity of any but her mother, escaped through the open window and stood on the upper step, looking like a wild, tropical bird, of rich plumage, ready to take flight into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a little astonished at this outbreak,--for he was a grandfatherly sort of personage, and usually a vast favorite with children,-essayed, however, to proceed with the examination. "Pearl," said he, with great solemnity, "thou must take heed to instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the pearl of great price. Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?" Now Pearl knew well enough who made her; for Hester Prynne, the daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of

immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore, so large were the attainments of her three years' lifetime, could have borne a fair examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechism, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works. But that perversity, which all children have more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her to speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her mouth, with many ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's question, the child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison-door. This fantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window; together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in coming hither. Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered something in the young clergyman's ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of skill, and even then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was startled to perceive what a change had come over his features,--how much uglier they were,--how his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen,--since the days when she had familiarly known him. She met his eyes for an instant, but was immediately constrained to give all her attention to the scene now going forward. "This is awful!" cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the astonishment into which Pearl's response had thrown him. "Here is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no further." Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms, confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression. Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready to defend them to the death. "God gave me the child!" cried she. "He gave her, in requital of all things else, which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness!--she is my torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me, too! See ye not, she is the

scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a million-fold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!" "My poor woman," said the not unkind old minister, "the child shall be well cared for!--far better than thou canst do it." "God gave her into my keeping," repeated Hester Prynne, raising her voice almost to a shriek. "I will not give her up!"--And here by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes.--"Speak thou for me!" cried she. "Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can. I will not lose the child! Speak for me! Thou knowest,--for thou hast sympathies which these men lack!--thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother's rights, and how much the stronger they are, when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter! Look thou to it! I will not lose the child! Look to it!" At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester Prynne's situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament was thrown into agitation. He looked now more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the scene of Hester's public ignominy; and whether it were his failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy depth. "There is truth in what she says," began the minister, with a voice sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall rechoed, and the hollow armor rang with it--"truth in what Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements,--both seemingly so peculiar,--which no other mortal being can possess. And, moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother and this child?" "Ay!--how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?" interrupted the Governor. "Make that plain, I pray you!" "It must be even so," resumed the minister. "For, if we deem it otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the Creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognized a deed of sin, and made of no account the distinction between

unhallowed lust and holy love? This child of its father's guilt and its mother's shame has come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so earnestly, and with such bitterness of spirit, the right to keep her. It was meant for a blessing; for the one blessing of her life! It was meant, doubtless, as the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution too; a torture, to be felt at many an unthought of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath she not expressed this thought in the garb of the poor child, so forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?" "Well said, again!" cried good Mr. Wilson. "I feared the woman had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!" "O, not so!--not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale. "She recognizes, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought, in the existence of that child. And may she feel, too,--what, methinks, is the very truth,--that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care,--to be trained up by her to righteousness,--to remind her, at every moment, of her fall,--but yet to teach her, as it were by the Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parent thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!" "You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness," said old Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him. "And there is weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken," added the Reverend Mr. Wilson. "What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well for the poor woman?" "Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate, "and hath adduced such arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care must be had, nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated examination in the catechism at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale's. Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing-men must take heed that she go both to school and to meeting."

The young minister, on ceasing to speak, had withdrawn a few steps from the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy folds of the window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure, which the sunlight cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the vehemence of his appeal. Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf, stole softly towards him, and, taking his hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against it; a caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her mother, who was looking on, asked herself,--"Is that my Pearl?" Yet she knew that there was love in the child's heart, although it mostly revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been softened by such gentleness as now. The minister,--for, save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of childish preference, accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to imply in us something truly worthy to be loved,--the minister looked round, laid his hand on the child's head, hesitated an instant, and then kissed her brow. Little Pearl's unwonted mood of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering down the hall, so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even her tiptoes touched the floor. "The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess," said he to Mr. Dimmesdale. "She needs no old woman's broomstick to fly withal!" "A strange child!" remarked old Roger Chillingworth. "It is easy to see the mother's part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher's research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyze that child's nature, and, from its make and mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?" "Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clew of profane philosophy," said Mr. Wilson. "Better to fast and pray upon it; and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless Providence reveal it of its own accord. Thereby, every good Christian man hath a title to show a father's kindness towards the poor, deserted babe." The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth into the sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham's bitter-tempered sister, and the same who, a few years later, was executed as a witch.

"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. "Wilt thou go with us to-night? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I wellnigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one." "Make my excuse to him, so please you!" answered Hester, with a triumphant smile. "I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!" "We shall have thee there anon!" said the witch-lady, frowning, as she drew back her head. But here--if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable--was already an illustration of the young minister's argument against sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus early had the child saved her from Satan's snare.

Chapter 9 - The Leech Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will remember, was hidden another name, which its former wearer had resolved should never more be spoken. It has been related, how, in the crowd that witnessed Hester Prynne's ignominious exposure, stood a man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just emerging from the perilous wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people. Her matronly fame was trodden under all men's feet. Infamy was babbling around her in the public market-place. For her kindred, should the tidings ever reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life, there remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonor; which would not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion with the intimacy and sacredness of their previous relationship. Then why--since the choice was with himself--should the individual, whose connection with the fallen woman had been the most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate his claim to an inheritance so little desirable?

He resolved not to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal of shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind, and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out of life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumor had long ago consigned him. This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately spring up, and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties. In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan town, as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure. As his studies, at a previous period of his life, had made him extensively acquainted with the medical science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented himself, and as such was cordially received. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialized, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his favor, than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the European pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.

This learned stranger was exemplary, as regarded at least the outward forms of a religious life, and, early after his arrival, had chosen for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little less than a heaven-ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labor for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith. About this period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and, more than all, by the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that, if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough, that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief that if Providence should see fit to remove him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to perform its humblest mission here on earth. With all this difference of opinion as to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of the fact. His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart, with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain. Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the prospect that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Roger Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the scene, few people could tell whence, dropping down, as it were, out of the sky, or starting from the nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily heightened to the miraculous. He was now known to be a man of skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs, and the blossoms of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the forest-trees, like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was valueless to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby, and other famous men,--whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less than supernatural,-as having been his correspondents or associates. Why, with such rank in the learned world, had he come hither? What could he, whose sphere was in great

cities, be seeking in the wilderness? In answer to this query, a rumor gained ground,--and, however absurd, was entertained by some very sensible people,-that Heaven had wrought an absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic, from a German university bodily through the air, and setting him down at the door of Mr. Dimmesdale's study! Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a providential hand in Roger Chillingworth's so opportune arrival. This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a parishioner, and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from his naturally reserved sensibility. He expressed great alarm at his pastor's state of health, but was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken, seemed not despondent of a favorable result. The elders, the deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens, of Mr. Dimmesdale's flock, were alike importunate that he should make trial of the physician's frankly offered skill. Mr. Dimmesdale gently repelled their entreaties. "I need no medicine," said he. But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous than before,--when it had now become a constant habit, rather than a casual gesture, to press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his labors? Did he wish to die? These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder ministers of Boston and the deacons of his church, who, to use their own phrase, "dealt with him," on the sin of rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out. He listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the physician. "Were it God's will," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in fulfilment of this pledge, he requested old Roger Chillingworth's professional advice, "I could be well content, that my labors, and my sorrows, and my sins, and my pains, should shortly end with me, and what is earthly of them be buried in my grave, and the spiritual go with me to my eternal state, rather than that you should put your skill to the proof in my behalf."

"Ah," replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness which, whether imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, "it is thus that a young clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep root, give up their hold of life so easily! And saintly men, who walk with God on earth, would fain be away, to walk with him on the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem." "Nay," rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart, with a flush of pain flitting over his brow, "were I worthier to walk there, I could be better content to toil here." "Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly," said the physician. In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so different in age, came gradually to spend much time together. For the sake of the minister's health, and to enable the leech to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the seashore, or in the forest; mingling various talk with the plash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was the guest of the other, in his place of study and retirement. There was a fascination for the minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he recognized an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among the members of his own profession. In truth, he was startled, if not shocked, to find this attribute in the physician. Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage continually deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society would he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with a tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams, and the

musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed, with comfort. So the minister, and the physician with him, withdrew again within the limits of what their church defined as orthodox. Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient carefully, both as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character. He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do him good. Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork there. So Roger Chillingworth--the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician--strove to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing every thing with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it up. A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy, as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if, to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognized character as a physician;--then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark, but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight. Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes above enumerated. Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have said, grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of

human thought and study, to meet upon; they discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness into his companion's ear. The latter had his suspicions, indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had never fairly been revealed to him. It was a strange reserve! After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the same house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister's life-tide might pass under the eye of his anxious and attached physician. There was much joy throughout the town, when this greatly desirable object was attained. It was held to be the best possible measure for the young clergyman's welfare; unless, indeed, as often urged by such as felt authorized to do so, he had selected some one of the many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. This latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of church-discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent, old physician, with his concord of paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice. The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on which the venerable structure of King's Chapel has since been built. It had the grave-yard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on one side, and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their respective employments, in both minister and man of physic. The motherly care of the good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains to create a noontide shadow, when desirable. The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the Scriptural story of David

and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet, in colors still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here, the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another's business. And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as we have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had done all this, for the purpose--besought in so many public, and domestic, and secret prayers--of restoring the young minister to health. But--it must now be said--another portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring, as to possess the character of truths supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which we speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious refutation. There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone; he testified to having seen the physician, under some other name, which the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Doctor Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the affair of Overbury. Two or three individuals hinted, that the man of skill, during his Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage priests; who were universally acknowledged to be powerful enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their skill in the black art. A large number--and many of these were

persons of such sober sense and practical observation, that their opinions would have been valuable, in other matters--affirmed that Roger Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a remarkable change while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first, his expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like. Now, there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight, the oftener they looked upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was getting sooty with the smoke. To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion, that the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of especial sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan himself, or Satan's emissary, in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. This diabolical agent had the Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's intimacy, and plot against his soul. No sensible man, it was confessed, could doubt on which side the victory would turn. The people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see the minister come forth out of the conflict, transfigured with the glory which he would unquestionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think of the perchance mortal agony through which he must struggle towards his triumph. Alas, to judge from the gloom and terror in the depths of the poor minister's eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory any thing but secure!

Chapter 10 - The Leech and His Patient Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he proceeded,

a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again, until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas for his own soul, if these were what he sought! Sometimes, a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful door-way in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face. The soil where this dark miner was working had perchance shown indications that encouraged him. "This man," said he, at one such moment, to himself, "pure as they deem him,--all spiritual as he seems,--hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother. Let us dig a little farther in the direction of this vein!" Then, after long search into the minister's dim interior, and turning over many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated by revelation,--all of which invaluable gold was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker,--he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another point. He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies only half asleep,--or, it may be, broad awake,--with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be thrown across his victim. In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation with him. But Old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathizing, but never intrusive friend. Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual's character more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are liable, had not rendered

him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared. He therefore still kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency. One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked with Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly plants. "Where," asked he, with a look askance at them,--for it was the clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straightforth at any object, whether human or inanimate,--"where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?" "Even in the grave-yard, here at hand," answered the physician, continuing his employment. "They are new to me. I found them growing on a grave, which bore no tombstone, no other memorial of the dead man, save these ugly weeds that have taken upon themselves to keep him in remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime." "Perchance," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he earnestly desired it, but could not." "And wherefore?" rejoined the physician. "Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest an outspoken crime?" "That, good Sir, is but a fantasy of yours," replied the minister. "There can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And I

conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable." "Then why not reveal them here?" asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing quietly aside at the minister. "Why should not the guilty ones sooner avail themselves of this unutterable solace?" "They mostly do," said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast, as if afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. "Many, many a poor soul hath given its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but while strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after such an outpouring, O, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air, after long stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why should a wretched man, guilty, we will say, of murder, prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe take care of it!" "Yet some men bury their secrets thus," observed the calm physician. "True; there are such men," answered Mr. Dimmesdale. "But, not to suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by the very constitution of their nature. Or,--can we not suppose it?--guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God's glory and man's welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow; while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves." "These men deceive themselves," said Roger Chillingworth, with somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with his forefinger. "They fear to take up the shame that rightfully belongs to them. Their love for man, their zeal for God's service,--these holy impulses may or may not coexist in their hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and which must needs propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they seek to glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands! If they would serve their fellow-men, let them do it by making manifest the power and reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential self-abasement! Wouldst thou have me to believe, O wise and

pious friend, that a false show can be better--can be more for God's glory, or man's welfare--than God's own truth? Trust me, such men deceive themselves!" "It may be so," said the young clergyman indifferently, as waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous temperament.-"But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?" Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the adjacent burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open window,--for it was summer-time,--the minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that traversed the inclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped irreverently from one grave to another; until, coming to the broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy,--perhaps of Isaac Johnson himself,--she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock, which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered. Hester did not pluck them off. Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window, and smiled grimly down. "There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child's composition," remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. "I saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor himself with water, at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane. What, in Heaven's name, is she? Is the imp altogether evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any discoverable principle of being?" "None,--save the freedom of a broken law," answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in a quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself. "Whether capable of good, I know not."

The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrank, with nervous dread, from the light missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her little hands in the most extravagant ecstasy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily looked up; and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one another in silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted,--"Come away, mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He hath got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother, or he will catch you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!" So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking fantastically among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature that had nothing in common with a bygone and buried generation, nor owned herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made afresh, out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself, without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime. "There goes a woman," resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause, "who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her breast?" "I do verily believe it," answered the clergyman. "Nevertheless, I cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face, which I would gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart." There was another pause; and the physician began anew to examine and arrange the plants which he had gathered. "You inquired of me, a little time agone," said he, at length, "my judgment as touching your health." "I did," answered the clergyman, "and would gladly learn it. Speak frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death."

"Freely, then, and plainly," said the physician, still busy with his plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the disorder is a strange one; not so much in itself, nor as outwardly manifested,--in so far, at least, as the symptoms have been laid open to my observation. Looking daily at you, my good Sir, and watching the tokens of your aspect, now for months gone by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and watchful physician might well hope to cure you. But--I know not what to say--the disease is what I seem to know, yet know it not." "You speak in riddles, learned Sir," said the pale minister, glancing aside out of the window. "Then, to speak more plainly," continued the physician, "and I crave pardon, Sir,-should it seem to require pardon,--for this needful plainness of my speech. Let me ask,--as your friend,--as one having charge, under Providence, of your life and physical well-being,--hath all the operations of this disorder been fairly laid open and recounted to me?" "How can you question it?" asked the minister. "Surely, it were child's play to call in a physician, and then hide the sore!" "You would tell me, then, that I know all?" said Roger Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated intelligence, on the minister's face. "Be it so! But, again! He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Your pardon, once again, good Sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence. You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument." "Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman, somewhat hastily rising from his chair. "You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the soul!" "Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption,--but standing up, and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,--"a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal

the bodily evil? How may this be, unless you first lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?" "No!--not to thee!--not to an earthly physician!" cried Mr. Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. "Not to thee! But, if it be the soul's disease, then do I commit myself to the one Physician of the soul! He, if it stand with his good pleasure, can cure; or he can kill! Let him do with me as, in his justice and wisdom, he shall see good. But who art thou, that meddlest in this matter?--that dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?" With a frantic gesture, he rushed out of the room. "It is as well to have made this step," said Roger Chillingworth to himself, looking after the minister with a grave smile. "There is nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!" It proved not difficult to restablish the intimacy of the two companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore. The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care, which, if not successful in restoring him to health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging his feeble existence to that hour. Roger Chillingworth readily assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always quitting the patient's apartment, at the close of the professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale's presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the threshold.

"A rare case!" he muttered. "I must needs look deeper into it. A strange sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art's sake, I must search this matter to the bottom!" It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, at noonday, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of the minister's repose was the more remarkable; inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose sleep, ordinarily, is as light, as fitful, and as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself, that he stirred not in his chair, when old Roger Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that, hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional eye. Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred. After a brief pause, the physician turned away. But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom. But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was the trait of wonder in it!

Chapter 11 - The Interior of a Heart After the incident last described, the intercourse between the clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was really of another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of vengeance! The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme. Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence--using the avenger and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most to punish--had substituted for his black devices. A revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered little, for his object, whether celestial, or from what other region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul of the latter seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor minister's interior world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was for ever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine;--and the physician knew it well! Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician's wand, uprose a grisly phantom,--uprose a thousand phantoms,--in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his breast!

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully,-even, at times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred,--at the deformed figure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait, his grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's sight; a token, implicitly to be relied on, of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause. He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose to which--poor, forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched than his victim--the avenger had devoted himself. While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of them were. There are scholars among them, who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron, or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were others, again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealized,

moreover, by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples, at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought--had they ever dreamed of seeking--to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down, afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt. Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To their high mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down, on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale's frame so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their children, that their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor's holy grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then, what was he?--a substance?--or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out, from his own pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was. "I, whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood,--I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion, in your behalf, with the Most High Omniscience,--I, in whose daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch,-I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track, whereby the pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided to the regions of the blest,--I, who have laid the hand of baptism upon your children,--I, who have breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted,--I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!" More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a purpose never to come down its steps, until he should have spoken words like the above. More than once, he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once--nay, more than a hundred times--he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was, that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes, by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning words. "The godly youth!" said they among themselves. "The saint on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!" The minister well knew--subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!--the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame,

without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self! His inward trouble drove him to practices, more in accordance with the old, corrupted faith of Rome, than with the better light of the church in which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders; laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly, because of that bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast,--not, however, like them, in order to purify the body and render it the fitter medium of celestial illumination,--but rigorously, and until his knees trembled beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness; sometimes with a glimmering lamp; and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify, himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more vividly, and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother, turning her face away as she passed by. Ghost of a mother,--thinnest fantasy of a mother,--methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son! And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne, leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first, at the scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast. None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in their nature, like yonder table of

carved oak, or that big, square, leathern-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false,--it is impalpable,--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth, that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth, was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of gayety, there would have been no such man! On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new thought had struck him. There might be a moment's peace in it. Attiring himself with as much care as if it had been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he stole softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.

Chapter 12 - The Minister's Vigil Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale reached the spot, where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived through her first hour of public ignominy. The same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps. It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eyewitnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been

summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance. And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro. "It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands. "The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!"

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches; whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at some distance, on the line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate himself, with a lamp in his hand, a white night-cap on his head, and a long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost, evoked unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At another window of the same house, moreover, appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also with a lamp, which, even thus far off, revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamor of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well known to make excursions into the forest. Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady quickly extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among the clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness--into which, nevertheless, he could see but little farther than he might into a mill-stone--retired from the window. The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon greeted by a little, glimmering light, which, at first a long way off, was approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition on here a post, and there a garden-fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here, again, an arched door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the lantern would fall upon him, in a few moments more, and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the light drew

nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman,--or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as highly valued friend,--the Reverend Mr. Wilson; who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying man. And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very hour. And now, surrounded, like the saintlike personages of olden times, with a radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin,--as if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates,-now, in short, good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a lighted lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled,--nay, almost laughed at them,--and then wondered if he were going mad. As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself from speaking. "A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson! Come up hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!" Good Heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant, he believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty platform. When the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety; although his mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid playfulness. Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break, and find him there. The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place of shame;

and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go, knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost--as he needs must think it--of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then--the morning light still waxing stronger--old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James's ruff fastened askew; and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms; which, now, by the by, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood! Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart,-but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute,--he recognized the tones of little Pearl. "Pearl! Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then, suppressing his voice,--"Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?" "Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the sidewalk, along which she had been passing.-"It is I, and my little Pearl." "Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister. "What sent you hither?"

"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne;--"at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and am now going homeward to my dwelling." "Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together!" She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his halftorpid system. The three formed an electric chain. "Minister!" whispered little Pearl. "What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale. "Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?" inquired Pearl. "Nay; not so, my little Pearl!" answered the minister; for, with the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was already trembling at the conjunction in which--with a strange joy, nevertheless--he now found himself. "Not so, my child. I shall, indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow!" Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister held it fast. "A moment longer, my child!" said he. "But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and mother's hand, tomorrow noontide?" "Not then, Pearl," said the minister, "but another time!" "And what other time?" persisted the child. "At the great judgment day!" whispered the minister,--and, strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled him to answer the child so. "Then, and there, before the judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I, must stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!" Pearl laughed again.

But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street, with the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with green on either side;--all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another. There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith. Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eyewitness, who beheld the wonder

through the colored, magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people's doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's history and fate. We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,--the letter A,--marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another's guilt might have seen another symbol in it. There was a singular circumstance that characterized Mr. Dimmesdale's psychological state, at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his features, as to all other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky, and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth have passed with them for the archfiend, standing there, with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the expression, or so intense the minister's perception of it, that it seemed still to

remain painted on the darkness, after the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the street and all things else were at once annihilated. "Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror. "I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!" She remembered her oath, and was silent. "I tell thee, my soul shivers at him," muttered the minister again. "Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless horror of the man." "Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!" "Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close to her lips. "Quickly!--and as low as thou canst whisper." Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind. The elvish child then laughed aloud. "Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister. "Thou wast not bold!--thou wast not true!" answered the child. "Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand, to-morrow noontide!" "Worthy Sir," said the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of the platform. "Pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well, well, indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep. Come, good Sir, and my dear friend, I pray you, let me lead you home!" "How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister, fearfully. "Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I knew nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill might to give him ease. He going home to a better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this strange light shone out. Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend Sir; else you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now, how they trouble the

brain,--these books!--these books! You should study less, good Sir, and take a little pastime; or these night-whimseys will grow upon you!" "I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale. With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerveless, from an ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away. The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it is said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But, as he came down the pulpit-steps, the gray-bearded sexton met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognized as his own. "It was found," said the sexton, "this morning, on the scaffold, where evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!" "Thank you, my good friend," said the minister gravely, but startled at heart; for, so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary. "Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!" "And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle him without gloves, henceforward," remarked the old sexton, grimly smiling. "But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last night? a great red letter in the sky,--the letter A,--which we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should be some notice thereof!" "No," answered the minister; "I had not heard of it."

Chapter 13 - Another View of Hester In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from all others, she could readily infer, that, besides the legitimate action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's well-being and repose. Knowing what this poor, fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her,--the outcast woman,--for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw--or seemed to see--that there lay a responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of human kind--links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material--had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations. Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had come, and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the townspeople. As is apt to be the case when a person stands out in any prominence before the community, and, at the same time, interferes neither with public nor individual interests and convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original

feeling of hostility. In this matter of Hester Prynne, there was neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she made no claim upon it, in requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies. Then, also, the blameless purity of her life, during all these years in which she had been set apart to infamy, was reckoned largely in her favor. With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining any thing, it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor wanderer to its paths. It was perceived, too, that, while Hester never put forward even the humblest title to share in the world's privileges,--farther than to breathe the common air, and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the faithful labor of her hands,--she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man, whenever benefits were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty; even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a monarch's robe. None so self-devoted as Hester, when pestilence stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble; as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creatures. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick-chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In such emergencies, Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich; a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,--so much power to do, and power to sympathize,--that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original

signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength. It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those whom she had served so zealously. Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive their greeting. If they were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on. This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind. The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice, when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity. Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal of this nature, society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than she cared to be favored with, or, perchance, than she deserved. The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities than the people. The prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning, that made it a far tougher labor to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals. Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since. "Do you see that woman with the embroidered badge?" they would say to strangers. "It is our Hester,--the town's own Hester,--who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!" Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years. It was none the less a fact, however, that, in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the

scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among thieves, it would have kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had drawn his arrow against the badge, but that the missile struck it, and fell harmless to the ground. The effect of the symbol--or rather, of the position in respect to society that was indicated by it--on the mind of Hester Prynne herself, was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more to something else, that there seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester's face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester's bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or--and the outward semblance is the same--crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured. Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,--alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,--alone, and hopeless of retrieving

her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,--she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world's law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged--not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode--the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known of it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door. It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then, she might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother's enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester's charge the germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties. Every thing was against her. The world was hostile. The child's own nature had something wrong in it, which continually betokened that she had been born amiss,--the effluence of her mother's lawless passion,--and often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little creature had been born at all. Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest

among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus, Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide. The scarlet letter had not done its office. Now, however, her interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and held up to her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt, that, whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy had been continually by his side, under the semblance of a friend and helper, and had availed himself of the opportunities thus afforded for tampering with the delicate springs of Mr. Dimmesdale's nature. Hester could not but ask herself, whether there had not originally been a defect of truth, courage, and loyalty, on her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown into a position where so much

evil was to be foreboded, and nothing auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification lay in the fact, that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker ruin than had overwhelmed herself, except by acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth's scheme of disguise. Under that impulse, she had made her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared, the more wretched alternative of the two. She determined to redeem her error, so far as it might yet be possible. Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin, and half maddened by the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked together in the prison-chamber. She had climbed her way, since then, to a higher point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought himself nearer to her level, or perhaps below it, by the revenge which he had stooped for. In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had so evidently set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she beheld the old physician, with a basket on one arm, and a staff in the other hand, stooping along the ground, in quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicine withal.

Chapter 14 - Hester and the Physician Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and there, she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid, on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to

say,--"This is a better place! Come thou into the pool!" And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water. Meanwhile, her mother had accosted the physician. "I would speak a word with you," said she,--"a word that concerns us much." "Aha! And is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger Chillingworth?" answered he, raising himself from his stooping posture. "With all my heart! Why, Mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been question concerning you in the council. It was debated whether or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my entreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith!" "It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this badge," calmly replied Hester. "Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport." "Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better," rejoined he, "A woman must needs follow her own fancy, touching the adornment of her person. The letter is gayly embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!" All this while, Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that he had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were visible, he bore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigor and alertness. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and purpose to mask this expression with a smile; but the latter played him false, and flickered over his visage so derisively, that the spectator could see his blackness all the better for it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare of red light out of his eyes; as if the old man's soul were on fire, and kept on smouldering duskily within his breast, until, by some casual puff of passion, it was blown into a momentary flame. This he

repressed as speedily as possible, and strove to look as if nothing of the kind had happened. In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office. This unhappy person had effected such a transformation by devoting himself, for seven years, to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he analyzed and gloated over. The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom. Here was another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her. "What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look at it so earnestly?" "Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter enough for it," answered she. "But let it pass! It is of yonder miserable man that I would speak." "And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth eagerly, as if he loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only person of whom he could make a confidant. "Not to hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the gentleman. So speak freely; and I will make answer." "When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years ago, it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy, as touching the former relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands, there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent, in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself; for, having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty towards him; and something whispered me that I was betraying it, in pledging myself to keep your counsel. Since that day, no man is so near to him as you. You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he knows you not. In permitting this, I have surely acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was left me to be true!"

"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth. "My finger, pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon,--thence, peradventure, to the gallows!" "It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne. "What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth again. "I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable priest! But for my aid, his life would have burned away in torments, within the first two years after the perpetration of his crime and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. O, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough! What art can do, I have exhausted on him. That he now breathes, and creeps about on earth, is owing all to me!" "Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne. "Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. "Better had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been conscious of me. He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense,--for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this,--he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence!--the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!--and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed!--he did not err!--there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment!" The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape, which he could not recognize, usurping the place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those moments-which sometimes occur only at the interval of years--when a man's moral aspect is

faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now. "Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the old man's look. "Has he not paid thee all?" "No!--no!--He has but increased the debt!" answered the physician; and, as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided into gloom. "Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? Even then, I was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn. But all my life had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object was but casual to the other,--faithfully for the advancement of human welfare. No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving little for himself,--kind, true, just, and of constant, if not warm affections? Was I not all this?" "All this, and more," said Hester. "And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his features. "I have already told thee what I am! A fiend! Who made me so?" "It was myself!" cried Hester, shuddering. "It was I, not less than he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?" "I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger Chillingworth. "If that have not avenged me, I can do no more!" He laid his finger on it, with a smile. "It has avenged thee!" answered Hester Prynne. "I judged no less," said the physician. "And now, what wouldst thou with me touching this man?" "I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly. "He must discern thee in thy true character. What may be the result, I know not. But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in thy hands. Nor do I,--whom the

scarlet letter has disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron, entering into the soul,--nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him,--no good for me,--no good for thee! There is no good for little Pearl! There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze!" "Woman, I could wellnigh pity thee!" said Roger Chillingworth, unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too; for there was a quality almost majestic in the despair which she expressed. "Thou hadst great elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature!" "And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for the hatred that has transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for thine own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that claims it! I said, but now, that there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling, at every step, over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged, and hast it at thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless benefit?" "Peace, Hester, peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy sternness. "It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but, since that moment, it has all been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may! Now go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man." He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of gathering herbs.

Chapter 15 - Hester and Pearl So Roger Chillingworth--a deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men's memories longer than they liked--took leave of Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there an herb, or grubbed up a root, and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half-fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier, the higher he rose towards heaven? "Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne bitterly, as she still gazed after him, "I hate the man!" She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days, in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his study, and sit down in the fire-light of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off the scholar's heart. Such scenes had once appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She marvelled

how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side. "Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester, more bitterly than before. "He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!" Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery, and wrought out no repentance? The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself. He being gone, she summoned back her child. "Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?" Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam, that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it with winged

footsteps, to catch the great snow-flakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beachbirds, that fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure, had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself. Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother's gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother's. A letter,--the letter A,--but freshly green, instead of scarlet! The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest; even as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import. "I wonder if mother will ask me what it means!" thought Pearl. Just then, she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne, dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom. "My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?" "Yes, mother," said the child. "It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught it me in the horn-book." Hester looked steadily into her little face; but, though there was that singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any meaning to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point. "Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?"

"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's face. "It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!" "And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child's observation; but, on second thoughts, turning pale. "What has the letter to do with any heart, save mine?" "Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said Pearl, more seriously than she was wont to speak. "Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking with! It may be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter mean?--and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom?--and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?" She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker coloring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl's character, there might be seen emerging--and could have been from the very first--the steadfast principles of an unflinching courage,-an uncontrollable will,--a sturdy pride, which might be disciplined into selfrespect,--and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined, might be

found to have the taint of falsehood in them. She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest flavors of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child. Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a spiritmessenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart, and converted it into a tomb?--and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart? Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's mind, with as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her mother's hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she put these searching questions, once, and again, and still a third time. "What does the letter mean, mother?--and why dost thou wear it?--and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?" "What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself.--"No! If this be the price of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it!" Then she spoke aloud. "Silly Pearl," said she, "what questions are these? There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the minister's heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of its gold thread!" In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as recognizing that, in spite of his

strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled. As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face. But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black eyes. "Mother," said she, "what does the scarlet letter mean?" And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other inquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter:-"Mother!--Mother!--Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?" "Hold thy tongue, naughty child!" answered her mother, with an asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. "Do not tease me; else I shall shut thee into the dark closet!"

could have been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would need the whole wide world to breathe in, while they talked together,--for all these reasons, Hester never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy than beneath the open sky. At last, while attending in a sick-chamber, whither the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian converts. He would probably return, by a certain hour, in the afternoon of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took little Pearl,--who was necessarily the companion of all her mother's expeditions, however inconvenient her presence,--and set forth. The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the peninsula to the mainland, was no other than a footpath. It straggled onward into the mystery of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which she had so long been wandering. The day was chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This flitting cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of some long vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight--feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and scene--withdrew itself as they came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier, because they had hoped to find them bright. "Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!" "Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester. "And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the beginning of her race. "Will not it come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?" "Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine! It will soon be gone."

Chapter 16 - A Forest Walk Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences, the true character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For several days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing him in some of the meditative walks which she knew him to be in the habit of taking, along the shores of the peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring country. There would have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman's good fame, had she visited him in his own study; where many a penitent, ere now, had confessed sins of perhaps as deep a die as the one betokened by the scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious heart imparted suspicion where none

Pearl set forth, at a great pace, and, as Hester smiled to perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, all brightened by its splendor, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the magic circle too. "It will go now!" said Pearl, shaking her head. "See!" answered Hester, smiling. "Now I can stretch out my hand, and grasp some of it." As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features, her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade. There was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense of new and untransmitted vigor in Pearl's nature, as this never-failing vivacity of spirits; she had not the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this too was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with which Hester had fought against her sorrows, before Pearl's birth. It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child's character. She wanted--what some people want throughout life--a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy. But there was time enough yet for little Pearl! "Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her, from the spot where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine. "We will sit down a little way within the wood, and rest ourselves." "I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl. "But you may sit down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile." "A story, child!" said Hester. "And about what?" "O, a story about the Black Man!" answered Pearl, taking hold of her mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously, into her face. "How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him,--a big, heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron pen to every body that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write their names with

their own blood. And then he sets his mark on their bosoms! Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?" "And who told you this story, Pearl?" asked her mother, recognizing a common superstition of the period. "It was the old dame in the chimney-corner, at the house where you watched last night," said the child. "But she fancied me asleep while she was talking of it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people had met him here, and had written in his book, and have his mark on them. And that ugly-tempered lady, old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And dost thou go to meet him in the night-time?" "Didst thou ever awake, and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester. "Not that I remember," said the child. "If thou fearest to leave me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very gladly go! But, mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And didst thou ever meet him? And is this his mark?" "Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?" asked her mother. "Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl. "Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother. "This scarlet letter is his mark!" Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along the forest-track. Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which, at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere. It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves. The trees impending over it had flung down great branches, from time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages, there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the eyes follow along

the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and here and there a huge rock, covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue. "O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk. "Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!" But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom. But, unlike the little stream, she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily along her course. "What does this sad little brook say, mother?" inquired she. "If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of it," answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine! But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting aside the branches. I would have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes yonder." "Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl. "Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother. "But do not stray far into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call." "Yes, mother," answered Pearl. "But, if it be the Black Man, wilt thou not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his arm?" "Go, silly child!" said her mother, impatiently. "It is no Black Man! Thou canst see him now through the trees. It is the minister!"

"And so it is!" said the child. "And, mother, he has his hand over his heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?" "Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time," cried Hester Prynne. "But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear the babble of the brook." The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice. But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened--or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen--within the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl, who had enough of shadow in her own little life, chose to break off all acquaintance with this repining brook. She set herself, therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that she found growing in the crevices of a high rock. When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under the deep shadow of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along the path, entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which he had cut by the way-side. He looked haggard and feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterized him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully visible, in this intense seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait; as if he saw no reason for taking one step farther, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of any thing, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for, or avoided. To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.

Chapter 17 - The Pastor and His Parishioner Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by, before Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length, she succeeded. "Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first; then louder, but hoarsely. "Arthur Dimmesdale!" "Who speaks?" answered the minister. Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so little relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be, that his pathway through life was haunted thus, by a spectre that had stolen out from among his thoughts. He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter. "Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?" "Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?" It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.

Without a word more spoken,--neither he nor she assuming the guidance, but with an unexpressed consent,--they glided back into the shadow of the woods, whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting. When they found voice to speak, it was, at first, only to utter remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintance might have made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and, next, the health of each. Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their hearts. So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed something slight and casual to run before, and throw open the doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led across the threshold. After a while, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's. "Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?" She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom. "Hast thou?" she asked. "None!--nothing but despair!" he answered. "What else could I look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist,--a man devoid of conscience,--a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts,--I might have found peace, long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it! But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I am most miserable!" "The people reverence thee," said Hester. "And surely thou workest good among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?" "More misery, Hester!--only the more misery!" answered the clergyman, with a bitter smile. "As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul, like mine, effect towards the redemption of other souls?--or a polluted soul, towards their purification? And as for the people's reverence, would that it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst thou deem it, Hester, a consolation, that I must stand up in my pulpit, and meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven were beaming from it!--must see my flock hungry for the truth, and listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking!--and then look inward, and discern the black

reality of what they idolize? I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at it!" "You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently. "You have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you, in the days long past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people's eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works? And wherefore should it not bring you peace?" "No, Hester, no!" replied the clergyman. "There is no substance in it! It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance I have had enough! Of penitence there has been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I am! Had I one friend,--or were it my worst enemy!--to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood!--all emptiness!--all death!" Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet, uttering his longrestrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke. "Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she, "with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!"--Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort.--"Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with him under the same roof!" The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at his heart as if he would have torn it out of his bosom. "Ha! What sayest thou?" cried he. "An enemy! And under mine own roof! What mean you?"

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one, whose purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more accurately. She doubted not, that the continual presence of Roger Chillingworth,-the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all the air about him,--and his authorized interference, as a physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual infirmities,--that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type. Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once,--nay, why should we not speak it?--still so passionately loved! Hester felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on the forest-leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet. "O Arthur," cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast through all extremity; save when thy good,--thy life,--thy fame,--were put in question! Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man!--the physician!--he whom they call Roger Chillingworth!--he was my husband!"

The minister looked at her, for an instant, with all that violence of passion, which-intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher, purer, softer qualities--was, in fact, the portion of him which the Devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was there a blacker or a fiercer frown, than Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his character had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands. "I might have known it!" murmured he. "I did know it! Was not the secret told me in the natural recoil of my heart, at the first sight of him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not understand? O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this thing! And the shame!--the indelicacy!--the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this! I cannot forgive thee!" "Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!" With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him, and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her,--for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman,--and still she bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear, and live! "Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated, over and over again. "Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?" "I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister, at length, with a deep utterance out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. "I freely forgive you now. May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!"

"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?" "Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I have not forgotten!" They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along;--and yet it inclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or constrained to forbode evil to come. And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the burden of her ignominy, and the minister the hollow mockery of his good name! So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true! He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him. "Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to keep our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge?" "There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester, thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion." "And I!--how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this deadly enemy?" exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself, and pressing his hand nervously against his heart,--a gesture that had grown involuntary with him. "Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!"

"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly and firmly. "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!" "It were far worse than death!" replied the minister. "But how to avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he was? Must I sink down there, and die at once?" "Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the tears gushing into her eyes. "Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no other cause!" "The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken priest. "It is too mighty for me to struggle with!" "Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it." "Be thou strong for me!" answered he. "Advise me what to do." "Is the world then so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued, that it could hardly hold itself erect. "Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but a leafstrewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?" "Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the minister, with a sad smile. "Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester. "It brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again. In our native land, whether in some remote rural village or in vast London,--or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy,--thou wouldst be beyond his power and knowledge! And what

hast thou to do with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better part in bondage too long already!" "It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were called upon to realize a dream. "I am powerless to go. Wretched and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonor, when his dreary watch shall come to an end!" "Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery," replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. "But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or,--as is more thy nature,--be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life!--that have made thee feeble to will and to do!--that will leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!" "O Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die here. There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world, alone!" It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach. He repeated the word. "Alone, Hester!"

"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all was spoken!

more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue, than if he had never sinned at all. Thus, we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded; so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and might even, in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall, and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his unforgotten triumph. The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it suffice, that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone. "If, in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall one instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of that earnest of Heaven's mercy. But now,--since I am irrevocably doomed,--wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she to sustain,--so tender to soothe! O Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me!"

Chapter 18 - A Flood of Sunshine Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but dared not speak. But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,--stern and wild ones,--and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,--for those it was easy to arrange,--but each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the

"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he met her glance. The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood. "Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering at himself. "Methought the germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem to have flung myself-sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened--down upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the better life! Why did we not find it sooner?" "Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne. "The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!" So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With a hand's breadth farther flight it would have fallen into the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel, which some illfated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and unaccountable misfortune. The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom! By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call

the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy. Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth--with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's! Hester looked at him with the thrill of another joy. "Thou must know Pearl!" said she. "Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen her,--yes, I know it!--but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her." "Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the minister, somewhat uneasily. "I have long shrunk from children, because they often show a distrust,--a backwardness to be familiar with me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl!" "Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother. "But she will love thee dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her! Pearl! Pearl!" "I see the child," observed the minister. "Yonder she is, standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So thou thinkest the child will love me?" Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible, at some distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled vision, in a sunbeam, which

fell down upon her through an arch of boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or distinct,--now like a real child, now like a child's spirit,-as the splendor went and came again. She heard her mother's voice, and approached slowly through the forest. Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely, while her mother sat talking with the clergyman. The great black forest--stern as it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into its bosom--became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to welcome her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with their wild flavor. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or merriment,--for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage that it is hard to distinguish between his moods,--so he chattered at the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a last year's nut, and already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said,--but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,--came up, and smelt of Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child. And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The flowers appeared to know it; and one and another whispered, as she passed, "Adorn thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!"--and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before her eyes. With these she decorated her hair, and her young waist, and became a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest

sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly back. Slowly; for she saw the clergyman!

Chapter 19 - The Child at the Brook-Side "Thou wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the minister sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou not think her beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies, in the wood, they could not have become her better. She is a splendid child! But I know whose brow she has!" "Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought--O Hester, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!--that my own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them! But she is mostly thine!" "No, no! Not mostly!" answered the mother with a tender smile. "A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet us." It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world, these seven past years, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,--all written in this symbol,--all plainly manifest,--had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined, when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together?

Thoughts like these--and perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define--threw an awe about the child, as she came onward. "Let her see nothing strange--no passion or eagerness--in thy way of accosting her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic little elf, sometimes. Especially, she is seldom tolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee!" "Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at Hester Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But, in truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile; but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first time,--thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor." "And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!" answered the mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing! She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!" By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on the farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk, waiting to receive her. Just where she had paused the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child,--another and the same,--with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had

strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it. There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was. "I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves." "Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching out both her arms. "How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice as much love, henceforward, as thy mother alone could give thee! Leap across the brook and come to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer!" Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed her bright, wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now included them both in the same glance; as if to detect and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand--with that gesture so habitual as to have become involuntary-stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing evidently towards her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was the flowergirdled and sunny image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too. "Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed Hester. Pearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a frown gathered on her brow; the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a yet more imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was the fantastic beauty of the

image, with its reflected frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl. "Hasten, Pearl; or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester Prynne, who, however inured to such behaviour on the elf-child's part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. "Leap across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to thee!" But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats, any more than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides; so that, alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester's bosom! "I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman, and turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and annoyance. "Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl misses something which she has always seen me wear!" "I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath of an old witch, like Mistress Hibbins," added he, attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me!" Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then a heavy sigh; while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly pallor. "Pearl," said she, sadly, "look down at thy feet! There!--before thee!--on the hither side of the brook!" The child turned her eyes to the point indicated; and there lay the scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream, that the gold embroidery was reflected in it. "Bring it hither!" said Hester.

"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl. "Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside to the minister. "O, I have much to tell thee about her. But, in very truth, she is right as regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer,--only a few days longer,--until we shall have left this region, and look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!" With these words, she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her, as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite space!--she had drawn an hour's free breath!-and here again was the scarlet misery, glittering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom. Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair, and confined them beneath her cap. As if there were a withering spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood, departed, like fading sunshine; and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her. When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to Pearl. "Dost thou know thy mother now, child?" asked she, reproachfully, but with a subdued tone. "Wilt thou come across the brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon her,--now that she is sad?" "Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the brook, and clasping Hester in her arms. "Now thou art my mother indeed! And I am thy little Pearl!" In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew down her mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But then--by a kind of necessity that always impelled this child to alloy whatever comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish--Pearl put up her mouth, and kissed the scarlet letter, too! "That was not kind!" said Hester. "When thou hast shown me a little love, thou mockest me!" "Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.

"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother. "Come thou, and entreat his blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother too. Wilt thou not love him? Come! he longs to greet thee!" "Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence into her mother's face. "Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together, into the town?" "Not now, dear child," answered Hester. "But in days to come he will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him; wilt thou not?" "And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired Pearl. "Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother. "Come and ask his blessing!" But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favor to the clergyman. It was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all. The minister-painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a talisman to admit him into the child's kindlier regards--bent forward, and impressed one on her brow. Hereupon, Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook, stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was quite washed off, and diffused through a long lapse of the gliding water. She then remained apart, silently watching Hester and the clergyman; while they talked together, and made such arrangements as were suggested by their new position, and the purposes soon to be fulfilled. And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.

Chapter 20 - The Minister in a Maze As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little Pearl, he threw a backward glance; half expecting that he should discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the woods. So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be received as real. But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe, still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together, and find a single hour's rest and solace. And there was Pearl, too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook,-now that the intrusive third person was gone,--and taking her old place by her mother's side. So the minister had not fallen asleep, and dreamed! In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their departure. It had been determined between them, that the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England, or all America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans, scattered thinly along the sea-board. Not to speak of the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the state, the more delicately adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this choice, it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour; one of those questionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main, and, within three days' time, would sail for Bristol. Hester Prynne-whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew--could take upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child, with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would probably be on the fourth day from the present. "This is most fortunate!" he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate, we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless,--to hold nothing back from the reader,--it was because, on the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. "At least, they shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no public duty unperformed, nor ill performed!" Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease, that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings, as he returned from his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath, he had toiled over the same ground only two days before. As he drew near the town, he took an impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not one, nor two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a weathercock at every point where his memory suggested one. Not the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the little town. They

looked neither older nor younger, now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably, as he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar, an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming about it now. This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will, and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore; but the same minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to the friends who greeted him,--"I am not the man for whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree-trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him,-"Thou art thyself the man!"--but the error would have been their own, not his. Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The good old man addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal privilege, which his venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his station in the Church, entitled him to use; and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister's professional and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful

example of how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank and inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now, during a conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoarybearded deacon, it was only by the most careful self-control that the former could refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into his mind, respecting the communion-supper. He absolutely trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself, in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid laughing to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister's impiety! Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member of his church; a most pious and exemplary old dame; poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied gravestones. Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul by religious consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith she had fed herself continually for more than thirty years. And, since Mr. Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's chief earthly comfort-which, unless it had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all--was to meet her pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth from his beloved lips into her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous infusion. What he really did whisper, the minister could never afterwards recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to the good widow's comprehension, or which Providence interpreted after a method of its own.

Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the celestial city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale. Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church-member, he met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly won--and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon, on the Sabbath after his vigil--to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope, that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?-this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small compass and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So--with a mightier struggle than he had yet sustained--he held his Geneva cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She ransacked her conscience,--which was full of harmless little matters, like her pocket or her work-bag,--and took herself to task, poor thing, for a thousand imaginary faults; and went about her household duties with swollen eyelids the next morning. Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and almost as horrible. It was,-we blush to tell it,--it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of little Puritan children who were playing there, and had but just begun to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seaman, one of the ship's crew from the Spanish Main. And, here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed, at

least, to shake hands with the tarry blackguard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths! It was not so much a better principle, as partly his natural good taste, and still more his buckramed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him safely through the latter crisis. "What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?" cried the minister to himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his hand against his forehead. "Am I mad? or am I given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood? And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination can conceive?" At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins, the reputed witchlady, is said to have been passing by. She made a very grand appearance; having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of velvet, and a ruff done up with the famous yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial friend, had taught her the secret, before this last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's murder. Whether the witch had read the minister's thoughts, or no, she came to a full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and--though little given to converse with clergymen--began a conversation. "So, reverend Sir, you have made a visit into the forest," observed the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. "The next time, I pray you to allow me only a fair warning, and I shall be proud to bear you company. Without taking overmuch upon myself, my good word will go far towards gaining any strange gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of!" "I profess, madam," answered the clergyman, with a grave obeisance, such as the lady's rank demanded, and his own good-breeding made imperative,--"I profess, on my conscience and character, that I am utterly bewildered as touching the purport of your words! I went not into the forest to seek a potentate; neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a view to gaining the favor of such personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath won from heathendom!"

"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high head-dress at the minister. "Well, well, we must needs talk thus in the daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk together!" She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognize a secret intimacy of connection. "Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen for her prince and master!" The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and holy, all awoke, to tempt, even while they frightened him. And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals and the world of perverted spirits. He had by this time reached his dwelling, on the edge of the burial-ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The minister was glad to have reached this shelter, without first betraying himself to the world by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been continually impelled while passing through the streets. He entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him throughout his walk from the forest-dell into the town, and thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here, gone through fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here, striven to pray; here, borne a hundred thousand agonies! There was the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to him, and God's voice through all! There, on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things, and

written thus far into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious curiosity. That self was gone! Another man had returned out of the forest; a wiser one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge that! While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door of the study, and the minister said, "Come in!"--not wholly devoid of an idea that he might behold an evil spirit. And so he did! It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered. The minister stood, white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast. "Welcome home, reverend Sir!" said the physician. "And how found you that godly man, the Apostle Eliot? But methinks, dear Sir, you look pale; as if the travel through the wilderness had been too sore for you. Will not my aid be requisite to put you in heart and strength to preach your Election Sermon?" "Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. "My journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free air which I have breathed, have done me good, after so long confinement in my study. I think to need no more of your drugs, my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a friendly hand." All this time, Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his patient. But, in spite of this outward show, the latter was almost convinced of the old man's knowledge, or, at least, his confident suspicion, with respect to his own interview with Hester Prynne. The physician knew, then, that, in the minister's regard, he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest enemy. So much being known, it would appear natural that a part of it should be expressed. It is singular, however, how long a time often passes before words embody things; and with what security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it. Thus, the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would touch, in express words, upon the real position which they sustained towards one another. Yet did the physician, in his dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.

"Were it not better," said he, "that you use my poor skill to-night? Verily, dear Sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous for this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great things from you; apprehending that another year may come about, and find their pastor gone." "Yea, to another world," replied the minister, with pious resignation. "Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my flock through the flitting seasons of another year! But, touching your medicine, kind Sir, in my present frame of body I need it not." "I joy to hear it," answered the physician. "It may be that my remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due effect. Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England's gratitude, could I achieve this cure!" "I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, with a solemn smile. "I thank you, and can but requite your good deeds with my prayers." "A good man's prayers are golden recompense!" rejoined old Roger Chillingworth, as he took his leave. "Yea, they are the current gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's own mint-mark on them!" Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous appetite. Then, flinging the already written pages of the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ-pipe as he. However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved for ever, he drove his task onward, with earnest haste and ecstasy. Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he careering on it; morning came, and peeped blushing through the curtains; and at last sunrise threw a golden beam into the study, and laid it right across the minister's bedazzled eyes. There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him!

Chapter 21 - The New England Holiday Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and little Pearl came into the market-place. It was already thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in considerable numbers; among whom, likewise, were many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of the forest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of the colony. On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven years past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had the effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline; while, again, the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a mask; or rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle. It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through seven miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn on her bosom!" Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind,

at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavored? The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker; or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency. Pearl was decked out with airy gayety. It would have been impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's simple robe. The dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them; always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester's brow. This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather than walk by her mother's side. She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music. When they reached the market-place, she became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like the broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than the centre of a town's business.

"Why, what is this, mother?" cried she. "Wherefore have all the people left their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See, there is the blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any kind body would only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. Why does he do so, mother?" "He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester. "He should not nod and smile at me, for all that,--the black, grim, ugly-eyed old man!" said Pearl. "He may nod at thee if he will; for thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But, see, mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians among them, and sailors! What have they all come to do here in the market-place?" "They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester. "For the Governor and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great people and good people, with the music, and the soldiers marching before them." "And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl. "And will he hold out both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the brook-side?" "He will be there, child," answered her mother. "But he will not greet thee to-day; nor must thou greet him." "What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking partly to herself. "In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it off! But, here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always over his heart!" "Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things," said her mother. "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery is every body's face to-day. The children have come from their schools, and the grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy. For, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so--as has been the custom of mankind

ever since a nation was first gathered--they make merry and rejoice; as if a good and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world!" It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year--as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries--the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction. But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the marketplace of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in proud old London,--we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show,--might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth--the statesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people's eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James;--no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman, with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps hundreds of years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however, the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling-matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all--on the platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places. It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would compare favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear--stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners,--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main,--who had come ashore to see the humors of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sunblackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vit from pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavorable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice. But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic, or casually associate. Thus, the Puritan elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly

at the clamor and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place, in close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel. The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather. There was a sword at his side, and a sword-cut on his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales. After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship strolled idly through the market-place; until, happening to approach the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognize, and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small, vacant area--a sort of magic circle--had formed itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve, and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly, withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered a good purpose, by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne's repute before the public, that the matron in town most eminent for rigid morality could not have held such intercourse with less result of scandal than herself. "So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or ship-fever, this voyage! What with the ship's surgeon and this other doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish vessel."

"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to appear. "Have you another passenger?" "Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician here-Chillingworth, he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-fare with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of,--he that is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers!" "They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt together." Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But, at that instant, she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in the remotest corner of the market-place, and smiling on her; a smile which--across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the crowd--conveyed secret and fearful meaning.

Chapter 22 - The Procession Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens, on its way towards the meeting-house; where, in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon. Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place. First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill, but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the multitude,--that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye. Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost, for an instant, the restless

agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be borne upward, like a floating sea-bird, on the long heaves and swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armour of the military company, which followed after the music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery--which still sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honorable fame--was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled with gentlemen, who felt the stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to equal. And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that made the warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the English settler on these rude shores,--having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong in him,--bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and weighty order, which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers,--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the people,

seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril, stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanour of natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the sovereign. Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the anniversary was expected. His was the profession, at that era, in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question--it offered inducements powerful enough, in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power--as in the case of Increase Mather--was within the grasp of a successful priest. It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step, as at other times; his frame was not bent; nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and imparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration of that potent cordial, which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest and longcontinued thought. Or, perchance, his sensitive temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music, that swelled heavenward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind? Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing, of what was around him; but the spiritual

element took up the feeble frame, and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many more. Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not; unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of recognition, she had imagined, must needs pass between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him,--least of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!--for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not. Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight. When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face. "Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the brook?" "Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother. "We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest." "I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked," continued the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now, before all the people; even as he did yonder among the dark old trees. What would the minister have

said, mother? Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me begone?" "What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place? Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!" Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose eccentricities--or insanity, as we should term it--led her to do what few of the townspeople would have ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter, in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne,--kindly as so many now felt towards the latter,--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins had doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in which the two women stood. "Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it!" whispered the old lady confidentially to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must needs say--he really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would think how little while it is since he went forth out of his study,--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I warrant,--to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that means, Hester Prynne! But, truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the same man. Many a church-member saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the world. But this minister! Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that encountered thee on the forest-path?" "Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne, feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and awe-stricken by

the confidence with which she affirmed a personal connection between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil One. "It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale!" "Fie, woman, fie!" cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester. "Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea; though no leaf of the wild garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their hair! I know thee, Hester; for I behold the token. We may all see it in the sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest it openly; so there need be no question about that. But this minister! Let me tell thee in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his own servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be disclosed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world! What is that the minister seeks to hide, with his hand always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne!" "What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly asked little Pearl. "Hast thou seen it?" "No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a profound reverence. "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another. They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of the Air! Wilt thou ride with me, some fine night, to see thy father? Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart!" Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the weird old gentlewoman took her departure. By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester near the spot. As the sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct, but varied, murmur and flow of the minister's very peculiar voice. This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment; insomuch that a listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher spoke, might still

have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the church-walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intentness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was for ever in it an essential character of plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish,--the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard, sighing amid a desolate silence. But even when the minister's voice grew high and commanding,--when it gushed irrepressibly upward,--when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open air,--still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain. What was it? The complaint of a human heart, sorrowladen, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching its sympathy or forgiveness,--at every moment,--in each accent,--and never in vain! It was this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his most appropriate power. During all this time Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would nevertheless have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense within her,--too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind,--that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity. Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray; even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of

dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed, amid the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but, oftentimes, a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw any thing to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or thing as her own property, so far as she desired it; but without yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face; and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in the night-time. One of these seafaring men--the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken to Hester Prynne--was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that he attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck and waist, with such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it was difficult to imagine her without it. "Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the seaman. "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?" "If the message pleases me I will," answered Pearl. "Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the black-a-visaged, humpshouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?"

"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!" cried Pearl, with her naughty smile. "If thou callest me that ill-name, I shall tell him of thee; and he will chase thy ship with a tempest!" Pursuing a zigzag course across the market-place, the child returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester's strong, calm steadfastly enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom, which--at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of misery--showed itself, with an unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path. With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to another trial. There were many people present, from the country roundabout, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumors, but who had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity, and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom; conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity among her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool, wellacquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester saw and recognized the self same faces of that group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the prisondoor, seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made. At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more

remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more painfully than at any time since the first day she put it on. While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for ever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an audience, whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control. The sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the market-place! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!

Chapter 23 - The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had been borne aloft, as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came to a pause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should follow the utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed tumult; as if the auditors, released from the high spell that had transported them into the region of another's mind, were returning into themselves, with all their awe and wonder still heavy on them. In a moment more, the crowd began to gush forth from the doors of the church. Now that there was an end, they needed other breath, more fit to support the gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than that atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame, and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought. In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with applauses of the minister. His hearers could not rest until they had told one another of what each knew better than he could tell or hear. According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day; nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through his. Its influence could be seen, as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him, and continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay before him, and filling him with ideas that must have been as marvellous to himself as to his audience.

His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they were here planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew towards the close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to its purpose as mightily as the old prophets of Israel were constrained; only with this difference, that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord. But, throughout it all, and through the whole discourse, there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to pass away. Yes; their minister whom they so loved--and who so loved them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a sigh--had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would soon leave them in their tears! This idea of his transitory stay on earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher had produced; it was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies, had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant,--at once a shadow and a splendor,--and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them. Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--as to most men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognized until they see it far behind them--an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph than any previous one, or than any which could hereafter be. He stood, at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England's earliest days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied, as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit, at the close of his Election Sermon. Meanwhile, Hester Prynne was standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast! Now was heard again the clangor of the music, and the measured tramp of the military escort, issuing from the church-door. The procession was to be marshalled thence to the town-hall, where a solemn banquet would complete the ceremonies of the day. Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers was seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew back reverently, on either side,

as the Governor and magistrates, the old and wise men, the holy ministers, and all that were eminent and renowned, advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in the market-place, their presence was greeted by a shout. This-though doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the child-like loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers--was felt to be an irrepressible outburst of the enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears. Each felt the impulse in himself, and, in the same breath, caught it from his neighbour. Within the church, it had hardly been kept down; beneath the sky, it pealed upward to the zenith. There were human beings enough, and enough of highly wrought and symphonious feeling, to produce that more impressive sound than the organ-tones of the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty swell of many voices, blended into one great voice by the universal impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never, from the soil of New England, had gone up such a shout! Never, on New England soil, had stood the man so honored by his mortal brethren as the preacher! How fared it with him then? Were there not the brilliant particles of a halo in the air about his head? So etherealized by spirit as he was, and so apotheosized by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps in the procession really tread upon the dust of earth? As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach among them. The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of the crowd after another obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale he looked amid all his triumph! The energy--or say, rather, the inspiration which had held him up, until he should have delivered the sacred message that brought its own strength along with it from heaven--was withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully performed its office. The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly among the late-decaying embers. It seemed hardly the face of a man alive, with such a deathlike hue; it was hardly a man with life in him, that tottered on his path so nervelessly, yet tottered, and did not fall! One of his clerical brethren,--it was the venerable John Wilson,--observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the retiring wave of intellect and

sensibility, stepped forward hastily to offer his support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled the old man's arm. He still walked onward, if that movement could be so described, which rather resembled the wavering effort of an infant, with its mother's arms in view, outstretched to tempt him forward. And now, almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he had come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold, where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester Prynne had encountered the world's ignominious stare. There stood Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand! And there was the scarlet letter on her breast! The minister here made a pause; although the music still played the stately and rejoicing march to which the procession moved. It summoned him onward,--onward to the festival!--but here he made a pause. Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye upon him. He now left his own place in the procession, and advanced to give assistance; judging from Mr. Dimmesdale's aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter's expression that warned back the magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague intimations that pass from one spirit to another. The crowd, meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder. This earthly faintness was, in their view, only another phase of the minister's celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into the light of heaven! He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms. "Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my little Pearl!" It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it. The child, with the bird-like motion which was one of her characteristics, flew to him, and clasped her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne--slowly, as if impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest will--likewise drew near, but paused before she reached him. At this instant old Roger Chillingworth thrust himself through the crowd,--or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some nether region,--to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do! Be that as it might, the old man rushed forward and caught the minister by the arm.

"Madman, hold! What is your purpose?" whispered he. "Wave back that woman! Cast off this child! All shall be well! Do not blacken your fame, and perish in dishonor! I can yet save you! Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?" "Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!" answered the minister, encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. "Thy power is not what it was! With God's help, I shall escape thee now!" He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter. "Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last moment, to do what--for my own heavy sin and miserable agony--I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all his might!--with all his own might and the fiend's! Come, Hester, come! Support me up yonder scaffold!" The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who stood more immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by surprise, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they saw,--unable to receive the explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any other,--that they remained silent and inactive spectators of the judgment which Providence seemed about to work. They beheld the minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder and supported by her arm around him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled, therefore, to be present at its closing scene. "Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret,--no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,--save on this very scaffold!" "Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!" answered the minister. Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester with an expression of doubt and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a feeble smile upon his lips. "Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the forest?"

"I know not! I know not!" she hurriedly replied. "Better? Yea; so we may both die, and little Pearl die with us!" "For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the minister; "and God is merciful! Let me now do the will which he hath made plain before my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste to take my shame upon me." Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little Pearl's, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his brethren; to the people, whose great heart was thoroughly appalled, yet overflowing with tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep lifematter--which, if full of sin, was full of anguish and repentance likewise--was now to be laid open to them. The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon the clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he stood out from all the earth to put in his plea of guilty at the bar of Eternal Justice. "People of New England!" cried he, with a voice that rose over them, high, solemn, and majestic,--yet had always a tremor through it, and sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a fathomless depth of remorse and woe,--"ye, that have loved me!--ye, that have deemed me holy!--behold me here, the one sinner of the world! At last!--at last!--I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I should have stood; here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me, at this dreadful moment, from grovelling down upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk hath been,--wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped to find repose,--it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible repugnance round about her. But there stood one in the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!" It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder of his secret undisclosed. But he fought back the bodily weakness,--and, still more, the faintness of heart,--that was striving for the mastery with him. He threw off all assistance, and stepped passionately forward a pace before the woman and the child. "It was on him!" he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so determined was he to speak out the whole. "God's eye beheld it! The angels were for ever pointing at it! The Devil knew it well, and fretted it continually with the touch of his burning

finger! But he hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you with the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful world!--and sad, because he missed his heavenly kindred! Now, at the death-hour, he stands up before you! He bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter! He tells you, that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart! Stand any here that question God's judgment on a sinner? Behold! Behold a dreadful witness of it!" With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation. For an instant the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly miracle; while the minister stood with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon the scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her bosom. Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed. "Thou hast escaped me!" he repeated more than once. "Thou hast escaped me!" "May God forgive thee!" said the minister. "Thou, too, hast deeply sinned!" He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the woman and the child. "My little Pearl," said he feebly,--and there was a sweet and gentle smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be sportive with the child,--"dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou wouldst not yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt?" Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled. "Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell!"

"Shall we not meet again?" whispered she, bending her face down close to his. "Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest?" "Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we broke!--the sin here so awfully revealed!--let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God,--when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,--it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell!" That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath. The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.

Chapter 24 - Conclusion After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold. Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne--imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin, there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance,--which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out,--by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again,--and those best able to appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body,--whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain; where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness. It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant's. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying,--conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels,--had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of

man's own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man's friends--and especially a clergyman's-will sometimes uphold his character; when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust. The authority which we have chiefly followed--a manuscript of old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale from contemporary witnesses--fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages. Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence:--"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the appearance and demeanour of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy--all his vital and intellectual force--seemed at once to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph and consummation, that evil principle was left with no further material to support it,--when, in short, there was no more devil's work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanized mortal to betake himself whither his Master would find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly. But, to all these shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances,--as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions,--we would fain be merciful. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a

high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister--mutual victims as they have been--may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love. Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to communicate to the reader. At old Roger Chillingworth's decease (which took place within the year), and by his last will and testament, of which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr. Wilson were executors, he bequeathed a very considerable amount of property, both here and in England, to little Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne. So Pearl--the elf-child,--the demon offspring, as some people, up to that epoch, persisted in considering her--became the richest heiress of her day, in the New World. Not improbably, this circumstance wrought a very material change in the public estimation; and, had the mother and child remained here, little Pearl, at a marriageable period of life, might have mingled her wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them all. But, in no long time after the physician's death, the wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with her. For many years, though a vague report would now and then find its way across the sea,--like a shapeless piece of driftwood tost ashore, with the initials of a name upon it,--yet no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were received. The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend. Its spell, however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore, where Hester Prynne had dwelt. Near this latter spot, one afternoon, some children were at play, when they beheld a tall woman, in a gray robe, approach the cottage-door. In all those years it had never once been opened; but either she unlocked it, or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these impediments,--and, at all events, went in. On the threshold she paused,--turned partly round,--for, perchance, the idea of entering, all alone, and all so changed, the home of so intense a former life, was

more dreary and desolate than even she could bear. But her hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast. And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken shame. But where was little Pearl? If still alive, she must now have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew--nor ever learned, with the fulness of perfect certainty--whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued, and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness. But, through the remainder of Hester's life, there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with some inhabitant of another land. Letters came, with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury, such as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased, and affection have imagined for her. There were trifles, too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate fingers, at the impulse of a fond heart. And, once, Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment, with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, been shown to our sobre-hued community. In fine, the gossips of that day believed,--and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made investigations a century later, believed,--and one of his recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully believes,--that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother; and that she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside. But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, that in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed,--of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it,--resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure

for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially,--in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,--or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,--came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end! So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate--as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport--there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one everglowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:-"On a field, sable, the letter A, gules." THE END

HERMAN MELVILLE

1081

And you O m y s o u l w h e r e you s t a n d , S u r r o u n d e d , d e t a c h e d , in m e a s u r e l e s s o c e a n s of s p a c e , C e a s e l e s s l y m u s i n g , v e n t u r i n g , t h r o w i n g , s e e k i n g t h e s p h e r e s to c o n n e c t them, Till t h e b r i d g e you will n e e d b e f o r m ' d , till t h e d u c t i l e a n c h o r h o l d , Till t h e g o s s a m e r t h r e a d you fling c a t c h s o m e w h e r e , O m y s o u l . 10 1868,1881

HERMAN MELVILLE 1819-1891

H e r m a n Melville b e g a n life with everything in his favor: heredity first of all, with t w o g e n u i n e R e v o l u t i o n a r y h e r o e s for g r a n d f a t h e r s . T h e Melvill family ( t h e e w a s a d d e d in the 1 8 3 0 s ) w a s solidly e s t a b l i s h e d in B o s t o n , a n d t h e G a n s e v o o r t s w e r e linked to the g r e a t e s t D u t c h p a t r o o n f a m i l i e s of N e w York. Melville's m u c h - t r a v e l e d father, Allan Melvill, a dry-goods m e r c h a n t in N e w York City, t o o k i n o r d i n a t e p r i d e in the g e n e a l o g y of the Melvills, t r a c i n g t h e line p a s t S c o t t i s h R e n a i s s a n c e c o u r t i e r s to a q u e e n of H u n g a r y a n d t r a c i n g his m o t h e r ' s family, the S c o l l a y s , to t h e k i n g s of Norway: " & so it a p p e a r s w e a r e of a royal line in both s i d e s of the H o u s e a f t e r all, it is not only a n a m u s i n g b u t a j u s t c a u s e of p r i d e , to resort b a c k t h r o u g h t h e a g e s to s u c h a n c e s t r y , & s h o u l d p r o d u c e a c o r r e s p o n d e n t spirit of e m u l a t i o n in their d e s c e n d a n t s to the r e m o t e s t p o s t e r i t y . " A s the third o l d e s t of eight c h i l d r e n b o r n b e t w e e n 1 8 1 5 a n d 1 8 3 0 , H e r m a n Melville s p e n t his early c h i l d h o o d in luxury. B u t A l l a n Melvill b e g a n b o r r o w i n g f r o m relatives in the 1 8 2 0 s , a l t e r n a t i n g b e t w e e n o v e r e n t h u s i a s m a b o u t the f u t u r e of b u s i n e s s in A m e r i c a a n d d r e a d of a n i n e v i t a b l e r e c e s s i o n . In 1 8 3 2 h e s u d d e n l y fell ill a n d d i e d in a d e l i r i u m that s o m e in t h e family t h o u g h t of a s m a d n e s s . H e w a s m a n y t h o u s a n d s of dollars in d e b t , a n d his family, t h e n living in Albany, b e c a m e d e p e n d e n t o n t h e c o n s c i e n t i o u s b u t finely c a l c u l a t e d c a r e of the G a n s e v o o r t s , e s p e c i a l l y Melville's u n c l e P e t e r . T a k e n o u t of s c h o o l w h e n h e w a s twelve, a few m o n t h s after his father's d e a t h , Melville c l e r k e d for two y e a r s at a b a n k . S t a r t i n g early in 1 8 3 4 h e w o r k e d two a n d a half years at his b r o t h e r G a n s e v o o r t s f u r - c a p s t o r e in Albany. In 1 8 3 7 h e s p e n t several m o n t h s in n e a r b y Pittsfield, M a s s a c h u s e t t s , r u n n i n g his u n c l e T h o m a s Melvill's f a r m after his u n c l e left for Illinois. J u s t after h e t u r n e d e i g h t e e n , h e t a u g h t in a c o u n t r y s c h o o l n e a r Pittsfield, w h e r e h e b o a r d e d with Y a n k e e b a c k w o o d s f a m i l i e s . T h e next s p r i n g h e t o o k a c o u r s e in s u r v e y i n g a n d e n g i n e e r i n g at the L a n s i n g b u r g h A c a d e m y , n e a r A l b a n y , b u t in t h e a f t e r m a t h of the P a n i c of 1 8 3 7 f o u n d n o work. H e s i g n e d on a voyage to a n d from L i v e r p o o l in 1 8 3 9 , the s u m m e r h e t u r n e d twenty, t h e n t h e next year j o b - h u n t e d fruitlessly a r o u n d the M i d w e s t . At t w e n t y - o n e , in J a n u a r y 1 8 4 1 , h e took the d e s p e r a t e m e a s u r e of s a i l i n g o n a w h a l e r for t h e S o u t h S e a s . In t h e s u m m e r of 1 8 4 2 Melville a n d a s h i p m a t e , T o b y G r e e n e , j u m p e d s h i p at N u k a h i v a , in t h e M a r q u e s a s ; a n d for a few w e e k s Melville lived with a tribe q u i t e u n t a i n t e d by W e s t e r n civilization; late in life h e felt h e h a d lived in t h e w o r l d ' s last E d e n . P i c k e d u p by a n A u s t r a l i a n w h a l e r l e s s t h a n a m o n t h after h e d e s e r t e d , h e t o o k part in a c o m i c o p e r a m u t i n y a n d w a s i m p r i s o n e d by t h e B r i t i s h c o n s u l in T a h i t i , a l o n g with a l e a r n e d friend (the " D r . L o n g G h o s t " of Omoo) w h o b e c a m e his c o m p a n i o n in e x p l o r i n g the flora a n d , e s p e c i a l l y , t h e f a u n a of T a h i t i a n d E i m e o . S h i p p i n g

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o n a N a n t u c k e t w h a l e r at E i m e o , Melville w a s d i s c h a r g e d in L a h a i n a , t h e n k n o c k e d a b o u t H o n o l u l u for a few m o n t h s b e f o r e s i g n i n g o n t h e frigate United States as an o r d i n a r y s e a m a n . After a leisurely c r u i s e in the Pacific, i n c l u d i n g a revisit to t h e M a r q u e s a s , t h e United States s a i l e d for h o m e , arriving at B o s t o n in O c t o b e r 1 8 4 4 . H e r m a n Melville w a s twenty-five; h e later said that f r o m that year, b e g i n n i n g A u g u s t 1, 1 8 4 4 , h e d a t e d his life. H e a p p a r e n t l y did not look for a j o b after his d i s c h a r g e from t h e navy in B o s t o n on O c t o b e r 14; within two or t h r e e m o n t h s h e h a d b e g u n writing Typee while s t a y i n g with his lawyer b r o t h e r s in N e w York City. Typee w a s p u b l i s h e d early in 1 8 4 6 . As t h e e a r l i e s t p e r s o n a l a c c o u n t of t h e S o u t h S e a s to have t h e readability a n d s u s p e n s e of a d v e n t u r e fiction, it m a d e a g r e a t s e n s a t i o n , c a p t u r i n g the i m a g i n a t i o n of b o t h the literary reviewers a n d the r e a d i n g p u b l i c with the surefire c o m b i n a t i o n of a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l novelty a n d w h a t reviewers regularly t a g g e d ( r e m e m b e r i n g Othello) a s " h a i r - b r e a d t h s c a p e s . " It w a s a t t e n d e d by v i g o r o u s , s a l e s - s t i m u l a t i n g c o n t r o v e r s y over its a u t h e n t i c i t y , c a p p e d by t h e e m e r g e n c e of T o b y , the l o n g - l o s t fellow r u n a w a y , in t h e p e r s o n of R i c h a r d T o b i a s G r e e n e , a h o u s e p a i n t e r n e a r B u f f a l o . In the m i d d l e of t h e p u b l i c i t y over Typee, G a n s e v o o r t d i e d s u d d e n l y at t h e a g e of thirty. In l e s s t h a n a y e a r the u n k n o w n sailor, t h e u n a p p r e c i a t e d s e c o n d s o n , h a d b e c o m e a s e n s a t i o n a l l y n e w s w o r t h y writer a n d t h e h e a d of his family. Melville i m m e d i a t e l y t u r n e d to the c o m p o s i t i o n of a s e q u e l , Omoo, the a c c o u n t m o r e strictly a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l t h a n Typeeof his b e a c h c o m b i n g in T a h i t i a n d E i m e o . Omoo l a c k e d t h e s u s p e n s e of Typee, but it w a s a m o r e p o l i s h e d p e r f o r m a n c e o f a writer far s u r e r of himself. It is a fine, h u m o r o u s p r o d u c t i o n , full of vivid c h a r a c t e r s k e t c h e s a n d m e m o r a b l e d o c u m e n t a t i o n of the evils w r o u g h t by t h e C h r i s t i a n i z e r s . It d e l i g h t e d r e a d e r s in 1 8 4 7 a n d g a v e g r e a t p l e a s u r e to later S o u t h S e a w a n d e r e r s like R o b e r t L o u i s S t e v e n s o n a n d H e n r y A d a m s . In the flush of his s u c c e s s with Omoo, Melville m a r r i e d E l i z a b e t h K n a p p S h a w o n A u g u s t 4, 1 8 4 7 , t h r e e d a y s after his t w e n t y - e i g h t h birthday. H e r father, L e m u e l S h a w , t h e c h i e f j u s t i c e of M a s s a c h u s e t t s , h a d b e e n a s c h o o l friend of A l l a n Melvill at t h e turn of t h e century. After t h e m a r r i a g e S h a w p r o v i d e d several a d v a n c e s a g a i n s t his d a u g h t e r ' s i n h e r i t a n c e , a l l o w i n g Melville to e s t a b l i s h h i m s e l f in M a n h a t t a n with his b r i d e , his y o u n g e r b r o t h e r Allan, Allan's o w n b r i d e , his m o t h e r , f o u r s i s t e r s , a n d his new m a n u s c r i p t . Melville was well o n his way to b e c o m i n g a literary fixture of N e w York City, a r e s i d e n t authority a n d reviewer of b o o k s on n a u t i c a l m a t t e r s a n d inland e x p l o r a t i o n , a n d a reliable d i s p e n s e r of v i g o r o u s , h u m o r o u s , a u t h e n t i c t a l e s of exotic a d v e n t u r e . I n s t e a d , the P o l y n e s i a n a d v e n t u r e r d i s c o v e r e d the world of t h e m i n d a n d t h e a e s thetic r a n g e of the E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e a s h e worked his way into his third b o o k , Mardi, w h i c h w a s p u b l i s h e d in April 1 8 4 9 , j u s t short of two y e a r s after h e b e g a n it. Mardi sold poorly, e s p e c i a l l y in t h e o v e r p r i c e d t h r e e - v o l u m e E n g l i s h e d i t i o n , a n d d e e p l y d a m a g e d Melville's g r o w i n g r e p u t a t i o n e x c e p t with a few r e a d e r s . Mardi is, in fact, a l m o s t u n r e a d a b l e , e x c e p t for a rarely d e d i c a t e d lover of a n t i q u a r i a n literary, philos o p h i c a l , m e t a p h y s i c a l , a n d political h o d g e p o d g e t h e sort o f e c c e n t r i c s c h o l a r w h o loves B u r t o n ' s Anatomy of Melancholy a n d B r o w n e ' s Vulgar Errors. M e l v i l l e a n s find it i n e x h a u s t i b l y f a s c i n a t i n g , r e c o g n i z i n g in it Melville's e x u b e r a n t r e s p o n s e to his realization that h e w a s o r c o u l d b e c o m e a g r e a t literary g e n i u s . Mardi w a s his d e c l a ration of literary i n d e p e n d e n c e , t h o u g h h e did not fully a c h i e v e that i n d e p e n d e n c e until Moby-Dick, two b o o k s a n d two y e a r s later. a n d its p u b l i c a t i o n , Early in 1 8 4 9 , d u r i n g the interval b e t w e e n c o m p l e t i n g Mardi Melville's first s o n , M a l c o l m , w a s b o r n . A c c e p t i n g t h e r e s p o n s i b i l i t i e s of a n e w father, h e w r o t e Redhurn ( 1 8 4 9 ) a n d White-Jacket ( 1 8 5 0 ) a s a c t s of c o n t r i t i o n , b o t h g r o u n d o u t d u r i n g o n e f o u r - m o n t h p e r i o d in the 1 8 4 9 s u m m e r s w e l t e r of a c h o l e r a - r i d d e n N e w York City. Redhurn, written in the first p e r s o n by the m i d d l e - a g e d , s e n t i m e n t a l W e l l i n g b o r o u g h R e d b u r n , is the story of t h e n a r r a t o r ' s first v o y a g e , w h i c h like M e l ville's o w n w a s a s u m m e r v o y a g e to a n d f r o m Liverpool, t h o u g h R e d b u r n is hardly

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m o r e t h a n a boy while Melville w a s twenty. T h e reviewers a n d t h e r e a d e r s liked it, e s p e c i a l l y the air of d o c u m e n t a r y c o n v i n c i n g n e s s that r e m i n d e d t h e m of Crusoe a n d other works by D a n i e l D e f o e . w a s p u b l i s h e d , Melville had c o m p l e t e d Wliite-Jacket, States in 1 8 4 3 a n d which 1844, WhiteL o n g before Redburn Robinson

w a s b a s e d on his e x p e r i e n c e s o n t h e m a n - o f - w a r United

s u p p l e m e n t e d by lavish b o r r o w i n g s f r o m earlier n a u t i c a l l i t e r a t u r e . Melville s a i l e d for L o n d o n in O c t o b e r 1 8 4 9 , c a r r y i n g with him proofs of the H a r p e r edition of Jacket. An o b s e r v e r d e s c r i b e d h i m a s wearily h a w k i n g his b o o k " f r o m Picadillv to

W h i t e c h a p e l , c a l l i n g u p o n every p u b l i s h e r in his w a y , " a n d in fact Melville r e p e a t e d l y m e t refusal b e c a u s e of t h e copyright p r o b l e m . H e u l t i m a t e l y s e t t l e d with B e n t l e y o n g o o d t e r m s b u t not g o o d e n o u g h to allow him to m a k e his h o p e d - f o r t o u r of E u r o p e a n d the Holy L a n d . S o o n after his return to N e w York on F e b r u a r y 1, 1 8 5 0 , e n t h u s i a s t i c reviews of White-Jacket b e g a n arriving from E n g l a n d , a n d in M a r c h the A m e r ican edition w a s p u b l i s h e d to s i m i l a r a c c l a i m . In a b u o y a n t m o o d , s u r e of his p o w e r s a n d s u r e of his ability to k e e p a n a u d i e n c e , Melville b e g a n his w h a l i n g b o o k . ( B y mid1 8 5 1 its w o r k i n g title w a s The Whale, Moby-Dick L i k e Mardi, Moby-Dick w h i c h r e m a i n e d t h e title for t h e E n g l i s h e d i t i o n ; w a s a l a s t - m i n u t e s u b s t i t u t e for the A m e r i c a n e d i t i o n . ) w a s luxury for Melville, a n e n o r m o u s , slowly written Melville v a c a t i o n e d at his u n c l e T h o -

b o o k . D u r i n g t h e c o m p o s i t i o n of Moby-Dick

m a s ' s old p l a c e in t h e B e r k s h i r e s . H e h a d left the region a s a t e e n a g e m a s t e r of a b a c k w o o d s s c h o o l ; a n d Pittsfield r e s i d e n t s r e m e m b e r e d h i m , if at all, a s that lad or, from a few years b e f o r e , a s the o r p h a n n e p h e w of T h o m a s Melvill, a p r e t e n t i o u s f a r m e r in a n d o u t of d e b t o r ' s p r i s o n until h e m o v e d to Illinois in 1 8 3 7 . N o w this n e p h e w w a s an a u t h o r of i n t e r n a t i o n a l r e p u t e , a n d t h e collision of t i m e s a n d circ u m s t a n c e s r e l e a s e d a n e a r - m a n i c s t a t e in Melville. H e w a s in this exalted m o o d w h e n he m e t N a t h a n i e l Manse few p a s s a g e s in Moby-Dick; b r o t h e r s ' Literary deepest attitudes World toward H a w t h o r n e . R e a d i n g H a w t h o r n e ' s Mosses from an Old j u s t after their m e e t i n g m a y have had s o m e m i n o r stylistic i n f l u e n c e o n a m o r e i m p o r t a n t , Melville u n d e r t o o k for the D u y c k i n c k a review of Mosses the p r o b l e m s in w h i c h h e a r t i c u l a t e d m a n y of his of A m e r i c a n writers. and opportunities

I n f u s i n g the whole review is Melville's exultant s e n s e that the day h a d c o m e w h e n A m e r i c a n writers c o u l d rival S h a k e s p e a r e ; in p r a i s i n g H a w t h o r n e ' s a c h i e v e m e n t s , h e w a s h o n o r i n g w h a t h e k n e w lay in his own m a n u s c r i p t . F u r t h e r m o r e , Melville g a v e c l e a r e r h i n t s at what sort of " t r u t h " h e m i g h t be trying to give in Molry-Dick d a r k , " S h a k e s p e a r e a n " t r u t h s a b o u t h u m a n n a t u r e a n d the u n i v e r s e that "in this world of l i e s " c a n be told only "covertly, a n d by s n a t c h e s . " O u t of his f a i l u r e s with Mardi a n d the slave labor of t h e next two b o o k s , Melville had built a literary theory in w h i c h a writer writes s i m u l t a n e o u s l y for two a u d i e n c e s , o n e c o m p o s e d of the m o b , t h e other of " e a g l e - e y e d " r e a d e r s w h o p e r c e i v e t h e true m e a n i n g of t h o s e p a s s a g e s that the a u t h o r h a s "directly c a l c u l a t e d to d e c e i v e e g r e g i o u s l y d e c e i v e t h e superficial s k i m m e r of p a g e s . " Still exultantly feeling his n e w p o w e r s , Melville m o v e d his family to a farm n e a r Pittsfield late in 1 8 5 0 . By D e c e m b e r h e h a d settled a g a i n into i n t e n s e work on his b o o k until the s p r i n g c h o r e s t o o k him away f r o m it. D u r i n g 1851 t h e m o s t s t i m u l a t i n g fact of Melville's e x i s t e n c e , o t h e r t h a n the b o o k h e b r o u g h t to c o m p l e t i o n a n d s a w t h r o u g h the p r e s s , w a s H a w t h o r n e ' s p r e s e n c e at L e n o x , n e a r e n o u g h for a few visits e x c e p t d u r i n g the worst of the B e r k s h i r e winter. As he finished Moby-Dick, Melville w a s a family m a n w h o s e h o u s e h o l d i n c l u d e d his m o t h e r a n d s i s t e r s a s well a s a s m a l l child a n d a p r e g n a n t wife. H e o w e d the H a r p e r s $ 7 0 0 b e c a u s e they h a d a d v a n c e d him m o r e t h a n his earlier b o o k s h a d e a r n e d , a n d in April 1851 they r e f u s e d h i m an a d v a n c e o n his w h a l i n g b o o k . O n M a y 1, Melville b o r r o w e d $ 2 , 0 5 0 from T . D. S t e w art, a n old L a n s i n g b u r g h a c q u a i n t a n c e ; a n d a few d a y s later h e painfully d e f i n e d his l i t e r a r y - e c o n o m i c d i l e m m a to H a w t h o r n e : " W h a t I feel m o s t m o v e d to write, that is b a n n e d . i t will not pay. Yet, a l t o g e t h e r , write t h e other is a final h a s h , a n d all my b o o k s are b o t c h e s . " way I c a n n o t . S o the p r o d u c t

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L a t e in 1 8 5 1 , a b o u t t h e t i m e Moby-Dick

was published, Melville began

Pierre,

t h i n k i n g h e c o u l d e x p r e s s the a g o n i e s of t h e growth of a h u m a n p s y c h e even while e n t h r a l l i n g r e a d e r s with t h e r o m a n t i c a n d e t h i c a l p e r p l e x i t i e s a t t e n d i n g o n y o u n g P i e r r e G l e n d i n n i n g ' s d i s c o v e r y of a d a r k m a i d e n w h o m i g h t b e his u n a c k n o w l e d g e d half-sister. Melville t o o k his m a n u s c r i p t to N e w York C i t y a r o u n d N e w Y e a r ' s D a y 1 8 5 2 , h o p i n g to p u b l i s h it a s a t a u t 3 6 0 - p a g e b o o k , little m o r e t h a n h a l f t h e size o f Moby-Dick. B u t d e s p i t e the early s a l e s of t h e w h a l i n g b o o k , Melville w a s still in d e b t cents on the Mobyto t h e H a r p e r s , w h o o f f e r e d h i m a p u n i t i v e c o n t r a c t for Pierretwenty

d o l l a r after e x p e n s e s r a t h e r t h a n the old r a t e of fifty c e n t s . S t u n g , M e l v i l l e a c c e p t e d , b u t his r a g e a n d s h a m e over t h e c o n t r a c t m i n g l e d with p a i n f r o m the reviews of Dick in t h e J a n u a r y p e r i o d i c a l s : the Southern Quarterly Review, "writ de lunatico" for i n s t a n c e , s a i d a

w a s j u s t i f i e d a g a i n s t M e l v i l l e a n d his c h a r a c t e r s . W i t h i n d a y s M e l a s o m e t i m e s wry, s o m e t i m e s r e c k l e s s l y bitter a c c o u n t Moby-Dick

ville b e g a n w o r k i n g into Pierre

of his o w n literary c a r e e r , e n l a r g i n g the w o r k a n d w r e c k i n g w h a t e v e r c h a n c e h e h a d of m a k i n g the w o r k w h a t h e h a d h o p e d a s m u c h m o r e p r o f o u n d t h a n as the legendary Krakens are larger than whales. Pierre w a s widely d e n o u n c e d a s i m m o r a l , a n d o n e P i e r r e - i n s p i r e d n e w s a c c o u n t w a s c a p t i o n e d " H E R M A N M E L V I L L E C R A Z Y . " In p a n i c t h e family m a d e efforts to g a i n Melville s o m e g o v e r n m e n t p o s t , p r e f e r a b l y foreign, b u t n o t h i n g c a m e of their a t t e m p t s to call in old favors. Melville s t a y e d on the f a r m with his e x p a n d i n g h o u s e hold (two d a u g h t e r s , E l i z a b e t h a n d F r a n c e s , w e r e b o r n in 1 8 5 3 a n d 1 8 5 5 ) . After Pierre Melville's c a r e e r faltered. In M a y 1 8 5 3 h e c o m p l e t e d The Isle of the Cross, a b o o k a b o u t a p a t i e n t s e a - c o a s t wife, b u t h e w a s s o m e h o w " p r e v e n t e d " f r o m p u b l i s h i n g it, a n d h e p r o b a b l y d e s t r o y e d it. In 1 8 5 3 a n d 1 8 5 4 h e w r o t e p a r t o f a b o o k a b o u t t o r t o i s e h u n t i n g in t h e G a l a p a g o s I s l a n d s , t h e n a p p a r e n t l y diverted s o m e of it i n t o The Encantadas a n d d e s t r o y e d the rest. Melville w a s u n d e r g o i n g a p r o f o u n d p s y c h o logical c r i s i s that left h i m m o r e r e s i g n e d to fate t h a n defiant, a n d in a d d i t i o n to his o l d e r a i l m e n t of w e a k eyes h e d e v e l o p e d a n e w set of c r i p p l i n g afflictions d i a g n o s e d as sciatica and rheumatism. In 1 8 5 3 Melville b e g a n a n e w , low-keyed c a r e e r a s writer of s h o r t s t o r i e s for t h e two m a j o r A m e r i c a n m o n t h l i e s , Harper's a n d Putnam's. O n e serial, the story of a R e v o l u t i o n a r y exile n a m e d Israel Potter, s t r e t c h e d o u t to b o o k l e n g t h . O f f e r i n g it to the p u b l i s h e r , Melville p r o m i s e d that it w o u l d c o n t a i n n o t h i n g " t o s h o c k t h e fastidio u s , " a n d in fact he r e s t r a i n e d his i m a g i n a t i o n a n d his m e t a p h y s i c a l a n d t h e o l o g i c a l c o m p u l s i o n s . S t r a i g h t f o r w a r d novel that it is, Israel Potter c o n t a i n s p a s s a g e s of g r e a t s t o r i e s a s The Piazza h i s t o r i c a l i n t e r e s t , e s p e c i a l l y t h e c o m p l e x p o r t r a i t s of B e n j a m i n F r a n k l i n , J o h n P a u l J o n e s , a n d E t h a n Allen. In 1 8 5 6 Melville c o l l e c t e d t h e Putnam's Tales, s u p p l y i n g a n e w p r e f a t o r y s k e t c h , The Piazza, which marked his development financial distress emerged a new

p a s t his earlier s i m p l e a d m i r a t i o n for H a w t h o r n e ' s s u b j e c t s a n d t e c h n i q u e s . F r o m this p e r i o d of p h y s i c a l a n d p s y c h i c s u f f e r i n g a n d of m a s t e r p i e c e , The Confidence-Man, a d e v a s t a t i n g i n d i c t m e n t of n a t i o n a l c o n f i d e n c e

in t h e f o r m of m i n g l e d m e t a p h y s i c a l s a t i r e a n d low c o m e d y . It w e n t a l m o s t u n r e a d in t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s ; in E n g l a n d t h e reviews were m o r e i n t e l l i g e n t b u t t h e s a l e s w e r e a l s o d i s a p p o i n t i n g , a n d M e l v i l l e did n o t e a r n a c e n t f r o m e i t h e r e d i t i o n . B y t h e s p r i n g of 1 8 5 6 Melville m a y h a v e r e c o v e r e d f r o m m o s t of his m e n t a l , spiritual, a n d p h y s i c a l a g o n i e s , b u t his e c o n o m i c d i s t r e s s w a s g r e a t e r t h a n ever. M e l v i l l e w a s f o r c e d to sell p a r t of the f a r m , but J u d g e S h a w m e t t h e family's a n x i e t i e s a b o u t H e r m a n ' s s t a t e of m i n d by p r o v i d i n g f u n d s for a n e x t e n d e d trip to E u r o p e a n d t h e L e v a n t , from O c t o b e r 1 8 5 6 to M a y 1 8 5 7 . In E n g l a n d M e l v i l l e told H a w t h o r n e , w h o h a d b e c o m e c o n s u l at L i v e r p o o l , that h e did not a n t i c i p a t e m u c h p l e a s u r e in his r a m b l e s , s i n c e " t h e spirit of a d v e n t u r e " h a d g o n e o u t of h i m . F o r u p w a r d s of a d e c a d e , Melville's a d v e n t u r i n g h a d b e e n i n w a r d p h i l o s o p h i c a l , m e t a p h y s i c a l , p s y c h o l o g i c a l , a n d artistic. W h e n h e r e t u r n e d h o m e , Melville w a s m o r e t h a n ever " a p o n d e r i n g m a n , " b u t h e told a y o u n g G a n s e v o o r t c o u s i n that h e w a s " n o t g o i n g to write any m o r e at present."

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T h a t m o m e n t s t r e t c h e d o n . Melville l e c t u r e d in the E a s t a n d M i d w e s t for t h r e e s e a s o n s ( 1 8 5 7 6 0 ) w i t h o u t m u c h profit, s p e a k i n g in s u c c e s s i v e y e a r s o n " S t a t u e s in R o m e , " " T h e S o u t h S e a s , " a n d " T r a v e l . " H e p r e p a r e d a v o l u m e of p o e m s in 1 8 6 0 a n d s a i l e d o n a v o y a g e to S a n F r a n c i s c o a s p a s s e n g e r o n a s h i p c a p t a i n e d by his y o u n g e s t b r o t h e r , T h o m a s , leaving his wife a n d his b r o t h e r Allan to s e e k fruitlessly for a p u b lisher. Early in 1 8 6 1 , Melville a t t e m p t e d , o n c e a g a i n , to " p r o c u r e s o m e foreign a p p o i n t m e n t u n d e r the n e w A d m i n i s t r a t i o n t h e c o n s u l s h i p at F l o r e n c e , for e x a m p l e . " A n u r g e n t letter r e c a l l e d h i m to Pittsfield, a n d h e a n d his wife r e a c h e d B o s t o n too late to s e e J u d g e S h a w alive. T h e e s t a t e w a s s l o w in b e i n g s e t t l e d , b u t p r o m p t l y e n o u g h s o m e s t o c k s w e r e in M r s . Melville's p o s s e s s i o n , a n d their e c o n o m i c p r e s s u r e s b e g a n to e a s e . T h e M e l v i l l e s s p e n t the winter of 186162 in M a n h a t t a n , t h e n in April Melville r e t u r n e d to A r r o w h e a d (which his b r o t h e r Allan later b o u g h t ) a n d m o v e d t h e family into Pittsfield, t h e n to N e w York in O c t o b e r 1 8 6 3 . Melville w a i t e d o u t t h e war, m a k i n g a trip to t h e Virginia battlefields with Allan in 1 8 6 4 to get sight of a G a n s e v o o r t c o u s i n a n d (as A l l a n p u t it), like all literary m e n , to " h a v e o p p o r t u n i t i e s to s e e that they m a y d e s c r i b e . " Battle-Pieces m a n ' s Drum-Taps ( 1 8 6 6 ) , a v o l u m e of Civil W a r p o e m s , w a s c a s u a l l y or disdainfully reviewed a n d quickly f o r g o t t e n ; n o w it r a n k s with Whita s the b e s t of h u n d r e d s of v o l u m e s of poetry to c o m e o u t of t h e financially war. As t h e u n e m p l o y e d d o , Melville took o u t his f r u s t r a t i o n s o n his family, s o m u c h s o that for years his wife's h a l f - b r o t h e r s c o n s i d e r e d h i m i n s a n e a s well a s i n c o m p e t e n t , a n d by early 1 8 6 7 Melville's wife m a y a l s o h a v e b e e n p e r s u a d e d t h a t h e w a s i n s a n e . H e r s e n s e of loyalty to h i m a n d her h o r r o r of g o s s i p , h o w e v e r , w e r e s t r o n g e n o u g h to m a k e h e r reject her m i n i s t e r ' s s u g g e s t i o n that s h e p r e t e n d to m a k e a r o u t i n e visit to B o s t o n a n d t h e n b a r r i c a d e h e r s e l f in t h e S h a w h o u s e , b u t a s h e r family realized, t h e law w a s o n Melville's s i d e , w h a t e v e r u n r e c o r d e d a b u s e s h e w a s guilty of. In 1 8 6 6 Melville h a d at last o b t a i n e d a political j o b n o t a s c o n s u l in s o m e exotic c a p i t a l b u t a s a d e p u t y i n s p e c t o r of c u s t o m s in N e w York City. After M a l c o l m killed h i m s e l f l a t e in 1 8 6 7 at t h e a g e of e i g h t e e n the M e l v i l l e s c l o s e d r a n k s . As Melville h a d p r e d i c t e d to H a w t h o r n e , h e b e c a m e k n o w n a s t h e " m a n w h o lived a m o n g the c a n n i b a l s , " h o l d i n g his p l a c e in e n c y c l o p e d i a s a n d literary h i s t o r i e s primarily a s t h e a u t h o r of Typee a n d Omoo, all b u t f o r g o t t e n by t h e p o s t b e l l u m literary world. B u t for y e a r s t h r o u g h the early 1 8 7 0 s Melville w o r k e d on a p o e m a b o u t a m o t l e y g r o u p of A m e r i c a n E u r o p e a n p i l g r i m s a n d t o u r i s t s w h o t a l k e d their way t h r o u g h s o m e of t h e s a m e P a l e s t i n i a n s c e n e s h e h a d visited a d e c a d e a n d m o r e earlier. T h i s p o e m , Clarel, g r e w to e i g h t e e n t h o u s a n d lines a n d a p p e a r e d in 1 8 7 6 , p a i d for by a specific b e q u e s t from the dying P e t e r G a n s e v o o r t . It is A m e r i c a ' s m o s t t h o u g h t f u l c o n t r i b u t i o n to t h e conflict of religious faith a n d D a r w i n i a n s k e p t i c i s m that o b s e s s e d E n g l i s h c o n t e m p o r a r i e s s u c h a s M a t t h e w A r n o l d a n d T h o m a s H a r d y . L i k e Mardi is i n e x h a u s t i b l e for w h a t it r e v e a l s of Melville's m i n d a n d art, b u t unlike Mardi Mardi h a d b e e n r e a d a n d a r g u e d a b o u t , a n d Clarel was ignored. it it is

p l o t t e d with t h e s u r e t y of artistic control that h e h a d l e a r n e d in t h e 1 8 5 0 s ; h o w e v e r , S t a n w i x , the s e c o n d Melville s o n , drifted away w i t h o u t a c a r e e r , b e a c h c o m b i n g for a t i m e in C e n t r a l A m e r i c a , finally d y i n g in S a n F r a n c i s c o in 1 8 8 6 . T h e first d a u g h t e r , c a l l e d B e s s i e , d e v e l o p e d s e v e r e arthritis, never m a r r i e d , a n d died in 1 9 0 8 . O n l y F r a n c e s m a r r i e d , a n d s h e lived until 1 9 3 4 , u n a b l e to r e c o g n i z e her f a t h e r in t h e w o r d s of t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y a d m i r e r s a n d flatly r e f u s i n g to talk a b o u t h i m . B u t t h r o u g h the 1 8 8 0 s Melville a n d his wife d r e w c l o s e r t o g e t h e r . A n e x t r a o r d i n a r y s e r i e s of l e g a c i e s c a m e to t h e m in Melville's last y e a r s ; ironically t h e w e a l t h w a s too late to m a k e m u c h c h a n g e in their lives, b u t it a l l o w e d h i m to retire f r o m t h e c u s t o m h o u s e at the b e g i n n i n g of 1 8 8 6 a n d d e v o t e h i m s e l f to his writing. F r o m t i m e to t i m e after Clarel he had written p o e m s that u l t i m a t e l y w e n t into two v o l u m e s w h i c h h e p r i n t e d privately shortly b e f o r e his d e a t h , e x c e p t for s o m e that r e m a i n e d u n p u b l i s h e d until the 1 9 2 0 s a n d later. Melville d e v e l o p e d t h e habit of writing p r o s e h e a d n o t e s to p o e m s , n o t a b l y s o m e d e a l i n g with a n i m a g i n a r y B u r g u n d y C l u b in w h i c h h e f o u n d c o n s o l a t i o n for his l o n e l i n e s s . H e c o u l d relax with t h e intelligent g o o d fellows of his i m a g i n a t i o n a s

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h e c o u l d never relax a m o n g the p o p u l a r literary m e n of t h e 1 8 7 0 s a n d 1 8 8 0 s w h o n o w a n d t h e n tried to p a t r o n i z e h i m . In the m i d - 1 8 8 0 s o n e p o e m a b o u t a B r i t i s h s a i l o r e v o k e d a h e a d n o t e that, e x p a n d e d a n d r e e x p a n d e d , w a s left nearly finished at Melville's d e a t h a s Billy Budd, Sailor, his final s t u d y of t h e a m b i g u o u s c l a i m s of a u t h o r i t y a n d individuality. B e f o r e Melville's d e a t h in 1 8 9 1 , s o m e t h i n g like a revival of his f a m e w a s in p r o g r e s s , e s p e c i a l l y in E n g l a n d . A m e r i c a n n e w s p a p e r s b e c a m e a c c u s t o m e d to r e p r i n t i n g a n d briefly c o m m e n t i n g on e x t r a o r d i n a r y i t e m s in British p e r i o d i c a l s , s u c h a s R o b e r t B u c h a n a n ' s f o o t n o t e to Melville's n a m e in a p o e t i c t r i b u t e to W h i t m a n ( 1 8 8 5 ) : "I s o u g h t e v e r y w h e r e for this T r i t o n , w h o is still living s o m e w h e r e in N e w York. N o o n e s e e m e d to k n o w a n y t h i n g of the o n e great i m a g i n a t i v e writer fit to s t a n d s h o u l d e r to s h o u l d e r with W h i t m a n on t h a t c o n t i n e n t . " T h e r e c u r r e n t i m a g e r y u s e d by Melville a s well a s j o u r n a l i s t s w a s of burial a n d p o s s i b l e r e s u r r e c t i o n . T h e t r u e Melville revival b e g a n with a r t i c l e s o n Melville's c e n t e n n i a l in 1 9 1 9 . T h a t revival, o n e of t h e m o s t c u r i o u s p h e n o m e n a of A m e r i c a n literary history, s w e p t Melville from t h e r a n k s of the l e s s e r A m e r i c a n w r i t e r s l e s s e r t h a n J a m e s F e n i m o r e C o o p e r a n d W i l l i a m G i l m o r e S i m m s i n t o the rarefied c o m p a n y of S h a k e s p e a r e a n d a few fellow i m m o r tals of world l i t e r a t u r e s o that only W h i t m a n , J a m e s , a n d F a u l k n e r a r e s e e n a s his A m e r i c a n e q u a l s . E v e n d u r i n g t h e m a s s c o n s u m p t i o n of Melville in the c l a s s r o o m a n d the s p a w n i n g of the W h i t e W h a l e in c o m i c b o o k s , c a r t o o n s , a n d s e a f o o d r e s t a u r a n t s , lonely c u l t i s t s a r e still to be f o u n d , t r a c i n g his j o u r n e y s in the S o u t h S e a s a n d M a n h a t t a n Island, a n d visiting his g r a v e in t h e Bronx, faithful to t h e M e l v i l l e w h o s p e a k s to t h e m w i t h o u t t h e aid of a n interpreter. T h a t m a y b e t h e true sign of the rarest literary i m m o r t a l i t y .

Bartleby, the Scrivener1

A Story of Wall-Street I a m a rather elderly m a n . T h e n a t u r e of my a v o c a t i o n s for the last thirty years h a s b r o u g h t m e into m o r e than ordinary c o n t a c t with what w o u l d s e e m an interesting a n d s o m e w h a t singular set of m e n , of w h o m a s yet n o t h i n g that I know of h a s ever b e e n w r i t t e n : I m e a n the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very m a n y of t h e m , professionally a n d privately, a n d if I p l e a s e d , c o u l d relate divers histories, at w h i c h g o o d - n a t u r e d g e n t l e m e n might s m i l e , a n d s e n t i m e n t a l s o u l s m i g h t w e e p . B u t I waive the b i o g r a p h i e s of all other scriveners for a few p a s s a g e s in the life of Bartleby, w h o w a s a scrivener the s t r a n g e s t I ever saw or h e a r d of. While of other law-copyists I might write the c o m p l e t e life, of Bartleby n o t h i n g of that sort c a n b e d o n e . I believe that no m a t e r i a l s exist for a full a n d satisfactory biography of this m a n . It is an irreparable l o s s to literature. Bartleby w a s o n e of t h o s e b e i n g s of w h o m n o t h i n g is a s c e r t a i n a b l e , except from the original s o u r c e s , a n d in his c a s e t h o s e are very s m a l l . W h a t my own a s t o n i s h e d eyes s a w of Bartleby, that is all I know of h i m , except, i n d e e d , o n e v a g u e report w h i c h will a p p e a r in the s e q u e l . E r e i n t r o d u c i n g the scrivener, as h e first a p p e a r e d to m e , it is fit I m a k e s o m e m e n t i o n of myself, my employees, my b u s i n e s s , my c h a m b e r s , a n d general s u r r o u n d i n g s ; b e c a u s e s o m e s u c h d e s c r i p t i o n is i n d i s p e n s a b l e to a n a d e q u a t e u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the c h i e f c h a r a c t e r a b o u t to b e p r e s e n t e d .
I . T h e t e x t is f r o m t h e first p r i n t i n g in t h e N o v e m ber and D e c e m b e r 1853 issues of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, t h e first w o r k b y M e l v i l l e t o b e p r i n t e d a f t e r t h e d i s a s t r o u s r e c e p t i o n o f Pierre d u r i n g t h e s u m m e r a n d fall o f 1 8 5 2 . O n e w o r k ( " T h e Isle of the C r o s s " ) , p r o b a b l y the story of .Agatha Robinson, a Nantucket woman who displayed patience, endurance, and resignedness, was apparently d e s t r o y e d after b e i n g r e j e c t e d by t h e H a r p e r s .

Herman Melville (18191891). Bartleby, the Scrivener. 1853. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street

I AM a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel. Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employes, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented. Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a

jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich mens bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astors good opinion. Some time prior to the period at which this little history begins, my avocations had been largely increased. The good old office, now extinct in the State of New-York, of a Master in Chancery, had been conferred upon me. It was not a very arduous office, but very pleasantly remunerative. I seldom lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages; but I must be permitted to be rash here and declare, that I consider the sudden and violent abrogation of the office of Master of Chancery, by the new Constitution, as a premature act; inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years. But this is by the way. 4

My chambers were up stairs at No. Wall-street. At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call life. But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes. Owing to the great height of the

surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern. At the period just preceding the advent of Bartleby, I had two persons as copyists in my employment, and a promising lad as an office-boy. First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut. These may seem names, the like of which are not usually found in the Directory. In truth they were nicknames, mutually conferred upon each other by my three clerks, and were deemed expressive of their respective persons or characters. Turkey was a short, pursy Englishman of about my own age, that is, somewhere not far from sixty. In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve oclock, meridianhis dinner hourit blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazingbut, as it were, with a gradual wanetill 6 oclock, P. M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory. There are many singular coincidences I have known in the course of my life, not the least among which was the fact, that exactly when Turkey displayed his fullest beams from his red and radiant countenance, just then, too, at that critical moment, began the daily period when I considered his business capacities as seriously disturbed for the remainder of the twenty-four hours. Not that he was absolutely idle, or averse to business then; far from it. The difficulty was, he was apt to be altogether too energetic. There was a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him. He would be incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand. All his blots upon my documents, were dropped there after twelve oclock, meridian. Indeed, not only would he be reckless and sadly given to making blots in the afternoon, but some days he went further, and was rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed with augmented blazonry, as if cannel coal had 6

been heaped on anthracite. He made an unpleasant racket with his chair; spilled his sand-box; in mending his pens, impatiently split them all to pieces, and threw them on the floor in a sudden passion; stood up and leaned over his table, boxing his papers about in a most indecorous manner, very sad to behold in an elderly man like him. Nevertheless, as he was in many ways a most valuable person to me, and all the time before twelve oclock, meridian, was the quickest, steadiest creature too, accomplishing a great deal of work in a style not easy to be matchedfor these reasons, I was willing to overlook his eccentricities, though indeed, occasionally, I remonstrated with him. I did this very gently, however, because, though the civilest, nay, the blandest and most reverential of men in the morning, yet in the afternoon he was disposed, upon provocation, to be slightly rash with his tongue, in fact, insolent. Now, valuing his morning services as I did, and resolved not to lose them; yet, at the same time made uncomfortable by his inflamed ways after twelve oclock; and being a man of peace, unwilling by my admonitions to call forth unseemly retorts from him; I took upon me, one Saturday noon (he was always worse on Saturdays), to hint to him, very kindly, that perhaps now that he was growing old, it might be well to abridge his labors; in short, he need not come to my chambers after twelve oclock, but, dinner over, had best go home to his lodgings and rest himself till tea-time. But no; he insisted upon his afternoon devotions. His countenance became intolerably fervid, as he oratorically assured megesticulating with a long ruler at the other end of the roomthat if his services in the morning were useful, how indispensible, then, in the afternoon? With submission, sir, said Turkey on this occasion, I consider myself your right-hand man. In the morning I but marshal and deploy my columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their head, and gallantly charge the foe, thus!and he made a violent thrust with the ruler. But the blots, Turkey, intimated I. 7

True,but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old ageeven if it blot the pageis honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old.

This appeal to my fellow-feeling was hardly to be resisted. At all events, 10 I saw that go he would not. So I made up my mind to let him stay, resolving, nevertheless, to see to it, that during the afternoon he had to do with my less important papers. Nippers, the second on my list, was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the 11 whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powersambition and indigestion. The ambition was evinced by a certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist, an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal documents. The indigestion seemed betokened in an occasional nervous testiness and grinning irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind together over mistakes committed in copying; unnecessary maledictions, hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked. Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting-paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk:then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back. In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing, it was to be rid of a scriveners table altogether. Among the manifestations of his

diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits from certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his clients. Indeed I was aware that not only was he, at times, considerable of a wardpolitician, but he occasionally did a little business at the Justices courts, and was not unknown on the steps of the Tombs. I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill. But with all his failings, and the annoyances he caused me, Nippers, like his compatriot Turkey, was a very useful man to me; wrote a neat, swift hand; and, when he chose, was not deficient in a gentlemanly sort of deportment. Added to this, he always dressed in a gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected credit upon my chambers. Whereas with respect to Turkey, I had much ado to keep him from being a reproach to me. His clothes were apt to look oily and smell of eating-houses. He wore his pantaloons very loose and baggy in summer. His coats were execrable; his hat not be to handled. But while the hat was a thing of indifference to me, inasmuch as his natural civility and deference, as a dependent Englishman, always led him to doff it the moment he entered the room, yet his coat was another matter. Concerning his coats, I reasoned with him; but with no effect. The truth was, I suppose, that a man with so small an income, could not afford to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time. As Nippers once observed, Turkeys money went chiefly for red ink. One winter day I presented Turkey with a highly-respectable looking coat of my own, a padded gray coat, of a most comfortable warmth, and which buttoned straight up from the knee to the neck. I thought Turkey would appreciate the favor, and abate his rashness and obstreperousness of afternoons. But no. I verily believe that buttoning himself up in so downy and blanket-like a coat had a pernicious effect upon him; upon the same principle that too much oats are bad for horses. In fact, precisely as a rash,

restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat. It made him insolent. He was a man whom prosperity harmed. Though concerning the self-indulgent habits of Turkey I had my own 12 private surmises, yet touching Nippers I was well persuaded that whatever might be his faults in other respects, he was, at least, a temperate young man. But indeed, nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless. When I consider how, amid the stillness of my chambers, Nippers would sometimes impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping over his table, spread his arms wide apart, seize the whole desk, and move it, and jerk it, with a grim, grinding motion on the floor, as if the table were a perverse voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and vexing him; I plainly perceive that for Nippers, brandy and water were altogether superfluous. It was fortunate for me that, owing to its peculiar causeindigestion 13 the irritability and consequent nervousness of Nippers, were mainly observable in the morning, while in the afternoon he was comparatively mild. So that Turkeys paroxysms only coming on about twelve oclock, I never had to do with their eccentricities at one time. Their fits relieved each other like guards. When Nippers was on, Turkeys was off; and vice versa. This was a good natural arrangement under the circumstances. Ginger Nut, the third on my list, was a lad some twelve years old. His 14 father was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench instead of a cart, before he died. So he sent him to my office as student at law, errand boy, and cleaner and sweeper, at the rate of one dollar a week. He had a little desk to himself, but he did not use it much. Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells of various sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth the whole noble science of the law was contained in a nut-shell. Not the least among the employments of Ginger Nut, as well as one which he discharged with the most alacrity, was his

duty as cake and apple purveyor for Turkey and Nippers. Copying law papers being proverbially a dry, husky sort of business, my two scriveners were fain to moisten their mouths very often with Spitzenbergs to be had at the numerous stalls nigh the Custom House and Post Office. Also, they sent Ginger Nut very frequently for that peculiar cakesmall, flat, round, and very spicyafter which he had been named by them. Of a cold morning when business was but dull, Turkey would gobble up scores of these cakes, as if they were mere wafersindeed they sell them at the rate of six or eight for a pennythe scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the crisp particles in his mouth. Of all the fiery afternoon blunders and flurried rashnesses of Turkey, was his once moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage for a seal. I came within an ace of dismissing him then. But he mollified me by making an oriental bow, and sayingWith submission, sir, it was generous of me to find you in stationery on my own account. Now my original businessthat of a conveyancer and title hunter, and 15 drawer-up of recondite documents of all sortswas considerably increased by receiving the masters office. There was now great work for scriveners. Not only must I push the clerks already with me, but I must have additional help. In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure nowpallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby. After a few words touching his qualifications, I engaged him, glad to 16 have among my corps of copyists a man of so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers. I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors divided my 17 premises into two parts, one of which was occupied by my scriveners, the other by myself. According to my humor I threw open these doors, or

closed them. I resolved to assign Bartleby a corner by the folding-doors, but on my side of them, so as to have this quiet man within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to be done. I placed his desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a wall, and the light came down from far above, between two lofty buildings, as from a very small opening in a dome. Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined. At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long 18 famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had be been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically. It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scriveners business to verify 19 the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand. Now and then, in the haste of business, it had been my habit to assist in 20 comparing some brief document myself, calling Turkey or Nippers for this purpose. One object I had in placing Bartleby so handy to me behind the

screen, was to avail myself of his services on such trivial occasions. It was on the third day, I think, of his being with me, and before any necessity had arisen for having his own writing examined, that, being much hurried to complete a small affair I had in hand, I abruptly called to Bartleby. In my haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance, I sat with my head bent over the original on my desk, and my right hand sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with the copy, so that immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby might snatch it and proceed to business without the least delay. In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it 21 was I wanted him to donamely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to. I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately 22 it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, I would prefer not to. Prefer not to, echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the 23 room with a stride. What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet heretake it, and I thrust it towards him. I would prefer not to, said he. 24 I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye 25 dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of

Cicero out of doors. I stood gazing at him awhile, as he went on with his own writing, and then reseated myself at my desk. This is very strange, thought I. What had one best do? But my business hurried me. I concluded to forget the matter for the present, reserving it for my future leisure. So calling Nippers from the other room, the paper was speedily examined. A few days after this, Bartleby concluded four lengthy documents, being 26 quadruplicates of a weeks testimony taken before me in my High Court of Chancery. It became necessary to examine them. It was an important suit, and great accuracy was imperative. Having all things arranged I called Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut from the next room, meaning to place the four copies in the hands of my four clerks, while I should read from the original. Accordingly Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut had taken their seats in a row, each with his document in hand, when I called to Bartleby to join this interesting group. Bartleby! quick, I am waiting. 27 I heard a slow scrape of his chair legs on the uncarpeted floor, and soon 28 he appeared standing at the entrance of his hermitage. What is wanted? said he mildly. 29 The copies, the copies, said I hurriedly. We are going to examine 30 them. Thereand I held towards him the fourth quadruplicate. I would prefer not to, he said, and gently disappeared behind the 31 screen. For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt, standing at the head 32 of my seated column of clerks. Recovering myself, I advanced towards the screen, and demanded the reason for such extraordinary conduct. Why do you refuse? I would prefer not to. 33 34

scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me. I began to reason with him. These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving to 36 you, because one examination will answer for your four papers. It is common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer! I prefer not to, he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me that while 37 I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the irresistible conclusion; but, at the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he did. You are decided, then, not to comply with my requesta request made 38 according to common usage and common sense? He briefly gave me to understand that on that point my judgment was 39 sound. Yes: his decision was irreversible. It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some 40 unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind. Turkey, said I, what do you think of this? Am I not right? 41 With submission, sir, said Turkey, with his blandest tone, I think that 42 you are. Nippers, said I, what do you think of it? I think I should kick him out of the office. 43 44

With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, 35

(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being morning, 45 Turkeys answer is couched in polite and tranquil terms, but Nippers replies in ill-tempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous sentence, Nipperss ugly mood was on duty, and Turkeys off.) Ginger Nut, said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, 46 what do you think of it? I think, sir, hes a little luny, replied Ginger Nut, with a grin. 47 You hear what they say, said I, turning towards the screen, come forth 48 and do your duty. But he vouchsafed no reply. I pondered a moment in sore perplexity. But 49 once more business hurried me. I determined again to postpone the consideration of this dilemma to my future leisure. With a little trouble we made out to examine the papers without Bartleby, though at every page or two, Turkey deferentially dropped his opinion that this proceeding was quite out of the common; while Nippers, twitching in his chair with a dyspeptic nervousness, ground out between his set teeth occasional hissing maledictions against the stubborn oaf behind the screen. And for his (Nipperss) part, this was the first and the last time he would do another mans business without pay. Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to every thing but his 50 own peculiar business there. Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another lengthy 51 work. His late remarkable conduct led me to regard his ways narrowly. I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed that he never went any where. As yet I had never of my personal knowledge known him to be outside of my office. He was a perpetual sentry in the corner. At about eleven oclock though, in the morning, I noticed that Ginger Nut would advance toward the opening in Bartlebys screen, as if silently beckoned thither by a gesture invisible to me where I sat. The boy would then leave

the office jingling a few pence, and reappear with a handful of ginger-nuts which he delivered in the hermitage, receiving two of the cakes for his trouble. He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly 52 speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none. Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the 53 individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of

Windsor soap. But one afternoon the evil impulse in me mastered me, and the following little scene ensued: Bartleby, said I, when those papers are all copied, I will compare them 54 with you. I would prefer not to. How? Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary? No answer. 55 56 57

All beer, cried Turkey; gentleness is effects of beerNippers and I 66 dined together to-day. You see how gentle I am, sir. Shall I go and black his eyes? You refer to Bartleby, I suppose. No, not to-day, Turkey, I replied; 67 pray, put up your fists. I closed the doors, and again advanced towards Bartleby. I felt additional 68 incentives tempting me to my fate. I burned to be rebelled against again. I remembered that Bartleby never left the office. Bartleby, said I, Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the Post 69 Office, wont you? (it was but a three minutes walk,) and see if there is any thing for me. I would prefer not to. You will not? I prefer not. 70 71 72

I threw open the folding-doors near by, and turning upon Turkey and 58 Nippers, exclaimed in an excited manner He says, a second time, he wont examine his papers. What do you think 59 of it, Turkey? It was afternoon, be it remembered. Turkey sat glowing like a brass 60 boiler, his bald head steaming, his hands reeling among his blotted papers. Think of it? roared Turkey; I think Ill just step behind his screen, and 61 black his eyes for him! So saying, Turkey rose to his feet and threw his arms into a pugilistic 62 position. He was hurrying away to make good his promise, when I detained him, alarmed at the effect of incautiously rousing Turkeys combativeness after dinner. Sit down, Turkey, said I, and hear what Nippers has to say. What do 63 you think of it, Nippers? Would I not be justified in immediately dismissing Bartleby? Excuse me, that is for you to decide, sir. I think his conduct quite 64 unusual, and indeed unjust, as regards Turkey and myself. But it may only be a passing whim. Ah, exclaimed I, you have strangely changed your mind thenyou 65 speak very gently of him now.

I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind inveteracy 73 returned. Was there any other thing in which I could procure myself to be ignominiously repulsed by this lean, penniless wight?my hired clerk? What added thing is there, perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do? Bartleby! No answer. Bartleby, in a louder tone. No answer. Bartleby, I roared. 74 75 76 77 78

Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the 79 third summons, he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage. Go to the next room, and tell Nippers to come to me. 80

I prefer not to, he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.

81

Very good, Bartleby, said I, in a quiet sort of serenely severe self- 82 possessed tone, intimating the unalterable purpose of some terrible retribution very close at hand. At the moment I half intended something of the kind. But upon the whole, as it was drawing towards my dinner-hour, I thought it best to put on my hat and walk home for the day, suffering much from perplexity and distress of mind. Shall I acknowledge it? The conclusion of this whole business was, that it 83 soon became a fixed fact of my chambers, that a pale young scrivener, by the name of Bartleby, had a desk there; that he copied for me at the usual rate of four cents a folio (one hundred words); but he was permanently exempt from examining the work done by him, that duty being transferred to Turkey and Nippers, one of compliment doubtless to their superior acuteness; moreover, said Bartleby was never on any account to be dispatched on the most trivial errand of any sort; and that even if entreated to take upon him such a matter, it was generally understood that he would prefer not toin other words, that he would refuse point-blank. As days passed on, I became considerably reconciled to Bartleby. His 84 steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry (except when he chose to throw himself into a standing revery behind his screen), his great stillness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a valuable acquisition. One prime thing was this,he was always there;first in the morning, continually through the day, and the last at night. I had a singular confidence in his honesty. I felt my most precious papers perfectly safe in his hands. Sometimes to be sure I could not, for the very soul of me, avoid falling into sudden spasmodic passions with him. For it was exceeding difficult to bear in mind all the time those strange peculiarities, privileges, and unheard of exemptions, forming the tacit stipulations on Bartlebys part under which he remained in my office. Now and then, in the eagerness of dispatching pressing

business, I would inadvertently summon Bartleby, in a short, rapid tone, to put his finger, say, on the incipient tie of a bit of red tape with which I was about compressing some papers. Of course, from behind the screen the usual answer, I prefer not to, was sure to come; and then, how could a human creature with the common infirmities of our nature, refrain from bitterly exclaiming upon such perversenesssuch unreasonableness. However, every added repulse of this sort which I received only tended to lessen the probability of my repeating the inadvertence. Here it must be said, that according to the custom of most legal 85 gentlemen occupying chambers in densely-populated law buildings, there were several keys to my door. One was kept by a woman residing in the attic, which person weekly scrubbed and daily swept and dusted my apartments. Another was kept by Turkey for convenience sake. The third I sometimes carried in my own pocket. The fourth I knew not who had. Now, one Sunday morning I happened to go to Trinity Church, to hear a 86 celebrated preacher, and finding myself rather early on the ground, I thought I would walk round to my chambers for a while. Luckily I had my key with me; but upon applying it to the lock, I found it resisted by something inserted from the inside. Quite surprised, I called out; when to my consternation a key was turned from within; and thrusting his lean visage at me, and holding the door ajar, the apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his shirt sleeves, and otherwise in a strangely tattered dishabille, saying quietly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just then, andpreferred not admitting me at present. In a brief word or two, he moreover added, that perhaps I had better walk round the block two or three times, and by that time he would probably have concluded his affairs. Now, the utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby, tenanting my law- 87 chambers of a Sunday morning, with his cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance, yet withal firm and self-possessed, had such a strange effect upon me, that incontinently I slunk away from my own door,

and did as desired. But not without sundry twinges of impotent rebellion against the mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener. Indeed, it was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only disarmed me, but unmanned me, as it were. For I consider that one, for the time, is a sort of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his hired clerk to dictate to him, and order him away from his own premises. Furthermore, I was full of uneasiness as to what Bartleby could possibly be doing in my office in his shirt sleeves, and in an otherwise dismantled condition of a Sunday morning. Was any thing amiss going on? Nay, that was out of the question. It was not to be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person. But what could he be doing there?copying? Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state approaching to nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that we would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day. Nevertheless, my mind was not pacified; and full of a restless curiosity, at 88 last I returned to the door. Without hindrance I inserted my key, opened it, and entered. Bartleby was not to be seen. I looked round anxiously, peeped behind his screen; but it was very plain that he was gone. Upon more closely examining the place, I surmised that for an indefinite period Bartleby must have ate, dressed, and slept in my office, and that too without plate, mirror, or bed. The cushioned seat of a ricketty old sofa in one corner bore the faint impress of a lean, reclining form. Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese. Yet, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelors hall all by himself. Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, What miserable friendlessness and loneliness

are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populousa sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage! For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging 89 melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a notunpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none. These sad fancyings chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brainled on to other and more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scriveners pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet. Suddenly I was attracted by Bartlebys closed desk, the key in open sight 90 left in the lock. I mean no mischief, seek the gratification of no heartless curiosity, 91 thought I; besides, the desk is mine, and its contents too, so I will make bold to look within. Every thing was methodically arranged, the papers smoothly placed. The pigeon holes were deep, and removing the files of documents, I groped into their recesses. Presently I felt something there, and dragged it out. It was an old bandanna handkerchief, heavy and knotted. I opened it, and saw it was a savings bank.

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I now recalled all the quiet mysteries which I had noted in the man. I 92 remembered that he never spoke but to answer; that though at intervals he had considerable time to himself, yet I had never seen him readingno, not even a newspaper; that for long periods he would stand looking out, at his pale window behind the screen, upon the dead brick wall; I was quite sure he never visited any refectory or eating house; while his pale face clearly indicated that he never drank beer like Turkey, or tea and coffee even, like other men; that he never went any where in particular that I could learn; never went out for a walk, unless indeed that was the case at present; that he had declined telling who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any relatives in the world; that though so thin and pale, he never complained of ill health. And more than all, I remembered a certain unconscious air of pallidhow shall I call it?of pallid haughtiness, say, or rather an austere reserve about him, which had positively awed me into my tame compliance with his eccentricities, when I had feared to ask him to do the slightest incidental thing for me, even though I might know, from his long-continued motionlessness, that behind his screen he must be standing in one of those dead-wall reveries of his. Revolving all these things, and coupling them with the recently 93 discovered fact that he made my office his constant abiding place and home, and not forgetful of his morbid moodiness; revolving all these things, a prudential feeling began to steal over me. My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being,

pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach. I did not accomplish the purpose of going to Trinity Church that morning. 94 Somehow, the things I had seen disqualified me for the time from churchgoing. I walked homeward, thinking what I would do with Bartleby. Finally, I resolved upon this;I would put certain calm questions to him the next morning, touching his history, &c., and if he declined to answer then openly and reservedly (and I supposed he would prefer not), then to give him a twenty dollar bill over and above whatever I might owe him, and tell him his services were no longer required; but that if in any other way I could assist him, I would be happy to do so, especially if he desired to return to his native place, wherever that might be, I would willingly help to defray the expenses. Moreover, if, after reaching home, he found himself at any time in want of aid, a letter from him would be sure of a reply. The next morning came. Bartleby, said I, gently calling to him behind his screen. No reply. 95 96 97

Bartleby, said I, in a still gentler tone, come here; I am not going to 98 ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to doI simply wish to speak to you. Upon this he noiselessly slid into view. Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born? I would prefer not to. 99 100 101

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Will you tell me any thing about yourself? I would prefer not to.

102 103

cadaverous reply. Just then the folding-doors opened, and Nippers approached. He seemed 111 suffering from an unusually bad nights rest, induced by severer indigestion than common. He overheard those final words of Bartleby. Prefer not, eh? gritted NippersId prefer him, if I were you, sir, 112 addressing meIdprefer him; Id give him preferences, the stubborn mule! What is it, sir, pray, that he prefersnot to do now? Bartleby moved not a limb. 113 Mr. Nippers, said I, Id prefer that you would withdraw for the 114 present. Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word 115 prefer upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce? This apprehension had not been without efficacy in determining me to summary means. As Nippers, looking very sour and sulky, was departing, Turkey blandly 116 and deferentially approached. With submission, sir, said he, yesterday I was thinking about Bartleby 117 here, and I think that if he would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day, it would do much towards mending him, and enabling him to assist in examining his papers. So you have got the word too, said I, slightly excited. 118 With submission, what word, sir, asked Turkey, respectfully crowding 119 himself into the contracted space behind the screen, and by so doing, making me jostle the scrivener. What word, sir? I would prefer to be left alone here, said Bartleby, as if offended at 120 being mobbed in his privacy.

But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel 104 friendly towards you. He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my 105 bust of Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head. What is your answer, Bartleby? said I, after waiting a considerable time 106 for a reply, during which his countenance remained immovable, only there was the faintest conceivable tremor of the white attenuated mouth. At present I prefer to give no answer, he said, and retired into his 107 hermitage. It was rather weak in me I confess, but his manner on this occasion 108 nettled me. Not only did there seem to lurk in it a certain disdain, but his perverseness seemed ungrateful, considering the undeniable good usage and indulgence he had received from me. Again I sat ruminating what I should do. Mortified as I was at his 109 behavior, and resolved as I had been to dismiss him when I entered my office, nevertheless I strangely felt something superstitious knocking at my heart, and forbidding me to carry out my purpose, and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to breathe one bitter word against this forlornest of mankind. At last, familiarly drawing my chair behind his screen, I sat down and said: Bartleby, never mind then about revealing your history; but let me entreat you, as a friend, to comply as far as may be with the usages of this office. Say now you will help to examine papers to-morrow or next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable:say so, Bartleby. At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable, was his mildly 110

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Thats the word, Turkey, said Ithats it.

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Oh, prefer? oh yesqueer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was 122 saying, if he would but prefer Turkey, interrupted I, you will please withdraw. Oh, certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should. 123 124

absent, and being in a great hurry to dispatch certain letters by the mail, I thought that, having nothing else earthly to do, Bartleby would surely be less inflexible than usual, and carry these letters to the post-office. But he blankly declined. So, much to my inconvenience, I went myself. Still added days went by. Whether Bartlebys eyes improved or not, I 133 could not say. To all appearance, I thought they did. But when I asked him if they did, he vouchsafed no answer. At all events, he would do no copying. At last, in reply to my urgings, he informed me that he had permanently given up copying. What! exclaimed I; suppose your eyes should get entirely wellbetter 134 than ever beforewould you not copy then? I have given up copying, he answered, and slid aside. 135 He remained as ever, a fixture in my chamber. Nayif that were 136 possiblehe became still more of a fixture than before. What was to be done? He would do nothing in the office: why should he stay there? In plain fact, he had now become a millstone to me, not only useless as a necklace, but afflictive to bear. Yet I was sorry for him. I speak less than truth when I say that, on his own account, he occasioned me uneasiness. If he would but have named a single relative or friend, I would instantly have written, and urged their taking the poor fellow away to some convenient retreat. But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic. At length, necessities connected with my business tyrannized over all other considerations. Decently as I could, I told Bartleby that in six days time he must unconditionally leave the office. I warned him to take measures, in the interval, for procuring some other abode. I offered to assist him in this endeavor, if he himself would but take the first step towards a removal. And when you finally quit me, Bartleby, added I, I shall see that you go not away entirely unprovided. Six days from this hour, remember.

As he opened the folding-door to retire, Nippers at his desk caught a 125 glimpse of me, and asked whether I would prefer to have a certain paper copied on blue paper or white. He did not in the least roguishly accent the word prefer. It was plain that it involuntarily rolled from his tongue. I thought to myself, surely I must get rid of a demented man, who already has in some degree turned the tongues, if not the heads of myself and clerks. But I thought it prudent not to break the dismission at once. The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window 126 in his dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing. Why, how now? what next? exclaimed I, do no more writing? No more. And what is the reason? Do you not see the reason for yourself, he indifferently replied. 127 128 129 130

I looked steadfastly at him, and perceived that his eyes looked dull and 131 glazed. Instantly it occurred to me, that his unexampled diligence in copying by his dim window for the first few weeks of his stay with me might have temporarily impaired his vision. I was touched. I said something in condolence with him. I hinted that of 132 course he did wisely in abstaining from writing for a while; and urged him to embrace that opportunity of taking wholesome exercise in the open air. This, however, he did not do. A few days after this, my other clerks being

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At the expiration of that period, I peeped behind the screen, and lo! 137 Bartleby was there. I buttoned up my coat, balanced myself; advanced slowly towards him, 138 touched his shoulder, and said, The time has come; you must quit this place; I am sorry for you; here is money; but you must go. I would prefer not, he replied, with his back still towards me. You must. He remained silent. 139 140 141

Now I had an unbounded confidence in this mans common honesty. He 142 had frequently restored to me sixpences and shillings carelessly dropped upon the floor, for I am apt to be very reckless in such shirt-button affairs. The proceeding then which followed will not be deemed extraordinary. Bartleby, said I, I owe you twelve dollars on account; here are thirty- 143 two; the odd twenty are yours.Will you take it? and I handed the bills towards him. But he made no motion. 144 I will leave them here then, putting them under a weight on the table. 145 Then taking my hat and cane and going to the door I tranquilly turned and addedAfter you have removed your things from these offices, Bartleby, you will of course lock the doorsince every one is now gone for the day but youand if you please, slip your key underneath the mat, so that I may have it in the morning. I shall not see you again; so good-bye to you. If hereafter in your new place of abode I can be of any service to you, do not fail to advise me by letter. Good-bye, Bartleby, and fare you well. But he answered not a word; like the last column of some ruined temple, 146 he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted room. As I walked home in a pensive mood, my vanity got the better of my pity. 147

I could not but highly plume myself on my masterly management in getting rid of Bartleby. Masterly I call it, and such it must appear to any dispassionate thinker. The beauty of my procedure seemed to consist in its perfect quietness. There was no vulgar bullying, no bravado of any sort, no choleric hectoring, and striding to and fro across the apartment, jerking out vehement commands for Bartleby to bundle himself off with his beggarly traps. Nothing of the kind. Without loudly bidding Bartleby departas an inferior genius might have doneI assumed the ground that depart he must; and upon the assumption built all I had to say. The more I thought over my procedure, the more I was charmed with it. Nevertheless, next morning, upon awakening, I had my doubts,I had somehow slept off the fumes of vanity. One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning. My procedure seemed as sagacious as ever,but only in theory. How it would prove in practicethere was the rub. It was truly a beautiful thought to have assumed Bartlebys departure; but, after all, that assumption was simply my own, and none of Bartlebys. The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he would quit me, but whether he would prefer so to do. He was more a man of preferences than assumptions. AFTER breakfast, I walked down town, arguing the 148 probabilities pro and con. One moment I thought it would prove a miserable failure, and Bartleby would be found all alive at my office as usual; the next moment it seemed certain that I should see his chair empty. And so I kept veering about. At the corner of Broadway and Canal-street, I saw quite an excited group of people standing in earnest conversation. Ill take odds he doesnt, said a voice as I passed. Doesnt go?done! said I, put up your money. 149 150

I was instinctively putting my hand in my pocket to produce my own, 151 when I remembered that this was an election day. The words I had

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overheard bore no reference to Bartleby, but to the success or non-success of some candidate for the mayoralty. In my intent frame of mind, I had, as it were, imagined that all Broadway shared in my excitement, and were debating the same question with me. I passed on, very thankful that the uproar of the street screened my momentary absent-mindedness. As I had intended, I was earlier than usual at my office door. I stood 152 listening for a moment. All was still. He must be gone. I tried the knob. The door was locked. Yes, my procedure had worked to a charm; he indeed must be vanished. Yet a certain melancholy mixed with this: I was almost sorry for my brilliant success. I was fumbling under the door mat for the key, which Bartleby was to have left there for me, when accidentally my knee knocked against a panel, producing a summoning sound, and in response a voice came to me from withinNot yet; I am occupied. It was Bartleby. 153 I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in 154 mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by summer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell. Not gone! I murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous 155 ascendancy which the inscrutable scrivener had over me, and from which ascendency, for all my chafing, I could not completely escape, I slowly went down stairs and out into the street, and while walking round the block, considered what I should next do in this unheard-of perplexity. Turn the man out by an actual thrusting I could not; to drive him away by calling him hard names would not do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea; and yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me,this too I could not think of. What was to be done? or, if nothing

could be done, was there any thing further that I could assume in the matter? Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively assume that departed he was. In the legitimate carrying out of this assumption, I might enter my office in a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him as if he were air. Such a proceeding would in a singular degree have the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly possible that Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions. But upon second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubious. I resolved to argue the matter over with him again. Bartleby, said I, entering the office, with a quietly severe expression, I 156 am seriously displeased. I am pained, Bartleby. I had thought better of you. I had imagined you of such a gentlemanly organization, that in any delicate dilemma a slight hint would sufficein short, an assumption. But it appears I am deceived. Why, I added, unaffectedly starting, you have not even touched the money yet, pointing to it, just where I had left it the evening previous. He answered nothing. 157 Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden 158 passion, advancing close to him. I would prefer not to quit you, he replied, gently emphasizing the not. 159 What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you 160 pay my taxes? Or is this property yours? He answered nothing. 161 Are you ready to go on and write now? Are your eyes recovered? Could 162 you copy a small paper for me this morning? or help examine a few lines? or step round to the post-office? In a word, will you do any thing at all, to give a coloring to your refusal to depart the premises?

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He silently retired into his hermitage.

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hard times, and ought to be indulged. I endeavored also immediately to occupy myself, and at the same time to 166 comfort my despondency. I tried to fancy that in the course of the morning, at such time as might prove agreeable to him, Bartleby, of his own free accord, would emerge from his hermitage, and take up some decided line of march in the direction of the door. But no. Half-past twelve oclock came; Turkey began to glow in the face, overturn his inkstand, and become generally obstreperous; Nippers abated down into quietude and courtesy; Ginger Nut munched his noon apple; and Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries. Will it be credited? Ought I to acknowledge it? That afternoon I left the office without saying one further word to him. Some days now passed, during which, at leisure intervals I looked a little 167 into Edwards on the Will, and Priestley on Necessity. Under the circumstances, those books induced a salutary feeling. Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old chairs; in short, I never feel so private as when I know you are here. At least I see it, I feel it; I penetrate to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain. I believe that this wise and blessed frame of mind would have continued 168 with me, had it not been for the unsolicited and uncharitable remarks obtruded upon me by my professional friends who visited the rooms. But thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous. Though to be sure, when I reflected

I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it but 164 prudent to check myself at present from further demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone. I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurried into his fatal actan act which certainly no man could possibly deplore more than the actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings upon the subject, that had that altercation taken place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have terminated as it did. It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associationsan uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt. But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me 165 concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why, simply by recalling the divine injunction: A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another. Yes, this it was that saved me. Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principlea great safeguard to its possessor. Men have committed murder for jealousys sake, and angers sake, and hatreds sake, and selfishness sake, and spiritual prides sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charitys sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with hightempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy. At any rate, upon the occasion in question, I strove to drown my exasperated feelings towards the scrivener by benevolently construing his conduct. Poor fellow, poor fellow! thought I, he dont mean any thing; and besides, he has seen

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upon it, it was not strange that people entering my office should be struck by the peculiar aspect of the unaccountable Bartleby, and so be tempted to throw out some sinister observations concerning him. Sometimes an attorney having business with me, and calling at my office, and finding no one but the scrivener there, would undertake to obtain some sort of precise information from him touching my whereabouts; but without heeding his idle talk, Bartleby would remain standing immovable in the middle of the room. So after contemplating him in that position for a time, the attorney would depart, no wiser than he came. Also, when a Reference was going on, and the room full of lawyers and 169 witnesses and business was driving fast; some deeply occupied legal gentleman present, seeing Bartleby wholly unemployed, would request him to run round to his (the legal gentlemans) office and fetch some papers for him. Thereupon, Bartleby would tranquilly decline, and yet remain idle as before. Then the lawyer would give a great stare, and turn to me. And what could I say? At last I was made aware that all through the circle of my professional acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much. And as the idea came upon me of his possibly turning out a long-lived man, and keep occupying my chambers, and denying my authority; and perplexing my visitors; and scandalizing my professional reputation; and casting a general gloom over the premises; keeping soul and body together to the last upon his savings (for doubtless he spent but half a dime a day), and in the end perhaps outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy: as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more, and my friends continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and for ever rid me of this intolerable incubus. Ere revolving any complicated project, however, adapted to this end, I 170

first simply suggested to Bartleby the propriety of his permanent departure. In a calm and serious tone, I commended the idea to his careful and mature consideration. But having taken three days to meditate upon it, he apprised me that his original determination remained the same; in short, that he still preferred to abide with me. What shall I do? I now said to myself, buttoning up my coat to the last 171 button. What shall I do? what ought I to do? what does conscience say I should do with this man, or rather ghost. Rid myself of him, I must; go, he shall. But how? You will not thrust him, the poor, pale, passive mortal,you will not thrust such a helpless creature out of your door? you will not dishonor yourself by such cruelty? No, I will not, I cannot do that. Rather would I let him live and die here, and then mason up his remains in the wall. What then will you do? For all your coaxing, he will not budge. Bribes he leaves under your own paperweight on your table; in short, it is quite plain that he prefers to cling to you. Then something severe, something unusual must be done. What! surely 172 you will not have him collared by a constable, and commit his innocent pallor to the common jail? And upon what ground could you procure such a thing to be done?a vagrant, is he? What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? It is because he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant. That is too absurd. No visible means of support: there I have him. Wrong again: for indubitably he does support himself, and that is the only unanswerable proof that any man can show of his possessing the means so to do. No more then. Since he will not quit me, I must quit him. I will change my offices; I will move elsewhere; and give him fair notice, that if I find him on my new premises I will then proceed against him as a common trespasser. Acting accordingly, next day I thus addressed him: I find these 173 chambers too far from the City Hall; the air is unwholesome. In a word, I propose to remove my offices next week, and shall no longer require your

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services. I tell you this now, in order that you may seek another place. He made no reply, and nothing more was said. 174 On the appointed day I engaged carts and men, proceeded to my 175 chambers, and having but little furniture, every thing was removed in a few hours. Throughout, the scrivener remained standing behind the screen, which I directed to be removed the last thing. It was withdrawn; and being folded up like a huge folio, left him the motionless occupant of a naked room. I stood in the entry watching him a moment, while something from within me upbraided me. I re-entered, with my hand in my pocketandand my heart in my 176 mouth. Good-bye, Bartleby; I am goinggood-bye, and God some way bless 177 you; and take that, slipping something in his hand. But it dropped upon the floor, and then,strange to sayI tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of. Established in my new quarters, for a day or two I kept the door locked, 178 and started at every footfall in the passages. When I returned to my rooms after any little absence, I would pause at the threshold for an instant, and attentively listen, ere applying my key. But these fears were needless. Bartleby never came nigh me. I thought all was going well, when a perturbed looking stranger visited 179 me, inquiring whether I was the person who had recently occupied rooms at No. Wall-street. Full of forebodings, I replied that I was. 180 Then sir, said the stranger, who proved a lawyer, you are responsible 181 for the man you left there. He refuses to do any copying; he refuses to do any thing; he says he prefers not to; and he refuses to quit the premises. I am very sorry, sir, said I, with assumed tranquillity, but an inward 182

tremor, but, really, the man you allude to is nothing to mehe is no relation or apprentice of mine, that you should hold me responsible for him. In mercys name, who is he? 183 I certainly cannot inform you. I know nothing about him. Formerly I 184 employed him as a copyist; but he has done nothing for me now for some time past. I shall settle him then,good morning, sir. 185 Several days passed, and I heard nothing more; and though I often felt a 186 charitable prompting to call at the place and see poor Bartleby, yet a certain squeamishness of I know not what withheld me. All is over with him, by this time, thought I at last, when through another 187 week no further intelligence reached me. But coming to my room the day after, I found several persons waiting at my door in a high state of nervous excitement. Thats the manhere he comes, cried the foremost one, whom I 188 recognized as the lawyer who had previously called upon me alone. You must take him away, sir, at once, cried a portly person among 189 them, advancing upon me, and whom I knew to be the landlord of No. Wall-street. These gentlemen, my tenants, cannot stand it any longer; Mr. B pointing to the lawyer, has turned him out of his room, and he now persists in haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry by night. Every body is concerned; clients are leaving the offices; some fears are entertained of a mob; something you must do, and that without delay. Aghast at this torrent, I fell back before it, and would fain have locked 190 myself in my new quarters. In vain I persisted that Bartleby was nothing to meno more than to any one else. In vain:I was the last person known

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to have any thing to do with him, and they held me to the terrible account. Fearful then of being exposed in the papers (as one person present obscurely threatened) I considered the matter, and at length said, that if the lawyer would give me a confidential interview with the scrivener, in his (the lawyers) own room, I would that afternoon strive my best to rid them of the nuisance they complained of. Going up stairs to my old haunt, there was Bartleby silently sitting upon 191 the banister at the landing. What are you doing here, Bartleby? said I. Sitting upon the banister, he mildly replied. I motioned him into the lawyers room, who then left us. 192 193 194

eyesight in that. I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular. His unwonted wordiness inspirited me. I returned to the charge. 204 205

Well then, would you like to travel through the country collecting bills 206 for the merchants? That would improve your health. No, I would prefer to be doing something else. 207 How then would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some 208 young gentleman with your conversation,how would that suit you? Not at all. It does not strike me that there is any thing definite about that. 209 I like to be stationary. But I am not particular. Stationary you shall be then, I cried, now losing all patience, and for 210 the first time in all my exasperating connection with him fairly flying into a passion. If you do not go away from these premises before night, I shall feel boundindeed I am boundtototo quit the premises myself! I rather absurdly concluded, knowing not with what possible threat to try to frighten his immobility into compliance. Despairing of all further efforts, I was precipitately leaving him, when a final thought occurred to meone which had not been wholly unindulged before. Bartleby, said I, in the kindest tone I could assume under such exciting 211 circumstances, will you go home with me nownot to my office, but my dwellingand remain there till we can conclude upon some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure? Come, let us start now, right away. No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all. 212 I answered nothing; but effectually dodging every one by the suddenness 213 and rapidity of my flight, rushed from the building, ran up Wall-street towards Broadway, and jumping into the first omnibus was soon removed from pursuit. As soon as tranquillity returned I distinctly perceived that I had now done all that I possibly could, both in respect to the demands of

Bartleby, said I, are you aware that you are the cause of great 195 tribulation to me, by persisting in occupying the entry after being dismissed from the office? No answer. 196 Now one of two things must take place. Either you must do something, 197 or something must be done to you. Now what sort of business would you like to engage in? Would you like to re-engage in copying for some one? No; I would prefer not to make any change. Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store? 198 199

There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a 200 clerkship; but I am not particular. Too much confinement, I cried, why you keep yourself confined all 201 the time! I would prefer not to take a clerkship, he rejoined, as if to settle that 202 little item at once. How would a bar-tenders business suit you? There is no trying of the 203

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the landlord and his tenants, and with regard to my own desire and sense of duty, to benefit Bartleby, and shield him from rude persecution. I now strove to be entirely care-free and quiescent; and my conscience justified me in the attempt; though indeed it was not so successful as I could have wished. So fearful was I of being again hunted out by the incensed landlord and his exasperated tenants, that, surrendering my business to Nippers, for a few days I drove about the upper part of the town and through the suburbs, in my rockaway; crossed over to Jersey City and Hoboken, and paid fugitive visits to Manhattanville and Astoria. In fact I almost lived in my rockaway for the time. When again I entered my office, lo, a note from the landlord lay upon the 214 desk. I opened it with trembling hands. It informed me that the writer had sent to the police, and had Bartleby removed to the Tombs as a vagrant. Moreover, since I knew more about him than any one else, he wished me to appear at that place, and make a suitable statement of the facts. These tidings had a conflicting effect upon me. At first I was indignant; but at last almost approved. The landlords energetic, summary disposition had led him to adopt a procedure which I do not think I would have decided upon myself; and yet as a last resort, under such peculiar circumstances, it seemed the only plan. As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be 215 conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale unmoving way, silently acquiesced. Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined the party; and 216 headed by one of the constables arm in arm with Bartleby, the silent procession filed its way through all the noise, and heat, and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon. The same day I received the note I went to the Tombs, or to speak more 217 properly, the Halls of Justice. Seeking the right officer, I stated the purpose

of my call, and was informed that the individual I described was indeed within. I then assured the functionary that Bartleby was a perfectly honest man, and greatly to be compassionated, however unaccountably eccentric. I narrated all I knew, and closed by suggesting the idea of letting him remain in as indulgent confinement as possible till something less harsh might be donethough indeed I hardly knew what. At all events, if nothing else could be decided upon, the alms-house must receive him. I then begged to have an interview. Being under no disgraceful charge, and quite serene and harmless in all 218 his ways, they had permitted him freely to wander about the prison, and especially in the inclosed grass-platted yards thereof. And so I found him there, standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high wall, while all around, from the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out upon him the eyes of murderers and thieves. Bartleby! 219 I know you, he said, without looking round,and I want nothing to 220 say to you. It was not I that brought you here, Bartleby, said I, keenly pained at his 221 implied suspicion. And to you, this should not be so vile a place. Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass. I know where I am, he replied, but would say nothing more, and so I 222 left him. As I entered the corridor again, a broad meat-like man, in an apron, 223 accosted me, and jerking his thumb over his shoulder saidIs that your friend? Yes. 224 Does he want to starve? If he does, let him live on the prison fare, thats 225

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all. Who are you? asked I, not knowing what to make of such an 226 unofficially speaking person in such a place. I am the grub-man. Such gentlemen as have friends here, hire me to 227 provide them with something good to eat. Is this so? said I, turning to the turnkey. He said it was. 228 229

astonishment. Hes odd, aint he? I think he is a little deranged, said I, sadly. 237 Deranged? deranged is it? Well now, upon my word, I thought that 238 friend of yourn was a gentleman forger; they are always pale and genteellike, them forgers. I cant help pity emcant help it, sir. Did you know Monroe Edwards? he added touchingly, and paused. Then, laying his hand pityingly on my shoulder, sighed, he died of consumption at SingSing. So you werent acquainted with Monroe? No, I was never socially acquainted with any forgers. But I cannot stop 239 longer. Look to my friend yonder. You will not lose by it. I will see you again. Some few days after this, I again obtained admission to the Tombs, and 240 went through the corridors in quest of Bartleby; but without finding him. I saw him coming from his cell not long ago, said a turnkey, may be 241 hes gone to loiter in the yards. So I went in that direction. 242 Are you looking for the silent man? said another turnkey passing me. 243 Yonder he liessleeping in the yard there. Tis not twenty minutes since I saw him lie down. The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common 244 prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung. Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying 245 on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went close up to him; stooped over, and

Well then, said I, slipping some silver into the grub-mans hands (for 230 so they called him). I want you to give particular attention to my friend there; let him have the best dinner you can get. And you must be as polite to him as possible. Introduce me, will you? said the grub-man, looking at me with an 231 expression which seem to say he was all impatience for an opportunity to give a specimen of his breeding. Thinking it would prove of benefit to the scrivener, I acquiesced; and 232 asking the grub-man his name, went up with him to Bartleby. Bartleby, this is Mr. Cutlets; you will find him very useful to you. 233 Your sarvant, sir, your sarvant, said the grub-man, making a low 234 salutation behind his apron. Hope you find it pleasant here, sir;spacious groundscool apartments, sirhope youll stay with us some timetry to make it agreeable. May Mrs. Cutlets and I have the pleasure of your company to dinner, sir, in Mrs. Cutlets private room? I prefer not to dine to-day, said Bartleby, turning away. It would 235 disagree with me; I am unused to dinners. So saying he slowly moved to the other side of the inclosure, and took up a position fronting the deadwall. Hows this? said the grub-man, addressing me with a stare of 236

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saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping. Something prompted me to touch him. I felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my spine to my feet. The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. His dinner is 246 ready. Wont he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining? Lives without dining, said I, and closed the eyes. Eh!Hes asleep, aint he? With kings and counsellors, murmured I. * * * * * * * * 247 248 249

letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! 251

There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history. 250 Imagination will readily supply the meagre recital of poor Bartlebys interment. But ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this little narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity as to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to the present narrators making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet here I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few months after the scriveners decease. Upon what basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it is I cannot now tell. But inasmuch as this vague report has not been without a certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it may prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead

Benito Cereno Herman Melville (1856)

In the year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a valuable cargo, in the harbor of St. Maria--a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There he had touched for water. On the second day, not long after dawn, while lying in his berth, his mate came below, informing him that a strange sail was coming into the bay. Ships were then not so plenty in those waters as now. He rose, dressed, and went on deck. The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

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To Captain Delano's surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine. But whatever misgivings might have obtruded on first seeing the stranger, would almost, in any seaman's mind, have been dissipated by observing that, the ship, in navigating into the harbor, was drawing too near the land; a sunken reef making out off her bow. This seemed to prove her a stranger, indeed, not only to the sealer, but the island; consequently, she could be no wonted freebooter on that ocean. With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her--a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun--by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and, apparently, in company with the strange ship entering the harbor--which, wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk _saya-y-manta._ It might have been but a deception of the vapors, but, the longer the stranger was watched the more singular appeared her manoeuvres. Ere long it seemed hard to decide whether she meant to come in or no--what she wanted, or what she was about. The wind, which had breezed up a little during the night, was now extremely light and baffling, which the more increased the apparent

uncertainty of her movements. Surmising, at last, that it might be a ship in distress, Captain Delano ordered his whale-boat to be dropped, and, much to the wary opposition of his mate, prepared to board her, and, at the least, pilot her in. On the night previous, a fishing-party of the seamen had gone a long distance to some detached rocks out of sight from the sealer, and, an hour or two before daybreak, had returned, having met with no small success. Presuming that the stranger might have been long off soundings, the good captain put several baskets of the fish, for presents, into his boat, and so pulled away. From her continuing too near the sunken reef, deeming her in danger, calling to his men, he made all haste to apprise those on board of their situation. But, some time ere the boat came up, the wind, light though it was, having shifted, had headed the vessel off, as well as partly broken the vapors from about her. Upon gaining a less remote view, the ship, when made signally visible on the verge of the leaden-hued swells, with the shreds of fog here and there raggedly furring her, appeared like a white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees. But it was no purely fanciful resemblance which now, for a moment, almost led Captain Delano to think that nothing less than a ship-load of monks was before him. Peering over the bulwarks were what really seemed, in the hazy distance, throngs of dark cowls; while, fitfully revealed through the open port-holes, other dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters. Upon a still nigher approach, this appearance was modified, and the true character of the vessel was plain--a Spanish merchantman of the first class, carrying negro slaves, amongst other valuable freight, from one colonial port to another. A very large, and, in its time, a very fine vessel, such as in those days were at intervals encountered along that main; sometimes superseded Acapulco treasure-ships, or retired frigates of the Spanish king's navy, which, like superannuated Italian palaces, still, under a decline of masters, preserved signs of former state.

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As the whale-boat drew more and more nigh, the cause of the peculiar pipeclayed aspect of the stranger was seen in the slovenly neglect pervading her. The spars, ropes, and great part of the bulwarks, looked woolly, from long unacquaintance with the scraper, tar, and the brush. Her keel seemed laid, her ribs put together, and she launched, from Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones. In the present business in which she was engaged, the ship's general model and rig appeared to have undergone no material change from their original warlike and Froissart pattern. However, no guns were seen. The tops were large, and were railed about with what had once been octagonal net-work, all now in sad disrepair. These tops hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries, in one of which was seen, perched, on a ratlin, a white noddy, a strange fowl, so called from its lethargic, somnambulistic character, being frequently caught by hand at sea. Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret, long ago taken by assault, and then left to decay. Toward the stern, two high-raised quarter galleries--the balustrades here and there covered with dry, tindery sea-moss--opening out from the unoccupied statecabin, whose dead-lights, for all the mild weather, were hermetically closed and calked--these tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked. Whether the ship had a figure-head, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to canvas wrapped about that part, either to protect it while undergoing a re-furbishing, or else decently to hide its decay. Rudely painted or chalked, as in a sailor freak, along the forward side of a sort of pedestal below the canvas, was the sentence, "_Seguid vuestro jefe_" (follow your leader); while upon the tarnished headboards, near by, appeared, in stately capitals, once gilt, the ship's

name, "SAN DOMINICK," each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of the hull. As, at last, the boat was hooked from the bow along toward the gangway amidship, its keel, while yet some inches separated from the hull, harshly grated as on a sunken coral reef. It proved a huge bunch of conglobated barnacles adhering below the water to the side like a wen--a token of baffling airs and long calms passed somewhere in those seas. Climbing the side, the visitor was at once surrounded by a clamorous throng of whites and blacks, but the latter outnumbering the former more than could have been expected, negro transportation-ship as the stranger in port was. But, in one language, and as with one voice, all poured out a common tale of suffering; in which the negresses, of whom there were not a few, exceeded the others in their dolorous vehemence. The scurvy, together with the fever, had swept off a great part of their number, more especially the Spaniards. Off Cape Horn they had narrowly escaped shipwreck; then, for days together, they had lain tranced without wind; their provisions were low; their water next to none; their lips that moment were baked. While Captain Delano was thus made the mark of all eager tongues, his one eager glance took in all faces, with every other object about him. Always upon first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign one, with a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manilla men, the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by first entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. Both house and ship--the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts--hoard from view their interiors till the last moment: but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the living spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes,

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gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave. Perhaps it was some such influence, as above is attempted to be described, which, in Captain Delano's mind, heightened whatever, upon a staid scrutiny, might have seemed unusual; especially the conspicuous figures of four elderly grizzled negroes, their heads like black, doddered willow tops, who, in venerable contrast to the tumult below them, were couched, sphynx-like, one on the starboard cat-head, another on the larboard, and the remaining pair face to face on the opposite bulwarks above the main-chains. They each had bits of unstranded old junk in their hands, and, with a sort of stoical self-content, were picking the junk into oakum, a small heap of which lay by their sides. They accompanied the task with a continuous, low, monotonous, chant; droning and drilling away like so many gray-headed bag-pipers playing a funeral march. The quarter-deck rose into an ample elevated poop, upon the forward verge of which, lifted, like the oakum-pickers, some eight feet above the general throng, sat along in a row, separated by regular spaces, the cross-legged figures of six other blacks; each with a rusty hatchet in his hand, which, with a bit of brick and a rag, he was engaged like a scullion in scouring; while between each two was a small stack of hatchets, their rusted edges turned forward awaiting a like operation. Though occasionally the four oakum-pickers would briefly address some person or persons in the crowd below, yet the six hatchet-polishers neither spoke to others, nor breathed a whisper among themselves, but sat intent upon their task, except at intervals, when, with the peculiar love in negroes of uniting industry with pastime, two and two they sideways clashed their hatchets together,' like cymbals, with a barbarous din. All six, unlike the generality, had the raw aspect of unsophisticated Africans. But that first comprehensive glance which took in those ten figures, with scores less conspicuous, rested but an instant upon them, as, impatient of the hubbub

of voices, the visitor turned in quest of whomsoever it might be that commanded the ship. But as if not unwilling to let nature make known her own case among his suffering charge, or else in despair of restraining it for the time, the Spanish captain, a gentlemanly, reserved-looking, and rather young man to a stranger's eye, dressed with singular richness, but bearing plain traces of recent sleepless cares and disquietudes, stood passively by, leaning against the main-mast, at one moment casting a dreary, spiritless look upon his excited people, at the next an unhappy glance toward his visitor. By his side stood a black of small stature, in whose rude face, as occasionally, like a shepherd's dog, he mutely turned it up into the Spaniard's, sorrow and affection were equally blended. Struggling through the throng, the American advanced to the Spaniard, assuring him of his sympathies, and offering to render whatever assistance might be in his power. To which the Spaniard returned for the present but grave and ceremonious acknowledgments, his national formality dusked by the saturnine mood of ill-health. But losing no time in mere compliments, Captain Delano, returning to the gangway, had his basket of fish brought up; and as the wind still continued light, so that some hours at least must elapse ere the ship could be brought to the anchorage, he bade his men return to the sealer, and fetch back as much water as the whale-boat could carry, with whatever soft bread the steward might have, all the remaining pumpkins on board, with a box of sugar, and a dozen of his private bottles of cider. Not many minutes after the boat's pushing off, to the vexation of all, the wind entirely died away, and the tide turning, began drifting back the ship helplessly seaward. But trusting this would not long last, Captain Delano sought, with good hopes, to cheer up the strangers, feeling no small satisfaction that, with persons in their condition, he could--thanks to his frequent voyages along the Spanish main--converse with some freedom in their native tongue.

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While left alone with them, he was not long in observing some things tending to heighten his first impressions; but surprise was lost in pity, both for the Spaniards and blacks, alike evidently reduced from scarcity of water and provisions; while long-continued suffering seemed to have brought out the less good-natured qualities of the negroes, besides, at the same time, impairing the Spaniard's authority over them. But, under the circumstances, precisely this condition of things was to have been anticipated. In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery. Still, Captain Delano was not without the idea, that had Benito Cereno been a man of greater energy, misrule would hardly have come to the present pass. But the debility, constitutional or induced by hardships, bodily and mental, of the Spanish captain, was too obvious to be overlooked. A prey to settled dejection, as if long mocked with hope he would not now indulge it, even when it had ceased to be a mock, the prospect of that day, or evening at furthest, lying at anchor, with plenty of water for his people, and a brother captain to counsel and befriend, seemed in no perceptible degree to encourage him. His mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected. Shut up in these oaken walls, chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about, at times suddenly pausing, starting, or staring, biting his lip, biting his finger-nail, flushing, paling, twitching his beard, with other symptoms of an absent or moody mind. This distempered spirit was lodged, as before hinted, in as distempered a frame. He was rather tall, but seemed never to have been robust, and now with nervous suffering was almost worn to a skeleton. A tendency to some pulmonary complaint appeared to have been lately confirmed. His voice was like that of one with lungs half gone--hoarsely suppressed, a husky whisper. No wonder that, as in this state he tottered about, his private servant apprehensively followed him. Sometimes the negro gave his master his arm, or took his handkerchief out of his pocket for him; performing these and similar offices with that affectionate zeal which transmutes into something filial or fraternal acts in themselves but menial; and which has gained for the negro the repute of

making the most pleasing body-servant in the world; one, too, whom a master need be on no stiffly superior terms with, but may treat with familiar trust; less a servant than a devoted companion. Marking the noisy indocility of the blacks in general, as well as what seemed the sullen inefficiency of the whites it was not without humane satisfaction that Captain Delano witnessed the steady good conduct of Babo. But the good conduct of Babo, hardly more than the ill-behavior of others, seemed to withdraw the half-lunatic Don Benito from his cloudy languor. Not that such precisely was the impression made by the Spaniard on the mind of his visitor. The Spaniard's individual unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous feature in the ship's general affliction. Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito's unfriendly indifference towards himself. The Spaniard's manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise. But this the American in charity ascribed to the harassing effects of sickness, since, in former instances, he had noted that there are peculiar natures on whom prolonged physical suffering seems to cancel every social instinct of kindness; as if, forced to black bread themselves, they deemed it but equity that each person coming nigh them should, indirectly, by some slight or affront, be made to partake of their fare. But ere long Captain Delano bethought him that, indulgent as he was at the first, in judging the Spaniard, he might not, after all, have exercised charity enough. At bottom it was Don Benito's reserve which displeased him; but the same reserve was shown towards all but his faithful personal attendant. Even the formal reports which, according to sea-usage, were, at stated times, made to him by some petty underling, either a white, mulatto or black, he hardly had patience enough to listen to, without betraying contemptuous aversion. His manner upon such occasions was, in its degree, not unlike that which might be supposed to

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have been his imperial countryman's, Charles V., just previous to the anchoritish retirement of that monarch from the throne. This splenetic disrelish of his place was evinced in almost every function pertaining to it. Proud as he was moody, he condescended to no personal mandate. Whatever special orders were necessary, their delivery was delegated to his body-servant, who in turn transferred them to their ultimate destination, through runners, alert Spanish boys or slave boys, like pages or pilot-fish within easy call continually hovering round Don Benito. So that to have beheld this undemonstrative invalid gliding about, apathetic and mute, no landsman could have dreamed that in him was lodged a dictatorship beyond which, while at sea, there was no earthly appeal. Thus, the Spaniard, regarded in his reserve, seemed the involuntary victim of mental disorder. But, in fact, his reserve might, in some degree, have proceeded from design. If so, then here was evinced the unhealthy climax of that icy though conscientious policy, more or less adopted by all commanders of large ships, which, except in signal emergencies, obliterates alike the manifestation of sway with every trace of sociality; transforming the man into a block, or rather into a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say. Viewing him in this light, it seemed but a natural token of the perverse habit induced by a long course of such hard self-restraint, that, notwithstanding the present condition of his ship, the Spaniard should still persist in a demeanor, which, however harmless, or, it may be, appropriate, in a well-appointed vessel, such as the San Dominick might have been at the outset of the voyage, was anything but judicious now. But the Spaniard, perhaps, thought that it was with captains as with gods: reserve, under all events, must still be their cue. But probably this appearance of slumbering dominion might have been but an attempted disguise to conscious imbecility--not deep policy, but shallow device. But be all this as it might, whether Don Benito's manner was designed or not,

the more Captain Delano noted its pervading reserve, the less he felt uneasiness at any particular manifestation of that reserve towards himself. Neither were his thoughts taken up by the captain alone. Wonted to the quiet orderliness of the sealer's comfortable family of a crew, the noisy confusion of the San Dominick's suffering host repeatedly challenged his eye. Some prominent breaches, not only of discipline but of decency, were observed. These Captain Delano could not but ascribe, in the main, to the absence of those subordinate deck-officers to whom, along with higher duties, is intrusted what may be styled the police department of a populous ship. True, the old oakumpickers appeared at times to act the part of monitorial constables to their countrymen, the blacks; but though occasionally succeeding in allaying trifling outbreaks now and then between man and man, they could do little or nothing toward establishing general quiet. The San Dominick was in the condition of a transatlantic emigrant ship, among whose multitude of living freight are some individuals, doubtless, as little troublesome as crates and bales; but the friendly remonstrances of such with their ruder companions are of not so much avail as the unfriendly arm of the mate. What the San Dominick wanted was, what the emigrant ship has, stern superior officers. But on these decks not so much as a fourth-mate was to be seen. The visitor's curiosity was roused to learn the particulars of those mishaps which had brought about such absenteeism, with its consequences; because, though deriving some inkling of the voyage from the wails which at the first moment had greeted him, yet of the details no clear understanding had been had. The best account would, doubtless, be given by the captain. Yet at first the visitor was loth to ask it, unwilling to provoke some distant rebuff. But plucking up courage, he at last accosted Don Benito, renewing the expression of his benevolent interest, adding, that did he (Captain Delano) but know the particulars of the ship's misfortunes, he would, perhaps, be better able in the end to relieve them. Would Don Benito favor him with the whole story.

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Don Benito faltered; then, like some somnambulist suddenly interfered with, vacantly stared at his visitor, and ended by looking down on the deck. He maintained this posture so long, that Captain Delano, almost equally disconcerted, and involuntarily almost as rude, turned suddenly from him, walking forward to accost one of the Spanish seamen for the desired information. But he had hardly gone five paces, when, with a sort of eagerness, Don Benito invited him back, regretting his momentary absence of mind, and professing readiness to gratify him. While most part of the story was being given, the two captains stood on the after part of the main-deck, a privileged spot, no one being near but the servant. "It is now a hundred and ninety days," began the Spaniard, in his husky whisper, "that this ship, well officered and well manned, with several cabin passengers--some fifty Spaniards in all--sailed from Buenos Ayres bound to Lima, with a general cargo, hardware, Paraguay tea and the like--and," pointing forward, "that parcel of negroes, now not more than a hundred and fifty, as you see, but then numbering over three hundred souls. Off Cape Horn we had heavy gales. In one moment, by night, three of my best officers, with fifteen sailors, were lost, with the main-yard; the spar snapping under them in the slings, as they sought, with heavers, to beat down the icy sail. To lighten the hull, the heavier sacks of mata were thrown into the sea, with most of the water-pipes lashed on deck at the time. And this last necessity it was, combined with the prolonged detections afterwards experienced, which eventually brought about our chief causes of suffering. When--" Here there was a sudden fainting attack of his cough, brought on, no doubt, by his mental distress. His servant sustained him, and drawing a cordial from his pocket placed it to his lips. He a little revived. But unwilling to leave him unsupported while yet imperfectly restored, the black with one arm still encircled his master, at the same time keeping his eye fixed on his face, as if to

watch for the first sign of complete restoration, or relapse, as the event might prove. The Spaniard proceeded, but brokenly and obscurely, as one in a dream. --"Oh, my God! rather than pass through what I have, with joy I would have hailed the most terrible gales; but--" His cough returned and with increased violence; this subsiding; with reddened lips and closed eyes he fell heavily against his supporter. "His mind wanders. He was thinking of the plague that followed the gales," plaintively sighed the servant; "my poor, poor master!" wringing one hand, and with the other wiping the mouth. "But be patient, Senor," again turning to Captain Delano, "these fits do not last long; master will soon be himself." Don Benito reviving, went on; but as this portion of the story was very brokenly delivered, the substance only will here be set down. It appeared that after the ship had been many days tossed in storms off the Cape, the scurvy broke out, carrying off numbers of the whites and blacks. When at last they had worked round into the Pacific, their spars and sails were so damaged, and so inadequately handled by the surviving mariners, most of whom were become invalids, that, unable to lay her northerly course by the wind, which was powerful, the unmanageable ship, for successive days and nights, was blown northwestward, where the breeze suddenly deserted her, in unknown waters, to sultry calms. The absence of the water-pipes now proved as fatal to life as before their presence had menaced it. Induced, or at least aggravated, by the more than scanty allowance of water, a malignant fever followed the scurvy; with the excessive heat of the lengthened calm, making such short work of it as to sweep away, as by billows, whole families of the Africans, and a yet larger number, proportionably, of the Spaniards, including, by a luckless fatality, every remaining officer on board. Consequently, in the smart west winds eventually following the calm, the already rent sails, having to

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be simply dropped, not furled, at need, had been gradually reduced to the beggars' rags they were now. To procure substitutes for his lost sailors, as well as supplies of water and sails, the captain, at the earliest opportunity, had made for Baldivia, the southernmost civilized port of Chili and South America; but upon nearing the coast the thick weather had prevented him from so much as sighting that harbor. Since which period, almost without a crew, and almost without canvas and almost without water, and, at intervals giving its added dead to the sea, the San Dominick had been battle-dored about by contrary winds, inveigled by currents, or grown weedy in calms. Like a man lost in woods, more than once she had doubled upon her own track. "But throughout these calamities," huskily continued Don Benito, painfully turning in the half embrace of his servant, "I have to thank those negroes you see, who, though to your inexperienced eyes appearing unruly, have, indeed, conducted themselves with less of restlessness than even their owner could have thought possible under such circumstances." Here he again fell faintly back. Again his mind wandered; but he rallied, and less obscurely proceeded. "Yes, their owner was quite right in assuring me that no fetters would be needed with his blacks; so that while, as is wont in this transportation, those negroes have always remained upon deck--not thrust below, as in the Guinea-men--they have, also, from the beginning, been freely permitted to range within given bounds at their pleasure." Once more the faintness returned--his mind roved--but, recovering, he resumed: "But it is Babo here to whom, under God, I owe not only my own preservation, but likewise to him, chiefly, the merit is due, of pacifying his more ignorant brethren, when at intervals tempted to murmurings." "Ah, master," sighed the black, bowing his face, "don't speak of me; Babo is nothing; what Babo has done was but duty."

"Faithful fellow!" cried Captain Delano. "Don Benito, I envy you such a friend; slave I cannot call him." As master and man stood before him, the black upholding the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other. The scene was heightened by, the contrast in dress, denoting their relative positions. The Spaniard wore a loose Chili jacket of dark velvet; white smallclothes and stockings, with silver buckles at the knee and instep; a highcrowned sombrero, of fine grass; a slender sword, silver mounted, hung from a knot in his sash--the last being an almost invariable adjunct, more for utility than ornament, of a South American gentleman's dress to this hour. Excepting when his occasional nervous contortions brought about disarray, there was a certain precision in his attire curiously at variance with the unsightly disorder around; especially in the belittered Ghetto, forward of the main-mast, wholly occupied by the blacks. The servant wore nothing but wide trowsers, apparently, from their coarseness and patches, made out of some old topsail; they were clean, and confined at the waist by a bit of unstranded rope, which, with his composed, deprecatory air at times, made him look something like a begging friar of St. Francis. However unsuitable for the time and place, at least in the blunt-thinking American's eyes, and however strangely surviving in the midst of all his afflictions, the toilette of Don Benito might not, in fashion at least, have gone beyond the style of the day among South Americans of his class. Though on the present voyage sailing from Buenos Ayres, he had avowed himself a native and resident of Chili, whose inhabitants had not so generally adopted the plain coat and once plebeian pantaloons; but, with a becoming modification, adhered to their provincial costume, picturesque as any in the world. Still, relatively to the pale history of the voyage, and his own pale face, there seemed something so

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incongruous in the Spaniard's apparel, as almost to suggest the image of an invalid courtier tottering about London streets in the time of the plague. The portion of the narrative which, perhaps, most excited interest, as well as some surprise, considering the latitudes in question, was the long calms spoken of, and more particularly the ship's so long drifting about. Without communicating the opinion, of course, the American could not but impute at least part of the detentions both to clumsy seamanship and faulty navigation. Eying Don Benito's small, yellow hands, he easily inferred that the young captain had not got into command at the hawse-hole, but the cabin-window; and if so, why wonder at incompetence, in youth, sickness, and gentility united? But drowning criticism in compassion, after a fresh repetition of his sympathies, Captain Delano, having heard out his story, not only engaged, as in the first place, to see Don Benito and his people supplied in their immediate bodily needs, but, also, now farther promised to assist him in procuring a large permanent supply of water, as well as some sails and rigging; and, though it would involve no small embarrassment to himself, yet he would spare three of his best seamen for temporary deck officers; so that without delay the ship might proceed to Conception, there fully to refit for Lima, her destined port. Such generosity was not without its effect, even upon the invalid. His face lighted up; eager and hectic, he met the honest glance of his visitor. With gratitude he seemed overcome. "This excitement is bad for master," whispered the servant, taking his arm, and with soothing words gently drawing him aside. When Don Benito returned, the American was pained to observe that his hopefulness, like the sudden kindling in his cheek, was but febrile and transient. Ere long, with a joyless mien, looking up towards the poop, the host invited his guest to accompany him there, for the benefit of what little breath of wind might be stirring.

As, during the telling of the story, Captain Delano had once or twice started at the occasional cymballing of the hatchet-polishers, wondering why such an interruption should be allowed, especially in that part of the ship, and in the ears of an invalid; and moreover, as the hatchets had anything but an attractive look, and the handlers of them still less so, it was, therefore, to tell the truth, not without some lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance, acquiesced in his host's invitation. The more so, since, with an untimely caprice of punctilio, rendered distressing by his cadaverous aspect, Don Benito, with Castilian bows, solemnly insisted upon his guest's preceding him up the ladder leading to the elevation; where, one on each side of the last step, sat for armorial supporters and sentries two of the ominous file. Gingerly enough stepped good Captain Delano between them, and in the instant of leaving them behind, like one running the gauntlet, he felt an apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs. But when, facing about, he saw the whole file, like so many organ-grinders, still stupidly intent on their work, unmindful of everything beside, he could not but smile at his late fidgety panic. Presently, while standing with his host, looking forward upon the decks below, he was struck by one of those instances of insubordination previously alluded to. Three black boys, with two Spanish boys, were sitting together on the hatches, scraping a rude wooden platter, in which some scanty mess had recently been cooked. Suddenly, one of the black boys, enraged at a word dropped by one of his white companions, seized a knife, and, though called to forbear by one of the oakum-pickers, struck the lad over the head, inflicting a gash from which blood flowed. In amazement, Captain Delano inquired what this meant. To which the pale Don Benito dully muttered, that it was merely the sport of the lad.

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"Pretty serious sport, truly," rejoined Captain Delano. "Had such a thing happened on board the Bachelor's Delight, instant punishment would have followed." At these words the Spaniard turned upon the American one of his sudden, staring, half-lunatic looks; then, relapsing into his torpor, answered, "Doubtless, doubtless, Senor." Is it, thought Captain Delano, that this hapless man is one of those paper captains I've known, who by policy wink at what by power they cannot put down? I know no sadder sight than a commander who has little of command but the name. "I should think, Don Benito," he now said, glancing towards the oakum-picker who had sought to interfere with the boys, "that you would find it advantageous to keep all your blacks employed, especially the younger ones, no matter at what useless task, and no matter what happens to the ship. Why, even with my little band, I find such a course indispensable. I once kept a crew on my quarterdeck thrumming mats for my cabin, when, for three days, I had given up my ship--mats, men, and all--for a speedy loss, owing to the violence of a gale, in which we could do nothing but helplessly drive before it." "Doubtless, doubtless," muttered Don Benito. "But," continued Captain Delano, again glancing upon the oakum-pickers and then at the hatchet-polishers, near by, "I see you keep some, at least, of your host employed." "Yes," was again the vacant response. "Those old men there, shaking their pows from their pulpits," continued Captain Delano, pointing to the oakum-pickers, "seem to act the part of old dominies to the rest, little heeded as their admonitions are at times. Is this voluntary on their

part, Don Benito, or have you appointed them shepherds to your flock of black sheep?" "What posts they fill, I appointed them," rejoined the Spaniard, in an acrid tone, as if resenting some supposed satiric reflection. "And these others, these Ashantee conjurors here," continued Captain Delano, rather uneasily eying the brandished steel of the hatchet-polishers, where, in spots, it had been brought to a shine, "this seems a curious business they are at, Don Benito?" "In the gales we met," answered the Spaniard, "what of our general cargo was not thrown overboard was much damaged by the brine. Since coming into calm weather, I have had several cases of knives and hatchets daily brought up for overhauling and cleaning." "A prudent idea, Don Benito. You are part owner of ship and cargo, I presume; but none of the slaves, perhaps?" "I am owner of all you see," impatiently returned Don Benito, "except the main company of blacks, who belonged to my late friend, Alexandro Aranda." As he mentioned this name, his air was heart-broken; his knees shook; his servant supported him. Thinking he divined the cause of such unusual emotion, to confirm his surmise, Captain Delano, after a pause, said: "And may I ask, Don Benito, whether-since awhile ago you spoke of some cabin passengers--the friend, whose loss so afflicts you, at the outset of the voyage accompanied his blacks?" "Yes." "But died of the fever?" "Died of the fever. Oh, could I but--"

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Again quivering, the Spaniard paused. "Pardon me," said Captain Delano, lowly, "but I think that, by a sympathetic experience, I conjecture, Don Benito, what it is that gives the keener edge to your grief. It was once my hard fortune to lose, at sea, a dear friend, my own brother, then supercargo. Assured of the welfare of his spirit, its departure I could have borne like a man; but that honest eye, that honest hand--both of which had so often met mine--and that warm heart; all, all--like scraps to the dogs--to throw all to the sharks! It was then I vowed never to have for fellowvoyager a man I loved, unless, unbeknown to him, I had provided every requisite, in case of a fatality, for embalming his mortal part for interment on shore. Were your friend's remains now on board this ship, Don Benito, not thus strangely would the mention of his name affect you." "On board this ship?" echoed the Spaniard. Then, with horrified gestures, as directed against some spectre, he unconsciously fell into the ready arms of his attendant, who, with a silent appeal toward Captain Delano, seemed beseeching him not again to broach a theme so unspeakably distressing to his master. This poor fellow now, thought the pained American, is the victim of that sad superstition which associates goblins with the deserted body of man, as ghosts with an abandoned house. How unlike are we made! What to me, in like case, would have been a solemn satisfaction, the bare suggestion, even, terrifies the Spaniard into this trance. Poor Alexandro Aranda! what would you say could you here see your friend--who, on former voyages, when you, for months, were left behind, has, I dare say, often longed, and longed, for one peep at you--now transported with terror at the least thought of having you anyway nigh him. At this moment, with a dreary grave-yard toll, betokening a flaw, the ship's forecastle bell, smote by one of the grizzled oakum-pickers, proclaimed ten o'clock, through the leaden calm; when Captain Delano's attention was caught by the moving figure of a gigantic black, emerging from the general crowd below, and slowly advancing towards the elevated poop. An iron collar was

about his neck, from which depended a chain, thrice wound round his body; the terminating links padlocked together at a broad band of iron, his girdle. "How like a mute Atufal moves," murmured the servant. The black mounted the steps of the poop, and, like a brave prisoner, brought up to receive sentence, stood in unquailing muteness before Don Benito, now recovered from his attack. At the first glimpse of his approach, Don Benito had started, a resentful shadow swept over his face; and, as with the sudden memory of bootless rage, his white lips glued together. This is some mulish mutineer, thought Captain Delano, surveying, not without a mixture of admiration, the colossal form of the negro. "See, he waits your question, master," said the servant. Thus reminded, Don Benito, nervously averting his glance, as if shunning, by anticipation, some rebellious response, in a disconcerted voice, thus spoke:-"Atufal, will you ask my pardon, now?" The black was silent. "Again, master," murmured the servant, with bitter upbraiding eyeing his countryman, "Again, master; he will bend to master yet." "Answer," said Don Benito, still averting his glance, "say but the one word, _pardon_, and your chains shall be off." Upon this, the black, slowly raising both arms, let them lifelessly fall, his links clanking, his head bowed; as much as to say, "no, I am content." "Go," said Don Benito, with inkept and unknown emotion. Deliberately as he had come, the black obeyed.

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"Excuse me, Don Benito," said Captain Delano, "but this scene surprises me; what means it, pray?" "It means that that negro alone, of all the band, has given me peculiar cause of offense. I have put him in chains; I--" Here he paused; his hand to his head, as if there were a swimming there, or a sudden bewilderment of memory had come over him; but meeting his servant's kindly glance seemed reassured, and proceeded:-"I could not scourge such a form. But I told him he must ask my pardon. As yet he has not. At my command, every two hours he stands before me." "And how long has this been?" "Some sixty days." "And obedient in all else? And respectful?" "Yes." "Upon my conscience, then," exclaimed Captain Delano, impulsively, "he has a royal spirit in him, this fellow." "He may have some right to it," bitterly returned Don Benito, "he says he was king in his own land." "Yes," said the servant, entering a word, "those slits in Atufal's ears once held wedges of gold; but poor Babo here, in his own land, was only a poor slave; a black man's slave was Babo, who now is the white's." Somewhat annoyed by these conversational familiarities, Captain Delano turned curiously upon the attendant, then glanced inquiringly at his master; but, as if long wonted to these little informalities, neither master nor man seemed to understand him.

"What, pray, was Atufal's offense, Don Benito?" asked Captain Delano; "if it was not something very serious, take a fool's advice, and, in view of his general docility, as well as in some natural respect for his spirit, remit him his penalty." "No, no, master never will do that," here murmured the servant to himself, "proud Atufal must first ask master's pardon. The slave there carries the padlock, but master here carries the key." His attention thus directed, Captain Delano now noticed for the first, that, suspended by a slender silken cord, from Don Benito's neck, hung a key. At once, from the servant's muttered syllables, divining the key's purpose, he smiled, and said:--"So, Don Benito--padlock and key--significant symbols, truly." Biting his lip, Don Benito faltered. Though the remark of Captain Delano, a man of such native simplicity as to be incapable of satire or irony, had been dropped in playful allusion to the Spaniard's singularly evidenced lordship over the black; yet the hypochondriac seemed some way to have taken it as a malicious reflection upon his confessed inability thus far to break down, at least, on a verbal summons, the entrenched will of the slave. Deploring this supposed misconception, yet despairing of correcting it, Captain Delano shifted the subject; but finding his companion more than ever withdrawn, as if still sourly digesting the lees of the presumed affront above-mentioned, by-and-by Captain Delano likewise became less talkative, oppressed, against his own will, by what seemed the secret vindictiveness of the morbidly sensitive Spaniard. But the good sailor, himself of a quite contrary disposition, refrained, on his part, alike from the appearance as from the feeling of resentment, and if silent, was only so from contagion. Presently the Spaniard, assisted by his servant somewhat discourteously crossed over from his guest; a procedure which, sensibly enough, might have been allowed to pass for idle caprice of ill-humor, had not master and man, lingering

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round the corner of the elevated skylight, began whispering together in low voices. This was unpleasing. And more; the moody air of the Spaniard, which at times had not been without a sort of valetudinarian stateliness, now seemed anything but dignified; while the menial familiarity of the servant lost its original charm of simple-hearted attachment. In his embarrassment, the visitor turned his face to the other side of the ship. By so doing, his glance accidentally fell on a young Spanish sailor, a coil of rope in his hand, just stepped from the deck to the first round of the mizzen-rigging. Perhaps the man would not have been particularly noticed, were it not that, during his ascent to one of the yards, he, with a sort of covert intentness, kept his eye fixed on Captain Delano, from whom, presently, it passed, as if by a natural sequence, to the two whisperers. His own attention thus redirected to that quarter, Captain Delano gave a slight start. From something in Don Benito's manner just then, it seemed as if the visitor had, at least partly, been the subject of the withdrawn consultation going on--a conjecture as little agreeable to the guest as it was little flattering to the host. The singular alternations of courtesy and ill-breeding in the Spanish captain were unaccountable, except on one of two suppositions--innocent lunacy, or wicked imposture. But the first idea, though it might naturally have occurred to an indifferent observer, and, in some respect, had not hitherto been wholly a stranger to Captain Delano's mind, yet, now that, in an incipient way, he began to regard the stranger's conduct something in the light of an intentional affront, of course the idea of lunacy was virtually vacated. But if not a lunatic, what then? Under the circumstances, would a gentleman, nay, any honest boor, act the part now acted by his host? The man was an impostor. Some low-born adventurer, masquerading as an oceanic grandee; yet so ignorant of the first requisites of mere gentlemanhood as to be betrayed into the present remarkable indecorum.

That strange ceremoniousness, too, at other times evinced, seemed not uncharacteristic of one playing a part above his real level. Benito Cereno--Don Benito Cereno--a sounding name. One, too, at that period, not unknown, in the surname, to super-cargoes and sea captains trading along the Spanish Main, as belonging to one of the most enterprising and extensive mercantile families in all those provinces; several members of it having titles; a sort of Castilian Rothschild, with a noble brother, or cousin, in every great trading town of South America. The alleged Don Benito was in early manhood, about twenty-nine or thirty. To assume a sort of roving cadetship in the maritime affairs of such a house, what more likely scheme for a young knave of talent and spirit? But the Spaniard was a pale invalid. Never mind. For even to the degree of simulating mortal disease, the craft of some tricksters had been known to attain. To think that, under the aspect of infantile weakness, the most savage energies might be couched--those velvets of the Spaniard but the silky paw to his fangs. From no train of thought did these fancies come; not from within, but from without; suddenly, too, and in one throng, like hoar frost; yet as soon to vanish as the mild sun of Captain Delano's good-nature regained its meridian. Glancing over once more towards his host--whose side-face, revealed above the skylight, was now turned towards him--he was struck by the profile, whose clearness of cut was refined by the thinness, incident to ill-health, as well as ennobled about the chin by the beard. Away with suspicion. He was a true offshoot of a true hidalgo Cereno. Relieved by these and other better thoughts, the visitor, lightly humming a tune, now began indifferently pacing the poop, so as not to betray to Don Benito that he had at all mistrusted incivility, much less duplicity; for such mistrust would yet be proved illusory, and by the event; though, for the present, the circumstance which had provoked that distrust remained unexplained. But when that little mystery should have been cleared up, Captain Delano thought he might extremely regret it, did he allow Don Benito to become aware that he had

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indulged in ungenerous surmises. In short, to the Spaniard's black-letter text, it was best, for awhile, to leave open margin. Presently, his pale face twitching and overcast, the Spaniard, still supported by his attendant, moved over towards his guest, when, with even more than his usual embarrassment, and a strange sort of intriguing intonation in his husky whisper, the following conversation began:-"Senor, may I ask how long you have lain at this isle?" "Oh, but a day or two, Don Benito." "And from what port are you last?" "Canton." "And there, Senor, you exchanged your sealskins for teas and silks, I think you said?" "Yes, Silks, mostly." "And the balance you took in specie, perhaps?" Captain Delano, fidgeting a little, answered-"Yes; some silver; not a very great deal, though." "Ah--well. May I ask how many men have you, Senor?" Captain Delano slightly started, but answered-"About five-and-twenty, all told." "And at present, Senor, all on board, I suppose?" "All on board, Don Benito," replied the Captain, now with satisfaction. "And will be to-night, Senor?"

At this last question, following so many pertinacious ones, for the soul of him Captain Delano could not but look very earnestly at the questioner, who, instead of meeting the glance, with every token of craven discomposure dropped his eyes to the deck; presenting an unworthy contrast to his servant, who, just then, was kneeling at his feet, adjusting a loose shoe-buckle; his disengaged face meantime, with humble curiosity, turned openly up into his master's downcast one. The Spaniard, still with a guilty shuffle, repeated his question: "And--and will be to-night, Senor?" "Yes, for aught I know," returned Captain Delano--"but nay," rallying himself into fearless truth, "some of them talked of going off on another fishing party about midnight." "Your ships generally go--go more or less armed, I believe, Senor?" "Oh, a six-pounder or two, in case of emergency," was the intrepidly indifferent reply, "with a small stock of muskets, sealing-spears, and cutlasses, you know." As he thus responded, Captain Delano again glanced at Don Benito, but the latter's eyes were averted; while abruptly and awkwardly shifting the subject, he made some peevish allusion to the calm, and then, without apology, once more, with his attendant, withdrew to the opposite bulwarks, where the whispering was resumed. At this moment, and ere Captain Delano could cast a cool thought upon what had just passed, the young Spanish sailor, before mentioned, was seen descending from the rigging. In act of stooping over to spring inboard to the deck, his voluminous, unconfined frock, or shirt, of coarse woolen, much spotted with tar, opened out far down the chest, revealing a soiled under garment of what seemed the finest linen, edged, about the neck, with a narrow blue ribbon, sadly faded and worn. At this moment the young sailor's eye was

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again fixed on the whisperers, and Captain Delano thought he observed a lurking significance in it, as if silent signs, of some Freemason sort, had that instant been interchanged. This once more impelled his own glance in the direction of Don Benito, and, as before, he could not but infer that himself formed the subject of the conference. He paused. The sound of the hatchet-polishing fell on his ears. He cast another swift side-look at the two. They had the air of conspirators. In connection with the late questionings, and the incident of the young sailor, these things now begat such return of involuntary suspicion, that the singular guilelessness of the American could not endure it. Plucking up a gay and humorous expression, he crossed over to the two rapidly, saying:--"Ha, Don Benito, your black here seems high in your trust; a sort of privy-counselor, in fact." Upon this, the servant looked up with a good-natured grin, but the master started as from a venomous bite. It was a moment or two before the Spaniard sufficiently recovered himself to reply; which he did, at last, with cold constraint:--"Yes, Senor, I have trust in Babo." Here Babo, changing his previous grin of mere animal humor into an intelligent smile, not ungratefully eyed his master. Finding that the Spaniard now stood silent and reserved, as if involuntarily, or purposely giving hint that his guest's proximity was inconvenient just then, Captain Delano, unwilling to appear uncivil even to incivility itself, made some trivial remark and moved off; again and again turning over in his mind the mysterious demeanor of Don Benito Cereno. He had descended from the poop, and, wrapped in thought, was passing near a dark hatchway, leading down into the steerage, when, perceiving motion there, he looked to see what moved. The same instant there was a sparkle in the shadowy hatchway, and he saw one of the Spanish sailors, prowling there hurriedly placing his hand in the bosom of his frock, as if hiding something.

Before the man could have been certain who it was that was passing, he slunk below out of sight. But enough was seen of him to make it sure that he was the same young sailor before noticed in the rigging. What was that which so sparkled? thought Captain Delano. It was no lamp--no match--no live coal. Could it have been a jewel? But how come sailors with jewels?--or with silk-trimmed under-shirts either? Has he been robbing the trunks of the dead cabin-passengers? But if so, he would hardly wear one of the stolen articles on board ship here. Ah, ah--if, now, that was, indeed, a secret sign I saw passing between this suspicious fellow and his captain awhile since; if I could only be certain that, in my uneasiness, my senses did not deceive me, then-Here, passing from one suspicious thing to another, his mind revolved the strange questions put to him concerning his ship. By a curious coincidence, as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous comment on the white stranger's thoughts. Pressed by such enigmas: and portents, it would have been almost against nature, had not, even into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings obtruded. Observing the ship, now helplessly fallen into a current, with enchanted sails, drifting with increased rapidity seaward; and noting that, from a lately intercepted projection of the land, the sealer was hidden, the stout mariner began to quake at thoughts which he barely durst confess to himself. Above all, he began to feel a ghostly dread of Don Benito. And yet, when he roused himself, dilated his chest, felt himself strong on his legs, and coolly considered it--what did all these phantoms amount to? Had the Spaniard any sinister scheme, it must have reference not so much to him (Captain Delano) as to his ship (the Bachelor's Delight). Hence the present drifting away of the one ship from the other, instead of favoring any such

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possible scheme, was, for the time, at least, opposed to it. Clearly any suspicion, combining such contradictions, must need be delusive. Beside, was it not absurd to think of a vessel in distress--a vessel by sickness almost dismanned of her crew--a vessel whose inmates were parched for water--was it not a thousand times absurd that such a craft should, at present, be of a piratical character; or her commander, either for himself or those under him, cherish any desire but for speedy relief and refreshment? But then, might not general distress, and thirst in particular, be affected? And might not that same undiminished Spanish crew, alleged to have perished off to a remnant, be at that very moment lurking in the hold? On heart-broken pretense of entreating a cup of cold water, fiends in human form had got into lonely dwellings, nor retired until a dark deed had been done. And among the Malay pirates, it was no unusual thing to lure ships after them into their treacherous harbors, or entice boarders from a declared enemy at sea, by the spectacle of thinly manned or vacant decks, beneath which prowled a hundred spears with yellow arms ready to upthrust them through the mats. Not that Captain Delano had entirely credited such things. He had heard of them--and now, as stories, they recurred. The present destination of the ship was the anchorage. There she would be near his own vessel. Upon gaining that vicinity, might not the San Dominick, like a slumbering volcano, suddenly let loose energies now hid? He recalled the Spaniard's manner while telling his story. There was a gloomy hesitancy and subterfuge about it. It was just the manner of one making up his tale for evil purposes, as he goes. But if that story was not true, what was the truth? That the ship had unlawfully come into the Spaniard's possession? But in many of its details, especially in reference to the more calamitous parts, such as the fatalities among the seamen, the consequent prolonged beating about, the past sufferings from obstinate calms, and still continued suffering from thirst; in all these points, as well as others, Don Benito's story had corroborated not only the wailing ejaculations of the indiscriminate multitude, white and black, but likewise--what seemed impossible to be counterfeit--by the very expression and

play of every human feature, which Captain Delano saw. If Don Benito's story was, throughout, an invention, then every soul on board, down to the youngest negress, was his carefully drilled recruit in the plot: an incredible inference. And yet, if there was ground for mistrusting his veracity, that inference was a legitimate one. But those questions of the Spaniard. There, indeed, one might pause. Did they not seem put with much the same object with which the burglar or assassin, by day-time, reconnoitres the walls of a house? But, with ill purposes, to solicit such information openly of the chief person endangered, and so, in effect, setting him on his guard; how unlikely a procedure was that? Absurd, then, to suppose that those questions had been prompted by evil designs. Thus, the same conduct, which, in this instance, had raised the alarm, served to dispel it. In short, scarce any suspicion or uneasiness, however apparently reasonable at the time, which was not now, with equal apparent reason, dismissed. At last he began to laugh at his former forebodings; and laugh at the strange ship for, in its aspect, someway siding with them, as it were; and laugh, too, at the odd-looking blacks, particularly those old scissors-grinders, the Ashantees; and those bed-ridden old knitting women, the oakum-pickers; and almost at the dark Spaniard himself, the central hobgoblin of all. For the rest, whatever in a serious way seemed enigmatical, was now goodnaturedly explained away by the thought that, for the most part, the poor invalid scarcely knew what he was about; either sulking in black vapors, or putting idle questions without sense or object. Evidently for the present, the man was not fit to be intrusted with the ship. On some benevolent plea withdrawing the command from him, Captain Delano would yet have to send her to Conception, in charge of his second mate, a worthy person and good navigator--a plan not more convenient for the San Dominick than for Don Benito; for, relieved from all anxiety, keeping wholly to his cabin, the sick man, under the good nursing of

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his servant, would, probably, by the end of the passage, be in a measure restored to health, and with that he should also be restored to authority. Such were the American's thoughts. They were tranquilizing. There was a difference between the idea of Don Benito's darkly pre-ordaining Captain Delano's fate, and Captain Delano's lightly arranging Don Benito's. Nevertheless, it was not without something of relief that the good seaman presently perceived his whale-boat in the distance. Its absence had been prolonged by unexpected detention at the sealer's side, as well as its returning trip lengthened by the continual recession of the goal. The advancing speck was observed by the blacks. Their shouts attracted the attention of Don Benito, who, with a return of courtesy, approaching Captain Delano, expressed satisfaction at the coming of some supplies, slight and temporary as they must necessarily prove. Captain Delano responded; but while doing so, his attention was drawn to something passing on the deck below: among the crowd climbing the landward bulwarks, anxiously watching the coming boat, two blacks, to all appearances accidentally incommoded by one of the sailors, violently pushed him aside, which the sailor someway resenting, they dashed him to the deck, despite the earnest cries of the oakum-pickers. "Don Benito," said Captain Delano quickly, "do you see what is going on there? Look!" But, seized by his cough, the Spaniard staggered, with both hands to his face, on the point of falling. Captain Delano would have supported him, but the servant was more alert, who, with one hand sustaining his master, with the other applied the cordial. Don Benito restored, the black withdrew his support, slipping aside a little, but dutifully remaining within call of a whisper. Such discretion was here evinced as quite wiped away, in the visitor's eyes, any blemish of impropriety which might have attached to the attendant, from the indecorous

conferences before mentioned; showing, too, that if the servant were to blame, it might be more the master's fault than his own, since, when left to himself, he could conduct thus well. His glance called away from the spectacle of disorder to the more pleasing one before him, Captain Delano could not avoid again congratulating his host upon possessing such a servant, who, though perhaps a little too forward now and then, must upon the whole be invaluable to one in the invalid's situation. "Tell me, Don Benito," he added, with a smile--"I should like to have your man here, myself--what will you take for him? Would fifty doubloons be any object?" "Master wouldn't part with Babo for a thousand doubloons," murmured the black, overhearing the offer, and taking it in earnest, and, with the strange vanity of a faithful slave, appreciated by his master, scorning to hear so paltry a valuation put upon him by a stranger. But Don Benito, apparently hardly yet completely restored, and again interrupted by his cough, made but some broken reply. Soon his physical distress became so great, affecting his mind, too, apparently, that, as if to screen the sad spectacle, the servant gently conducted his master below. Left to himself, the American, to while away the time till his boat should arrive, would have pleasantly accosted some one of the few Spanish seamen he saw; but recalling something that Don Benito had said touching their ill conduct, he refrained; as a shipmaster indisposed to countenance cowardice or unfaithfulness in seamen. While, with these thoughts, standing with eye directed forward towards that handful of sailors, suddenly he thought that one or two of them returned the glance and with a sort of meaning. He rubbed his eyes, and looked again; but again seemed to see the same thing. Under a new form, but more obscure than

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any previous one, the old suspicions recurred, but, in the absence of Don Benito, with less of panic than before. Despite the bad account given of the sailors, Captain Delano resolved forthwith to accost one of them. Descending the poop, he made his way through the blacks, his movement drawing a queer cry from the oakum-pickers, prompted by whom, the negroes, twitching each other aside, divided before him; but, as if curious to see what was the object of this deliberate visit to their Ghetto, closing in behind, in tolerable order, followed the white stranger up. His progress thus proclaimed as by mounted kings-at-arms, and escorted as by a Caffre guard of honor, Captain Delano, assuming a good-humored, off-handed air, continued to advance; now and then saying a blithe word to the negroes, and his eye curiously surveying the white faces, here and there sparsely mixed in with the blacks, like stray white pawns venturously involved in the ranks of the chess-men opposed. While thinking which of them to select for his purpose, he chanced to observe a sailor seated on the deck engaged in tarring the strap of a large block, a circle of blacks squatted round him inquisitively eying the process. The mean employment of the man was in contrast with something superior in his figure. His hand, black with continually thrusting it into the tar-pot held for him by a negro, seemed not naturally allied to his face, a face which would have been a very fine one but for its haggardness. Whether this haggardness had aught to do with criminality, could not be determined; since, as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through casual association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal--a hacked one. Not again that this reflection occurred to Captain Delano at the time, charitable man as he was. Rather another idea. Because observing so singular a haggardness combined with a dark eye, averted as in trouble and shame, and then again recalling Don Benito's confessed ill opinion of his crew, insensibly

he was operated upon by certain general notions which, while disconnecting pain and abashment from virtue, invariably link them with vice. If, indeed, there be any wickedness on board this ship, thought Captain Delano, be sure that man there has fouled his hand in it, even as now he fouls it in the pitch. I don't like to accost him. I will speak to this other, this old Jack here on the windlass. He advanced to an old Barcelona tar, in ragged red breeches and dirty night-cap, cheeks trenched and bronzed, whiskers dense as thorn hedges. Seated between two sleepy-looking Africans, this mariner, like his younger shipmate, was employed upon some rigging--splicing a cable--the sleepy-looking blacks performing the inferior function of holding the outer parts of the ropes for him. Upon Captain Delano's approach, the man at once hung his head below its previous level; the one necessary for business. It appeared as if he desired to be thought absorbed, with more than common fidelity, in his task. Being addressed, he glanced up, but with what seemed a furtive, diffident air, which sat strangely enough on his weather-beaten visage, much as if a grizzly bear, instead of growling and biting, should simper and cast sheep's eyes. He was asked several questions concerning the voyage--questions purposely referring to several particulars in Don Benito's narrative, not previously corroborated by those impulsive cries greeting the visitor on first coming on board. The questions were briefly answered, confirming all that remained to be confirmed of the story. The negroes about the windlass joined in with the old sailor; but, as they became talkative, he by degrees became mute, and at length quite glum, seemed morosely unwilling to answer more questions, and yet, all the while, this ursine air was somehow mixed with his sheepish one. Despairing of getting into unembarrassed talk with such a centaur, Captain Delano, after glancing round for a more promising countenance, but seeing none, spoke pleasantly to the blacks to make way for him; and so, amid various

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grins and grimaces, returned to the poop, feeling a little strange at first, he could hardly tell why, but upon the whole with regained confidence in Benito Cereno. How plainly, thought he, did that old whiskerando yonder betray a consciousness of ill desert. No doubt, when he saw me coming, he dreaded lest I, apprised by his Captain of the crew's general misbehavior, came with sharp words for him, and so down with his head. And yet--and yet, now that I think of it, that very old fellow, if I err not, was one of those who seemed so earnestly eying me here awhile since. Ah, these currents spin one's head round almost as much as they do the ship. Ha, there now's a pleasant sort of sunny sight; quite sociable, too. His attention had been drawn to a slumbering negress, partly disclosed through the lacework of some rigging, lying, with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts, was her wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half lifted from the deck, crosswise with its dam's; its hands, like two paws, clambering upon her; its mouth and nose ineffectually rooting to get at the mark; and meantime giving a vexatious half-grunt, blending with the composed snore of the negress. The uncommon vigor of the child at length roused the mother. She started up, at a distance facing Captain Delano. But as if not, at all concerned at the attitude in which she had been caught, delightedly she caught the child up, with maternal transports, covering it with kisses. There's naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love, thought Captain Delano, well pleased. This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more particularly than before. He was gratified with their manners: like most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution; equally ready to die for their infants or fight for them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as

doves. Ah! thought Captain Delano, these, perhaps, are some of the very women whom Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of. These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and ease. At last he looked to see how his boat was getting on; but it was still pretty remote. He turned to see if Don Benito had returned; but he had not. To change the scene, as well as to please himself with a leisurely observation of the coming boat, stepping over into the mizzen-chains, he clambered his way into the starboard quarter-gallery--one of those abandoned Venetian-looking water-balconies previously mentioned--retreats cut off from the deck. As his foot pressed the half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses matting the place, and a chance phantom cats-paw--an islet of breeze, unheralded unfollowed--as this ghostly cats-paw came fanning his cheek; as his glance fell upon the row of small, round dead-lights--all closed like coppered eyes of the coffined--and the statecabin door, once connecting with the gallery, even as the dead-lights had once looked out upon it, but now calked fast like a sarcophagus lid; and to a purpleblack tarred-over, panel, threshold, and post; and he bethought him of the time, when that state-cabin and this state-balcony had heard the voices of the Spanish king's officers, and the forms of the Lima viceroy's daughters had perhaps leaned where he stood--as these and other images flitted through his mind, as the cats-paw through the calm, gradually he felt rising a dreamy inquietude, like that of one who alone on the prairie feels unrest from the repose of the noon. He leaned against the carved balustrade, again looking off toward his boat; but found his eye falling upon the ribbon grass, trailing along the ship's water-line, straight as a border of green box; and parterres of sea-weed, broad ovals and crescents, floating nigh and far, with what seemed long formal alleys between, crossing the terraces of swells, and sweeping round as if leading to the grottoes below. And overhanging all was the balustrade by his arm, which, partly stained with pitch and partly embossed with moss, seemed the charred ruin of some summer-house in a grand garden long running to waste.

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Trying to break one charm, he was but becharmed anew. Though upon the wide sea, he seemed in some far inland country; prisoner in some deserted chateau, left to stare at empty grounds, and peer out at vague roads, where never wagon or wayfarer passed. But these enchantments were a little disenchanted as his eye fell on the corroded main-chains. Of an ancient style, massy and rusty in link, shackle and bolt, they seemed even more fit for the ship's present business than the one for which she had been built. Presently he thought something moved nigh the chains. He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard. Groves of rigging were about the chains; and there, peering from behind a great stay, like an Indian from behind a hemlock, a Spanish sailor, a marlingspike in his hand, was seen, who made what seemed an imperfect gesture towards the balcony, but immediately as if alarmed by some advancing step along the deck within, vanished into the recesses of the hempen forest, like a poacher. What meant this? Something the man had sought to communicate, unbeknown to any one, even to his captain. Did the secret involve aught unfavorable to his captain? Were those previous misgivings of Captain Delano's about to be verified? Or, in his haunted mood at the moment, had some random, unintentional motion of the man, while busy with the stay, as if repairing it, been mistaken for a significant beckoning? Not unbewildered, again he gazed off for his boat. But it was temporarily hidden by a rocky spur of the isle. As with some eagerness he bent forward, watching for the first shooting view of its beak, the balustrade gave way before him like charcoal. Had he not clutched an outreaching rope he would have fallen into the sea. The crash, though feeble, and the fall, though hollow, of the rotten fragments, must have been overheard. He glanced up. With sober curiosity peering down upon him was one of the old oakum-pickers, slipped from his perch to an outside boom; while below the old negro, and, invisible to

him, reconnoitering from a port-hole like a fox from the mouth of its den, crouched the Spanish sailor again. From something suddenly suggested by the man's air, the mad idea now darted into Captain Delano's mind, that Don Benito's plea of indisposition, in withdrawing below, was but a pretense: that he was engaged there maturing his plot, of which the sailor, by some means gaining an inkling, had a mind to warn the stranger against; incited, it may be, by gratitude for a kind word on first boarding the ship. Was it from foreseeing some possible interference like this, that Don Benito had, beforehand, given such a bad character of his sailors, while praising the negroes; though, indeed, the former seemed as docile as the latter the contrary? The whites, too, by nature, were the shrewder race. A man with some evil design, would he not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden? Not unlikely, perhaps. But if the whites had dark secrets concerning Don Benito, could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes? These difficulties recalled former ones. Lost in their mazes, Captain Delano, who had now regained the deck, was uneasily advancing along it, when he observed a new face; an aged sailor seated cross-legged near the main hatchway. His skin was shrunk up with wrinkles like a pelican's empty pouch; his hair frosted; his countenance grave and composed. His hands were full of ropes, which he was working into a large knot. Some blacks were about him obligingly dipping the strands for him, here and there, as the exigencies of the operation demanded. Captain Delano crossed over to him, and stood in silence surveying the knot; his mind, by a not uncongenial transition, passing from its own entanglements to those of the hemp. For intricacy, such a knot he had never seen in an American ship, nor indeed any other. The old man looked like an Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon. The knot seemed a combination of

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double-bowline-knot, treble-crown-knot, back-handed-well-knot, knot-in-andout-knot, and jamming-knot. At last, puzzled to comprehend the meaning of such a knot, Captain Delano addressed the knotter:-"What are you knotting there, my man?" "The knot," was the brief reply, without looking up. "So it seems; but what is it for?" "For some one else to undo," muttered back the old man, plying his fingers harder than ever, the knot being now nearly completed. While Captain Delano stood watching him, suddenly the old man threw the knot towards him, saying in broken English--the first heard in the ship--something to this effect: "Undo it, cut it, quick." It was said lowly, but with such condensation of rapidity, that the long, slow words in Spanish, which had preceded and followed, almost operated as covers to the brief English between. For a moment, knot in hand, and knot in head, Captain Delano stood mute; while, without further heeding him, the old man was now intent upon other ropes. Presently there was a slight stir behind Captain Delano. Turning, he saw the chained negro, Atufal, standing quietly there. The next moment the old sailor rose, muttering, and, followed by his subordinate negroes, removed to the forward part of the ship, where in the crowd he disappeared. An elderly negro, in a clout like an infant's, and with a pepper and salt head, and a kind of attorney air, now approached Captain Delano. In tolerable Spanish, and with a good-natured, knowing wink, he informed him that the old knotter was simple-witted, but harmless; often playing his odd tricks. The negro concluded by begging the knot, for of course the stranger would not care to be troubled with it. Unconsciously, it was handed to him. With a sort of conge, the negro received it, and, turning his back, ferreted into it like a detective custom-

house officer after smuggled laces. Soon, with some African word, equivalent to pshaw, he tossed the knot overboard. All this is very queer now, thought Captain Delano, with a qualmish sort of emotion; but, as one feeling incipient sea-sickness, he strove, by ignoring the symptoms, to get rid of the malady. Once more he looked off for his boat. To his delight, it was now again in view, leaving the rocky spur astern. The sensation here experienced, after at first relieving his uneasiness, with unforeseen efficacy soon began to remove it. The less distant sight of that wellknown boat--showing it, not as before, half blended with the haze, but with outline defined, so that its individuality, like a man's, was manifest; that boat, Rover by name, which, though now in strange seas, had often pressed the beach of Captain Delano's home, and, brought to its threshold for repairs, had familiarly lain there, as a Newfoundland dog; the sight of that household, boat evoked a thousand trustful associations, which, contrasted with previous suspicions, filled him not only with lightsome confidence, but somehow with half humorous self-reproaches at his former lack of it. "What, I, Amasa Delano--Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad--I, Amasa; the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the water-side to the school-house made from the old hulk--I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is some one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote and drule, I'm afraid." Light of heart and foot, he stepped aft, and there was met by Don Benito's servant, who, with a pleasing expression, responsive to his own present feelings, informed him that his master had recovered from the effects of his coughing fit, and had just ordered him to go present his compliments to his good guest, Don

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Amasa, and say that he (Don Benito) would soon have the happiness to rejoin him. There now, do you mark that? again thought Captain Delano, walking the poop. What a donkey I was. This kind gentleman who here sends me his kind compliments, he, but ten minutes ago, dark-lantern in had, was dodging round some old grind-stone in the hold, sharpening a hatchet for me, I thought. Well, well; these long calms have a morbid effect on the mind, I've often heard, though I never believed it before. Ha! glancing towards the boat; there's Rover; good dog; a white bone in her mouth. A pretty big bone though, seems to me.-What? Yes, she has fallen afoul of the bubbling tide-rip there. It sets her the other way, too, for the time. Patience. It was now about noon, though, from the grayness of everything, it seemed to be getting towards dusk. The calm was confirmed. In the far distance, away from the influence of land, the leaden ocean seemed laid out and leaded up, it's course finished, soul gone, defunct. But the current from landward, where the ship was, increased; silently sweeping her further and further towards the tranced waters beyond. Still, from his knowledge of those latitudes, cherishing hopes of a breeze, and a fair and fresh one, at any moment, Captain Delano, despite present prospects, buoyantly counted upon bringing the San Dominick safely to anchor ere night. The distance swept over was nothing; since, with a good wind, ten minutes' sailing would retrace more than sixty minutes, drifting. Meantime, one moment turning to mark "Rover" fighting the tide-rip, and the next to see Don Benito approaching, he continued walking the poop. Gradually he felt a vexation arising from the delay of his boat; this soon merged into uneasiness; and at last--his eye falling continually, as from a stage-box into the pit, upon the strange crowd before and below him, and, by-and-by, recognizing there the face--now composed to indifference--of the Spanish sailor

who had seemed to beckon from the main-chains--something of his old trepidations returned. Ah, thought he--gravely enough--this is like the ague: because it went off, it follows not that it won't come back. Though ashamed of the relapse, he could not altogether subdue it; and so, exerting his good-nature to the utmost, insensibly he came to a compromise. Yes, this is a strange craft; a strange history, too, and strange folks on board. But--nothing more. By way of keeping his mind out of mischief till the boat should arrive, he tried to occupy it with turning over and over, in a purely speculative sort of way, some lesser peculiarities of the captain and crew. Among others, four curious points recurred: First, the affair of the Spanish lad assailed with a knife by the slave boy; an act winked at by Don Benito. Second, the tyranny in Don Benito's treatment of Atufal, the black; as if a child should lead a bull of the Nile by the ring in his nose. Third, the trampling of the sailor by the two negroes; a piece of insolence passed over without so much as a reprimand. Fourth, the cringing submission to their master, of all the ship's underlings, mostly blacks; as if by the least inadvertence they feared to draw down his despotic displeasure. Coupling these points, they seemed somewhat contradictory. But what then, thought Captain Delano, glancing towards his now nearing boat--what then? Why, Don Benito is a very capricious commander. But he is not the first of the sort I have seen; though it's true he rather exceeds any other. But as a nation-continued he in his reveries--these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it. And yet, I dare say, Spaniards in the main are as good folks as any in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Ah good! last "Rover" has come.

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As, with its welcome freight, the boat touched the side, the oakum-pickers, with venerable gestures, sought to restrain the blacks, who, at the sight of three gurried water-casks in its bottom, and a pile of wilted pumpkins in its bow, hung over the bulwarks in disorderly raptured. Don Benito, with his servant, now appeared; his coming, perhaps, hastened by hearing the noise. Of him Captain Delano sought permission to serve out the water, so that all might share alike, and none injure themselves by unfair excess. But sensible, and, on Don Benito's account, kind as this offer was, it was received with what seemed impatience; as if aware that he lacked energy as a commander, Don Benito, with the true jealousy of weakness, resented as an affront any interference. So, at least, Captain Delano inferred. In another moment the casks were being hoisted in, when some of the eager negroes accidentally jostled Captain Delano, where he stood by the gangway; so, that, unmindful of Don Benito, yielding to the impulse of the moment, with good-natured authority he bade the blacks stand back; to enforce his words making use of a half-mirthful, half-menacing gesture. Instantly the blacks paused, just where they were, each negro and negress suspended in his or her posture, exactly as the word had found them--for a few seconds continuing so-while, as between the responsive posts of a telegraph, an unknown syllable ran from man to man among the perched oakum-pickers. While the visitor's attention was fixed by this scene, suddenly the hatchet-polishers half rose, and a rapid cry came from Don Benito. Thinking that at the signal of the Spaniard he was about to be massacred, Captain Delano would have sprung for his boat, but paused, as the oakumpickers, dropping down into the crowd with earnest exclamations, forced every white and every negro back, at the same moment, with gestures friendly and familiar, almost jocose, bidding him, in substance, not be a fool. Simultaneously the hatchet-polishers resumed their seats, quietly as so many tailors, and at

once, as if nothing had happened, the work of hoisting in the casks was resumed, whites and blacks singing at the tackle. Captain Delano glanced towards Don Benito. As he saw his meagre form in the act of recovering itself from reclining in the servant's arms, into which the agitated invalid had fallen, he could not but marvel at the panic by which himself had been surprised, on the darting supposition that such a commander, who, upon a legitimate occasion, so trivial, too, as it now appeared, could lose all self-command, was, with energetic iniquity, going to bring about his murder. The casks being on deck, Captain Delano was handed a number of jars and cups by one of the steward's aids, who, in the name of his captain, entreated him to do as he had proposed--dole out the water. He complied, with republican impartiality as to this republican element, which always seeks one level, serving the oldest white no better than the youngest black; excepting, indeed, poor Don Benito, whose condition, if not rank, demanded an extra allowance. To him, in the first place, Captain Delano presented a fair pitcher of the fluid; but, thirsting as he was for it, the Spaniard quaffed not a drop until after several grave bows and salutes. A reciprocation of courtesies which the sight-loving Africans hailed with clapping of hands. Two of the less wilted pumpkins being reserved for the cabin table, the residue were minced up on the spot for the general regalement. But the soft bread, sugar, and bottled cider, Captain Delano would have given the whites alone, and in chief Don Benito; but the latter objected; which disinterestedness not a little pleased the American; and so mouthfuls all around were given alike to whites and blacks; excepting one bottle of cider, which Babo insisted upon setting aside for his master. Here it may be observed that as, on the first visit of the boat, the American had not permitted his men to board the ship, neither did he now; being unwilling to add to the confusion of the decks.

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Not uninfluenced by the peculiar good-humor at present prevailing, and for the time oblivious of any but benevolent thoughts, Captain Delano, who, from recent indications, counted upon a breeze within an hour or two at furthest, dispatched the boat back to the sealer, with orders for all the hands that could be spared immediately to set about rafting casks to the watering-place and filling them. Likewise he bade word be carried to his chief officer, that if, against present expectation, the ship was not brought to anchor by sunset, he need be under no concern; for as there was to be a full moon that night, he (Captain Delano) would remain on board ready to play the pilot, come the wind soon or late. As the two Captains stood together, observing the departing boat--the servant, as it happened, having just spied a spot on his master's velvet sleeve, and silently engaged rubbing it out--the American expressed his regrets that the San Dominick had no boats; none, at least, but the unseaworthy old hulk of the longboat, which, warped as a camel's skeleton in the desert, and almost as bleached, lay pot-wise inverted amidships, one side a little tipped, furnishing a subterraneous sort of den for family groups of the blacks, mostly women and small children; who, squatting on old mats below, or perched above in the dark dome, on the elevated seats, were descried, some distance within, like a social circle of bats, sheltering in some friendly cave; at intervals, ebon flights of naked boys and girls, three or four years old, darting in and out of the den's mouth. "Had you three or four boats now, Don Benito," said Captain Delano, "I think that, by tugging at the oars, your negroes here might help along matters some. Did you sail from port without boats, Don Benito?" "They were stove in the gales, Senor." "That was bad. Many men, too, you lost then. Boats and men. Those must have been hard gales, Don Benito."

"Past all speech," cringed the Spaniard. "Tell me, Don Benito," continued his companion with increased interest, "tell me, were these gales immediately off the pitch of Cape Horn?" "Cape Horn?--who spoke of Cape Horn?" "Yourself did, when giving me an account of your voyage," answered Captain Delano, with almost equal astonishment at this eating of his own words, even as he ever seemed eating his own heart, on the part of the Spaniard. "You yourself, Don Benito, spoke of Cape Horn," he emphatically repeated. The Spaniard turned, in a sort of stooping posture, pausing an instant, as one about to make a plunging exchange of elements, as from air to water. At this moment a messenger-boy, a white, hurried by, in the regular performance of his function carrying the last expired half hour forward to the forecastle, from the cabin time-piece, to have it struck at the ship's large bell. "Master," said the servant, discontinuing his work on the coat sleeve, and addressing the rapt Spaniard with a sort of timid apprehensiveness, as one charged with a duty, the discharge of which, it was foreseen, would prove irksome to the very person who had imposed it, and for whose benefit it was intended, "master told me never mind where he was, or how engaged, always to remind him to a minute, when shaving-time comes. Miguel has gone to strike the half-hour afternoon. It is _now_, master. Will master go into the cuddy?" "Ah--yes," answered the Spaniard, starting, as from dreams into realities; then turning upon Captain Delano, he said that ere long he would resume the conversation. "Then if master means to talk more to Don Amasa," said the servant, "why not let Don Amasa sit by master in the cuddy, and master can talk, and Don Amasa can listen, while Babo here lathers and strops."

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"Yes," said Captain Delano, not unpleased with this sociable plan, "yes, Don Benito, unless you had rather not, I will go with you." "Be it so, Senor." As the three passed aft, the American could not but think it another strange instance of his host's capriciousness, this being shaved with such uncommon punctuality in the middle of the day. But he deemed it more than likely that the servant's anxious fidelity had something to do with the matter; inasmuch as the timely interruption served to rally his master from the mood which had evidently been coming upon him. The place called the cuddy was a light deck-cabin formed by the poop, a sort of attic to the large cabin below. Part of it had formerly been the quarters of the officers; but since their death all the partitioning had been thrown down, and the whole interior converted into one spacious and airy marine hall; for absence of fine furniture and picturesque disarray of odd appurtenances, somewhat answering to the wide, cluttered hall of some eccentric bachelor-squire in the country, who hangs his shooting-jacket and tobacco-pouch on deer antlers, and keeps his fishing-rod, tongs, and walking-stick in the same corner. The similitude was heightened, if not originally suggested, by glimpses of the surrounding sea; since, in one aspect, the country and the ocean seem cousinsgerman. The floor of the cuddy was matted. Overhead, four or five old muskets were stuck into horizontal holes along the beams. On one side was a claw-footed old table lashed to the deck; a thumbed missal on it, and over it a small, meagre crucifix attached to the bulk-head. Under the table lay a dented cutlass or two, with a hacked harpoon, among some; melancholy old rigging, like a heap of poor friars' girdles. There were also two long, sharp-ribbed settees of Malacca cane, black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors' racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the

back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment. A flag locker was in one corner, open, exposing various colored bunting, some rolled up, others half unrolled, still others tumbled. Opposite was a cumbrous washstand, of black mahogany, all of one block, with a pedestal, like a font, and over it a railed shelf, containing combs, brushes, and other implements of the toilet. A torn hammock of stained grass swung near; the sheets tossed, and the pillow wrinkled up like a brow, as if who ever slept here slept but illy, with alternate visitations of sad thoughts and bad dreams. The further extremity of the cuddy, overhanging the ship's stern, was pierced with three openings, windows or port-holes, according as men or cannon might peer, socially or unsocially, out of them. At present neither men nor cannon were seen, though huge ring-bolts and other rusty iron fixtures of the woodwork hinted of twenty-four-pounders. Glancing towards the hammock as he entered, Captain Delano said, "You sleep here, Don Benito?" "Yes, Senor, since we got into mild weather." "This seems a sort of dormitory, sitting-room, sail-loft, chapel, armory, and private closet all together, Don Benito," added Captain Delano, looking round. "Yes, Senor; events have not been favorable to much order in my arrangements." Here the servant, napkin on arm, made a motion as if waiting his master's good pleasure. Don Benito signified his readiness, when, seating him in the Malacca arm-chair, and for the guest's convenience drawing opposite one of the settees, the servant commenced operations by throwing back his master's collar and loosening his cravat. There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for avocations about one's person. Most negroes are natural valets and hair-

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dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castinets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction. There is, too, a smooth tact about them in this employment, with a marvelous, noiseless, gliding briskness, not ungraceful in its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still more so to be the manipulated subject of. And above all is the great gift of good-humor. Not the mere grin or laugh is here meant. Those were unsuitable. But a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune. When to this is added the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs, Johnson and Byron--it may be, something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno--took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. But if there be that in the negro which exempts him from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or cynical mind, how, in his most prepossessing aspects, must he appear to a benevolent one? When at ease with respect to exterior things, Captain Delano's nature was not only benign, but familiarly and humorously so. At home, he had often taken rare satisfaction in sitting in his door, watching some free man of color at his work or play. If on a voyage he chanced to have a black sailor, invariably he was on chatty and half-gamesome terms with him. In fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs. Hitherto, the circumstances in which he found the San Dominick had repressed the tendency. But in the cuddy, relieved from his former uneasiness, and, for various reasons, more sociably inclined than at any previous period of the day, and seeing the colored servant, napkin on arm, so debonair about his master, in a business so familiar as that of shaving, too, all his old weakness for negroes returned.

Among other things, he was amused with an odd instance of the African love of bright colors and fine shows, in the black's informally taking from the flaglocker a great piece of bunting of all hues, and lavishly tucking it under his master's chin for an apron. The mode of shaving among the Spaniards is a little different from what it is with other nations. They have a basin, specifically called a barber's basin, which on one side is scooped out, so as accurately to receive the chin, against which it is closely held in lathering; which is done, not with a brush, but with soap dipped in the water of the basin and rubbed on the face. In the present instance salt-water was used for lack of better; and the parts lathered were only the upper lip, and low down under the throat, all the rest being cultivated beard. The preliminaries being somewhat novel to Captain Delano, he sat curiously eying them, so that no conversation took place, nor, for the present, did Don Benito appear disposed to renew any. Setting down his basin, the negro searched among the razors, as for the sharpest, and having found it, gave it an additional edge by expertly strapping it on the firm, smooth, oily skin of his open palm; he then made a gesture as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard's lank neck. Not unaffected by the close sight of the gleaming steel, Don Benito nervously shuddered; his usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro's body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white a man at the block. But this was one of those antic conceits, appearing and vanishing in a breath, from which, perhaps, the best regulated mind is not always free.

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Meantime the agitation of the Spaniard had a little loosened the bunting from around him, so that one broad fold swept curtain-like over, the chair-arm to the floor, revealing, amid a profusion of armorial bars and ground-colors--black, blue, and yellow--a closed castle in a blood red field diagonal with a lion rampant in a white. "The castle and the lion," exclaimed Captain Delano--"why, Don Benito, this is the flag of Spain you use here. It's well it's only I, and not the King, that sees this," he added, with a smile, "but"--turning towards the black--"it's all one, I suppose, so the colors be gay;" which playful remark did not fail somewhat to tickle the negro. "Now, master," he said, readjusting the flag, and pressing the head gently further back into the crotch of the chair; "now, master," and the steel glanced nigh the throat. Again Don Benito faintly shuddered. "You must not shake so, master. See, Don Amasa, master always shakes when I shave him. And yet master knows I never yet have drawn blood, though it's true, if master will shake so, I may some of these times. Now master," he continued. "And now, Don Amasa, please go on with your talk about the gale, and all that; master can hear, and, between times, master can answer." "Ah yes, these gales," said Captain Delano; "but the more I think of your voyage, Don Benito, the more I wonder, not at the gales, terrible as they must have been, but at the disastrous interval following them. For here, by your account, have you been these two months and more getting from Cape Horn to St. Maria, a distance which I myself, with a good wind, have sailed in a few days. True, you had calms, and long ones, but to be becalmed for two months, that is, at least, unusual. Why, Don Benito, had almost any other gentleman told me such a story, I should have been half disposed to a little incredulity."

Here an involuntary expression came over the Spaniard, similar to that just before on the deck, and whether it was the start he gave, or a sudden gawky roll of the hull in the calm, or a momentary unsteadiness of the servant's hand, however it was, just then the razor drew blood, spots of which stained the creamy lather under the throat: immediately the black barber drew back his steel, and, remaining in his professional attitude, back to Captain Delano, and face to Don Benito, held up the trickling razor, saying, with a sort of half humorous sorrow, "See, master--you shook so--here's Babo's first blood." No sword drawn before James the First of England, no assassination in that timid King's presence, could have produced a more terrified aspect than was now presented by Don Benito. Poor fellow, thought Captain Delano, so nervous he can't even bear the sight of barber's blood; and this unstrung, sick man, is it credible that I should have imagined he meant to spill all my blood, who can't endure the sight of one little drop of his own? Surely, Amasa Delano, you have been beside yourself this day. Tell it not when you get home, sappy Amasa. Well, well, he looks like a murderer, doesn't he? More like as if himself were to be done for. Well, well, this day's experience shall be a good lesson. Meantime, while these things were running through the honest seaman's mind, the servant had taken the napkin from his arm, and to Don Benito had said-"But answer Don Amasa, please, master, while I wipe this ugly stuff off the razor, and strop it again." As he said the words, his face was turned half round, so as to be alike visible to the Spaniard and the American, and seemed, by its expression, to hint, that he was desirous, by getting his master to go on with the conversation, considerately to withdraw his attention from the recent annoying accident. As if glad to snatch the offered relief, Don Benito resumed, rehearsing to Captain Delano, that not only were the calms of unusual duration, but the ship had fallen in with obstinate currents; and other things he added, some of which were but

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repetitions of former statements, to explain how it came to pass that the passage from Cape Horn to St. Maria had been so exceedingly long; now and then, mingling with his words, incidental praises, less qualified than before, to the blacks, for their general good conduct. These particulars were not given consecutively, the servant, at convenient times, using his razor, and so, between the intervals of shaving, the story and panegyric went on with more than usual huskiness. To Captain Delano's imagination, now again not wholly at rest, there was something so hollow in the Spaniard's manner, with apparently some reciprocal hollowness in the servant's dusky comment of silence, that the idea flashed across him, that possibly master and man, for some unknown purpose, were acting out, both in word and deed, nay, to the very tremor of Don Benito's limbs, some juggling play before him. Neither did the suspicion of collusion lack apparent support, from the fact of those whispered conferences before mentioned. But then, what could be the object of enacting this play of the barber before him? At last, regarding the notion as a whimsy, insensibly suggested, perhaps, by the theatrical aspect of Don Benito in his harlequin ensign, Captain Delano speedily banished it. The shaving over, the servant bestirred himself with a small bottle of scented waters, pouring a few drops on the head, and then diligently rubbing; the vehemence of the exercise causing the muscles of his face to twitch rather strangely. His next operation was with comb, scissors, and brush; going round and round, smoothing a curl here, clipping an unruly whisker-hair there, giving a graceful sweep to the temple-lock, with other impromptu touches evincing the hand of a master; while, like any resigned gentleman in barber's hands, Don Benito bore all, much less uneasily, at least than he had done the razoring; indeed, he sat so pale and rigid now, that the negro seemed a Nubian sculptor finishing off a white statue-head.

All being over at last, the standard of Spain removed, tumbled up, and tossed back into the flag-locker, the negro's warm breath blowing away any stray hair, which might have lodged down his master's neck; collar and cravat readjusted; a speck of lint whisked off the velvet lapel; all this being done; backing off a little space, and pausing with an expression of subdued self-complacency, the servant for a moment surveyed his master, as, in toilet at least, the creature of his own tasteful hands. Captain Delano playfully complimented him upon his achievement; at the same time congratulating Don Benito. But neither sweet waters, nor shampooing, nor fidelity, nor sociality, delighted the Spaniard. Seeing him relapsing into forbidding gloom, and still remaining seated, Captain Delano, thinking that his presence was undesired just then, withdrew, on pretense of seeing whether, as he had prophesied, any signs of a breeze were visible. Walking forward to the main-mast, he stood awhile thinking over the scene, and not without some undefined misgivings, when he heard a noise near the cuddy, and turning, saw the negro, his hand to his cheek. Advancing, Captain Delano perceived that the cheek was bleeding. He was about to ask the cause, when the negro's wailing soliloquy enlightened him. "Ah, when will master get better from his sickness; only the sour heart that sour sickness breeds made him serve Babo so; cutting Babo with the razor, because, only by accident, Babo had given master one little scratch; and for the first time in so many a day, too. Ah, ah, ah," holding his hand to his face. Is it possible, thought Captain Delano; was it to wreak in private his Spanish spite against this poor friend of his, that Don Benito, by his sullen manner, impelled me to withdraw? Ah this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.--Poor fellow!

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He was about to speak in sympathy to the negro, but with a timid reluctance he now re-entered the cuddy. Presently master and man came forth; Don Benito leaning on his servant as if nothing had happened. But a sort of love-quarrel, after all, thought Captain Delano. He accosted Don Benito, and they slowly walked together. They had gone but a few paces, when the steward--a tall, rajah-looking mulatto, orientally set off with a pagoda turban formed by three or four Madras handkerchiefs wound about his head, tier on tier--approaching with a saalam, announced lunch in the cabin. On their way thither, the two captains were preceded by the mulatto, who, turning round as he advanced, with continual smiles and bows, ushered them on, a display of elegance which quite completed the insignificance of the small bare-headed Babo, who, as if not unconscious of inferiority, eyed askance the graceful steward. But in part, Captain Delano imputed his jealous watchfulness to that peculiar feeling which the full-blooded African entertains for the adulterated one. As for the steward, his manner, if not bespeaking much dignity of self-respect, yet evidenced his extreme desire to please; which is doubly meritorious, as at once Christian and Chesterfieldian. Captain Delano observed with interest that while the complexion of the mulatto was hybrid, his physiognomy was European--classically so. "Don Benito," whispered he, "I am glad to see this usher-of-the-golden-rod of yours; the sight refutes an ugly remark once made to me by a Barbadoes planter; that when a mulatto has a regular European face, look out for him; he is a devil. But see, your steward here has features more regular than King George's of England; and yet there he nods, and bows, and smiles; a king, indeed--the king of kind hearts and polite fellows. What a pleasant voice he has, too?"

"He has, Senor." "But tell me, has he not, so far as you have known him, always proved a good, worthy fellow?" said Captain Delano, pausing, while with a final genuflexion the steward disappeared into the cabin; "come, for the reason just mentioned, I am curious to know." "Francesco is a good man," a sort of sluggishly responded Don Benito, like a phlegmatic appreciator, who would neither find fault nor flatter. "Ah, I thought so. For it were strange, indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins, if a little of our blood mixed with the African's, should, far from improving the latter's quality, have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness." "Doubtless, doubtless, Senor, but"--glancing at Babo--"not to speak of negroes, your planter's remark I have heard applied to the Spanish and Indian intermixtures in our provinces. But I know nothing about the matter," he listlessly added. And here they entered the cabin. The lunch was a frugal one. Some of Captain Delano's fresh fish and pumpkins, biscuit and salt beef, the reserved bottle of cider, and the San Dominick's last bottle of Canary. As they entered, Francesco, with two or three colored aids, was hovering over the table giving the last adjustments. Upon perceiving their master they withdrew, Francesco making a smiling conge, and the Spaniard, without condescending to notice it, fastidiously remarking to his companion that he relished not superfluous attendance. Without companions, host and guest sat down, like a childless married couple, at opposite ends of the table, Don Benito waving Captain Delano to his place, and, weak as he was, insisting upon that gentleman being seated before himself.

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The negro placed a rug under Don Benito's feet, and a cushion behind his back, and then stood behind, not his master's chair, but Captain Delano's. At first, this a little surprised the latter. But it was soon evident that, in taking his position, the black was still true to his master; since by facing him he could the more readily anticipate his slightest want. "This is an uncommonly intelligent fellow of yours, Don Benito," whispered Captain Delano across the table. "You say true, Senor." During the repast, the guest again reverted to parts of Don Benito's story, begging further particulars here and there. He inquired how it was that the scurvy and fever should have committed such wholesale havoc upon the whites, while destroying less than half of the blacks. As if this question reproduced the whole scene of plague before the Spaniard's eyes, miserably reminding him of his solitude in a cabin where before he had had so many friends and officers round him, his hand shook, his face became hueless, broken words escaped; but directly the sane memory of the past seemed replaced by insane terrors of the present. With starting eyes he stared before him at vacancy. For nothing was to be seen but the hand of his servant pushing the Canary over towards him. At length a few sips served partially to restore him. He made random reference to the different constitution of races, enabling one to offer more resistance to certain maladies than another. The thought was new to his companion. Presently Captain Delano, intending to say something to his host concerning the pecuniary part of the business he had undertaken for him, especially--since he was strictly accountable to his owners--with reference to the new suit of sails, and other things of that sort; and naturally preferring to conduct such affairs in private, was desirous that the servant should withdraw; imagining that Don Benito for a few minutes could dispense with his attendance. He, however, waited awhile; thinking that, as the conversation proceeded, Don Benito, without being prompted, would perceive the propriety of the step.

But it was otherwise. At last catching his host's eye, Captain Delano, with a slight backward gesture of his thumb, whispered, "Don Benito, pardon me, but there is an interference with the full expression of what I have to say to you." Upon this the Spaniard changed countenance; which was imputed to his resenting the hint, as in some way a reflection upon his servant. After a moment's pause, he assured his guest that the black's remaining with them could be of no disservice; because since losing his officers he had made Babo (whose original office, it now appeared, had been captain of the slaves) not only his constant attendant and companion, but in all things his confidant. After this, nothing more could be said; though, indeed, Captain Delano could hardly avoid some little tinge of irritation upon being left ungratified in so inconsiderable a wish, by one, too, for whom he intended such solid services. But it is only his querulousness, thought he; and so filling his glass he proceeded to business. The price of the sails and other matters was fixed upon. But while this was being done, the American observed that, though his original offer of assistance had been hailed with hectic animation, yet now when it was reduced to a business transaction, indifference and apathy were betrayed. Don Benito, in fact, appeared to submit to hearing the details more out of regard to common propriety, than from any impression that weighty benefit to himself and his voyage was involved. Soon, his manner became still more reserved. The effort was vain to seek to draw him into social talk. Gnawed by his splenetic mood, he sat twitching his beard, while to little purpose the hand of his servant, mute as that on the wall, slowly pushed over the Canary. Lunch being over, they sat down on the cushioned transom; the servant placing a pillow behind his master. The long continuance of the calm had now affected the atmosphere. Don Benito sighed heavily, as if for breath.

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"Why not adjourn to the cuddy," said Captain Delano; "there is more air there." But the host sat silent and motionless. Meantime his servant knelt before him, with a large fan of feathers. And Francesco coming in on tiptoes, handed the negro a little cup of aromatic waters, with which at intervals he chafed his master's brow; smoothing the hair along the temples as a nurse does a child's. He spoke no word. He only rested his eye on his master's, as if, amid all Don Benito's distress, a little to refresh his spirit by the silent sight of fidelity. Presently the ship's bell sounded two o'clock; and through the cabin windows a slight rippling of the sea was discerned; and from the desired direction. "There," exclaimed Captain Delano, "I told you so, Don Benito, look!" He had risen to his feet, speaking in a very animated tone, with a view the more to rouse his companion. But though the crimson curtain of the stern-window near him that moment fluttered against his pale cheek, Don Benito seemed to have even less welcome for the breeze than the calm. Poor fellow, thought Captain Delano, bitter experience has taught him that one ripple does not make a wind, any more than one swallow a summer. But he is mistaken for once. I will get his ship in for him, and prove it. Briefly alluding to his weak condition, he urged his host to remain quietly where he was, since he (Captain Delano) would with pleasure take upon himself the responsibility of making the best use of the wind. Upon gaining the deck, Captain Delano started at the unexpected figure of Atufal, monumentally fixed at the threshold, like one of those sculptured porters of black marble guarding the porches of Egyptian tombs. But this time the start was, perhaps, purely physical. Atufal's presence, singularly attesting docility even in sullenness, was contrasted with that of the hatchet-polishers, who in patience evinced their industry; while both spectacles

showed, that lax as Don Benito's general authority might be, still, whenever he chose to exert it, no man so savage or colossal but must, more or less, bow. Snatching a trumpet which hung from the bulwarks, with a free step Captain Delano advanced to the forward edge of the poop, issuing his orders in his best Spanish. The few sailors and many negroes, all equally pleased, obediently set about heading the ship towards the harbor. While giving some directions about setting a lower stu'n'-sail, suddenly Captain Delano heard a voice faithfully repeating his orders. Turning, he saw Babo, now for the time acting, under the pilot, his original part of captain of the slaves. This assistance proved valuable. Tattered sails and warped yards were soon brought into some trim. And no brace or halyard was pulled but to the blithe songs of the inspirited negroes. Good fellows, thought Captain Delano, a little training would make fine sailors of them. Why see, the very women pull and sing too. These must be some of those Ashantee negresses that make such capital soldiers, I've heard. But who's at the helm. I must have a good hand there. He went to see. The San Dominick steered with a cumbrous tiller, with large horizontal pullies attached. At each pully-end stood a subordinate black, and between them, at the tiller-head, the responsible post, a Spanish seaman, whose countenance evinced his due share in the general hopefulness and confidence at the coming of the breeze. He proved the same man who had behaved with so shame-faced an air on the windlass. "Ah,--it is you, my man," exclaimed Captain Delano--"well, no more sheep'seyes now;--look straight forward and keep the ship so. Good hand, I trust? And want to get into the harbor, don't you?"

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The man assented with an inward chuckle, grasping the tiller-head firmly. Upon this, unperceived by the American, the two blacks eyed the sailor intently. Finding all right at the helm, the pilot went forward to the forecastle, to see how matters stood there. The ship now had way enough to breast the current. With the approach of evening, the breeze would be sure to freshen. Having done all that was needed for the present, Captain Delano, giving his last orders to the sailors, turned aft to report affairs to Don Benito in the cabin; perhaps additionally incited to rejoin him by the hope of snatching a moment's private chat while the servant was engaged upon deck. From opposite sides, there were, beneath the poop, two approaches to the cabin; one further forward than the other, and consequently communicating with a longer passage. Marking the servant still above, Captain Delano, taking the nighest entrance--the one last named, and at whose porch Atufal still stood-hurried on his way, till, arrived at the cabin threshold, he paused an instant, a little to recover from his eagerness. Then, with the words of his intended business upon his lips, he entered. As he advanced toward the seated Spaniard, he heard another footstep, keeping time with his. From the opposite door, a salver in hand, the servant was likewise advancing. "Confound the faithful fellow," thought Captain Delano; "what a vexatious coincidence." Possibly, the vexation might have been something different, were it not for the brisk confidence inspired by the breeze. But even as it was, he felt a slight twinge, from a sudden indefinite association in his mind of Babo with Atufal. "Don Benito," said he, "I give you joy; the breeze will hold, and will increase. By the way, your tall man and time-piece, Atufal, stands without. By your order, of course?"

Don Benito recoiled, as if at some bland satirical touch, delivered with such adroit garnish of apparent good breeding as to present no handle for retort. He is like one flayed alive, thought Captain Delano; where may one touch him without causing a shrink? The servant moved before his master, adjusting a cushion; recalled to civility, the Spaniard stiffly replied: "you are right. The slave appears where you saw him, according to my command; which is, that if at the given hour I am below, he must take his stand and abide my coming." "Ah now, pardon me, but that is treating the poor fellow like an ex-king indeed. Ah, Don Benito," smiling, "for all the license you permit in some things, I fear lest, at bottom, you are a bitter hard master." Again Don Benito shrank; and this time, as the good sailor thought, from a genuine twinge of his conscience. Again conversation became constrained. In vain Captain Delano called attention to the now perceptible motion of the keel gently cleaving the sea; with lacklustre eye, Don Benito returned words few and reserved. By-and-by, the wind having steadily risen, and still blowing right into the harbor bore the San Dominick swiftly on. Sounding a point of land, the sealer at distance came into open view. Meantime Captain Delano had again repaired to the deck, remaining there some time. Having at last altered the ship's course, so as to give the reef a wide berth, he returned for a few moments below. I will cheer up my poor friend, this time, thought he. "Better and better," Don Benito, he cried as he blithely re-entered: "there will soon be an end to your cares, at least for awhile. For when, after a long, sad voyage, you know, the anchor drops into the haven, all its vast weight seems

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lifted from the captain's heart. We are getting on famously, Don Benito. My ship is in sight. Look through this side-light here; there she is; all a-taunt-o! The Bachelor's Delight, my good friend. Ah, how this wind braces one up. Come, you must take a cup of coffee with me this evening. My old steward will give you as fine a cup as ever any sultan tasted. What say you, Don Benito, will you?" At first, the Spaniard glanced feverishly up, casting a longing look towards the sealer, while with mute concern his servant gazed into his face. Suddenly the old ague of coldness returned, and dropping back to his cushions he was silent. "You do not answer. Come, all day you have been my host; would you have hospitality all on one side?" "I cannot go," was the response. "What? it will not fatigue you. The ships will lie together as near as they can, without swinging foul. It will be little more than stepping from deck to deck; which is but as from room to room. Come, come, you must not refuse me." "I cannot go," decisively and repulsively repeated Don Benito. Renouncing all but the last appearance of courtesy, with a sort of cadaverous sullenness, and biting his thin nails to the quick, he glanced, almost glared, at his guest, as if impatient that a stranger's presence should interfere with the full indulgence of his morbid hour. Meantime the sound of the parted waters came more and more gurglingly and merrily in at the windows; as reproaching him for his dark spleen; as telling him that, sulk as he might, and go mad with it, nature cared not a jot; since, whose fault was it, pray? But the foul mood was now at its depth, as the fair wind at its height. There was something in the man so far beyond any mere unsociality or sourness previously evinced, that even the forbearing good-nature of his guest could no longer endure it. Wholly at a loss to account for such demeanor, and deeming

sickness with eccentricity, however extreme, no adequate excuse, well satisfied, too, that nothing in his own conduct could justify it, Captain Delano's pride began to be roused. Himself became reserved. But all seemed one to the Spaniard. Quitting him, therefore, Captain Delano once more went to the deck. The ship was now within less than two miles of the sealer. The whale-boat was seen darting over the interval. To be brief, the two vessels, thanks to the pilot's skill, ere long neighborly style lay anchored together. Before returning to his own vessel, Captain Delano had intended communicating to Don Benito the smaller details of the proposed services to be rendered. But, as it was, unwilling anew to subject himself to rebuffs, he resolved, now that he had seen the San Dominick safely moored, immediately to quit her, without further allusion to hospitality or business. Indefinitely postponing his ulterior plans, he would regulate his future actions according to future circumstances. His boat was ready to receive him; but his host still tarried below. Well, thought Captain Delano, if he has little breeding, the more need to show mine. He descended to the cabin to bid a ceremonious, and, it may be, tacitly rebukeful adieu. But to his great satisfaction, Don Benito, as if he began to feel the weight of that treatment with which his slighted guest had, not indecorously, retaliated upon him, now supported by his servant, rose to his feet, and grasping Captain Delano's hand, stood tremulous; too much agitated to speak. But the good augury hence drawn was suddenly dashed, by his resuming all his previous reserve, with augmented gloom, as, with half-averted eyes, he silently reseated himself on his cushions. With a corresponding return of his own chilled feelings, Captain Delano bowed and withdrew. He was hardly midway in the narrow corridor, dim as a tunnel, leading from the cabin to the stairs, when a sound, as of the tolling for execution in some jailyard, fell on his ears. It was the echo of the ship's flawed bell, striking the hour, drearily reverberated in this subterranean vault. Instantly, by a fatality not to be

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withstood, his mind, responsive to the portent, swarmed with superstitious suspicions. He paused. In images far swifter than these sentences, the minutest details of all his former distrusts swept through him. Hitherto, credulous good-nature had been too ready to furnish excuses for reasonable fears. Why was the Spaniard, so superfluously punctilious at times, now heedless of common propriety in not accompanying to the side his departing guest? Did indisposition forbid? Indisposition had not forbidden more irksome exertion that day. His last equivocal demeanor recurred. He had risen to his feet, grasped his guest's hand, motioned toward his hat; then, in an instant, all was eclipsed in sinister muteness and gloom. Did this imply one brief, repentant relenting at the final moment, from some iniquitous plot, followed by remorseless return to it? His last glance seemed to express a calamitous, yet acquiescent farewell to Captain Delano forever. Why decline the invitation to visit the sealer that evening? Or was the Spaniard less hardened than the Jew, who refrained not from supping at the board of him whom the same night he meant to betray? What imported all those day-long enigmas and contradictions, except they were intended to mystify, preliminary to some stealthy blow? Atufal, the pretended rebel, but punctual shadow, that moment lurked by the threshold without. He seemed a sentry, and more. Who, by his own confession, had stationed him there? Was the negro now lying in wait? The Spaniard behind--his creature before: to rush from darkness to light was the involuntary choice. The next moment, with clenched jaw and hand, he passed Atufal, and stood unharmed in the light. As he saw his trim ship lying peacefully at anchor, and almost within ordinary call; as he saw his household boat, with familiar faces in it, patiently rising and falling, on the short waves by the San Dominick's side; and then, glancing about the decks where he stood, saw the oakum-pickers still gravely plying their fingers; and heard the low, buzzing whistle and industrious hum of the hatchet-polishers, still bestirring themselves over their endless

occupation; and more than all, as he saw the benign aspect of nature, taking her innocent repose in the evening; the screened sun in the quiet camp of the west shining out like the mild light from Abraham's tent; as charmed eye and ear took in all these, with the chained figure of the black, clenched jaw and hand relaxed. Once again he smiled at the phantoms which had mocked him, and felt something like a tinge of remorse, that, by harboring them even for a moment, he should, by implication, have betrayed an atheist doubt of the ever-watchful Providence above. There was a few minutes' delay, while, in obedience to his orders, the boat was being hooked along to the gangway. During this interval, a sort of saddened satisfaction stole over Captain Delano, at thinking of the kindly offices he had that day discharged for a stranger. Ah, thought he, after good actions one's conscience is never ungrateful, however much so the benefited party may be. Presently, his foot, in the first act of descent into the boat, pressed the first round of the side-ladder, his face presented inward upon the deck. In the same moment, he heard his name courteously sounded; and, to his pleased surprise, saw Don Benito advancing--an unwonted energy in his air, as if, at the last moment, intent upon making amends for his recent discourtesy. With instinctive good feeling, Captain Delano, withdrawing his foot, turned and reciprocally advanced. As he did so, the Spaniard's nervous eagerness increased, but his vital energy failed; so that, the better to support him, the servant, placing his master's hand on his naked shoulder, and gently holding it there, formed himself into a sort of crutch. When the two captains met, the Spaniard again fervently took the hand of the American, at the same time casting an earnest glance into his eyes, but, as before, too much overcome to speak. I have done him wrong, self-reproachfully thought Captain Delano; his apparent coldness has deceived me: in no instance has he meant to offend.

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Meantime, as if fearful that the continuance of the scene might too much unstring his master, the servant seemed anxious to terminate it. And so, still presenting himself as a crutch, and walking between the two captains, he advanced with them towards the gangway; while still, as if full of kindly contrition, Don Benito would not let go the hand of Captain Delano, but retained it in his, across the black's body. Soon they were standing by the side, looking over into the boat, whose crew turned up their curious eyes. Waiting a moment for the Spaniard to relinquish his hold, the now embarrassed Captain Delano lifted his foot, to overstep the threshold of the open gangway; but still Don Benito would not let go his hand. And yet, with an agitated tone, he said, "I can go no further; here I must bid you adieu. Adieu, my dear, dear Don Amasa. Go--go!" suddenly tearing his hand loose, "go, and God guard you better than me, my best friend." Not unaffected, Captain Delano would now have lingered; but catching the meekly admonitory eye of the servant, with a hasty farewell he descended into his boat, followed by the continual adieus of Don Benito, standing rooted in the gangway. Seating himself in the stern, Captain Delano, making a last salute, ordered the boat shoved off. The crew had their oars on end. The bowsmen pushed the boat a sufficient distance for the oars to be lengthwise dropped. The instant that was done, Don Benito sprang over the bulwarks, falling at the feet of Captain Delano; at the same time calling towards his ship, but in tones so frenzied, that none in the boat could understand him. But, as if not equally obtuse, three sailors, from three different and distant parts of the ship, splashed into the sea, swimming after their captain, as if intent upon his rescue. The dismayed officer of the boat eagerly asked what this meant. To which, Captain Delano, turning a disdainful smile upon the unaccountable Spaniard, answered that, for his part, he neither knew nor cared; but it seemed as if Don Benito had taken it into his head to produce the impression among his people

that the boat wanted to kidnap him. "Or else--give way for your lives," he wildly added, starting at a clattering hubbub in the ship, above which rang the tocsin of the hatchet-polishers; and seizing Don Benito by the throat he added, "this plotting pirate means murder!" Here, in apparent verification of the words, the servant, a dagger in his hand, was seen on the rail overhead, poised, in the act of leaping, as if with desperate fidelity to befriend his master to the last; while, seemingly to aid the black, the three white sailors were trying to clamber into the hampered bow. Meantime, the whole host of negroes, as if inflamed at the sight of their jeopardized captain, impended in one sooty avalanche over the bulwarks. All this, with what preceded, and what followed, occurred with such involutions of rapidity, that past, present, and future seemed one. Seeing the negro coming, Captain Delano had flung the Spaniard aside, almost in the very act of clutching him, and, by the unconscious recoil, shifting his place, with arms thrown up, so promptly grappled the servant in his descent, that with dagger presented at Captain Delano's heart, the black seemed of purpose to have leaped there as to his mark. But the weapon was wrenched away, and the assailant dashed down into the bottom of the boat, which now, with disentangled oars, began to speed through the sea. At this juncture, the left hand of Captain Delano, on one side, again clutched the half-reclined Don Benito, heedless that he was in a speechless faint, while his right-foot, on the other side, ground the prostrate negro; and his right arm pressed for added speed on the after oar, his eye bent forward, encouraging his men to their utmost. But here, the officer of the boat, who had at last succeeded in beating off the towing sailors, and was now, with face turned aft, assisting the bowsman at his oar, suddenly called to Captain Delano, to see what the black was about; while a Portuguese oarsman shouted to him to give heed to what the Spaniard was saying.

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Glancing down at his feet, Captain Delano saw the freed hand of the servant aiming with a second dagger--a small one, before concealed in his wool--with this he was snakishly writhing up from the boat's bottom, at the heart of his master, his countenance lividly vindictive, expressing the centred purpose of his soul; while the Spaniard, half-choked, was vainly shrinking away, with husky words, incoherent to all but the Portuguese. That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation swept, illuminating, in unanticipated clearness, his host's whole mysterious demeanor, with every enigmatic event of the day, as well as the entire past voyage of the San Dominick. He smote Babo's hand down, but his own heart smote him harder. With infinite pity he withdrew his hold from Don Benito. Not Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, in leaping into the boat, had intended to stab. Both the black's hands were held, as, glancing up towards the San Dominick, Captain Delano, now with scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt. Like delirious black dervishes, the six Ashantees danced on the poop. Prevented by their foes from springing into the water, the Spanish boys were hurrying up to the topmost spars, while such of the few Spanish sailors, not already in the sea, less alert, were descried, helplessly mixed in, on deck, with the blacks. Meantime Captain Delano hailed his own vessel, ordering the ports up, and the guns run out. But by this time the cable of the San Dominick had been cut; and the fag-end, in lashing out, whipped away the canvas shroud about the beak, suddenly revealing, as the bleached hull swung round towards the open ocean, death for the figure-head, in a human skeleton; chalky comment on the chalked words below, "_Follow your leader_." At the sight, Don Benito, covering his face, wailed out: "'Tis he, Aranda! my murdered, unburied friend!"

Upon reaching the sealer, calling for ropes, Captain Delano bound the negro, who made no resistance, and had him hoisted to the deck. He would then have assisted the now almost helpless Don Benito up the side; but Don Benito, wan as he was, refused to move, or be moved, until the negro should have been first put below out of view. When, presently assured that it was done, he no more shrank from the ascent. The boat was immediately dispatched back to pick up the three swimming sailors. Meantime, the guns were in readiness, though, owing to the San Dominick having glided somewhat astern of the sealer, only the aftermost one could be brought to bear. With this, they fired six times; thinking to cripple the fugitive ship by bringing down her spars. But only a few inconsiderable ropes were shot away. Soon the ship was beyond the gun's range, steering broad out of the bay; the blacks thickly clustering round the bowsprit, one moment with taunting cries towards the whites, the next with upthrown gestures hailing the now dusky moors of ocean--cawing crows escaped from the hand of the fowler. The first impulse was to slip the cables and give chase. But, upon second thoughts, to pursue with whale-boat and yawl seemed more promising. Upon inquiring of Don Benito what firearms they had on board the San Dominick, Captain Delano was answered that they had none that could be used; because, in the earlier stages of the mutiny, a cabin-passenger, since dead, had secretly put out of order the locks of what few muskets there were. But with all his remaining strength, Don Benito entreated the American not to give chase, either with ship or boat; for the negroes had already proved themselves such desperadoes, that, in case of a present assault, nothing but a total massacre of the whites could be looked for. But, regarding this warning as coming from one whose spirit had been crushed by misery the American did not give up his design. The boats were got ready and armed. Captain Delano ordered his men into them. He was going himself when Don Benito grasped his arm.

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"What! have you saved my life, Senor, and are you now going to throw away your own?" The officers also, for reasons connected with their interests and those of the voyage, and a duty owing to the owners, strongly objected against their commander's going. Weighing their remonstrances a moment, Captain Delano felt bound to remain; appointing his chief mate--an athletic and resolute man, who had been a privateer's-man--to head the party. The more to encourage the sailors, they were told, that the Spanish captain considered his ship good as lost; that she and her cargo, including some gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons. Take her, and no small part should be theirs. The sailors replied with a shout. The fugitives had now almost gained an offing. It was nearly night; but the moon was rising. After hard, prolonged pulling, the boats came up on the ship's quarters, at a suitable distance laying upon their oars to discharge their muskets. Having no bullets to return, the negroes sent their yells. But, upon the second volley, Indian-like, they hurtled their hatchets. One took off a sailor's fingers. Another struck the whale-boat's bow, cutting off the rope there, and remaining stuck in the gunwale like a woodman's axe. Snatching it, quivering from its lodgment, the mate hurled it back. The returned gauntlet now stuck in the ship's broken quarter-gallery, and so remained. The negroes giving too hot a reception, the whites kept a more respectful distance. Hovering now just out of reach of the hurtling hatchets, they, with a view to the close encounter which must soon come, sought to decoy the blacks into entirely disarming themselves of their most murderous weapons in a handto-hand fight, by foolishly flinging them, as missiles, short of the mark, into the sea. But, ere long, perceiving the stratagem, the negroes desisted, though not before many of them had to replace their lost hatchets with handspikes; an exchange which, as counted upon, proved, in the end, favorable to the assailants.

Meantime, with a strong wind, the ship still clove the water; the boats alternately falling behind, and pulling up, to discharge fresh volleys. The fire was mostly directed towards the stern, since there, chiefly, the negroes, at present, were clustering. But to kill or maim the negroes was not the object. To take them, with the ship, was the object. To do it, the ship must be boarded; which could not be done by boats while she was sailing so fast. A thought now struck the mate. Observing the Spanish boys still aloft, high as they could get, he called to them to descend to the yards, and cut adrift the sails. It was done. About this time, owing to causes hereafter to be shown, two Spaniards, in the dress of sailors, and conspicuously showing themselves, were killed; not by volleys, but by deliberate marksman's shots; while, as it afterwards appeared, by one of the general discharges, Atufal, the black, and the Spaniard at the helm likewise were killed. What now, with the loss of the sails, and loss of leaders, the ship became unmanageable to the negroes. With creaking masts, she came heavily round to the wind; the prow slowly swinging into view of the boats, its skeleton gleaming in the horizontal moonlight, and casting a gigantic ribbed shadow upon the water. One extended arm of the ghost seemed beckoning the whites to avenge it. "Follow your leader!" cried the mate; and, one on each bow, the boats boarded. Sealing-spears and cutlasses crossed hatchets and hand-spikes. Huddled upon the long-boat amidships, the negresses raised a wailing chant, whose chorus was the clash of the steel. For a time, the attack wavered; the negroes wedging themselves to beat it back; the half-repelled sailors, as yet unable to gain a footing, fighting as troopers in the saddle, one leg sideways flung over the bulwarks, and one without, plying their cutlasses like carters' whips. But in vain. They were almost overborne, when, rallying themselves into a squad as one man, with a huzza, they sprang inboard, where, entangled, they involuntarily separated again. For a few breaths'

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space, there was a vague, muffled, inner sound, as of submerged sword-fish rushing hither and thither through shoals of black-fish. Soon, in a reunited band, and joined by the Spanish seamen, the whites came to the surface, irresistibly driving the negroes toward the stern. But a barricade of casks and sacks, from side to side, had been thrown up by the main-mast. Here the negroes faced about, and though scorning peace or truce, yet fain would have had respite. But, without pause, overleaping the barrier, the unflagging sailors again closed. Exhausted, the blacks now fought in despair. Their red tongues lolled, wolf-like, from their black mouths. But the pale sailors' teeth were set; not a word was spoken; and, in five minutes more, the ship was won. Nearly a score of the negroes were killed. Exclusive of those by the balls, many were mangled; their wounds--mostly inflicted by the long-edged sealing-spears, resembling those shaven ones of the English at Preston Pans, made by the poled scythes of the Highlanders. On the other side, none were killed, though several were wounded; some severely, including the mate. The surviving negroes were temporarily secured, and the ship, towed back into the harbor at midnight, once more lay anchored. Omitting the incidents and arrangements ensuing, suffice it that, after two days spent in refitting, the ships sailed in company for Conception, in Chili, and thence for Lima, in Peru; where, before the vice-regal courts, the whole affair, from the beginning, underwent investigation. Though, midway on the passage, the ill-fated Spaniard, relaxed from constraint, showed some signs of regaining health with free-will; yet, agreeably to his own foreboding, shortly before arriving at Lima, he relapsed, finally becoming so reduced as to be carried ashore in arms. Hearing of his story and plight, one of the many religious institutions of the City of Kings opened an hospitable refuge to him, where both physician and priest were his nurses, and a member of the order volunteered to be his one special guardian and consoler, by night and by day.

The following extracts, translated from one of the official Spanish documents, will, it is hoped, shed light on the preceding narrative, as well as, in the first place, reveal the true port of departure and true history of the San Dominick's voyage, down to the time of her touching at the island of St. Maria. But, ere the extracts come, it may be well to preface them with a remark. The document selected, from among many others, for partial translation, contains the deposition of Benito Cereno; the first taken in the case. Some disclosures therein were, at the time, held dubious for both learned and natural reasons. The tribunal inclined to the opinion that the deponent, not undisturbed in his mind by recent events, raved of some things which could never have happened. But subsequent depositions of the surviving sailors, bearing out the revelations of their captain in several of the strangest particulars, gave credence to the rest. So that the tribunal, in its final decision, rested its capital sentences upon statements which, had they lacked confirmation, it would have deemed it but duty to reject. ***** I, DON JOSE DE ABOS AND PADILLA, His Majesty's Notary for the Royal Revenue, and Register of this Province, and Notary Public of the Holy Crusade of this Bishopric, etc. Do certify and declare, as much as is requisite in law, that, in the criminal cause commenced the twenty-fourth of the month of September, in the year seventeen hundred and ninety-nine, against the negroes of the ship San Dominick, the following declaration before me was made: _Declaration of the first witness_, DON BENITO CERENO. The same day, and month, and year, His Honor, Doctor Juan Martinez de Rozas, Councilor of the Royal Audience of this Kingdom, and learned in the law of this Intendency, ordered the captain of the ship San Dominick, Don Benito Cereno, to appear; which he did, in his litter, attended by the monk Infelez; of whom he received the

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oath, which he took by God, our Lord, and a sign of the Cross; under which he promised to tell the truth of whatever he should know and should be asked;--and being interrogated agreeably to the tenor of the act commencing the process, he said, that on the twentieth of May last, he set sail with his ship from the port of Valparaiso, bound to that of Callao; loaded with the produce of the country beside thirty cases of hardware and one hundred and sixty blacks, of both sexes, mostly belonging to Don Alexandro Aranda, gentleman, of the city of Mendoza; that the crew of the ship consisted of thirty-six men, beside the persons who went as passengers; that the negroes were in part as follows: [_Here, in the original, follows a list of some fifty names, descriptions, and ages, compiled from certain recovered documents of Aranda's, and also from recollections of the deponent, from which portions only are extracted._] --One, from about eighteen to nineteen years, named Jose, and this was the man that waited upon his master, Don Alexandro, and who speaks well the Spanish, having served him four or five years; * * * a mulatto, named Francesco, the cabin steward, of a good person and voice, having sung in the Valparaiso churches, native of the province of Buenos Ayres, aged about thirty-five years. * * * A smart negro, named Dago, who had been for many years a grave-digger among the Spaniards, aged forty-six years. * * * Four old negroes, born in Africa, from sixty to seventy, but sound, calkers by trade, whose names are as follows:--the first was named Muri, and he was killed (as was also his son named Diamelo); the second, Nacta; the third, Yola, likewise killed; the fourth, Ghofan; and six full-grown negroes, aged from thirty to forty-five, all raw, and born among the Ashantees--Matiluqui, Yan, Leche, Mapenda, Yambaio, Akim; four of whom were killed; * * * a powerful negro named Atufal, who being supposed to have been a

chief in Africa, his owner set great store by him. * * * And a small negro of Senegal, but some years among the Spaniards, aged about thirty, which negro's name was Babo; * * * that he does not remember the names of the others, but that still expecting the residue of Don Alexandra's papers will be found, will then take due account of them all, and remit to the court; * * * and thirty-nine women and children of all ages. [_The catalogue over, the deposition goes on_] * * * That all the negroes slept upon deck, as is customary in this navigation, and none wore fetters, because the owner, his friend Aranda, told him that they were all tractable; * * * that on the seventh day after leaving port, at three o'clock in the morning, all the Spaniards being asleep except the two officers on the watch, who were the boatswain, Juan Robles, and the carpenter, Juan Bautista Gayete, and the helmsman and his boy, the negroes revolted suddenly, wounded dangerously the boatswain and the carpenter, and successively killed eighteen men of those who were sleeping upon deck, some with hand-spikes and hatchets, and others by throwing them alive overboard, after tying them; that of the Spaniards upon deck, they left about seven, as he thinks, alive and tied, to manoeuvre the ship, and three or four more, who hid themselves, remained also alive. Although in the act of revolt the negroes made themselves masters of the hatchway, six or seven wounded went through it to the cockpit, without any hindrance on their part; that during the act of revolt, the mate and another person, whose name he does not recollect, attempted to come up through the hatchway, but being quickly wounded, were obliged to return to the cabin; that the deponent resolved at break of day to come up the companion-way, where the negro Babo was, being the ringleader, and Atufal, who assisted him, and having spoken to them, exhorted them to cease committing such atrocities, asking

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them, at the same time, what they wanted and intended to do, offering, himself, to obey their commands; that notwithstanding this, they threw, in his presence, three men, alive and tied, overboard; that they told the deponent to come up, and that they would not kill him; which having done, the negro Babo asked him whether there were in those seas any negro countries where they might be carried, and he answered them, No; that the negro Babo afterwards told him to carry them to Senegal, or to the neighboring islands of St. Nicholas; and he answered, that this was impossible, on account of the great distance, the necessity involved of rounding Cape Horn, the bad condition of the vessel, the want of provisions, sails, and water; but that the negro Babo replied to him he must carry them in any way; that they would do and conform themselves to everything the deponent should require as to eating and drinking; that after a long conference, being absolutely compelled to please them, for they threatened to kill all the whites if they were not, at all events, carried to Senegal, he told them that what was most wanting for the voyage was water; that they would go near the coast to take it, and thence they would proceed on their course; that the negro Babo agreed to it; and the deponent steered towards the intermediate ports, hoping to meet some Spanish, or foreign vessel that would save them; that within ten or eleven days they saw the land, and continued their course by it in the vicinity of Nasca; that the deponent observed that the negroes were now restless and mutinous, because he did not effect the taking in of water, the negro Babo having required, with threats, that it should be done, without fail, the following day; he told him he saw plainly that the coast was steep, and the rivers designated in the maps were not to be found, with other reasons suitable to the circumstances; that the best way would be to go to the island of Santa Maria, where they

might water easily, it being a solitary island, as the foreigners did; that the deponent did not go to Pisco, that was near, nor make any other port of the coast, because the negro Babo had intimated to him several times, that he would kill all the whites the very moment he should perceive any city, town, or settlement of any kind on the shores to which they should be carried: that having determined to go to the island of Santa Maria, as the deponent had planned, for the purpose of trying whether, on the passage or near the island itself, they could find any vessel that should favor them, or whether he could escape from it in a boat to the neighboring coast of Arruco, to adopt the necessary means he immediately changed his course, steering for the island; that the negroes Babo and Atufal held daily conferences, in which they discussed what was necessary for their design of returning to Senegal, whether they were to kill all the Spaniards, and particularly the deponent; that eight days after parting from the coast of Nasca, the deponent being on the watch a little after day-break, and soon after the negroes had their meeting, the negro Babo came to the place where the deponent was, and told him that he had determined to kill his master, Don Alexandro Aranda, both because he and his companions could not otherwise be sure of their liberty, and that to keep the seamen in subjection, he wanted to prepare a warning of what road they should be made to take did they or any of them oppose him; and that, by means of the death of Don Alexandro, that warning would best be given; but, that what this last meant, the deponent did not at the time comprehend, nor could not, further than that the death of Don Alexandro was intended; and moreover the negro Babo proposed to the deponent to call the mate Raneds, who was sleeping in the cabin, before the thing was done, for fear, as the deponent understood it, that the mate, who was a good navigator, should be killed with Don

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Alexandro and the rest; that the deponent, who was the friend, from youth, of Don Alexandro, prayed and conjured, but all was useless; for the negro Babo answered him that the thing could not be prevented, and that all the Spaniards risked their death if they should attempt to frustrate his will in this matter, or any other; that, in this conflict, the deponent called the mate, Raneds, who was forced to go apart, and immediately the negro Babo commanded the Ashantee Martinqui and the Ashantee Lecbe to go and commit the murder; that those two went down with hatchets to the berth of Don Alexandro; that, yet half alive and mangled, they dragged him on deck; that they were going to throw him overboard in that state, but the negro Babo stopped them, bidding the murder be completed on the deck before him, which was done, when, by his orders, the body was carried below, forward; that nothing more was seen of it by the deponent for three days; * * * that Don Alonzo Sidonia, an old man, long resident at Valparaiso, and lately appointed to a civil office in Peru, whither he had taken passage, was at the time sleeping in the berth opposite Don Alexandro's; that awakening at his cries, surprised by them, and at the sight of the negroes with their bloody hatchets in their hands, he threw himself into the sea through a window which was near him, and was drowned, without it being in the power of the deponent to assist or take him up; * * * that a short time after killing Aranda, they brought upon deck his german-cousin, of middle-age, Don Francisco Masa, of Mendoza, and the young Don Joaquin, Marques de Aramboalaza, then lately from Spain, with his Spanish servant Ponce, and the three young clerks of Aranda, Jose Mozairi Lorenzo Bargas, and Hermenegildo Gandix, all of Cadiz; that Don Joaquin and Hermenegildo Gandix, the negro Babo, for purposes hereafter to appear, preserved alive; but Don Francisco Masa, Jose Mozairi, and Lorenzo Bargas, with Ponce the servant, beside the boatswain, Juan

Robles, the boatswain's mates, Manuel Viscaya and Roderigo Hurta, and four of the sailors, the negro Babo ordered to be thrown alive into the sea, although they made no resistance, nor begged for anything else but mercy; that the boatswain, Juan Robles, who knew how to swim, kept the longest above water, making acts of contrition, and, in the last words he uttered, charged this deponent to cause mass to be said for his soul to our Lady of Succor: * * * that, during the three days which followed, the deponent, uncertain what fate had befallen the remains of Don Alexandro, frequently asked the negro Babo where they were, and, if still on board, whether they were to be preserved for interment ashore, entreating him so to order it; that the negro Babo answered nothing till the fourth day, when at sunrise, the deponent coming on deck, the negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship's proper figure-head--the image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World; that the negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's; that, upon discovering his face, the negro Babo, coming close, said words to this effect: "Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body, follow your leader," pointing to the prow; * * * that the same morning the negro Babo took by succession each Spaniard forward, and asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's; that each Spaniard covered his face; that then to each the negro Babo repeated the words in the first place said to the deponent; * * * that they (the Spaniards), being then assembled aft, the negro Babo harangued them, saying that he had now done all; that the deponent (as navigator for the negroes) might pursue his course, warning him and all of them that they should, soul and body, go the way of Don Alexandro, if he saw them (the Spaniards)

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speak, or plot anything against them (the negroes)--a threat which was repeated every day; that, before the events last mentioned, they had tied the cook to throw him overboard, for it is not known what thing they heard him speak, but finally the negro Babo spared his life, at the request of the deponent; that a few days after, the deponent, endeavoring not to omit any means to preserve the lives of the remaining whites, spoke to the negroes peace and tranquillity, and agreed to draw up a paper, signed by the deponent and the sailors who could write, as also by the negro Babo, for himself and all the blacks, in which the deponent obliged himself to carry them to Senegal, and they not to kill any more, and he formally to make over to them the ship, with the cargo, with which they were for that time satisfied and quieted. * * But the next day, the more surely to guard against the sailors' escape, the negro Babo commanded all the boats to be destroyed but the long-boat, which was unseaworthy, and another, a cutter in good condition, which knowing it would yet be wanted for towing the water casks, he had it lowered down into the hold. ***** [_Various particulars of the prolonged and perplexed navigation ensuing here follow, with incidents of a calamitous calm, from which portion one passage is extracted, to wit_:] --That on the fifth day of the calm, all on board suffering much from the heat, and want of water, and five having died in fits, and mad, the negroes became irritable, and for a chance gesture, which they deemed suspicious--though it was harmless--made by the mate, Raneds, to the deponent in the act of handing a quadrant, they killed him; but that for this they afterwards were sorry, the mate being the only remaining navigator on board, except the deponent. *****

--That omitting other events, which daily happened, and which can only serve uselessly to recall past misfortunes and conflicts, after seventy-three days' navigation, reckoned from the time they sailed from Nasca, during which they navigated under a scanty allowance of water, and were afflicted with the calms before mentioned, they at last arrived at the island of Santa Maria, on the seventeenth of the month of August, at about six o'clock in the afternoon, at which hour they cast anchor very near the American ship, Bachelor's Delight, which lay in the same bay, commanded by the generous Captain Amasa Delano; but at six o'clock in the morning, they had already descried the port, and the negroes became uneasy, as soon as at distance they saw the ship, not having expected to see one there; that the negro Babo pacified them, assuring them that no fear need be had; that straightway he ordered the figure on the bow to be covered with canvas, as for repairs and had the decks a little set in order; that for a time the negro Babo and the negro Atufal conferred; that the negro Atufal was for sailing away, but the negro Babo would not, and, by himself, cast about what to do; that at last he came to the deponent, proposing to him to say and do all that the deponent declares to have said and done to the American captain; * * * * * * * that the negro Babo warned him that if he varied in the least, or uttered any word, or gave any look that should give the least intimation of the past events or present state, he would instantly kill him, with all his companions, showing a dagger, which he carried hid, saying something which, as he understood it, meant that that dagger would be alert as his eye; that the negro Babo then announced the plan to all his companions, which pleased them; that he then, the better to disguise the truth, devised many expedients, in some of them uniting deceit and defense; that of this sort was the device of the six Ashantees before named, who

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were his bravoes; that them he stationed on the break of the poop, as if to clean certain hatchets (in cases, which were part of the cargo), but in reality to use them, and distribute them at need, and at a given word he told them; that, among other devices, was the device of presenting Atufal, his right hand man, as chained, though in a moment the chains could be dropped; that in every particular he informed the deponent what part he was expected to enact in every device, and what story he was to tell on every occasion, always threatening him with instant death if he varied in the least: that, conscious that many of the negroes would be turbulent, the negro Babo appointed the four aged negroes, who were calkers, to keep what domestic order they could on the decks; that again and again he harangued the Spaniards and his companions, informing them of his intent, and of his devices, and of the invented story that this deponent was to tell; charging them lest any of them varied from that story; that these arrangements were made and matured during the interval of two or three hours, between their first sighting the ship and the arrival on board of Captain Amasa Delano; that this happened about half-past seven o'clock in the morning, Captain Amasa Delano coming in his boat, and all gladly receiving him; that the deponent, as well as he could force himself, acting then the part of principal owner, and a free captain of the ship, told Captain Amasa Delano, when called upon, that he came from Buenos Ayres, bound to Lima, with three hundred negroes; that off Cape Horn, and in a subsequent fever, many negroes had died; that also, by similar casualties, all the sea officers and the greatest part of the crew had died. ***** [_And so the deposition goes on, circumstantially recounting the fictitious story dictated to the deponent by Babo, and through the

deponent imposed upon Captain Delano; and also recounting the friendly offers of Captain Delano, with other things, but all of which is here omitted. After the fictitious story, etc. the deposition proceeds_:] ***** --that the generous Captain Amasa Delano remained on board all the day, till he left the ship anchored at six o'clock in the evening, deponent speaking to him always of his pretended misfortunes, under the fore-mentioned principles, without having had it in his power to tell a single word, or give him the least hint, that he might know the truth and state of things; because the negro Babo, performing the office of an officious servant with all the appearance of submission of the humble slave, did not leave the deponent one moment; that this was in order to observe the deponent's actions and words, for the negro Babo understands well the Spanish; and besides, there were thereabout some others who were constantly on the watch, and likewise understood the Spanish; * * * that upon one occasion, while deponent was standing on the deck conversing with Amasa Delano, by a secret sign the negro Babo drew him (the deponent) aside, the act appearing as if originating with the deponent; that then, he being drawn aside, the negro Babo proposed to him to gain from Amasa Delano full particulars about his ship, and crew, and arms; that the deponent asked "For what?" that the negro Babo answered he might conceive; that, grieved at the prospect of what might overtake the generous Captain Amasa Delano, the deponent at first refused to ask the desired questions, and used every argument to induce the negro Babo to give up this new design; that the negro Babo showed the point of his dagger; that, after the information had been obtained the negro Babo again drew him aside, telling him that that very night he (the deponent) would be captain of two ships, instead of one,

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for that, great part of the American's ship's crew being to be absent fishing, the six Ashantees, without any one else, would easily take it; that at this time he said other things to the same purpose; that no entreaties availed; that, before Amasa Delano's coming on board, no hint had been given touching the capture of the American ship: that to prevent this project the deponent was powerless; * * *--that in some things his memory is confused, he cannot distinctly recall every event; * * *--that as soon as they had cast anchor at six of the clock in the evening, as has before been stated, the American Captain took leave, to return to his vessel; that upon a sudden impulse, which the deponent believes to have come from God and his angels, he, after the farewell had been said, followed the generous Captain Amasa Delano as far as the gunwale, where he stayed, under pretense of taking leave, until Amasa Delano should have been seated in his boat; that on shoving off, the deponent sprang from the gunwale into the boat, and fell into it, he knows not how, God guarding him; that-***** [_Here, in the original, follows the account of what further happened at the escape, and how the San Dominick was retaken, and of the passage to the coast; including in the recital many expressions of "eternal gratitude" to the "generous Captain Amasa Delano." The deposition then proceeds with recapitulatory remarks, and a partial renumeration of the negroes, making record of their individual part in the past events, with a view to furnishing, according to command of the court, the data whereon to found the criminal sentences to be pronounced. From this portion is the following_;] --That he believes that all the negroes, though not in the first place knowing to the design of revolt, when it was accomplished, approved it. * * * That the negro, Jose, eighteen years old, and

in the personal service of Don Alexandro, was the one who communicated the information to the negro Babo, about the state of things in the cabin, before the revolt; that this is known, because, in the preceding midnight, he use to come from his berth, which was under his master's, in the cabin, to the deck where the ringleader and his associates were, and had secret conversations with the negro Babo, in which he was several times seen by the mate; that, one night, the mate drove him away twice; * * that this same negro Jose was the one who, without being commanded to do so by the negro Babo, as Lecbe and Martinqui were, stabbed his master, Don Alexandro, after be had been dragged half-lifeless to the deck; * * that the mulatto steward, Francesco, was of the first band of revolters, that he was, in all things, the creature and tool of the negro Babo; that, to make his court, he, just before a repast in the cabin, proposed, to the negro Babo, poisoning a dish for the generous Captain Amasa Delano; this is known and believed, because the negroes have said it; but that the negro Babo, having another design, forbade Francesco; * * that the Ashantee Lecbe was one of the worst of them; for that, on the day the ship was retaken, he assisted in the defense of her, with a hatchet in each hand, with one of which he wounded, in the breast, the chief mate of Amasa Delano, in the first act of boarding; this all knew; that, in sight of the deponent, Lecbe struck, with a hatchet, Don Francisco Masa, when, by the negro Babo's orders, he was carrying him to throw him overboard, alive, beside participating in the murder, before mentioned, of Don Alexandro Aranda, and others of the cabin-passengers; that, owing to the fury with which the Ashantees fought in the engagement with the boats, but this Lecbe and Yan survived; that Yan was bad as Lecbe; that Yan was the man who, by Babo's command, willingly prepared the skeleton of Don Alexandro, in a way the negroes afterwards

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told the deponent, but which he, so long as reason is left him, can never divulge; that Yan and Lecbe were the two who, in a calm by night, riveted the skeleton to the bow; this also the negroes told him; that the negro Babo was he who traced the inscription below it; that the negro Babo was the plotter from first to last; he ordered every murder, and was the helm and keel of the revolt; that Atufal was his lieutenant in all; but Atufal, with his own hand, committed no murder; nor did the negro Babo; * * that Atufal was shot, being killed in the fight with the boats, ere boarding; * * that the negresses, of age, were knowing to the revolt, and testified themselves satisfied at the death of their master, Don Alexandro; that, had the negroes not restrained them, they would have tortured to death, instead of simply killing, the Spaniards slain by command of the negro Babo; that the negresses used their utmost influence to have the deponent made away with; that, in the various acts of murder, they sang songs and danced--not gaily, but solemnly; and before the engagement with the boats, as well as during the action, they sang melancholy songs to the negroes, and that this melancholy tone was more inflaming than a different one would have been, and was so intended; that all this is believed, because the negroes have said it.--that of the thirty-six men of the crew, exclusive of the passengers (all of whom are now dead), which the deponent had knowledge of, six only remained alive, with four cabin-boys and ship-boys, not included with the crew; * *--that the negroes broke an arm of one of the cabin-boys and gave him strokes with hatchets. [_Then follow various random disclosures referring to various periods of time. The following are extracted_;] --That during the presence of Captain Amasa Delano on board, some attempts were made by the sailors, and one by Hermenegildo Gandix, to convey hints to him of the true state of affairs; but that

these attempts were ineffectual, owing to fear of incurring death, and, futhermore, owing to the devices which offered contradictions to the true state of affairs, as well as owing to the generosity and piety of Amasa Delano incapable of sounding such wickedness; * * * that Luys Galgo, a sailor about sixty years of age, and formerly of the king's navy, was one of those who sought to convey tokens to Captain Amasa Delano; but his intent, though undiscovered, being suspected, he was, on a pretense, made to retire out of sight, and at last into the hold, and there was made away with. This the negroes have since said; * * * that one of the ship-boys feeling, from Captain Amasa Delano's presence, some hopes of release, and not having enough prudence, dropped some chance-word respecting his expectations, which being overheard and understood by a slave-boy with whom he was eating at the time, the latter struck him on the head with a knife, inflicting a bad wound, but of which the boy is now healing; that likewise, not long before the ship was brought to anchor, one of the seamen, steering at the time, endangered himself by letting the blacks remark some expression in his countenance, arising from a cause similar to the above; but this sailor, by his heedful after conduct, escaped; * * * that these statements are made to show the court that from the beginning to the end of the revolt, it was impossible for the deponent and his men to act otherwise than they did; * * *--that the third clerk, Hermenegildo Gandix, who before had been forced to live among the seamen, wearing a seaman's habit, and in all respects appearing to be one for the time; he, Gandix, was killed by a musket ball fired through mistake from the boats before boarding; having in his fright run up the mizzen-rigging, calling to the boats--"don't board," lest upon their boarding the negroes should kill him; that this inducing the Americans to believe he some way favored the cause of the negroes,

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they fired two balls at him, so that he fell wounded from the rigging, and was drowned in the sea; * * *--that the young Don Joaquin, Marques de Aramboalaza, like Hermenegildo Gandix, the third clerk, was degraded to the office and appearance of a common seaman; that upon one occasion when Don Joaquin shrank, the negro Babo commanded the Ashantee Lecbe to take tar and heat it, and pour it upon Don Joaquin's hands; * * *--that Don Joaquin was killed owing to another mistake of the Americans, but one impossible to be avoided, as upon the approach of the boats, Don Joaquin, with a hatchet tied edge out and upright to his hand, was made by the negroes to appear on the bulwarks; whereupon, seen with arms in his hands and is a questionable altitude, he was shot for a renegade seaman; * * *--that on the person of Don Joaquin was found secreted a jewel, which, by papers that were discovered, proved to have been meant for the shrine of our Lady of Mercy in Lima; a votive offering, beforehand prepared and guarded, to attest his gratitude, when he should have landed in Peru, his last destination, for the safe conclusion of his entire voyage from Spain; * * *--that the jewel, with the other effects of the late Don Joaquin, is in the custody of the brethren of the Hospital de Sacerdotes, awaiting the disposition of the honorable court; * * *--that, owing to the condition of the deponent, as well as the haste in which the boats departed for the attack, the Americans were not forewarned that there were, among the apparent crew, a passenger and one of the clerks disguised by the negro Babo; * * *--that, beside the negroes killed in the action, some were killed after the capture and re-anchoring at night, when shackled to the ring-bolts on deck; that these deaths were committed by the sailors, ere they could be prevented. That so soon as informed of it, Captain Amasa Delano used all his authority, and, in particular with his own hand, struck down Martinez Gola, who,

having found a razor in the pocket of an old jacket of his, which one of the shackled negroes had on, was aiming it at the negro's throat; that the noble Captain Amasa Delano also wrenched from the hand of Bartholomew Barlo a dagger, secreted at the time of the massacre of the whites, with which he was in the act of stabbing a shackled negro, who, the same day, with another negro, had thrown him down and jumped upon him; * * *--that, for all the events, befalling through so long a time, during which the ship was in the hands of the negro Babo, he cannot here give account; but that, what he has said is the most substantial of what occurs to him at present, and is the truth under the oath which he has taken; which declaration he affirmed and ratified, after hearing it read to him. He said that he is twenty-nine years of age, and broken in body and mind; that when finally dismissed by the court, he shall not return home to Chili, but betake himself to the monastery on Mount Agonia without; and signed with his honor, and crossed himself, and, for the time, departed as he came, in his litter, with the monk Infelez, to the Hospital de Sacerdotes. BENITO CERENO. DOCTOR ROZAS. If the Deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick's hull lies open to-day. Hitherto the nature of this narrative, besides rendering the intricacies in the beginning unavoidable, has more or less required that many things, instead of being set down in the order of occurrence, should be retrospectively, or irregularly given; this last is the case with the following passages, which will conclude the account:

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During the long, mild voyage to Lima, there was, as before hinted, a period during which the sufferer a little recovered his health, or, at least in some degree, his tranquillity. Ere the decided relapse which came, the two captains had many cordial conversations--their fraternal unreserve in singular contrast with former withdrawments. Again and again it was repeated, how hard it had been to enact the part forced on the Spaniard by Babo. "Ah, my dear friend," Don Benito once said, "at those very times when you thought me so morose and ungrateful, nay, when, as you now admit, you half thought me plotting your murder, at those very times my heart was frozen; I could not look at you, thinking of what, both on board this ship and your own, hung, from other hands, over my kind benefactor. And as God lives, Don Amasa, I know not whether desire for my own safety alone could have nerved me to that leap into your boat, had it not been for the thought that, did you, unenlightened, return to your ship, you, my best friend, with all who might be with you, stolen upon, that night, in your hammocks, would never in this world have wakened again. Do but think how you walked this deck, how you sat in this cabin, every inch of ground mined into honey-combs under you. Had I dropped the least hint, made the least advance towards an understanding between us, death, explosive death--yours as mine--would have ended the scene." "True, true," cried Captain Delano, starting, "you have saved my life, Don Benito, more than I yours; saved it, too, against my knowledge and will." "Nay, my friend," rejoined the Spaniard, courteous even to the point of religion, "God charmed your life, but you saved mine. To think of some things you did-those smilings and chattings, rash pointings and gesturings. For less than these, they slew my mate, Raneds; but you had the Prince of Heaven's safe-conduct through all ambuscades."

"Yes, all is owing to Providence, I know: but the temper of my mind that morning was more than commonly pleasant, while the sight of so much suffering, more apparent than real, added to my good-nature, compassion, and charity, happily interweaving the three. Had it been otherwise, doubtless, as you hint, some of my interferences might have ended unhappily enough. Besides, those feelings I spoke of enabled me to get the better of momentary distrust, at times when acuteness might have cost me my life, without saving another's. Only at the end did my suspicions get the better of me, and you know how wide of the mark they then proved." "Wide, indeed," said Don Benito, sadly; "you were with me all day; stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a monster, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. To such degree may malign machinations and deceptions impose. So far may even the best man err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted. But you were forced to it; and you were in time undeceived. Would that, in both respects, it was so ever, and with all men." "You generalize, Don Benito; and mournfully enough. But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves." "Because they have no memory," he dejectedly replied; "because they are not human." "But these mild trades that now fan your cheek, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the trades." "With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb, Senor," was the foreboding response. "You are saved," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; "you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?"

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"The negro." There was silence, while the moody man sat, slowly and unconsciously gathering his mantle about him, as if it were a pall. There was no more conversation that day. But if the Spaniard's melancholy sometimes ended in muteness upon topics like the above, there were others upon which he never spoke at all; on which, indeed, all his old reserves were piled. Pass over the worst, and, only to elucidate let an item or two of these be cited. The dress, so precise and costly, worn by him on the day whose events have been narrated, had not willingly been put on. And that silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command, was not, indeed, a sword, but the ghost of one. The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty. As for the black--whose brain, not body, had schemed and led the revolt, with the plot--his slight frame, inadequate to that which it held, had at once yielded to the superior muscular strength of his captor, in the boat. Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words. Put in irons in the hold, with the rest, he was carried to Lima. During the passage, Don Benito did not visit him. Nor then, nor at any time after, would he look at him. Before the tribunal he refused. When pressed by the judges he fainted. On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo. Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites; and across the Plaza looked towards St. Bartholomew's church, in whose vaults slept then, as now, the recovered bones of Aranda: and across the Rimac bridge looked towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia without; where,

three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader.

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h e a d , that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, m e t , u n a b a s h e d , the gaze of the w h i t e s ; a n d a c r o s s the Plaza looked towards S t . B a r t h o l o m e w ' s c h u r c h , in w h o s e vaults slept then, a s now, the recovered b o n e s of A r a n d a ; a n d a c r o s s the R i m a c bridge looked towards the m o n a s t e r y , o n M o u n t A g o n i a without; w h e r e , three m o n t h s after b e i n g d i s m i s s e d by the c o u r t , B e n i t o C e r e n o , b o r n e on the bier, did, i n d e e d , follow his leader. 1855,1856

EMILY DICKINSON 1830-1886

E m i l y E l i z a b e t h D i c k i n s o n w a s b o r n o n D e c e m b e r 10, 1 8 3 0 , in A m h e r s t , M a s s a c h u setts, the s e c o n d child of E d w a r d ( 1 8 0 3 - 1 8 7 4 ) a n d E m i l y N o r c r o s s D i c k i n s o n ( 1 8 0 4 1 8 8 2 ) . D i c k i n s o n lived o u t her life in only two h o u s e s , t h e s p a c i o u s b u t t h e n - d i v i d e d D i c k i n s o n family H o m e s t e a d w h e r e s h e w a s b o r n , t h e n a n o t h e r l a r g e h o u s e n e a r b y from 1 8 4 0 until 1 8 5 5 , w h e n her f a t h e r b o u g h t b a c k t h e entire H o m e s t e a d . T h e r e a f t e r s h e lived in the h o u s e w h e r e s h e w a s b o r n , dying t h e r e (of w h a t w a s d i a g n o s e d a s Bright's d i s e a s e , followed by a s t r o k e ) o n M a y 15, 1 8 8 6 . H e r c l o s e s t friends a n d lifelong allies w e r e her brother, W i l l i a m A u s t i n ( 1 8 2 9 - 1 8 9 5 ) , a year a n d a half o l d e r t h a n s h e , a n d her sister, L a v i n i a ( V i n n i e ) , w h o w a s b o r n in F e b r u a r y 1 8 3 3 a n d d i e d in 1 8 9 9 . In 1 8 5 6 w h e n h e r b r o t h e r , c a l l e d A u s t i n , m a r r i e d her s c h o o l friend S u s a n G i l b e r t ( 1 8 3 0 - 1 9 1 3 ) t h e c o u p l e m o v e d into the E v e r g r e e n s , next d o o r to t h e H o m e s t e a d , newly built for t h e c o u p l e by E d w a r d D i c k i n s o n . N e i t h e r E m i l y nor L a v i n i a m a r r i e d . E m i l y D i c k i n s o n s e l d o m left A m h e r s t . H e r o n e lengthy a b s e n c e w a s a year at M t . H o l y o k e F e m a l e S e m i n a r y ( 1 8 4 7 4 8 ) , in S o u t h H a d l e y , ten l o n g m i l e s a w a y , w h e r e s h e w a s i n t e n s e l y h o m e s i c k for her "own D E A R H O M E " ; a n d o n c e b a c k in A m h e r s t s h e b e c k o n e d her b r o t h e r from his s c h o o l t e a c h i n g in B o s t o n : " W a l k a w a y to f r e e d o m a n d the s u n s h i n e h e r e at h o m e . " U n d a u n t e d by her p o w e r f u l father's d o m e s t i c t y r a n n i e s , c h e r i s h i n g her m o t h e r (who r e m a i n s h a r d for b i o g r a p h e r s to c h a r a c t e r i z e , a p a s s i v e w o m a n in a h o u s e h o l d of forceful p e r s o n a l i t i e s ) , D i c k i n s o n d e c l a r e d h o m e to b e holy, " t h e definition of G o d , " a p l a c e of "Infinite p o w e r . " E c o n o m i c a l l y , politically, a n d intellectually, the D i c k i n s o n s w e r e a m o n g A m h e r s t ' s most prominent families. Edward Dickinson helped found Amherst College as a Calvinistic a l t e r n a t i v e to t h e m o r e liberal H a r v a r d a n d Yale, a n d he w a s its t r e a s u r e r for thirty-six years. H e s e r v e d a s a s t a t e r e p r e s e n t a t i v e a n d a s t a t e s e n a t o r . D u r i n g his t e r m in the n a t i o n a l H o u s e of B e p r e s e n t a t i v e s ( 1 8 5 3 1 8 5 4 ) , E m i l y D i c k i n s o n visited h i m in W a s h i n g t o n a n d s t a y e d briefly in P h i l a d e l p h i a on her way h o m e . A s u c c e s s f u l lawyer, A u s t i n b e c a m e a j u s t i c e of t h e p e a c e in 1 8 5 7 a n d followed his father, in 1 8 7 3 , a s t r e a s u r e r of A m h e r s t C o l l e g e . E m i l y D i c k i n s o n a t t e n d e d A m h e r s t A c a d e m y from 1 8 4 0 through 1846, years her biographer Richard B. Sewall calls "a blossoming period in her life, full a n d j o y o u s " ; t h e n s h e s p e n t her year at M t . H o l y o k e . At e i g h t e e n s h e w a s formally e d u c a t e d far b e y o n d the level t h e n a c h i e v e d by m o s t A m e r i c a n s , m a l e or f e m a l e . Religion w a s a n e s s e n t i a l part of to J o n a t h a n E d w a r d s ' s S t o c k b r i d g e t h e 1 8 4 0 s , w h e r e , for m a n y of the the i d e a of hell a n d the fear of t h e Dickinson's education, and Amherst was nearer of a c e n t u r y b e f o r e t h a n it w a s to the B o s t o n of e d u c a t e d c l a s s e s , U n i t a r i a n i s m h a d d i s p o s e d of fiery pit. F o r D i c k i n s o n , b e i n g terrorized by old-

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f a s h i o n e d s e r m o n s a b o u t d a m n a t i o n w a s c o m p o u n d e d by t h e f r e q u e n c y of d e a t h in that a g e of high infant a n d c h i l d h o o d mortality a n d high mortality in childbirth. As her girlhood friends m a r r i e d a n d m o v e d away, s h e g r a d u a l l y b e c a m e e s t r a n g e d from t h e religious beliefs of the c o m m u n i t y . F o r several y e a r s s h e dutifully a t t e n d e d c h u r c h , a n d her terror d i m i n i s h e d , e s p e c i a l l y after 1 8 5 2 , w h e n s h e b e c a m e friends with J o s i a h G i l b e r t H o l l a n d , a s s o c i a t e editor of the S p r i n g f i e l d Republican, a n d his wife; their liberal t h e o l o g y e n c o u r a g e d her to s t r u g g l e a g a i n s t t h e i n f l u e n c e of serm o n s t h r e a t e n i n g d a m n a t i o n for s o u l s like her own. D i c k i n s o n ' s s l o w t r i u m p h over religious fears w a s intricately involved in her s e e i n g h e r s e l f a s a p o e t a n d w a s m u c h a i d e d by t h e lifelong c o u r s e of r e a d i n g o n w h i c h s h e e m b a r k e d o n c e b a c k at h o m e after M t . H o l y o k e . O f c o n t e m p o r a r y A m e r i c a n writing D i c k i n s o n k n e w the poetry of L o n g f e l l o w , H o l m e s , a n d L o w e l l . S h e identified wryly with H a w t h o r n e ' s i s o l a t e d , g n a r l e d , i d i o s y n c r a t i c c h a r a c t e r s , s u c h a s H e p z i b a h in The House of the Seven Gables. R a l p h W a l d o E m e r s o n w a s an e n d u r i n g favorite a n d a p a l p a b l e p r e s e n c e , a l t h o u g h s h e did not go next d o o r to m e e t him w h e n he s t a y e d at the E v e r g r e e n s o n a l e c t u r e tour in 1 8 5 7 . By t h e early 1 8 6 0 s s h e loved T h o r e a u , r e c o g n i z i n g a k i n d r e d spirit in t h e i n d e p e n d e n t , n a t u r e - l o v i n g m a n w h o d e l i g h t e d in b e i n g t h e village c r a n k of C o n c o r d . S h e a l s o r e a d a h o s t of l e s s e r A m e r i c a n fiction writers a n d p o e t s a s lowly a s the a u t h o r s of w h a t S e w a l l calls " t h e e n d l e s s string of fugitive v e r s e s in the p e r i o d i c a l s (the Republican, t h e Hampshire and Franklin
Express, t h e Atlantic, Harper's, and Scribuer's)."

D i c k i n s o n ' s d e e p e s t literary d e b t s w e r e to the B i b l e a n d to British writers, d e a d a n d living. In her maturity, t h r o u g h n a t i o n a l m a g a z i n e s s h e s u b s c r i b e d to a n d b o o k s s h e o r d e r e d from B o s t o n , s h e h a d a c c e s s to t h e b e s t British literature of her t i m e within w e e k s or m o n t h s , u s u a l l y , of its p u b l i c a t i o n . H e r k n o w l e d g e of S h a k e s p e a r e w a s minu t e a n d extremely p e r s o n a l , a n d s h e k n e w line by line w o r k s of o t h e r older British p o e t s , notably M i l t o n . A favorite r e c e n t p o e t w a s K e a t s , a n d her r e a d i n g of her E n g l i s h c o n t e m p o r a r i e s s t a r t e d early. S h e r e a d t h e novels of C h a r l e s D i c k e n s a s they a p p e a r e d . S h e k n e w the p o e m s of R o b e r t B r o w n i n g a n d t h e p o e t l a u r e a t e T e n n y s o n , but the E n g l i s h c o n t e m p o r a r i e s w h o m a t t e r e d m o s t to her c a r e e r w e r e E l i z a b e t h Barrett B r o w n i n g a n d t h e B r o n t e s i s t e r s . B r o w n i n g w a s i m m e n s e l y i m p o r t a n t a s a n e x a m p l e of a s u c c e s s f u l c o n t e m p o r a r y f e m a l e p o e t . I n d e e d (to j u d g e from N o . 5 9 3 [ 6 2 7 ] ) , s h e s e e m s to h a v e a w a k e n e d D i c k i n s o n to her v o c a t i o n w h e n s h e w a s still " a s o m b r e G i r l , " a n d D i c k i n s o n revered her. F o r D i c k i n s o n all three of t h e B r o n t e s i s t e r s (the "Yorkshire girls") b e c a m e not merely a d m i r e d a u t h o r s b u t daily p r e s e n c e s in her life. D i c k i n s o n s u b s e q u e n t l y h a d yet a n o t h e r E n g l i s h m o d e l , G e o r g e Eliot, w h o m s h e c a l l e d " M r s . L e w e s , " u n p e r t u r b e d by n e w s p a p e r a c c o u n t s of the s c a n d a l o u s h o u s e hold the writer m a i n t a i n e d with t h e m a r r i e d G e o r g e L e w e s . S h e r e a d Eliot's n o v e l s , a n d p o e m s s h e r e a d a s they a p p e a r e d ; a n d after Eliot's d e a t h s h e eagerly a w a i t e d t h e a n n o u n c e d b i o g r a p h y . In her g r o w i n g s e c l u s i o n D i c k i n s o n b e c a m e a s f a m i l i a r with Eliot's fictional c h a r a c t e r s a s s h e w a s with m a n y of the i n h a b i t a n t s of A m h e r s t ; only D i c k e n s filled her m i n d with a s m a n y fictional a c q u a i n t a n c e s a s Eliot d i d . T h e s c a n d a l o u s G e o r g e S a n d w a s a powerful F r e n c h parallel, not m e r e l y a s a w o m a n b u t , after her d e a t h , a s a n o t h e r " q u e e n " l i k e herself, a q u e e n of a literary r e a l m . " G i g a n t i c " E m i l y B r o n t e w a s a d e a d E n g l i s h q u e e n , M r s . B r o w n i n g a n d G e o r g e Eliot r e i g n e d a s d u a l E n g l i s h q u e e n s of poetry a n d (primarily) p r o s e , a n d E m i l y D i c k i n s o n r e i g n e d u n c h a l l e n g e d (in her o w n k n o w l e d g e ) a s t h e q u e e n of A m e r i c a n poetry; h u m o r o u s l y s h e d e c l a r e d that every day s h e tried o u t w a y s of b e h a v i n g " 'If 1 s h o u l d b e a Q u e e n tomorrow' " (No. 3 7 3 ) [575]. N o o n e h a s p e r s u a s i v e l y t r a c e d the p r e c i s e s t a g e s of D i c k i n s o n ' s g r o w t h from a c o n v e n t i o n a l schoolgirl versifier to o n e of the g r e a t e s t A m e r i c a n p o e t s . It s e e m s , however, that her originality e m e r g e d in m u s i c b e f o r e it e m e r g e d in v e r s e . T h r o u g h voice a n d p i a n o l e s s o n s , s h e b e c a m e a m u s i c i a n g o o d e n o u g h to i m p r o v i s e for her family, but often a l o n e , playing softly after the rest of the family h a d retired. G o i n g b e y o n d i m p r o v i s i n g original m e l o d i e s o n t h e p i a n o , s h e b e g a n to i m p r o v i s e poetry

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that w a s not merely of her o w n a u t h o r s h i p but w a s g e n u i n e l y original, in E m e r s o n ' s s e n s e of a d o r n i n g t h e world with a n e w thing. F r o m her t w e n t i e s until her d e a t h D i c k i n s o n w a s free to d e v o t e m u c h of her life to poetry; a n d by the late 1 8 5 0 s , w h e n s h e h a d b e c o m e a true poet, R i c h a r d B. S e w a l l e x p l a i n s , D i c k i n s o n "lived i n c r e a s i n g l y in her o w n c h o s e n country, w h e r e s h e w a s free. H e r h o m e w a s t h e s e t t i n g , with a family that l e a r n e d not to i n t r u d e . H e r c o m p a n i o n s w e r e her L e x i c o n ; the t h i n g s of n a t u r e ; her b o o k s ; her letters, w h i c h b e c a m e i n c r e a s i n g l y the m e a s u r e of her fulfilled r e l a t i o n s h i p s ; but e s p e c i a l l y her p o e m s , in w h i c h s h e e x p l o r e d t h e truth of her fulfillments a n d her u n f u l f i l l m e n t s w i t h n a t u r e , m a n , a n d G o d . " In 1 8 6 2 s h e c o u l d write, "All m e n s a y 'What' to m e . " S h e d i s c o n c e r t e d p e o p l e , d e l i g h t i n g in h e r p e c u liarities that by t h e n w e r e m a n i f e s t e d not only in m u s i c a l i m p r o v i s a t i o n s a n d brilliant c o n v e r s a t i o n but a l s o in g r e a t p o e m s . H e r t h o u g h t often c a m e in t h e form of t e r s e , striking definitions or p r o p o s i t i o n s , u s e d a n d r e u s e d in letters a n d p o e m s , w h i c h s h e f r e q u e n t l y wrote d o w n , a s S e w a l l says, thriftily, "on o d d s a n d e n d s of p a p e r , o n t h e b a c k of r e c i p e s , invitations, s h o p p i n g lists, c l i p p i n g s "; a y o u n g c o u s i n r e c a l l e d Dicki n s o n c o m p o s i n g poetry in the pantry a s s h e s k i m m e d the milk. D i c k i n s o n f o u n d p o e t i c f r e e d o m within t h e c o n f i n e s of a m e t e r f a m i l i a r to her f r o m earliest c h i l d h o o d ; within that form s h e m u l t i p l i e d a u r a l p o s s i b i l i t i e s by w h a t a later a u d i e n c e called "off" r h y m e s or " s l a n t " r h y m e s . H e r p r e c i s e s y n t a c t i c a l a l l o c a t i o n s , w h i c h w o u l d run a c r o s s the e n d of the c o n v e n t i o n a l s t o p p i n g p l a c e of a line or a s t a n z a b r e a k , forced her r e a d e r to learn w h e r e to p a u s e to collect t h e s e n s e b e f o r e r e a d i n g o n . S h e b r o u g h t to poetry her s c h o o l i n g in c o n t e m p o r a r y s c i e n c e , a s well a s her lifelong a l e r t n e s s to c o n t e m p o r a r y e v e n t s , a n d s e i z e d on the f a m i l i a r g e n r e of the " o c c a s i o n a l p o e m , " a p o e m s u g g e s t e d by s o m e event or e x p e r i e n c e , a s her way of r e s p o n d i n g to the e v e n t s of the day, i n c l u d i n g m a n y p a s s a g e s s h e e n c o u n t e r e d in her r e a d i n g . T h e result w a s often o c c a s i o n a l poetry in w h i c h t h e o c c a s i o n w a s tacit, not explicit. H e r s u b j e c t matter, like her f o r m , s e e m e d c o n v e n t i o n a l u n d e r the rubrics d e v i s e d after her d e a t h for the first ( 1 8 9 0 ) e d i t i o n of her p o e m s : L i f e , L o v e , N a t u r e , T i m e , a n d Eternity, but often s h e b r o u g h t dazzling originality to t h e tritest topic. H e r " N a t u r e " p o e m s , for e x a m p l e , delight with s h a r p , p r e c i s e o b s e r v a t i o n s , but they a r e i n f u s e d with m i n g l e d e c s t a s y a n d p a i n : her i n t e n s e j o y in the arrival of s p r i n g is t e m p e r e d with t h e a c u t e p a i n of k n o w i n g that s u m m e r s in w e s t e r n M a s s a c h u s e t t s may end when August burns "low." L e t t e r s , in p a r t i c u l a r three drafts of letters to her " M a s t e r , " a n d m a n y d o z e n s of love p o e m s h a v e c o n v i n c e d b i o g r a p h e r s that D i c k i n s o n e x p e r i e n c e d a n u m b e r of p a s s i o n a t e r e l a t i o n s h i p s , o n e of w h i c h m a y have b e e n with the friend w h o b e c a m e her sister-in-law, o n e or m o r e of t h e m o s t i n t e n s e of w h i c h m a y h a v e b e e n with m e n already m a r r i e d . T h e r e is mystery a b o u t h o w s h e m e t s o m e of t h e m e n w h o m s h e is said to have loved, mystery a b o u t w h i c h of the m e n loved her in r e t u r n , mystery a b o u t w h e r e a n d h o w often s h e m e t t h e m . O n e of t h e s e r e l a t i o n s h i p s w a s with a m a n w h o p u b l i s h e d a few of her p o e m s a n d (had he b e e n p e r c e p t i v e e n o u g h ) c o u l d have p u b lished m a n y m o r e , t h e e l e c t r i c , startlingly h a n d s o m e , m a r r i e d S a m u e l B o w l e s , editor of t h e S p r i n g f i e l d Republican, w h o m a y have h a d D i c k i n s o n in m i n d w h e n he insolently c o m p l a i n e d a b o u t the way " w o m e n - w r i t e r s " t a k e c r i t i c i s m : " t h e y r e c e i v e the u n v a r n i s h e d truth a s if it w e r e a red-hot b u l l e t . " A n o t h e r p o s s i b l e o b j e c t of her affections is the R e v e r e n d C h a r l e s W a d s w o r t h , w h o m s h e m e t in P h i l a d e l p h i a in 1 8 5 5 a n d w h o visited her in A m h e r s t in 1 8 6 0 a n d 1 8 8 0 . In P h i l a d e l p h i a , a n d in S a n F r a n c i s c o after 1 8 6 2 , he lived a p u b l i c life a s m i n i s t e r a n d a s h u s b a n d a n d father. T h e last m a n s h e is known to h a v e loved w a s J u d g e O t i s Phillips L o r d , two d e c a d e s o l d e r than s h e , a c o n s e r v a t i v e W h i g w h o h a d outlived his party ( m u c h like her own f a t h e r a n d Melville's father-in-law L e m u e l S h a w , the " S h a w " o f N o . 1 1 6 [ 1 0 1 ] ) . K n o w i n g her own p o w e r s , for s o m e years D i c k i n s o n w a n t e d fiercely to b e p u b l i s h e d o n her own t e r m s . S h e s e n t m a n y p o e m s to M r . a n d M r s . B o w l e s , privately, b u t in tacit h o p e that S a m u e l B o w l e s w o u l d s e e that they a p p e a r e d in the Republican; he did p u b l i s h a few, after w h i p p i n g t h e m into m o r e c o n v e n t i o n a l s h a p e . S h e a l s o

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s e n t p o e m s to J o s i a h H o l l a n d , w h o d i d n o t p u b l i s h t h e m in Scribner's w h e n h e c o u l d h a v e a n d w h o d i d n o t p u s h B o w l e s to p u b l i s h m o r e in t h e Republican. W h e n T . W . H i g g i n s o n ' s " L e t t e r t o a Y o u n g C o n t r i b u t o r " a p p e a r e d in t h e April 1 8 6 2 Atlantic Monthly, a c o m p e n d i u m o f p r a c t i c a l a d v i c e o n p r e p a r i n g a n d p l a c i n g m a n u s c r i p t s in a c o m p e t i t i v e literary m a r k e t p l a c e , s h e f o u n d in t h e e s s a y t h e a s s u r a n c e t h a t "every editor is a l w a y s h u n g e r i n g a n d thirsting after n o v e l t i e s , " e a g e r for t h e privilege of " b r i n g i n g forward a n e w g e n i u s . " In a n o t h e r p a s s a g e H i g g i n s o n e n c o u r a g i n g l y e x a l t e d " t h e m a g n i f i c e n t mystery o f w o r d s " over a style merely c o n v e n t i o n a l l y s m o o t h a n d a c c u r a t e . I g n o r i n g o t h e r p a s s a g e s ( s u c h a s a s t e r n w a r n i n g a g a i n s t p r e m a t u r e indiv i d u a l i s m a n d " m a n n e r i s m " ) , s h e c o p i e d o u t a few of h e r p o e m s p l a i n l y to s e e if h e would publish them. In h e r letter to H i g g i n s o n o n April 1 5 , 1 8 6 2 , h e r first s e n t e n c e w a s a p l e a for r e c o g n i t i o n : " A r e y o u t o o d e e p l y o c c u p i e d to s a y if m y V e r s e is a l i v e ? " If it w a s alive, plainly, it d e s e r v e d to b e in print. H i g g i n s o n w a s i n c a p a b l e o f r e s p o n d i n g a s s h e h o p e d , a n d in t h e f a c e of h i s d i s a p p r o v a l o f h e r f o r m a l i m p e r f e c t i o n s s h e d e f e n s i v e l y d i s g u i s e d h e r d e s i r e to b e c o m e a p u b l i s h e d p o e t . H i g g i n s o n l o o m s large in a n y Dickinson b i o g r a p h y n o t b e c a u s e h e r e c o g n i z e d h e r a s a g r e a t p o e t in t i m e to n o u r i s h a n d p r o l o n g h e r i n t e n s e c r e a t i v e y e a r s , b u t b e c a u s e M a b e l L o o m i s T o d d m u c h later e n l i s t e d h i m a s a front m a n , w h o s e literary s t a t u r e w o u l d g u a r a n t e e t h a t a t t e n t i o n w o u l d b e p a i d t o t h e 1 8 9 0 v o l u m e o f D i c k i n s o n ' s poetry s h e h a d e d i t e d with m i n i m a l help from h i m . After H i g g i n s o n ' s d i s a p p o i n t i n g r e s p o n s e t o h e r p o e m s , D i c k i n s o n built u p a n a r m o r a g a i n s t r e j e c t i o n , p r o c l a i m i n g c o n t e m p t u o u s l y that p u b l i c a t i o n w a s " t h e A u c t i o n / O f t h e M i n d o f M a n " a n d that s h e w o u l d g o to h e r m a k e r u n d e f i l e d by c o m m e r c e . B u t k n o w i n g s h e w a s g r e a t a n d h a v i n g l o n g e d for p u b l i c r e c o g n i t i o n , s h e c o n t i n u e d for t h e rest o f h e r life t o f u n c t i o n (in h e r o w n eyes) o n e q u a l f o o t i n g with h e r g r e a t V i c t o r i a n c o n t e m p o r a r i e s . T h e s e c o n d half o f D i c k i n s o n ' s life w a s m a r k e d by a s u c c e s s i o n o f d e a t h s . S h e h a d e x p e r i e n c e d d e a t h s all h e r life, b u t n o t h i n g to c o m p a r e with t h e d e a t h o f h e r eightyear-old n e p h e w G i l b e r t in 1 8 8 3 , next d o o r at t h e E v e r g r e e n s . D i c k i n s o n ' s s e c l u s i o n late in life m a y h a v e o w e d a s m u c h to h e r d e s i r e to d i s t a n c e h e r s e l f from s t r a i n s in the m a r r i a g e next d o o r a s a n y t h i n g e l s e . In 1 8 8 1 D a v i d T o d d arrived in A m h e r s t a s d i r e c t o r o f t h e A m h e r s t C o l l e g e O b s e r v a t o r y . H i s y o u n g wife, M a b e l , w a s t a k e n u p by S u e G i l b e r t for a t i m e , a n d t h e s u b s e q u e n t s e x u a l liaison b e t w e e n A u s t i n a n d M a b e l l a s t e d until A u s t i n ' s d e a t h . S e v e r a l m o n t h s b e f o r e h e r d e a t h in 1 8 8 2 , M r s . D i c k i n s o n r e a d s o m e o f her d a u g h ter's poetry t o M r s . T o d d , w h o f o u n d t h e m "full o f p o w e r . " S o o n T o d d a n d E m i l y D i c k i n s o n h a d e s t a b l i s h e d " a very p l e a s a n t f r i e n d s h i p " w i t h o u t m e e t i n g ( M a b e l T o d d s a w D i c k i n s o n o n c e , in h e r coffin), a n d T o d d h a d d e c i d e d t h a t e v e n t h o u g h h e r n e i g h b o r r e m i n d e d h e r o f D i c k e n s ' s M i s s H a v e r s h a m in G r e a t Expectations, this A m h e r s t e c c e n t r i c w a s " i n m a n y r e s p e c t s a g e n i u s . " W i t h o u t t h e p o e t ' s o v e r t u r e s (a g l a s s o f sherry, flowers, p o e m s ) t o t h e n e w c o m e r , E m i l y D i c k i n s o n w o u l d n o t b e in this or a n y o t h e r a n t h o l o g y . S h e m i g h t h a v e b e e n wholly f o r g o t t e n h a d n o t y o u n g M a b e l T o d d (at L a v i n i a ' s i n s t i g a t i o n ) p a i n s t a k i n g l y t r a n s c r i b e d m a n y o f D i c k i n s o n ' s p o e m s . T h e s u b s e q u e n t p r e s e r v a t i o n a n d p u b l i c a t i o n o f D i c k i n s o n ' s p o e m s a n d letters w e r e i n i t i a t e d a n d c a r r i e d forth by T o d d , a l m o s t s i n g l e - h a n d e d l y . S h e p e r s u a d e d t h e e v e r - c a u t i o u s T . W . H i g g i n s o n to h e l p h e r s e e a c o l l e c t i o n o f Poems into print in 1 8 9 0 a n d a " s e c o n d s e r i e s " o f P o e m s in 1 8 9 1 ; s h e p u b l i s h e d a third s e r i e s in 1 8 9 6 , w i t h o u t H i g g i n s o n ' s i n v o l v e m e n t . R i c h a r d B . S e w a l l e s t i m a t e s t h a t only a b o u t a t e n t h o f t h e letters D i c k i n s o n wrote h a v e survived a n d only a t h o u s a n d t h o f t h o s e written t o h e r . M a b e l T o d d c o u l d d o n o t h i n g a b o u t t h e d e s t r u c t i o n o f letters t o D i c k i n s o n , b u t t h r o u g h h e r e d i t i n g a n d h e r p o p u l a r l e c t u r e s s h e p e r f o r m e d s m a l l m i r a c l e s in a l e r t i n g p e o p l e , in t i m e , to t h e p r e s e r v a t i o n o f D i c k i n s o n ' s letters, t h e first e d i t i o n o f w h i c h s h e p u b l i s h e d in 1 8 9 4 . In t h e 1 8 9 0 s s o m e critics r e a c t e d with s u p e r i o r i t y t o w a r d w h a t t h e y s a w a s v e r s e that violated t h e l a w s o f m e t e r , b u t t h e p u b l i c loved t h e p o e m s at o n c e . After T o d d ' s l a b o r s D i c k i n s o n ' s survival a s a p o p u l a r m i n o r p o e t w a s n e v e r

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l o n g in d o u b t ; a n d t h r o u g h h e r efforts t h e d o c u m e n t a r y m a t e r i a l s w e r e p r e s e r v e d o n w h i c h literary s c h o l a r s a n d critics c o u l d later c r o w n D i c k i n s o n a s o n e o f t h e g r e a t American poets, another "gigantic Emily." T h e texts o f t h e p o e m s a r e f r o m T h o m a s H . J o h n s o n ' s o n e - v o l u m e e d i t i o n , The
Poems of Emily Dickinson ( 1 9 6 0 ) . B r a c k e t e d n u m b e r s r e f e r to The Poems of Emily

Dickinson, e d i t e d by R. W . F r a n k l i n ( 1 9 9 9 ) . T h e letters by D i c k i n s o n to H i g g i n s o n a r e from vol. 2 o f The Letters of Emily Dickinson, e d i t e d by T h o m a s H . J o h n s o n a n d Theodora Ward (1958).

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I never lost a s m u c h b u t twice, A n d that w a s in t h e s o d . T w i c e have I s t o o d a b e g g a r Refore t h e door o f G o d ! Angelstwice descending Reimbursed my store Rurglar! B a n k e r F a t h e r ! I a m poor once more! c. 1 8 5 8

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S u c c e s s is c o u n t e d s w e e t e s t By t h o s e w h o ne'er s u c c e e d . To comprehend a nectar R e q u i r e s sorest n e e d . N o t o n e of all t h e p u r p l e H o s t W h o took t h e F l a g today C a n tell t h e definition S o clear o f Victory As h e d e f e a t e d d y i n g O n w h o s e forbidden e a r T h e d i s t a n t strains of t r i u m p h B u r s t agonized a n d clear! c. 1 8 5 9

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Nature: SOME keep the Sabbath going to Church -I keep it, staying at Home -With a Bobolink for a Chorister -And an Orchard for a Dome -Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -I just wear my Wings -And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church -Our little Sexton sings. God preaches,a noted Clergyman, And the sermon is never long. So instead of getting to Heaven, at last -I m going all along! But most like Chaos,stopless -- cool, Without a Chance, or spar -Or even a Report of Land To justify Despair.

SUCCESS is counted sweetest By those who neer succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory, As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear.

A BIRD came down the walk: He did not know I saw; He bit an angle-worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw. And then he drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a beetle pass. He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all abroad, They looked like frightened beads, I thought He stirred his velvet head Like one in danger; cautious, I offered him a crumb, And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home Than oars divide the ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or butterflies, off banks of noon, Leap, plashless, as they swim.

MY life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me, So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.

THE SOUL selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority Obtrude no more. Unmoved, she notes the chariots pausing At her low gate; Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling Upon her mat. I ve known her from an ample nation Choose one; Then close the valves of her attention Like stone.

Language and Consciousness IT WAS not Death, for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down -It was not Night, for all the Bells Put out their Tongues, for Noon. It was not Frost, for on my Flesh I felt Siroccos -- crawl, Nor Fire -- for just my Marble Feet Could keep a Chancel, cool -And yet, it tasted, like them all, The Figures I have seen Set orderly, for Burial, Reminded me, of mine -As if my life were shaven And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key, And t was like Midnight, some -When everything that ticked -- has stopped-And Space stares all around, Or Grisly frosts, first Autumn morns, Repeal the Beating Ground.

AFTER great pain, a formal feeling comes -The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before? The Feet, mechanical, go round -Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone -This is the Hour of Lead -Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go

ALONE, I cannot be For Hosts do visit me Recordless Company Who baffle Key They have no Robes, nor Names No Almanacs nor Climes But general Homes Like Gnomes Their Coming, may be known By Couriers within Their going is not For they've never gone

The minister goes stiffly in As if the house were his, And he owned all the mourners now, And little boys besides; And then the milliner, and the man Of the appalling trade, To take the measure of the house. There ll be that dark parade Of tassels and of coaches soon; It s easy as a sign, The intuition of the news In just a country town.

ONE NEED not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place. Far safer, of a midnight meeting External ghost, Than an interior confronting That whiter host. Far safer through an Abbey gallop, The stones achase, Than, moonless, ones own self encounter In lonesome place. Ourself, behind ourself concealed, Should startle most; Assassin, hid in our apartment, Be horrors least. The prudent carries a revolver, He bolts the door, Oerlooking a superior spectre More near.

THE LAST night that she lived, It was a common night, Except the dying; this to us Made nature different. We noticed smallest things, Things overlooked before, By this great light upon our minds Italicized, as t were. That others could exist While she must finish quite, A jealousy for her arose So nearly infinite. We waited while she passed; It was a narrow time, Too jostled were our souls to speak, At length the notice came. She mentioned, and forgot; Then lightly as a reed Bent to the water, shivered scarce, Consented, and was dead. And we, we placed the hair, And drew the head erect; And then an awful leisure was, Our faith to regulate.

MUCH madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. T is the majority In this, as all, prevails. 5 Assent, and you are sane; Demur,you re straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain.

Death: THERES been a death in the opposite house As lately as to-day. I know it by the numb look Such houses have alway. The neighbors rustle in and out, The doctor drives away. A window opens like a pod, Abrupt, mechanically; Somebody flings a mattress out, The children hurry by; They wonder if It died on that, I used to when a boy.

DEATH is like the insect Menacing the tree, Competent to kill it, But decoyed may be. Bait it with the balsam, Seek it with the knife, Baffle, if it cost you Everything in life. Then, if it have burrowed Out of reach of skill, Ring the tree and leave it, T is the vermins will.

T WAS just this time last year I died. I know I heard the corn, When I was carried by the farms, It had the tassels on. I thought how yellow it would look When Richard went to mill; And then I wanted to get out, But something held my will. I thought just how red apples wedged The stubbles joints between; And carts went stooping round the fields To take the pumpkins in. I wondered which would miss me least, And when Thanksgiving came, If father d multiply the plates To make an even sum. And if my stocking hung too high, Would it blur the Christmas glee, That not a Santa Claus could reach The altitude of me? But this sort grieved myself, and so I thought how it would be When just this time, some perfect year, Themselves should come to me.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I 10 Could make assignable,and then There interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see.

15

I FELT a Funeral in my Brain, And Mourners, to and fro, Kept treading treading till it seemed That Sense was breaking through And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum Kept beating beating till I thought My Mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a Box, And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again. Then Space began to toll As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being but an Ear, And I, and Silence some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here. And then a Plank in Reason broke, And I dropped down, and down And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing then -

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labor, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school where children played At wrestling in a ring; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then t is centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses heads Were toward eternity.

I HEARD a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm. The eyes beside had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in his power. 5

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HENRY J A M E S 18431916
A s a y o u n g m a n H e n r y J a m e s set o u t to b e a "literary m a s t e r " in t h e E u r o p e a n s e n s e . E v e n t h o u g h his i n t r i c a t e style a n d c h o i c e , in his fiction, of highly c u l t i v a t e d c h a r a c t e r s r a n c o u n t e r to t h e v e r n a c u l a r t r a d i t i o n p o p u l a r i z e d by M a r k T w a i n , J a m e s a t t r a c t e d , in his o w n lifetime, a s e l e c t c o m p a n y of a d m i r e r s a n d m a d e a g o o d living f r o m his writings, t h o u g h they never m a d e him rich. T h e s e w r i t i n g s , t h e p r o d u c t of more than half a century as a publishing author, include tales, novellas, novels, plays, a u t o b i o g r a p h i e s , c r i t i c i s m , travel p i e c e s , l e t t e r s , reviews, a n d b i o g r a p h i e s a l t o g e t h e r perhaps as m u c h as one hundred volumes, a prodigious output even by laten i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y s t a n d a r d s . T h e r e c o g n i t i o n of his intrinsic i m p o r t a n c e a s well a s his wide i n f l u e n c e a s novelist a n d critic i n c r e a s e d in t h e y e a r s b e t w e e n the world w a r s , w h e n A m e r i c a n literary t a s t e r e a c h e d a n e w level of s o p h i s t i c a t i o n . J a m e s is n o w firmly e s t a b l i s h e d a s o n e of A m e r i c a ' s m a j o r n o v e l i s t s a n d c r i t i c s , a s a s u b t l e p s y c h o l o g i c a l realist, a n d a s a n u n s u r p a s s e d literary stylist a n d c r a f t s m a n . H e n r y J a m e s w a s b o r n in N e w York C i t y o n April 1 5 , 1 8 4 3 . H i s f a t h e r w a s a n e c c e n t r i c , i n d e p e n d e n t l y w e a l t h y p h i l o s o p h e r a n d r e l i g i o u s v i s i o n a r y ; his slightly o l d e r b r o t h e r , W i l l i a m , w a s the first n o t a b l e A m e r i c a n p s y c h o l o g i s t a n d p e r h a p s o u r c o u n try's m o s t influential p h i l o s o p h e r ; two y o u n g e r b r o t h e r s a n d a s i s t e r , A l i c e , h e r s e l f a p e r c e p t i v e o b s e r v e r a n d d i a r i s t , c o m p l e t e d this r e m a r k a b l e A m e r i c a n family. F i r s t t a k e n to E u r o p e a s a n infant, J a m e s s p e n t his b o y h o o d in a still a l m o s t b u c o l i c N e w York C i t y b e f o r e the family o n c e a g a i n left for the C o n t i n e n t w h e n h e w a s twelve. H i s father w a n t e d t h e c h i l d r e n to h a v e a r i c h , " s e n s u o u s e d u c a t i o n , " a n d d u r i n g t h e next four y e a r s , with stays in E n g l a n d , S w i t z e r l a n d , a n d F r a n c e , they w e r e t a k e n to g a l l e r i e s , l i b r a r i e s , m u s e u m s , a n d (of s p e c i a l i n t e r e s t to H e n r y ) t h e a t e r s . H e n r y ' s form a l s c h o o l i n g w a s u n s y s t e m a t i c , b u t h e m a s t e r e d F r e n c h well e n o u g h to b e g i n a lifelong s t u d y of its l i t e r a t u r e , a n d f r o m c h i l d h o o d o n h e w a s a w a r e of t h e i n t r i c a t e n e t w o r k of i n s t i t u t i o n s a n d t r a d i t i o n s in E u r o p e that h e later l a m e n t e d (in his s t u d y of H a w t h o r n e a n d e l s e w h e r e ) A m e r i c a n n o v e l i s t s h a d to d o w i t h o u t . J a m e s early d e v e l o p e d w h a t h e d e s c r i b e d in A Small Boy and Others ( 1 9 1 3 ) a s the " p r a c t i c e of w o n d e r i n g a n d d a w d l i n g a n d g a p i n g . " T h i s m e m o i r a l s o tells a b o u t a n " o b s c u r e h u r t " to his b a c k w h i c h , d i s q u a l i f y i n g h i m f r o m s e r v i c e in t h e Civil W a r , m u s t h a v e r e i n f o r c e d his i n c l i n a t i o n to o b s e r v e r a t h e r t h a n p a r t i c i p a t e . In his later t e e n s his i n t e r e s t in l i t e r a t u r e a n d in writing intensified, a n d by the t i m e h e w a s t w e n t y - o n e h e w a s p u b l i s h i n g reviews a n d s t o r i e s in s o m e of the l e a d i n g A m e r i c a n
journalsAtlantic Monthly, North American Review, Galaxy, a n d Nation. Though

J a m e s did not d e c i d e to settle p e r m a n e n t l y in E n g l a n d until 1 8 7 6 (after m u c h s h u t tling b a c k a n d forth b e t w e e n A m e r i c a a n d E u r o p e a n d after a trial r e s i d e n c e in F r a n c e a n d Italy), t h e d i r e c t i o n of his s i n g l e - m i n d e d c a r e e r a s m a n of letters w a s clearly m a r k e d in his early m a n h o o d . J a m e s never m a r r i e d . H e m a i n t a i n e d c l o s e ties with his family, kept u p a l a r g e c o r r e s p o n d e n c e , w a s e x t r e m e l y s o c i a b l e a n d a f a m o u s d i n e r - o u t , a n d k n e w m o s t of his g r e a t c o n t e m p o r a r i e s in t h e a r t s , m a n y i n t i m a t e l y but h e lived a n d w o r k e d a l o n e . H i s e m o t i o n a l life a n d p r o d i g i o u s c r e a t i v e e n e r g y w e r e i n v e s t e d for m o r e t h a n fifty years in w h a t h e c a l l e d t h e " s a c r e d r a g e " of his art. L e o n E d e l , J a m e s ' s b i o g r a p h e r , d i v i d e s the writer's m a t u r e c a r e e r into t h r e e p a r t s . In t h e first, w h i c h c u l m i n a t e d with The Portrait of a Lady ( 1 8 8 1 ) , h e felt his way toward and appropriated the so-called international t h e m e t h e d r a m a , c o m i c and t r a g i c , of A m e r i c a n s in E u r o p e a n d o c c a s i o n a l l y of E u r o p e a n s in A m e r i c a . In t h e tripartite s e c o n d p e r i o d , h e e x p e r i m e n t e d with d i v e r s e t h e m e s a n d f o r m s i n i t i a l l y with n o v e l s d e a l i n g explicitly with the s o c i a l a n d p o l i t i c a l c u r r e n t s of t h e 1 8 7 0 s a n d 1 8 8 0 s , t h e n with writing for t h e t h e a t e r , a n d finally with s h o r t e r fictions that e x p l o r e t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p of a r t i s t s to s o c i e t y a n d the t r o u b l e d p s y c h o l o g y of o p p r e s s e d c h i l d r e n a n d h a u n t e d or o b s e s s e d m e n a n d w o m e n s u c h a s t h o s e d e p i c t e d in The Jolly Corner

H E N R Y J A M E S

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( 1 9 0 8 ) . In J a m e s ' s last p e r i o d t h e s o - c a l l e d m a j o r p h a s e h e r e t u r n e d to international or c o s m o p o l i t a n s u b j e c t s in a n e x t r a o r d i n a r y s e r i e s o f e l a b o r a t e l y d e v e l o p e d novels, s h o r t e r fiction, a n d c r i t i c i s m . Pilgrim, s t o r i e s ; Transatlantic Sketches, T h r e e of his e a r l i e s t b o o k s A Passionate travel p i e c e s ; a n d Roderick Hudson, a n o v e l w e r e all p u b l i s h e d in 1 8 7 5 . The American ( 1 8 7 7 ) w a s his first s u c c e s s f u l a n d e x t e n d e d t r e a t m e n t o f t h e n a i v e y o u n g A m e r i c a n ( C h r i s t o p h e r N e w m a n ) in t e n s i o n with t h e t r a d i t i o n s , c u s t o m s , a n d v a l u e s of the O l d W o r l d . Daisy Miller ( 1 8 7 8 ) w a s t h e w o r k with w h i c h he a c h i e v e d , for a t i m e , w i d e s p r e a d p o p u l a r i t y . In this " s t u d y , " a s it w a s originally s u b t i t l e d , t h e d a n g e r o u s l y naive y o u n g A m e r i c a n girl (a s u b j e c t to b e t r e a t e d often by J a m e s a n d his friend W . D . H o w e l l s ) p a y s for h e r willful r e s i s t a n c e to E u r o p e a n s o c i a l m o r e s with h e r life. T h e s e stories m a k e it c l e a r that J a m e s w a s n e i t h e r a c h a u v i n i s t nor a r e s e n t f u l e m i g r e b u t a c o s m o p o l i t a n c o n c e r n e d with e x p l o r i n g t h e A m e r i c a n n a t i o n a l c h a r a c t e r a s it w a s t e s t e d by c u l t u r a l d i s p l a c e m e n t . D e s p i t e their a p p e a l , t h e relatively s i m p l e c h a r a c t e r s o f D a i s y M i l l e r a n d C h r i s t o p h e r N e w m a n m a k e r o m a n c e , m e l o d r a m a , a n d p a t h o s ( w h a t e v e r their c h a r m s ) m o r e likely t h a n p s y c h o l o g i c a l c o m p l e x i t y a n d g e n u i n e t r a g e d y , w h i c h r e q u i r e , e s p e c i a l l y for J a m e s , a b r o a d c a n v a s . In t h e c h a r a c t e r a n d c a r e e r o f I s a b e l A r c h e r h e f o u n d t h e f o c u s for his first m a s t e r p i e c e o f t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l t h e m e , The Portrait of a Lady ( 1 8 8 1 ) . H e r e , t h e c o m p l e x i n n e r lives of his A m e r i c a n c h a r a c t e r s a r e fully a n d realistically p r o j e c t e d . All t h e s a m e , e v e n in a relatively short w o r k s u c h a s Daisy Miller, J a m e s ' s e s s e n t i a l t h e m e s a n d p r o c e d u r e s a r e e v i d e n t . W i t h this w o r k J a m e s ' s skillful u s e o f t h e limited p o i n t o f view, in this i n s t a n c e largely that o f W i n t e r b o u r n e a c h a r a c t e r w h o is h i m s e l f limited by his s e l f - a b s o r b e d a n x i e t i e s a n d t h u s u n a b l e to s e e D a i s y for w h o s h e i s b e c a m e a m a j o r f e a t u r e o f J a m e s ' s fictional p r a c t i c e . F r o m 1 8 8 5 to 1 8 9 0 J a m e s w a s largely o c c u p i e d writing t h r e e n o v e l s in t h e n a t u ralistic m o d e T l t e Bostonians ( 1 8 8 6 ) , The Princess Casamassima ( 1 8 8 6 ) , a n d The Tragic Muse ( 1 8 8 9 ) . T h e s e s t o r i e s of r e f o r m e r s , r a d i c a l s , a n d r e v o l u t i o n a r i e s a r e better a p p r e c i a t e d in o u r t i m e t h a n they w e r e in h i s . O u t o f a s e n s e o f artistic c h a l l e n g e a s well a s financial n e e d , J a m e s a t t e m p t e d to regain t h e p o p u l a r i t y Daisy Miller had briefly b r o u g h t h i m a n d e a r n m o n e y by t u r n i n g d r a m a t i s t . B e t w e e n 1 8 9 0 a n d 1 8 9 5 he wrote s e v e n plays; two were p r o d u c e d , n e i t h e r w a s a s u c c e s s . B e t w e e n 1 8 9 5 a n d 1 9 0 0 J a m e s r e t u r n e d to fiction, e s p e c i a l l y to e x p e r i m e n t a l s h o r t e r w o r k s with t h r e e d o m i n a n t s u b j e c t s , w h i c h h e often c o m b i n e d : m i s u n d e r s t o o d o r t r o u b l e d writers a n d artists, g h o s t s a n d a p p a r i t i o n s , a n d d o o m e d o r t h r e a t e n e d c h i l d r e n a n d a d o l e s c e n t s . " T h e Real T h i n g " ( 1 8 9 2 ) is a n e x c e l l e n t e x a m p l e o f a s p e c i a l kind o f artistic d i l e m m a that f a s c i n a t e d J a m e s . " T h e J o l l y C o r n e r " involves m o r e actively a q u e s t for a s e l f that m i g h t have b e e n , h o w e v e r f r i g h t e n i n g a n d horrible that alter e g o m i g h t turn o u t to be. W i t h t h e h e l p of Alice S t a v e r t o n , S p e n c e r B r y d o n r e t u r n s to his b i r t h p l a c e , a s J a m e s h i m s e l f d i d in 1 9 0 4 - 0 5 , a n d finds a c c e p t a n c e . The Beast in the Jungle (1903) p r o j e c t s t h e c a r e e r o f a n o t h e r e g o c e n t r i c m a n , o n e w h o s e o b s e s s i v e c o n c e r n over the v a g u e p r o s p e c t o f p e r s o n a l d i s a s t e r d e s t r o y s his c h a n c e s for love a n d life in t h e present. F o l l o w i n g his o w n a d v i c e to o t h e r novelists to " d r a m a t i z e , d r a m a t i z e , d r a m a t i z e , " J a m e s i n c r e a s i n g l y r e m o v e d h i m s e l f a s c o n t r o l l i n g n a r r a t o r ; in T . S . E l i o t ' s p h r a s e , h e b e c a m e invisible in his work. T h e benefits o f this h e i g h t e n e d e m p h a s i s on s h o w i n g r a t h e r t h a n telling w e r e c o m p r e s s i o n o r i n t e n s i f i c a t i o n a n d e n h a n c e d o p p o r t u n i t y for a m b i g u i t y . T h e m o r e t h e a u t h o r w i t h d r e w , t h e m o r e t h e r e a d e r w a s f o r c e d to e n t e r the p r o c e s s of c r e a t i n g m e a n i n g . W e a r e a c c u s t o m e d n o w to h a v i n g o u r fiction t h u s " o b j e c t i f i e d " ; it is J a m e s w h o is largely r e s p o n s i b l e for this d e v e l o p m e n t in n a r r a t i v e t e c h n i q u e , w h i c h a c h i e v e d its fullest e x p r e s s i o n in t h e t h r e e g r e a t n o v e l s o f his last
p h a s e T h e Wings of the Dove ( 1 9 0 2 ) , The Ambassadors ( 1 9 0 3 ) , a n d The Golden Bowl

( 1 9 0 4 ) . All t h r e e r e t u r n to his i n t e r n a t i o n a l t h e m e , b u t with a n e w f o c u s o n t h e w a y in w h i c h p e o p l e m a k e their o w n realities t h r o u g h their p e r c e p t i o n s a n d i m p r e s s i o n s . A m e r i c a n i n n o c e n c e , at this p o i n t , b e c o m e s a willful refusal to p e r c e i v e ; b u t only

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HENRY

JAMES

a w a r e n e s s of o n e ' s o w n c h a r a c t e r a n d o t h e r s ' p r o v i d e s t h e w i s d o m to e s c a p e d i s a s t e r . T h e t r e a t m e n t of this s o p h i s t i c a t e d t h e m e is c h a r a c t e r i z e d by a n e x t r a o r d i n a r y richn e s s of syntax, c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n , point of view, s y m b o l i c r e s o n a n c e , m e t a p h o r , a n d o r g a n i z i n g r h y t h m s . T h e w o r l d of t h e s e novels is, a s o n e c o m m e n t a t o r h a s r e m a r k e d , like t h e very a t m o s p h e r e of t h e m i n d . T h e s e d r a m a s of p e r c e p t i o n a r e widely c o n s i d e r e d to b e J a m e s ' s m o s t influential c o n t r i b u t i o n to the craft of fiction. W h e n J a m e s w a s not writing fiction, h e often w r o t e a b o u t i t e i t h e r his own or o t h e r s ' . H e w a s , a s h e n o t e d in o n e of his l e t t e r s , " a critical, a non-naif, a questioning, worrying r e a d e r . " If h e w a s s o m e w h a t n a r r o w in his r e a d i n g r e s t r i c t i n g h i m s e l f chiefly to n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y fictionhe m a d e his l i m i t e d e x p e r i e n c e c o u n t for a s m u c h in c r i t i c i s m a s it did in fiction. H i s i n q u i r i e s into the a c h i e v e m e n t of o t h e r w r i t e r s p r e s e r v e d in s u c h v o l u m e s a s French Poets and Novelists (1878), Partial Portraits ( 1 8 8 8 ) , a n d Notes on Novelists ( 1 9 1 4 ) a r e r e m a r k a b l e for their b r e a d t h , b a l a n c e , a n d a c u t e n e s s . M o r e b r o a d l y t h e o r e t i c a l t h a n his r e v i e w s or e s s a y s o n individual writers, " T h e Art of F i c t i o n " ( 1 8 8 4 ) fairly r e p r e s e n t s J a m e s ' s c e n t r a l a e s t h e t i c c o n c e p t i o n s . C a l l i n g a t t e n t i o n to t h e u n p a r a l l e l e d o p p o r t u n i t i e s o p e n to t h e artist of fiction a n d t h e b e a u t y of t h e novel f o r m , J a m e s a l s o i n s i s t s that " t h e d e e p e s t quality of a w o r k of art will always b e the quality of t h e m i n d of t h e p r o d u c e r " a n d that " n o g o o d novel will ever p r o c e e d f r o m a s u p e r f i c i a l m i n d . " J a m e s left n o b e t t e r r e c o r d t h a n this e s s a y of his always t w i n n e d c o n c e r n s over t h e m o r a l a n d f o r m a l q u a l i t i e s of fiction, of t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n a e s t h e t i c a n d m o r a l p e r c e p t i o n . J a m e s w a s a n e x t r e m e l y s e l f - c o n s c i o u s writer, a n d h i s Complete Notebooks, edited a n d p u b l i s h e d in 1 9 8 7 with a n i n t r o d u c t i o n by L e o n E d e l a n d Lyall P o w e r s , reveal a s u b t l e , i n t e n s e m i n d in t h e a c t of d i s c o v e r i n g s u b j e c t s , m e t h o d s , a n d p r i n c i p l e s . T h e p r e f a c e s h e wrote for S c r i b n e r ' s lavish t w e n t y - f o u r - v o l u m e N e w Y o r k E d i t i o n ( 1 9 0 7 - 0 9 ) of his extensively r e v i s e d n o v e l s a n d t a l e s , g a t h e r e d a n d p u b l i s h e d in 1 9 3 4 with a n e x t e n s i v e i n t r o d u c t i o n by R. P. B l a c k m u r , a s The Art of the Novel, contain J a m e s ' s final s t u d y of t h e w o r k s that h e c o n s i d e r e d b e s t r e p r e s e n t e d his a c h i e v e m e n t . A s the c u l m i n a t i o n of a lifetime of reflection o n t h e craft of fiction, they p r o v i d e e x t r a o r d i n a r y a c c o u n t s of t h e o r i g i n s a n d g r o w t h of his m a j o r writings a n d e x q u i s i t e a n a l y s e s of t h e fictional p r o b l e m s that e a c h w o r k p o s e d . T h e s e p r e f a c e s p r o v i d e d b o t h v o c a b u l a r y a n d e x a m p l e for the c l o s e textual a n a l y s i s of p r o s e fiction in the " N e w C r i t i c i s m " t h a t w a s d o m i n a n t in A m e r i c a n E n g l i s h D e p a r t m e n t s f o l l o w i n g W o r l d W a r II. D u r i n g his 1 9 0 4 - 0 5 visit to t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , J a m e s t r a v e l e d extensively a n d lect u r e d in his native l a n d a n d C a n a d a . T h e c h i e f fruit of this e x p e r i e n c e w a s The American Scene ( 1 9 0 7 ) . T h i s " a b s o l u t e l y p e r s o n a l " b o o k is p e r h a p s t h e m o s t vividly p a r t i c u l a r a c c o u n t w e h a v e of t h e v a s t a n d p r o f o u n d c h a n g e s t h a t o c c u r r e d in A m e r i c a b e t w e e n t h e Civil W a r a n d W o r l d W a r I, t h e p e r i o d J a m e s later c h a r a c t e r i z e d a s t h e " A g e of t h e M i s t a k e . " T h e s a m e i n t r i c a t e , r u m i n a t i v e r i c h n e s s m a r k s t h e t h r e e a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l r e m i n i s c e n c e s h e w r o t e l a t e in life: A Small Boy and Others ( 1 9 1 3 ) , Notes of a Son and Brother ( 1 9 1 4 ) , a n d the f r a g m e n t a r y a n d p o s t h u m o u s l y p u b l i s h e d The
Middle Years (1917).

H e n r y J a m e s b e c a m e a n a t u r a l i z e d B r i t i s h s u b j e c t o u t of i m p a t i e n c e with A m e r i c a ' s r e l u c t a n c e to e n t e r W o r l d W a r I. J a m e s h a d involved h i m s e l f in w a r - r e l i e f w o r k starti n g in 1 9 1 5 a n d in 1 9 1 6 , a n d shortly b e f o r e h e d i e d h e w a s a w a r d e d t h e B r i t i s h O r d e r of M e r i t . D e s p i t e their difficulty, m o s t of t h e n o v e l s a n d s t o r i e s of J a m e s h a v e r e m a i n e d c o n s i s t e n t l y in print. T h e r i c h n e s s of h i s w o r k c o n t i n u e s to a t t r a c t literary s c h o l a r s a n d i n t e r p r e t e r s , a n d m a n y m i l l i o n s of p e o p l e a r o u n d t h e w o r l d h a v e b e c o m e f a m i l i a r with J a m e s t h r o u g h t h e n u m e r o u s a d a p t a t i o n s of h i s fiction for s t a g e , film, a n d television.

Henry James - DAISY MILLER (1878)

Chapter I At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. There are, indeed, many hotels; for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travellers will remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake a lake that it behoves every tourist to visit. The shore of the lake presents an unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from the 'grand hotel' of the newest fashion, with a chalk-white front, a hundred balconies, and a dozen flags flying from its roof, to the little Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in German-looking lettering upon a pink or yellow wall, and an awkward summer-house in the angle of the garden. One of the hotels at Vevey, however, is famous, even classical, being distinguished from many of its upstart neighbours by an air both of luxury and of maturity. In this region, in the month of June, American travellers are extremely numerous, it may be said indeed, that Vevey assumes at this period some of the characteristics of an American watering-place. There are sights and sounds which evoke a vision, an echo, of Newport and Saratoga. There is a flitting hither and thither of 'stylish' young girls, a rustling of muslin flounces, a rattle of dance music in the morning hours, a sound of high-pitched voices at all times. You receive an impression of these things at the excellent inn of the 'Trois Couronnes,' and are transported in fancy to the Ocean House or to Congress Hall. But at the 'Trois Couronnes,' it must be added, there are other features that are much at variance with these suggestions: neat German waiters, who look like secretaries of legation: Russian princesses sitting in the garden; little Polish boys walking about, held by the hand, with their governors; a view of the snowy crest of the Dent du Midi and the picturesque towers of the Castle of Chillon.

I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago, sat in the garden of the 'Trois Couronnes,' looking about him, rather idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned. It was a beautiful summer morning, and in whatever fashion the young American looked at things, they must have seemed to him charming. He had come from Geneva the day before, by the little steamer, to see his aunt, who was staying at the hotel Geneva having been for a long time his place or residence. But his aunt had a headache his aunt had almost always a headache and now she was shut up in her room, smelling camphor, so that he was at liberty to wander about. He was some seven-and-twenty years of age; when his friends spoke of him, they usually said that he was at Geneva, 'studying.' When his enemies spoke of him they said but, after all, he had no enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and universally liked. What I should say is, simply, that when certain persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who lived there a foreign lady a person older than himself. Very few Americans indeed I think none had ever seen this lady, about whom there were some singular stories. But Winterbourne had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been put to school there as a boy, and he had afterwards gone to college there circumstances which had led to his forming a great many youthful friendships. Many of these he had kept, and they were a source of great satisfaction to him. After knocking at his aunt's door and learning that she was indisposed, he had taken a walk about the town and then he had come in to his breakfast. He had now finished his breakfast, but he was drinking a small cup of coffee, which had been served to him on a little table in the garden by one of the waiters, who looked like an attache. At last he finished his coffee and lit a

cigarette. Presently a small boy came walking along the path an urchin of nine or ten. The child, who was diminutive for his years, had an aged expression of countenance, a pale complexion, and sharp little features. He was dressed in knickerbockers, with red stockings, which displayed his poor little spindleshanks; he also wore a brilliant red cravat. He carried in his hand a long alpenstock, the sharp point of which he thrust into everything that he approached the flower-beds, the garden benches, the trains of the ladies' dresses. In front of Winterbourne he paused, looking at him with a pair of bright penetrating little eyes. 'Will you give me a lump of sugar?' he asked, in a sharp hard little voice a voice immature, and yet, somehow, not young. Winterbourne glanced at the small table near him, on which his coffee-service rested, and saw that several morsels of sugar remained. 'Yes, you may take one,' he answered; 'but I don't think sugar is good for little boys.' This little boy stepped forward and carefully selected three of the coveted fragments, two of which he buried in the pocket of his knickerbockers, depositing the other as promptly in another place. He poked his alpenstock, lance-fashion, into Winterbourne's bench, and tried to crack the lump of sugar with his teeth. 'Oh, blazes; it's har-r-d!' he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a peculiar manner. Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the honour of claiming him as a fellow-countryman. 'Take care you don't hurt your teeth,' he said, paternally. 'I haven't got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and one came out right afterwards. she said she'd slap me if any more came out. I can't help it. It's this

old Europe. It's the climate that makes them come out In America they didn't come out. It's these hotels.' Winterbourne was much amused. 'If you eat three lumps of sugar your mother will certainly slap you,' he said. 'she's got to give me some candy, then,' rejoined his young interlocutor. 'I can't get any candy here any American candy. American candy's the best candy.' 'And are American little boys the best little boys?' asked Winterbourne. 'I don't know. I'm an American boy,' said the child. 'I see you are one of the best!' laughed Winterbourne. 'Are you an American man?' pursued this vivacious infant. And then, on Winterbourne's affirmative reply 'American men are the best,' he declared. His companion thanked him for the compliment; and the child, who had now got astride of his alpenstock, stood looking about him, while he attacked a second lump of sugar. Winterbourne wondered if he himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had been brought to Europe at about this age. 'Here comes my sister!' cried the child, in a moment. 'she's an American girl.' Winterbourne looked along the path and saw a beautiful young lady advancing. 'American girls are the best girls,' he said, cheerfully, to his young companion. 'My sister ain't the best!' the child declared. 'she's always blowing at me.' 'I imagine that is your fault; not hers,' said Winter-bourne. The young lady meanwhile had drawn near. she was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-coloured ribbon. She was bareheaded; but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery; and 2

she was strikingly, admirably pretty. 'How pretty they are!' thought Winter-bourne, straightening himself in his seat, as if he were prepared to rise. The young lady paused in front of his bench, near the parapet of the garden, which overlooked the lake. The little boy had now converted his alpenstock into a vaulting-pole, by the aid of which he was springing about in the gravel, and kicking it up not a little. 'Randolph,' said the young lady, 'what are you doing?' 'I'm going up the Alps,' replied Randolph. 'This is the way!' And he gave another little jump, scattering the pebbles about Winterbourne's ears. 'That's the way they come down,' said Winterbourne. 'He's an American man!' cried Randolph, in his little hard voice. The young lady gave no heed to this announcement, but looked straight at her brother. 'Well, I guess you had better be quiet,' she simply observed. It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a manner presented. He got up and stepped slowly towards the young girl, throwing away his cigarette. 'This little boy and I have made acquaintance,' he said, with great civility. In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady except under certain rarely occurring conditions; but here at Vevey, what conditions could be better than these? a pretty American girl coming and standing in front of you in a garden. This pretty American girl, however, on hearing Winterbourne's observation, simply glanced at him; she then turned her head and looked over the parapet, at the lake and the opposite mountains. He wondered whether he had gone too far; but he decided that he must advance farther, rather than retreat. While he was thinking of something else to say, the young lady turned to the little boy again. 'I should like to know where you got that pole,' she said. 'I bought it!' responded Randolph.

'You don't mean to say you're going to take it to Italy!' 'Yes, I am going to take it to Italy!' the child declared. The young girl glanced over the front of her dress and smoothed out a knot or two of ribbon. Then she rested her eyes upon the prospect again. 'Well, I guess you had better leave it somewhere,' she said, after a moment. 'Are you going to Italy?' Winterbourne inquired, in a tone of great respect. The young lady glanced at him again. 'Yes, sir,' she replied. And she said nothing more. 'Are you a going over the Simplon?' Winter-bourne pursued, a little embarrassed. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I suppose it's some mountain. Randolph, what mountain are we going over?' 'Going where?' the child demanded. 'To Italy,' Winterbourne explained. 'I don't know,' said Randolph. 'I don't want to go to Italy. I want to go to America.' 'Oh, Italy is a beautiful place!' rejoined the young man. 'Can you get candy there?' Randolph loudly inquired. 'I hope not,' said his sister. 'I guess you have had enough candy, and mother thinks so too.' 'I haven't had any for ever so long for a hundred weeks!' cried the boy, still jumping about. The young lady inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was 3

not in the least embarrassed herself. There had not been the slightest alteration in her charming complexion; she was evidently neither offended nor fluttered. If she looked another way when he spoke to her, and seemed not particularly to hear him, this was simply her habit, her manner. Yet, as he talked a little more, and pointed out some of the objects of interest in the view, with which she appeared quite unacquainted, she gradually gave him more of the benefit of her glance; and then he saw that this glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking. It was not, however, what would have been called an immodest glance, for the young girl's eyes were singularly honest and fresh. They were wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman's various features her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analysing it; and as regards this young lady's face he made several observations. It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it very forgivingly of a want of finish. He thought it very possible that Master Randolph's sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own, but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage, there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation. She told him that they were going to Rome for the winter she and her mother and Randolph. She asked him if he was a 'real American;' she wouldn't have taken him for one, he seemed more like a German this was said after a little hesitation especially when he spoke. Winterbourne, laughing, answered that he had met Germans who spoke like Americans; but that he had not, so far as he remembered, met an American who spoke like a German. Then he asked her if she would not be more comfortable in sitting upon the bench which he had just quitted. She answered that she liked standing up and walking about; but she presently sat down. She told him she was from New York State 'if you know where that is.' Winterbourne learned more about her by catching hold of her small slippery brother and making him stand a few minutes by his side. 'Tell me your name, my boy,' he said.

'Randolph C. Miller,' said the boy, sharply. 'And I'll tell you her name;' and he levelled his alpenstock at his sister. 'You had better wait till you are asked!' said this young lady, calmly. 'I should like very much to know your name,' said Winterbourne. 'Her name is Daisy Miller!' cried the child. 'But that isn't her real name, that isn't her name on her cards.' 'It's a pity you haven't got one of my cards!' said Miss Miller. 'Her real name is Annie P. Miller,' the boy went on. 'Ask him his name,' said his sister indicating Winter-bourne. But on this point Randolph seemed perfectly indifferent; he continued to supply information with regard to his own family. 'My father's name is Ezra B. Miller,' he announced. 'My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe.' Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial rewards. But Randolph immediately added, 'My father's in schenectady. He's got a big business. My father's rich, you bet.' 'Well!' ejaculated Miss Miller, loweling her parasol and looking at the embroidered border. Winterbourne presently released the child, who departed, dragging his alpenstock along the path. 'He doesn't like Europe,' said the young girl. 'He wants to go back.' 'To schenectady, you mean?' 'Yes; he wants to go right home. He hasn't got any boys here. There is one boy here, but he always goes round with a teacher; they won't let him play.' 'And your brother hasn't any teacher?' Winterbourne inquired. 4

'Mother thought of getting him one, to travel round with us. There was a lady told her of a very good teacher; an American lady perhaps you know her Mrs.. Sanders. I think she came from Boston. She told her of this teacher, and we thought of getting him to travel round with us. But Randolph said he didn't want a teacher travelling round with us. He said he wouldn't have lessons when he was in the cars. And we were in the cars about half the time. There was an English lady we met in the cars I think her name was Miss Featherstone; perhaps you know her. She wanted to know why I didn't give Randolph lessons give him "instruction," she called it. I guess he could give me more instruction than I could give him. He's very smart.' 'Yes,' said Winterbourne; 'he seems very smart.' 'Mother's going to get a teacher for him as soon as we get to Italy. Can you get good teachers in Italy?' 'Very good, I should think,' said Winterbourne. 'Or else she's going to find some school. He ought to learn some more. He's only nine. He's going to college.' And in this way Miss Miller continued to converse upon the affairs of her family, and upon other topics. She sat there with her extremely pretty hands, ornamented with very brilliant rings, folded in her lap, and with her pretty eyes now resting upon those of Winterbourne, now wandering over the garden, the people who passed by, and the beautiful view. She talked to Winterbourne as if she had known him a long time. He found it very pleasant. It was many years since he had heard a young girl talk so much. It might have been said of this unknown young lady, who had come and sat down beside him upon a bench, that she chattered. She was very quiet, she sat in a charming tranquil attitude; but her lips and her eyes were constantly moving. She had a soft, slender, agreeable voice, and her tone was decidedly sociable. she gave Winterbourne a history of her movements and intentions, and those of her mother and brother, in Europe, and enumerated, in particular, the various hotels at which they had stopped. 'That English lady in the cars,' she

said 'Miss Featherstone asked me if we didn't all live in hotels in America. I told her I had never been in so many hotels in my life as since I came to Europe. I have never seen so many it's nothing but hotels.' But Miss Miller did not make this remark with a querulous accent, she appeared to be in the best humour with everything. she declared that the hotels were very good, when once you got used to their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet. she was not disappointed not a bit. Perhaps it was because she had heard so much about it before. she had ever so many intimate friends that had been there ever so many times. And then she had had ever so many dresses and things from Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress she felt as if she were in Europe. 'It was a kind of a wishing-cap,' said Winterbourne. 'Yes,' said Miss Miller, without examining this analogy; 'it always made me wish I was here. But I needn't have done that for dresses. I am sure they send all the pretty ones to America; you see the most frightful things here. The only thing I don't like,' she proceeded, 'is the society. There isn't any society; or, if there is, I don't know where it keeps itself Do you? I suppose there is some society somewhere, but I haven't seen anything of it. I'm very fond of society, and I have always had a great deal of it. I don't mean only in Schenectady, but in New York. I used to go to New York every winter. In New York I had lots of society. Last winter I had seventeen dinners given me; and three of them were by gentlemen,' added Daisy Miller. 'I have more friends in New York than in Schenectady more gentlemen friends; and more young lady friends too,' she resumed in a moment. She paused again for an instant she was looking at Winterbourne with all her prettiness in her lively eyes and in her light, slightly monotonous smile. 'I have always had,' she said, 'a great deal of gentlemen's society.' Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed. He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion; never, at 5

least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment. And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they said at Geneva? He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone. Never indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming; but how deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen's society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category. He had known, here in Europe, two or three women persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with husbands who were great coquettes dangerous, terrible women, with whom one's relations were liable to take a serious turn. But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt. Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. He leaned back in his seat; he remarked to himself that she had the most charming nose he had ever seen; he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt. It presently became apparent that he was on the way to learn. 'Have you been to that old Castle?' asked the young girl, pointing with her parasol to the far-gleaming walls of the Chateau de Chillon. 'Yes, formerly, more than once,' said Winterbourne. 'you too, I suppose, have seen it?'

'No; we haven't been there. I want to go there dreadfully. Of course I mean to go there. I wouldn't go away from here without having seen that old Castle.' 'It's a very pretty excursion,' said Winterbourne, 'and very easy to make. You can drive, you know, or you can go by the little steamer.' 'You can go in the cars,' said Miss Miller. 'Yes; you can go in the cars,' Winterbourne assented. 'Our courier says they take you right up to the Castle,' the young girl continued. 'We were going last week; but my mother gave out. she suffers dreadfully from dyspepsia. she said she couldn't go. Randolph wouldn't go either; he says he doesn't think much of old Castles. But I guess we'll go this week, if we can get Randolph.' 'Your brother is not interested in ancient monuments?' Winterbourne inquired, smiling. 'He says he don't care much about old Castles. He's only nine. He wants to stay at the hotel. Mother's afraid to leave him alone, and the courier won't stay with him; so we haven't been to many places. But it will be too bad if we don't go up there.' And Miss Miller pointed again at the Chateau de Chillon. 'I should think it might be arranged,' said Winter-bourne. 'Couldn't you get some one to stay for the afternoon with Randolph?' Miss Miller looked at him a moment; and then, very placidly 'I wish you would stay with him!' she said. Winterbourne hesitated a moment. 'I would much rather go to Chillon with you.' 'With me?' asked the young girl, with the same placidity.

She didn't rise, blushing, as a young girl at Geneva would have done; and yet Winterbourne, conscious that he had been very bold, thought it possible she was offended. 'With your mother,' he answered very respectfully. But it seemed that both his audacity and his respect were lost upon Miss Daisy Miller. 'I guess my mother won't go, after all,' she said. 'She don't like to ride round in the afternoon. But did you really mean what you said just now; that you would like to go up there?' 'Most earnestly,' Winterbourne declared. 'Then we may arrange it. If mother will stay with Randolph, I guess Eugenio will.' 'Eugenio?' the young man inquired. 'Eugenio's our courier. He doesn't like to stay with Randolph; he's the most fastidious man I ever saw. But he's a splendid courier. I guess he'll stay at home with Randolph if mother does, and then we can go to the castle.' Winterbourne reflected for an instant as lucidly as possible 'we' could only mean Miss Daisy Miller and himself. This programme seemed almost too agreeable for credence; he felt as if he ought to kiss the young lady's hand. Possibly he would have done so and quite spoiled the project; but at this moment another person presumably Eugenio appeared. A tall, handsome man, with superb whiskers, wearing a velvet morning coat and a brilliant watch-chain, approached Miss Miller, looking sharply at her companion. 'Oh, Eugenio!' said Miss Miller, with the friendliest accent. Eugenio had looked at Winterbourne from head to foot; he now bowed gravely to the young lady. 'I have the honour to inform Mademoiselle that luncheon is upon the table.' Miss Miller slowly rose. 'see here, Eugenio,' she said. 'I'm going to that old castle, anyway.'

'To the Chateau de Chillon Mademoiselle?' the courier inquired. 'Mademoiselle has made arrangements?' he added, in a tone which struck Winterbourne as very impertinent. Eugenio's tone apparently threw, even to Miss Miller's own apprehension, a slightly ironical light upon the young girl's situation. she turned to Winterbourne blushing a little a very little. 'You won't back out?' she said. 'I shall not be happy till we go!' he protested. 'And you are staying in this hotel?' she went on. 'And you are really an American?' The courier stood looking at Winterbourne, offensively. The young man, at least, thought his manner of looking an offence to Miss Miller; it conveyed an imputation that she 'picked up' acquaintances. 'I shall have the honour of presenting to you a person who will tell you all about me,' he said, smiling, and referring to his aunt. 'Oh, well, we'll go some day,' said Miss Miller. And she gave him a smile and turned away. She put up her parasol and walked back to the inn beside Eugenio. Win-terbourne stood looking after her; and as she moved away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel, said to himself that she had the tournure of a princess.

Chapter 2 He had, however, engaged to do more than proved feasible in promising to present his aunt, Mrs.. Costello, to Miss Daisy Miller. As soon as the former lady had got better of her headache he waited upon her in her apartment; and, 7

after the proper inquiries in regard to her health, he asked her if she had observed, in the hotel, an American family a mamma, a daughter, and a little boy. 'And a courier?' said Mrs.. Costello. 'Oh yes, I have observed them. Seen them heard them and kept out of their way.' Mrs.. Costello was a widow with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick-headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time. She had a long pale face, a high nose, and a great deal of very striking white hair, which she wore in large puffs and rouleaux over the top of her head. She had two sons married in New York, and another who was now in Europe. This young man was amusing himself at Homburg, and, though he was on his travels, was rarely perceived to visit any particular city at the moment selected by his mother for her own appearance there. Her nephew who had come up to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than those who, as she said, were nearer to her. He had imbibed at Geneva the idea that one must always be attentive to one's aunt. Mrs.. Costello had not seen him for many years, and she was greatly pleased with him, manifesting her approbation by initiating him into many of the secrets of that social sway which, as she gave him to understand, she exerted in the American capital. She admitted that she was very exclusive, but, if he were acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be. And her picture of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of that city, which she presented to him in many different lights, was, to Winterbourne's imagination, almost oppressively striking. He immediately perceived, from her tone, that Miss Daisy Miller's place in the social scale was low. 'I am afraid you don't approve of them,' he said. 'They are very common,' Mrs.. Costello declared. 'They are the sort of Americans that one does one's duty by not not accepting.' 'Ah, you don't accept them?' said the young man.

'I can't, my dear Frederick. I would if I could, but I can't.' 'The young girl is very pretty,' said Winterbourne, in a moment, 'Of course she's pretty. But she is very common.' 'I see what you mean, of course,' said Winterbourne, after another pause. 'she has that charming look they all have,' his aunt resumed. 'I can't think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection no, you don't know how well she dresses. I can't think where they get their taste.' 'But, my dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Comanche savage.' 'She is a young lady,' said Mrs.. Costello, 'who has an intimacy with her mamma's courier!' 'An intimacy with the courier?' the young man demanded. 'Oh, the mother is just as bad! They treat the courier like a familiar friend like a gentleman. I shouldn't wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds to the young lady's idea of a count. He sits with them in the garden, in the evening. I think he smokes.' Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they helped him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy. Evidently she was rather wild. 'Well,' he said, 'I am not a courier, and yet she was very charming to me.' 'You had better have said at first,' said Mrs.. Costello with dignity, 'that you had made her acquaintance.' 'We simply met in the garden, and we talked a bit.' Tout bonnement! And pray what did you say? ' 'I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admirable aunt.' 8

'I am much obliged to you.' 'It was to guarantee my respectability,' said Winter-bourne. 'And pray who is to guarantee hers?' 'Ah, you are cruel!' said the young man. 'she's a very nice girl.' 'You don't say that as if you believed it,' Mrs.. Cos-tello observed. 'she is completely uncultivated,' Winterbourne went on. 'But she is wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice. To prove that I believe it, I am going to take her to the Chateau de Chillon.' 'You two are going off there together? I should say it proved just the contrary. How long had you known her, may I ask, when this interesting project was formed? You haven't been twenty-four hours in the house.' 'I had known her half an hour!' said Winterbourne smiling 'Dear me!' cried Mrs.. Costello. 'What a dreadful girl!' Her nephew was silent for some moments. 'You really think, men,' he began earnestly, and with a desire for trustworthy information 'you really think that ' But he paused again. 'Think what, sir?' said his aunt. 'That she is the sort of young lady who expects a man sooner or later to carry her on?' 'I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You are too innocent.' 'My dear aunt, I am not so innocent,' said Winter-bourne, smiling and curling his moustache.

'You are too guilty, then!' Winterbourne continued to curl his moustache, meditatively. 'You won't let the poor girl know you, then?' he asked at last. 'Is it literally true that she is going to the Chateau de Chillon with you?' 'I think that she fully intends it.' 'Then, my dear Frederick,' said Mrs.. Costello, 'I must decline the honour of her acquaintance. I am an old woman, but I am not too old thank Heaven to be shocked!' 'But don't they all do these things the young girls in America?' Winterbourne inquired. Mrs.. Costello stared a moment. 'I should like to see my granddaughters do them!' she declared, grimly. This seemed to throw some light upon the matter, for Winterbourne remembered to have heard that his pretty cousins in New York were 'tremendous flirts.' If, therefore, Miss Daisy Miller exceeded the liberal license allowed to these young ladies, it was probable that anything might be expected of her. Winterbourne was impatient to see her again, and he was vexed with himself that, by instinct, he should not appreciate her justly. Though he was impatient to see her, he hardly knew what he should say to her about his aunt's refusal to become acquainted with her, but he discovered, promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy Miller there was no great need of walking on tiptoe. He found her that evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight, like an indolent sylph, and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld. It was ten o'clock. He had dined with his aunt, had been sitting with her since dinner, and had just taken leave of her till the morrow. Miss Daisy Miller seemed very glad to see him; she declared it was the longest evening she had ever passed. 9

'Have you been all alone?' he asked. 'I have been walking round with mother. But mother gets tired walking round,' she answered. 'Has she gone to bed?' 'No; she doesn't like to go to bed,' said the young girl. 'She doesn't sleep not three hours. She says she doesn't know how she lives. she's dreadfully nervous. I guess she sleeps more than she thinks. she's gone somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him to go to bed. He doesn't like to go to bed.' 'Let us hope she will persuade him,' observed Winter-bourne. 'she will talk to him all she can; but he doesn't like her to talk to him,' said Miss Daisy, opening her fan. 'she's going to try to get Eugenio to talk to him. But he isn't afraid of Eugenio. Eugenio's a splendid courier, but he can't make much impression on Randolph! I don't believe he'll go to bed before eleven.' It appeared that Randolph's vigil was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for Winter-bourne strolled about with the young girl for some time without meeting her mother. 'I have been looking round for that lady you want to introduce me to,' his companion resumed. 'She's your aunt.' Then on Winterbourne's admitting the fact, and expressing some curiosity as to how she had learned it, she said she had heard all about Mrs.. Costello from the chamber maid. she was very quiet and very comme ilfaut; she wore white puffs; she spoke to no one, and she never dined at the table d'hote. Every two days she had a headache. 'I think that's a lovely description, headache and all!' said Miss Daisy, chattering along in her thin, gay voice. 'I want to know her ever so much. I know just what your aunt would be; I know I should like her. She would be very exclusive. I like a lady to be exclusive; I'm dying to be exclusive myself. Well, we are exclusive, mother and I. We don't speak to every one or they don't speak to us. I suppose it's about the same thing. Any way, I shall be ever so glad to know your aunt Win-terbourne was embarrassed. 'She would be most happy,' he said; 'but I am afraid those headaches will interfere.'

The young girl looked at him through the dusk. 'But I suppose she doesn't have a headache every day,' she said, sympathetically. Winterbourne was silent a moment. 'She tells me she does,' he answered at last not knowing what to say. Miss Daisy Miller stopped and stood looking at him. Her prettiness was still visible in the darkness; she was opening and closing her enormous fan. 'She doesn't want to know me!' she said, suddenly. 'Why don't you say so? You needn't be afraid. I'm not afraid!' And she gave a little laugh. Winterbourne fancied there was a tremor in her voice; he was touched, shocked, mortified by it. 'My dear young lady,' he protested, 'she knows no one. It's her wretched health.' The young girl walked on a few steps, laughing still. 'You needn't be afraid,' she repeated. 'Why should she want to know me?' Then she paused again; she was close to the parapet of the garden, and in front of her was the starlit lake. There was a vague sheen upon its surface, and in the distance were dimly-seen mountain forms. Daisy Miller looked out upon the mysterious prospect, and then she gave another little laugh. 'Gracious! she is exclusive!' she said. Winterbourne wondered whether she was seriously wounded, and for a moment almost wished that her sense of injury might be such as to make it becoming in him to attempt to reassure and comfort her. He had a pleasant sense that she would be very approachable for consolatory purposes. He felt then, for the instant, quite ready to sacrifice his aunt, conversationally, to admit that she was a proud, rude woman, and to declare that they needn't mind her. But before he had time to commit himself to this perilous mixture of gallantly and impiety, the young lady, resuming her walk, gave an exclamation in quite another tone. 'Well; here's mother! I guess she hasn't got Randolph to go to bed.' The figure of a lady appeared, at a distance, very indistinct in the darkness, and advancing with a slow and wavering movement. Suddenly it seemed to pause. 10

'Are you sure it is your mother? Can you distinguish her in this thick dusk?' Winterbourne asked. 'Well!' cried Miss Daisy Miller, with a laugh, 'I guess I know my own mother. And when she has got on my shawl, too! She is always wearing my things.' The lady in question, ceasing to advance, hovered vaguely about the spot at which she had checked her steps. 'I am afraid your mother doesn't see you,' said Win-terbourne. 'Or perhaps,' he added thinking, with Miss Miller, the joke permissible 'perhaps she feels guilty about your shawl.' 'Oh, it's a fearful old thing!' the young girl replied, serenely. 'I told her she could wear it. She won't come here, because she sees you.' 'Ah, then,' said Winterbourne, 'I had better leave you.' 'Oh no! come on!' urged Miss Daisy Miller. 'I'm afraid your mother doesn't approve of my walking with you.' Miss Miller gave him a serious glance. 'It isn't for me; it's for you that is, it's for her. Well, I don't know who it's for! But mother doesn't like any of my gentlemen friends. she's right down timid. she always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I do introduce them almost always. If I didn't introduce my gentlemen friends to mother,' the young girl added, in her little soft, flat monotone, 'I shouldn't think I was natural.' 'To introduce me,' said Winterbourne, 'you must know my name.' And he proceeded to pronounce it. 'Oh dear; I can't say all that!' said his companion with a laugh. But by this time they had come up to Mrs.. Miller, who, as they drew near, walked to the parapet of the garden and leaned upon it, looking intently at the lake and turning her back upon them. 'Mother!' said the young girl in a tone of decision. Upon

this the elder lady turned round. 'Mr. Winterbourne,' said Miss Daisy Miller, introducing the young man very frankly and prettily. 'Common' she was, as Mrs.. Costello had pronounced her, yet it was a wonder to Winterbourne that, with her commonness, she had a singularly delicate grace. Her mother was a small, spare, light person, with a wandering eye, a very exiguous nose, and a large forehead, decorated with a certain amount of thin, much frizzled hair. Like her daughter, Mrs.. Miller was dressed with extreme elegance: she had enormous diamonds in her ears. so far as Winterbourne could observe, she gave him no greeting she certainly was not looking at him. Daisy was near her, pulling her shawl straight. 'What are you doing, poking round here?' this young lady inquired; but by no means with that harshness of accent which her choice of words may imply. 'I don't know,' said her mother, turning towards the lake again. 'I shouldn't think you'd want that shawl!' Daisy exclaimed. 'Well I do!' her mother answered, with a little laugh. 'Did you get Randolph to go to bed?' asked the young girl. 'No; I couldn't induce him,' said Mrs.. Miller, very gently. 'He wants to talk to the waiter. He likes to talk to that waiter.' 'I was telling Mr. Winterbourne,' the young girl went on; and to the young man's ear her tone might have indicated that she had been uttering his name all her life. 'Oh yes!' said Winterbourne; 'I have the pleasure of knowing your son.' Randolph's mamma was silent; she turned her attention to the lake. But at last she spoke. 'Well, I don't see how he lives!' 'Anyhow, it isn't so bad as it was at Dover,' said Daisy Miller. 11

'And what occurred at Dover?' Winterbourne asked. 'He wouldn't go to bed at all. I guess he sat up all night in the public parlour. He wasn't in bed at twelve o'clock: I know that.' 'It was half-past twelve,' declared Mrs.. Miller, with mild emphasis. 'Does he sleep much during the day?' Winterbourne demanded. 'I guess he doesn't sleep much,' Daisy rejoined. 'I wish he would!' said her mother. 'It seems as if he couldn't.' 'I think he's real tiresome,' Daisy pursued. Then, for some moments, there was silence. 'Well, Daisy Miller,' said the elder lady, presently, 'I shouldn't think you'd want to talk against your own brother!' 'Well, he is tiresome, mother,' said Daisy, quite without the asperity of a retort. 'He's only nine,' urged Mrs.. Miller. 'Well, he wouldn't go to that Castle,' said the young girl. 'I'm going there with Mr. Winterbourne.' To this announcement, very placidly made, Daisy's mamma offered no response. Winterbourne took for granted that she deeply disapproved of the projected excursion; but he said to himself that she was a simple, easily-managed person, and that a few deferential protestations would take the edge from her displeasure. 'Yes,' he began; 'your daughter has kindly allowed me the honour of being her guide.' Mrs.. Miller's wandering eyes attached themselves, with a sort of appealing air, to Daisy, who, however, strolled a few steps farther, gently humming to herself. 'I presume you will go in the cars,' said her mother. 'Yes; or in the boat,' said Winterbourne.

'Well, of course, I don't know,' Mrs.. Miller rejoined. 'I have never been to that Castle.' 'It is a pity you shouldn't go,' said Winterbourne beginning to feel reassured as to her opposition. And yet he was quite prepared to find that, as a matter of course, she meant to accompany her daughter. 'We've been thinking ever so much about going,' she pursued; 'but it seems as if we couldn't. Of course Daisy she wants to go round. But there's a lady here I don't know her name she says she shouldn't think we'd want to go to see castles here; she should think we'd want to wait till we got to Italy. It seems as if there would be so many there,' continued Mrs.. Miller, with an air of increasing confidence. 'Of course, we only want to see the principal ones. We visited several in England,' she presently added. 'Ah yes! in England there are beautiful castles,' said Winterbourne. 'But Chillon, here, is very well worth seeing.' 'Well, if Daisy feels up to it ' said Mrs.. Miller, in a tone impregnated with a sense of the magnitude of the enterprise. 'It seems as if there was nothing she wouldn't undertake.' 'Oh, I think she'll enjoy it!' Winterbourne declared. And he desired more and more to make it a certainty that he was to have the privilege of a tete-a-tete with the young lady, who was still strolling along in front of them, softly vocalising. 'You are not disposed, madam,' he inquired, 'to undertake it yourself?' Daisy's mother looked at him an instant, askance, and then walked forward in silence. Then 'I guess she had better go alone,' she said, simply. Winterbourne observed to himself that this was a very different type of maternity from that of the vigilant matrons who massed themselves in the forefront of social intercourse in the dark old city at the other end of the lake. 12

But his meditations were interrupted by hearing his name very distinctly pronounced by Mrs.. Miller's unprotected daughter. 'Mr. Winterbourne!' murmured Daisy. 'Mademoiselle!' said the young man. 'Don't you want to take me out in a boat?' 'At present?' he asked. 'Of course!' said Daisy. 'Well, Annie Miller!' exclaimed her mother. 'I beg you, madam, to let her go,' said Winterbourne, ardently; for he had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl. 'I shouldn't think she'd want to,' said her mother. 'I should think she'd rather go indoors.' 'I'm sure Mr. Winterbourne wants to take me,' Daisy declared. 'He's so awfully devoted!' 'I will row you over to Chillon in the starlight.' 'I don't believe it!' said Daisy. 'Well!' ejaculated the elder lady again. 'You haven't spoken to me for half an hour,' her daughter went on. 'I have been having some very pleasant conversation with your mother,' said Winterbourne. 'Well; I want you to take me out in a boat!' Daisy repeated. They had all stopped, and she had turned round and was looking at Winterbourne. Her face wore a charming smile, her pretty eyes were gleaming, she was swinging her great fan about. No; it's impossible to be prettier than that, thought Winterbourne.

'There are half a dozen boats moored at that landing place,' he said, pointing to certain steps which descended from the garden to the lake. 'If you will do me the honour to accept my arm, we will go and select one of them.' Daisy stood there smiling; she threw back her head and gave a little light laugh. 'I like a gentleman to be formal!' she declared. 'I assure you it's a formal offer.' 'I was bound I would make you say something,' Daisy went on. 'You see it's not very difficult,' said Winterbourne. 'But I am afraid you are charming me.' 'I think not, sir,' remarked Mrs.. Miller, very gently. 'Do, then, let me give you a row,' he said to the young girl. 'It's quite lovely, the way you say that!' cried Daisy. 'It will be still more lovely to do it.' 'Yes, it would be lovely!' said Daisy. But she made no movement to accompany him; she only stood there laughing. 'I should think you had better find out what time it is,' interposed her mother. 'It is eleven o'clock, madam,' said a voice, with a foreign accent, out of the neighbouring darkness; and Win-terbourne, turning, perceived the florid personage who was in attendance upon the two ladies. He had apparently just approached. 'Oh, Eugenio,' said Daisy, 'I am going out in a boat!' Eugenio bowed. 'At eleven o'clock. Mademoiselle?' 'I am going with Mr. Winterbourne. This very minute.' 13

'Do tell her she can't,' said Mrs.. Miller to the courier. 'I think you had better not go out in a boat, Mademoiselle,' Eugenio declared. Winterbourne wished to Heaven this pretty girl were not so familiar with her courier, but he said nothing. 'I suppose you don't think it's proper!' Daisy exclaimed. 'Eugenio doesn't think anything's proper.' 'I am at your service,' said Winterbourne. 'Does Mademoiselle propose to go alone?' asked Eugenio of Mrs.. Miller. 'Oh no; with this gentleman!' answered Daisy's mamma. The courier looked for a moment at Winterbourne the latter thought he was smiling and then, solemnly, with a bow, 'As Mademoiselle pleases!' he said. 'Oh, I hoped you would make a fuss!' said Daisy. 'I don't care to go now.' 'I myself shall make a fuss if you don't go,' said Win-terbourne. 'That's all I want a little fuss!' And the young girl began to laugh again. 'Mr. Randolph has gone to bed!' the courier announced, frigidly. 'Oh, Daisy, now we can go!' said Mrs.. Miller. Daisy turned away from Winterbourne, looking at him, smiling and fanning herself. 'Good-night,' she said; 'I hope you are disappointed, or disgusted, or something!' He looked at her, taking the hand she offered him. 'I am puzzled,' he answered. 'Well; I hope it won't keep you awake!' she said very smartly; and, under the escort of the privileged Eugenio, the two ladies passed towards the house.

Winterbourne stood looking after them, he was indeed puzzled. He lingered beside the lake for a quarter of an hour, turning over the mystery of the young girl's sudden familiarities and caprices. But the only very definite conclusion he came to was that he should enjoy deucedly 'going off' with her somewhere. Two days afterwards he went off with her to the Castle of Chillon. He waited for her in the large hall of the hotel, where the couriers, the servants, the foreign tourists, were lounging about and staring. It was not the place he would have chosen, but she had appointed it. She came tripping downstairs, buttoning her long gloves, squeezing her folded parasol against her pretty figure, dressed in the perfection of a soberly elegant travelling costume. Win-terbourne was a man of imagination and, as our ancestors used to say, of sensibility; as he looked at her dress and, on the great staircase, her little rapid, confiding step, he felt as if there were something romantic going forward. He could have believed he was going to elope with her. He passed out with her among all the idle people that were assembled there; they were all looking at her very hard; she had begun to chatter as soon as she joined him. Win-terbourne's preference had been that they should be conveyed to Chillon in a carriage; but she expressed a lively wish to go in the little steamer; she declared that she had a passion for steamboats. There was always such a lovely breeze upon the water and you saw such lots of people. The sail was not long, but Winterbourne's companion found time to say a great many things. To the young man himself their little excursion was so much of an escapade an adventure that, even allowing for her habitual sense of freedom, he had some expectation of seeing her regard it in the same way. But it must be confessed that, in this particular, he was disappointed. Daisy Miller was extremely animated, she was in charming spirits; but she was apparently not at all excited; she was not fluttered; she avoided neither his eyes nor those of any one else; she blushed neither when she looked at him nor when she saw that people were looking at her. People continued to look at her a great deal, 14

and Winterbourne took much satisfaction in his pretty companion's distinguished air. He had been a little afraid that she would talk loud, laugh overmuch, and even, perhaps, desire to move about the boat a good deal. But he quite forgot his fears; he sat smiling, with his eyes upon her face, while, without moving from her place, she delivered herself of a great number of original reflections. It was the most charming garrulity he had ever heard. He had assented to the idea that she was 'common;' but was she so, after all, or was he simply getting used to her commonness? Her conversation was chiefly of what metaphysicians term the objective cast; but every now and then it took a subjective turn. 'What on earth are you so grave about?' she suddenly demanded, fixing her agreeable eyes upon Winterbourne's. 'Am I grave?' he asked. 'I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.' 'You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your ears are very near together.' 'should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?' 'Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It will pay the expenses of our journey.' 'I never was better pleased in my life,' murmured Winterbourne. she looked at him a moment, and then burst into a little laugh. 'I like to make you say those things! You're a queer mixture!' In the castle, after they had landed, the subjective element decidedly prevailed. Daisy tripped about the vaulted chambers, rustled her skirts in the corkscrew staircases, flirted back with a pretty little cry and a shudder from the edge of the oubliettes, and turned a singularly well-shaped ear to everything that Winterbourne told her about the place. But he saw that she cared very little for feudal antiquities, and that the dusky traditions of Chillon made but a slight impression upon her. They had the good fortune to have been able to walk

about without other companionship than that of the custodian, and Winter-bourne arranged with this functionary that they should not be hurried that they should linger and pause wherever they chose. The custodian interpreted the bargain generously Winterbourne, on his side, had been generous and ended by leaving them quite to themselves. Miss Miller's observations were not remarkable for logical consistency, for anything she wanted to say she was sure to find a pretext. she found a great many pretexts in the rugged embrasures of Chillon for asking Winterbourne sudden questions about himself his family, his previous history, his tastes, his habits, his intentions and for supplying information upon corresponding points in her own personality. Of her own tastes, habits, and intentions Miss Miller was prepared to give the most definite, and indeed the most favourable, account. 'Well; I hope you know enough!' she said to her companion, after he had told her the history of the unhappy Bonivard. 'I never saw a man that knew so much!' The history of Bonivard had evidently, as they say, gone into one ear and out of the other. But Daisy went on to say that she wished Winterbourne would travel with them and 'go round' with them; they might know something, in that case. 'Don't you want to come and teach Randolph?' she asked. Winterbourne said that nothing could possibly please him so much; but that he had unfortunately other occupations. 'Other occupations? I don't believe it!' said Miss Daisy. 'What do you mean? You are not in business.' The young man admitted that he was not in business; but he had engagements which, even within a day or two, would force him to go back to Geneva. 'Oh, bother!' she said, 'I don't believe it!' and she began to talk about something else. But a few moments later, when he was pointing out to her the pretty design of an antique fireplace, she broke out irrelevantly, 'you don't mean to say you are going back to Geneva?' 'It is a melancholy fact that I shall have to return to Geneva tomorrow.' 'Well, Mr. Winterbourne,' said Daisy, I think you're horrid!' 15

'Oh, don't say such dreadful things!' said Winter-bourne 'just at the last.' 'The last!' cried the young girl; 'I call it the first I have half a mind to leave you here and go straight back to the hotel alone.' And for the next ten minutes she did nothing but call him horrid. Poor Winterbourne was fairly bewildered; no young lady had as yet done him the honour to be so agitated by the announcement of his movements. His companion after this, ceased to pay any attention to the curiosities of Chillon or the beauties of the lake; she opened fire upon the mysterious charmer in Geneva, whom she appeared to have instantly taken it for granted that he was hurrying back to see. How did Miss Daisy Miller know that there was a charmer in Geneva? Winter-bourne, who denied the existence of such a person, was quite unable to discover; and he was divided between amazement at the rapidity of her induction and amusement at the frankness of her persiflage. She seemed to him, in all this, an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity. 'Does she never allow you more than three days at a time?' asked Daisy, ironically. 'Doesn't she give you a vacation in summer? There's no one so hard worked, but they can get leave to go off somewhere at this season. I suppose, if you stay another day, she'll come after you in the boat. Do wait over till Friday, and I will go down to the landing to see her arrive!' Winterbourne began to think he had been wrong to feel disappointed in the temper in which the young lady had embarked. If he had missed the personal accent, the personal accent was now making its appearance. It sounded very distinctly, at last, in her telling him she would stop 'teasing' him if he would promise her solemnly to come down to Rome in the winter. 'That's not a difficult promise to make,' said Winter-bourne. 'My aunt has taken an apartment in Rome for the winter, and has already asked me to come and see her.' 'I don't want you to come for your aunt,' said Daisy; 'I want you to come for me.' And this was the only allusion that the young man was ever to hear her make to his invidious kinswoman. He declared that, at any rate, he would

certainly come. After this Daisy stopped teasing. Winterbourne took a carriage, and they drove back to Vevey in the dusk; the young girl was very quiet. In the evening Winterbourne mentioned to Mrs.. Costello that he had spent the afternoon at Chillon with Miss Daisy Miller. 'The Americans of the courier?' asked this lady. 'Ah, happily,' said Winterbourne, 'the courier stayed at home.' 'she went with you all alone?' 'All alone.' Mrs.. Costello sniffed a little at her smelling-bottle. 'And that,' she exclaimed, 'is the young person you wanted me to know!'

Chapter 3 Winterbourne, who had returned to Geneva the day after his excursion to Chillon, went to Rome towards the end of January. His aunt had been established there for several weeks, and he had received a couple of letters from her. 'Those people you were so devoted to last summer at Vevey have turned up here, courier and all,' she wrote. 'They seem to have made several acquaintances, but the courier continues to be the most intime. The young lady, however, is also very intimate with some third-rate Italians, with whom she rackets about in a way that makes much talk. Bring me that pretty novel of Cherbuliez's "Paule Mere" and don't come later than the 23rd.' In the natural course of events Winterbourne, on arriving in Rome, would presently have ascertained Mrs. Miller's address at the American banker's, and 16

have gone to pay his compliments to Miss Daisy. 'After what happened at Vevey I certainly think I may call upon them,' he said to Mrs. Costello. 'If, after what happens at Vevey and everywhere you desire to keep up the acquaintance, you are very welcome. Of course a man may know every one. Men are welcome to the privilege!' 'Pray, what is it that happens here, for instance?' Winterbourne demanded. 'The girl goes about alone with her foreigners. As to what happens farther, you must apply elsewhere for information. She has picked up half-a-dozen of the regular Roman fortune hunters, and she takes them about to people's houses. When she comes to a party she brings with her a gentleman with a good deal of manner and a wonderful moustache.' 'And where is the mother?' 'I haven't the least idea. They are very dreadful people.' Winterbourne meditated a moment. 'They are very ignorant very innocent only. Depend upon it they are not bad.' 'They are hopelessly vulgar,' said Mrs. Costello. 'Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being "bad" is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough.' The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half-a-dozen wonderful moustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her. He had perhaps not definitely flattered himself that he had made an ineffaceable impression upon her heart, but he was annoyed at hearing of a state of affairs so little in harmony with an image that had lately flitted in and out of his own meditations; the image of a very pretty girl looking out of an old Roman window and asking herself urgently when Mr. Winterbourne would arrive. If, however, he determined to wait a little before reminding Miss Miller of his claims to her consideration, he went very soon to call upon two or three other

friends. One of these friends was an American lady who had spent several winters at Geneva, where she had placed her children at school. She was a very accomplished woman, and she lived in the Via Gregoriana. Winterbourne found her in a little crimson drawing-room, on a third floor; the room was filled with southern sunshine. He had not been there ten minutes when the servant came in, announcing 'Madame Mila!' This announcement was presently followed by the entrance of little Randolph Miller, who stopped in the middle of the room and stood staring at Winterbourne. An instant later his pretty sister crossed the threshold; and then, after a considerable interval, Mrs. Miller slowly advanced. 'I know you!' said Randolph. 'I'm sure you know a great many things,' exclaimed Winterbourne, taking him by the hand. 'How is your education coming on?' Daisy was exchanging greetings very prettily with her hostess; but when she heard Winterbourne's voice she quickly turned her head. 'Well, I declare!' she said. 'I told you I should come, you know,' Winterbourne rejoined smiling. 'Well I didn't believe it,' said Miss Daisy. 'I am much obliged to you,' laughed the young man. 'You might have come to see me!' said Daisy. 'I arrived only yesterday.' 'I don't believe that!' the young girl declared. Winterbourne turned with a protesting smile to her mother; but this lady evaded his glance, and seating herself, fixed her eyes upon her son. 'We've got a bigger place than this,' said Randolph. 'It's all gold on the walls.' Mrs. Miller turned uneasily in her chair. 'I told you if I were to bring you you would say something!' she murmured. 17

'I told you!' Randolph exclaimed. 'I tell you, sir!' he added jocosely, giving Winterbourne a thump on the knee. 'It is bigger, too!' Daisy had entered upon a lively conversation with her hostess; Winterbourne judged it becoming to address a few words to her mother. 'I hope you have been well since we parted at Vevey,' he said. Mrs. Miller now certainly looked at him at his chin. 'Not very well, sir,' she answered. 'she's got the dyspepsia,' said Randolph. 'I've got it too. Father's got it. I've got it worst!' This announcement, instead of embarrassing Mrs. Miller, seemed to relieve her. 'I suffer from the liver,' she said. 'I think it's this climate; it's less bracing than schenectady, especially in the winter season. I don't know whether you know we reside at schenectady. I was saying to Daisy that I certainly hadn't found any one like Dr. Davis, and I didn't believe I should. Oh, at schenectady, he stands first, they think everything of him. He has so much to do, and yet there was nothing he wouldn't do for me. He said he never saw anything like my dyspepsia, but he was bound to cure it. I'm sure there was nothing he wouldn't try. He was just going to try something new when we came off. Mr. Miller wanted Daisy to see Europe for herself. But I wrote to Mr. Miller that it seems as if I couldn't get on without Dr Davis. At Schenectady he stands at the very top; and there's a great deal of sickness there, too. It affects my sleep.' Winterbourne had a good deal of pathological gossip with Dr Davis's patient, during which Daisy chattered unremittingly to her own companion. The young man asked Mrs. Miller how she was pleased with Rome. 'Well, I must say I am disappointed,' she answered. 'We had heard so much about it; I suppose we had heard too much. But we couldn't help that. We had been led to expect something different.' 'Ah, wait a little, and you will become very fond of it,' said Winterbourne.

'I hate it worse and worse every day!' cried Randolph. 'You are like the infant Hannibal,' said Winterbourne. 'No, I ain't!' Randolph declared, at a venture. 'You are not much like an infant,' said his mother. 'But we have seen places,' she resumed, 'that I should put a long way before Rome.' And in reply to Winterbourne's interrogation, 'There's Zurich,' she observed; 'I think Zurich is lovely; and we hadn't heard half so much about it.' 'The best place we've seen is the City of Richmond!' said Randolph. 'He means the ship,' his mother explained. 'We crossed in that ship. Randolph had a good time on the City of Richmond.' 'It's the best place I've seen,' the child repeated. 'Only it was turned the wrong way.' 'Well, we've got to turn the right way some time,' said Mrs. Miller, with a little laugh. Winterbourne expressed the hope that her daughter at least found some gratification in Rome, and she declared that Daisy was quite carried away. It's on account of the society the society's splendid. She goes round everywhere, she has made a great number of acquaintances. Of course she goes round more than I do. I must say they have been very sociable; they have taken her right in. And then she knows a great many gentlemen. Oh, she thinks there's nothing like Rome. Of course, it's a great deal pleasanter for a young lady if she knows plenty of gentlemen.' By this time Daisy had turned her attention again to Winterbourne. 'I've been telling Mrs. Walker how mean you were!' the young girl announced. 'And what is the evidence you have offered?' asked Winterbourne, rather annoyed at Miss Miller's want of appreciation of the zeal of an admirer who on his way down to Rome had stopped neither at Bologna nor at Florence, simply because of a certain sentimental impatience. He remembered that a cynical compatriot had once told him that American women the pretty ones and this 18

gave a largeness to the axiom were at once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness. 'Why, you were awfully mean at Vevey,' said Daisy. 'You wouldn't do anything. You wouldn't stay there when I asked you.' 'My dearest young lady,' cried Winterbourne, with eloquence, 'have I come all the way to Rome to encounter your reproaches?' 'Just hear him say that!' said Daisy to her hostess, giving a twist to a bow on this lady's dress. 'Did you ever hear anything so quaint?' 'so quaint, my dear?' murmured Mrs. Walker, in the tone of a partisan of Winterbourne. 'Well, I don't know,' said Daisy, fingering Mrs. Walker's ribbons. 'Mrs. Walker, I want to tell you something.' 'Mother,' interposed Randolph, with his rough ends to his words, 'I tell you you've got to go. Eugenio'll raise something!' 'I'm not afraid of Eugenio,' said Daisy, with a toss of her head. 'Look here, Mrs. Walker,' she went on, 'you know I'm coming to your party.' 'I am delighted to hear it.' 'I've got a lovely dress.' 'I am very sure of that.' 'But I want to ask a favour permission to bring a friend.' 'I shall be happy to see any of your friends,' said Mrs. Walker, turning with a smile to Mrs. Miller. 'Oh, they are not my friends,' answered Daisy's mamma, smiling shyly, in her own fashion. 'I never spoke to them!' 'It's an intimate friend of mine Mr. Giovanelli,' said Daisy, without a tremor in her clear little voice, or a shadow on her brilliant little face.

Mrs. Walker was silent a moment, she gave a rapid glance at Winterbourne. 'I shall be glad to see Mr. Gio-vanelli,' she then said. 'He's an Italian,' Daisy pursued, with the prettiest serenity. 'He's a great friend of mine he's the handsomest man in the world except Mr. Winterbourne! He knows plenty of Italians, but he wants to know some Americans. He thinks ever so much of Americans. He's tremendously clever. He's perfectly lovely!' It was settled that this brilliant personage should be brought to Mrs. Walker's party, and then Mrs. Miller prepared to take her leave. 'I guess we'll go back to the hotel,' she said. 'You may go back to the hotel, mother, but I'm going to take a walk,' said Daisy. 'she's going to walk with Mr. Giovanelli,' Randolph proclaimed. 'I am going to the Pincio,' said Daisy, smiling. 'Alone, my dear at this hour?' Mrs. Walker asked. The afternoon was drawing to a close it was the hour for the throng of carriages and of contemplative pedestrians. 'I don't think it's safe, my dear,' said Mrs. Walker. 'Neither do I,' subjoined Mrs. Miller. 'You'll get the fever as sure as you live. Remember what Dr Davis told you!' 'Give her some medicine before she goes,' said Randolph. The company had risen to its feet; Daisy, still showing her pretty teeth, bent over and kissed her hostess. 'Mrs. Walker, you are too perfect,' she said. 'I'm not going alone; I am going to meet a friend.' 'Your friend won't keep you from getting the fever,' Mrs. Miller observed. 'Is it Mr. Giovanelli?' asked the hostess. 19

Winterbourne was watching the young girl; at this question his attention quickened. She stood there smiling and smoothing her bonnet-ribbons; she glanced at Winter-bourne. Then, while she glanced and smiled, she answered without a shade of hesitation, 'Mr. Giovanelli the beautiful Giovanelli.' 'My dear young friend,' said Mrs. Walker, taking her hand, pleadingly, 'don't walk off to the Pincio at this hour to meet a beautiful Italian.' 'Well, he speaks English,' said Mrs. Miller. 'Gracious me!' Daisy exclaimed, 'I don't want to do anything improper. There's an easy way to settle it.' she continued to glance at Winterbourne. 'The Pincio is only a hundred yards distant, and if Mr. Winterbourne were as polite as he pretends he would offer to walk with me!' Winterbourne's politeness hastened to affirm itself, and the young girl gave him gracious leave to accompany her. They passed downstairs before her mother, and at the door Winterbourne perceived Mrs. Miller's carriage drawn up, with the ornamental courier whose acquaintance he had made at Vevey seated within. 'Good-bye, Eugenio!' cried Daisy, 'I'm going to take a walk.' The distance from the Via Gregoriana to the beautiful garden at the other end of the Pincian Hill is, in fact, rapidly traversed. As the day was splendid, however, and the concourse of vehicles, walkers, and loungers numerous, the young Americans found their progress much delayed. This fact was highly agreeable to Winterbourne, in spite of his consciousness of his singular situation. The slow-moving, idly-gazing Roman crowd, bestowed much attention upon the extremely pretty young foreign lady who was passing through it upon his arm; and he wondered what on earth had been in Daisy's mind when she proposed to expose herself, unattended, to its appreciation. His own mission, to her sense apparently, was to consign her to the hands of Mr. Giovanelli; but Winterbourne, at once annoyed and gratified, resolved that he would do no such thing. 'Why haven't you been to see me?' asked Daisy. 'You can't get out of that.'

'I have had the honour of telling you that I have only just stepped out of the train.' 'You must have stayed in the train a good while after it stopped!' cried the young girl, with her little laugh. 'I suppose you were asleep. You have had time to go to see Mrs. Walker.' 'I knew Mrs. Walker ' Winterbourne began to explain. 'I knew where you knew her. You knew her at Geneva. She told me so. Well, you knew me at Vevey. That's just as good. So you ought to have come.' She asked him no other question than this; she began to prattle about her own affairs. 'We've got splendid rooms at the hotel; Euge-nio says they're the best rooms in Rome. We are going to stay all winter if we don't die of the fever; and I guess we'll stay then. It's a great deal nicer than I thought; I thought it would be fearfully quiet; I was sure it would be awfully poky. I was sure we should be going round all the time with one of those dreadful old men that explain about the pictures and things. But we only had about a week of that, and now I'm enjoying myself. I know ever so many people, and they are all so charming. The society's extremely select. There are all kinds English, and Germans, and Italians. I think I like the English best. I like their style of conversation. But there are some lovely Americans. I never saw anything so hospitable. There's something or other every day. There's not much dancing; but I must say I never thought dancing was everything. I was always fond of conversation. I guess I shall have plenty at Mrs. Walker's her rooms are so small.' When they had passed the gate of the Pincian Gardens, Miss Miller began to wonder where Mr. Giovanelli might be. 'We had better go straight to that place in front,' she said, 'where you look at the view.' 'I certainly shall not help you to find him,' Winter-bourne declared. 'Then I shall find him without you,' said Miss Daisy. 'You certainly won't leave me!' cried Winterbourne. 20

She burst into her little laugh. 'Are you afraid you'll get lost or run over? But there's Giovanelli, leaning against that tree. He's staring at the women in the carriages: did you ever see anything so cool?' Winterbourne perceived at some distance a little man standing with folded arms, nursing his cane. He had a handsome face, an artfully-poised hat, a glass in one eye and a nosegay in his button-hole. Winterbourne looked at him a moment and then said, 'Do you mean to speak to that man?' 'Do I mean to speak to him? Why, you don't suppose I mean to communicate by signs?' 'Pray understand, then,' said Winterbourne, 'that I intend to remain with you.' Daisy stopped and looked at him, without a sign of troubled consciousness in her face; with nothing but the presence of her charming eyes and her happy dimples. 'Well, she's a cool one!' thought the young man. 'I don't like the way you say that,' said Daisy. 'It's too imperious.' 'I beg your pardon if I say it wrong. The main point is to give you an idea of my meaning.' The young girl looked at him more gravely, but with eyes that were prettier than ever. 'I' have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.' 'I think you have made a mistake,' said Winterbourne. 'You should sometimes listen to a gentleman the right one!' Daisy began to laugh again. 'I do nothing but listen to gentlemen!' she exclaimed. 'Tell me if Mr. Giovanelli is the right one?' The gentleman with the nosegay in his bosom had now perceived our two friends, and was approaching the young girl with obsequious rapidity. He

bowed to Winter-bourne as well as to the latter's companion; he had a brilliant smile, an intelligent eye; Winterbourne thought him not a bad-looking fellow. But he nevertheless said to Daisy 'No, he's not the right one.' Daisy evidently had a natural talent for performing introductions; she mentioned the name of each of her companions to the other. she strolled along with one of them on each side of her; Mr. Giovanelli, who spoke English very cleverly Winter-bourne afterwards learned that he had practised the idiom upon a great many American heiresses addressed her a great deal of very polite nonsense; he was extremely urbane, and the young American, who said nothing, reflected upon that profundity of Italian cleverness which enables people to appear more gracious in proportion as they are more acutely disappointed. Giovanelli, of course, had counted upon something more intimate; he had not bargained for a party of three. But he kept his temper in a manner which suggested far-stretching intentions. Winter-bourne flattered himself that he had taken his measure. 'He is not a gentleman,' said the young American 'he is only a clever imitation of one. He is a music-master, or a penny-a-liner, or a third-rate artist Damn his good looks!' Mr. Giovanelli had certainly a very pretty face; but Winter-bourne felt a superior indignation at his own lovely fellow-countrywoman's not knowing the difference between a spurious gentleman and a real one. Giovanelli chattered and jested and made himself wonderfully agreeable. It was time that if he was an imitation the imitation was very skilful. 'Nevertheless,' Winterbourne said to himself, 'a nice girl ought to know!' And then he came back to the question whether this was in fact a nice girl. Would a nice girl even allowing for her being a little American flirt make a rendezvous with a presumably low-lived foreigner? The rendezvous in this case, indeed, had been in broad daylight, and in the most crowded corner of Rome; but was it not impossible to regard the choice of these circumstances as a proof of extreme cynicism? singular though it may seem, Winterbourne was vexed that the young girl, in joining her amoroso, should not appear more impatient of his own company, and he was vexed because of his inclination. It was impossible to regard her as a perfectly well-conducted young lady; she was 21

wanting in a certain indispensable delicacy. It would therefore simplify matters greatly to be able to treat her as the object of one of those sentiments which are called by romancers 'lawless passions.' That she should seem to wish to get rid of him would help him to think more lightly of her, and to be able to think more lightly of her would make her much less perplexing. But Daisy, on this occasion, continued to present herself as an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence. she had been walking some quarter of an hour, attended by her two cavaliers, and responding in a tone of very childish gaiety, as it seemed to Winterbourne, to the pretty speeches of Mr. Giovanelli, when a carriage that had detached itself from the revolving train drew up beside the path. At the same moment Winterbourne perceived that his friend Mrs. Walker the lady whose house he had lately left was seated in the vehicle and was beckoning to him. Leaving Miss Miller's side, he hastened to obey her summons. Mrs. Walker was flushed; she wore an excited air. 'It is really too dreadful,' she said. 'That girl must not do this sort of thing. She must not walk here with you two men. Fifty people have noticed her.' Winterbourne raised his eyebrows. 'I think it's a pity to make too much fuss about it.' 'It's a pity to let the girl ruin herself!' 'She is very innocent,' said Winterbourne. 'She is very crazy!' cried Mrs. Walker. 'Did you ever see anything so imbecile as her mother? After you had all left me, just now, I could not sit still for thinking of it. It seemed too pitiful, not even to attempt to save her. I ordered the carriage and put on my bonnet, and came here as quickly as possible. Thank heaven I have found you!' 'What do you propose to do with us?' asked Winter-bourne, smiling.

'To ask her to get in, to drive her about here for half an hour, so that the world may see she is not running absolutely wild, and then to take her safely home.' 'I don't think it's a very happy thought,' said Winter-bourne; 'but you can try.' Mrs. Walker tried. The young man went in pursuit of Miss Miller, who had simply nodded and smiled at his interlocutrix in the carriage and had gone her way with her own companion. Daisy, on learning that Mrs. Walker wished to speak to her, retraced her steps with a perfect good grace, and with Mr. Giovanelli at her side. She declared that she was delighted to have a chance to present this gentleman to Mrs. Walker. She immediately achieved the introduction, and declared that she had never in her life seen anything so lovely as Mrs. Walker's carriage-rug. 'I am glad you admire it,' said this lady, smiling sweetly. 'Will you get in and let me put it over you?' 'Oh no, thank you,' said Daisy. 'I shall admire it much more as I see you driving round with it.' 'Do get in and drive with me,' said Mrs. Walker. 'That would be charming, but it's so enchanting just as I am!' and Daisy gave a brilliant glance at the gentlemen on either side of her. 'It may be enchanting, dear child, but it is not the custom here,' urged Mrs. Walker, leaning forward in her victoria with her hands devoutly clasped. 'Well it ought to be, then!' said Daisy. 'If I didn't walk I should expire.' 'You should walk with your mother, dear,' cried the lady from Geneva losing patience.

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'With my mother dear!' exclaimed the young girl. Winterbourne saw that she scented interference. 'My mother never walked ten steps in her life. And then you know,' she added with a laugh, 'I am more than five years old.' 'You are old enough to be more reasonable. You are old enough, dear Miss Miller, to be talked about.' Daisy looked at Mrs. Walker, smiling intensely. 'Talked about? What do you mean?' 'Come into my carriage and I will tell you.' Daisy turned her quickened glance again from one of the gentlemen beside her to the other. Mr. Giovanelli was bowing to and fro, rubbing down his gloves and laughing very agreeably; Winterbourne thought it a most unpleasant scene. 'I don't think I want to know what you mean,' said Daisy presently. 'I don't think I should like it.' Winterbourne wished that Mrs. Walker would tuck in her carriage-rug and drive away; but this lady did not enjoy being defied, as she afterwards told him. 'should you prefer being thought a very reckless girl?' she demanded. 'Gracious me!' exclaimed Daisy. She looked again at Mr. Giovanelli, then she turned to Winterbourne. There was a little pink flush in her cheek, she was tremendously pretty. 'Does Mr. Winterbourne think,' she asked slowly, smiling, throwing back her head and glancing at him from head to foot, 'that to save my reputation I ought to get into the carriage?' Winterbourne coloured; for an instant he hesitated greatly. It seemed so strange to hear her speak that way of her 'reputation.' But he himself, in fact, must speak in accordance with gallantry. The finest gallantly, here, was simply to tell her the truth; and the truth, for Winter-bourne, as the few indications I have been able to give have made him known to the reader, was that Daisy

Miller should take Mrs. Walker's advice. He looked at her exquisite prettiness; and then he said very gently, 'I think you should get into the carriage.' Daisy gave a violent laugh. 'I never heard anything so stiff! If this is improper, Mrs. Walker,' she pursued, 'then I am all improper, and you must give me up. Good-bye; I hope you'll have a lovely ride!' and, with Mr. Giovanelli, who made a triumphantly obsequious salute, she turned away. Mrs. Walker sat looking after her, and there were tears in Mrs. Walker's eyes. 'Get in here, sir,' she said to Winterbourne, indicating the place beside her. The young man answered that he felt bound to accompany Miss Miller; whereupon Mrs. Walker declared that if he refused her this favour she would never speak to him again. she was evidently in earnest Winterbourne overtook Daisy and her companion, and offering the young girl his hand, told her that Mrs. Walker had made an imperious claim upon his society. He expected that in answer she would say something rather free, something to commit herself still farther to that 'recklessness' from which Mrs. Walker had so charitably endeavoured to dissuade her. But she only shook his hand, hardly looking at him, while Mr. Gio-vanelli bade him farewell with a too emphatic flourish of the hat. Winterbourne was not in the best possible humour as he took his seat in Mrs. Walker's victoria. 'That was not clever of you,' he said candidly, while the vehicle mingled again with the throng of carriages. 'In such a case,' his companion answered, 'I don't wish to be clever, I wish to be earnest!' 'Well, your earnestness has only offended her and put her off.' 'It has happened very well,' said Mrs. Walker. 'If she is so perfectly determined to compromise herself, the sooner one knows it the better; one can act accordingly.' 'I suspect she meant no harm,' Winterbourne rejoined. 23

'So I thought a month ago. But she has been going too far.' 'What has she been doing?' 'Everything that is not done here. Flirting with any man she could pick up, sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o'clock at night. Her mother goes away when visitors come.' 'But her brother,' said Winterbourne, laughing, 'sits up till midnight.' 'He must be edified by what he sees. I'm told that at their hotel every one is talking about her, and that a smile goes round among the servants when a gentleman comes and asks for Miss Miller.' 'The servants be hanged!' said Winterbourne angrily. 'The poor girl's only fault,' he presently added, 'is that she is very uncultivated.' 'she is naturally indelicate,' Mrs. Walker declared. 'Take that example this morning. How long had you known her at Vevey?' 'A couple of days.' 'Fancy, then, her making it a personal matter that you should have left the place!' Winterbourne was silent for some moments, then he said, 'I suspect, Mrs. Walker, that you and I have lived too long at Geneva!' And he added a request that she should inform him with what particular design she had made him enter her carriage. 'I wished to beg you to cease your relations with Miss Miller not to flirt with her to give her no farther opportunity to expose herself to let her alone, in short.' 'I'm afraid I can't do that,' said Winterbourne. 'I like her extremely.' her.'

'All the more reason that you shouldn't help her to make a scandal.' 'There shall be nothing scandalous in my attentions to 'There certainly will be in the way she takes them. But I have said what I had on my conscience,' Mrs. Walker pursued. 'If you wish to rejoin the young lady I will put you down. Here, by the way, you have a chance.' The carriage was traversing that part of the Pincian Garden which overhangs the wall of Rome and overlooks the beautiful Villa Borghese. It is bordered by a large parapet, near which there are several seats. One of the seats, at a distance, was occupied by a gentleman and a lady, towards whom Mrs. Walker gave a toss of her head. At the same moment these persons rose and walked towards the parapet. Winterbourne had asked the coachman to stop; he now descended from the carriage. His companion looked at him a moment in silence; then, while he raised his hat, she drove majestically away. Winterbourne stood there; he had turned his eyes towards Daisy and her cavalier. They evidently saw no one; they were too deeply occupied with each other. When they reached the low garden wall they stood a moment looking off at the great flat-topped pine clusters of the Villa Borghese; then Giovanelli seated himself familiarly upon the broad ledge of the wall. The western sun in the opposite sky sent out a brilliant shaft through a couple of cloud-bars, whereupon Daisy's companion took her parasol out of her hands and opened it. She came a little nearer, and he held the parasol over her; then, still holding it, he let it rest upon her shoulder, so that both of their heads were hidden from Winter-bourne. This young man lingered a moment, then he began to walk. But he walked not towards the couple with the parasol; towards the residence of his aunt, Mrs. Cos-tello.

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they couldn't leave off. Mr. Giovanelli sings splendidly. But I guess they'll come before very long,' concluded Mrs. Miller hopefully. Chapter 4 He flattered himself on the following day that there was no smiling among the servants when he, at least, asked for Mrs. Miller at her hotel. This lady and her daughter, however, were not at home; and on the next day after, repeating his visit, Winterbourne again had the misfortune not to find them. Mrs. Walker's party took place on the evening of the third day, and in spite of the frigidity of his last interview with the hostess Winterbourne was among the guests. Mrs. Walker was one of those American ladies who, while residing abroad, make a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society; and she had on this occasion collected several specimens of her diversely-born fellow-mortals to serve, as it were, as textbooks. When Winterbourne arrived Daisy Miller was not there; but in a few moments he saw her mother come in alone, very shyly and ruefully. Mrs. Miller's hair, above her exposed-looking temples, was more frizzled than ever. As she approached Mrs. Walker Winterbourne also drew near. 'You see I've come all alone,' said poor Mrs. Miller. 'I'm so frightened; I don't know what to do; it's the first time I've ever been to a party alone especially in this country. I wanted to bring Randolph or Eugenio, or some one, but Daisy just pushed me off by myself. I ain't used to going round alone.' 'And does not your daughter intend to favour us with her society?' demanded Mrs. Walker, impressively. 'Well, Daisy's all dressed,' said Mrs. Miller, with that accent of the dispassionate, if not of the philosophic, historian, with which she always recorded the current incidents of her daughter's career. 'she got dressed on purpose before dinner. But she's got a friend of hers there; that gentleman the Italian that she wanted to bring. They've got going at the piano; it seems as if 'I'm sorry she should come in that way,' said Mrs. Walker. 'Well, I told her that there was no use in her getting dressed before dinner if she was going to wait three hours,' responded Daisy's mamma. 'I didn't see the use of her putting on such a dress as that to sit round with Mr. Gio-vanelli.' 'This is most horrible!' said Mrs. Walker, turning away and addressing herself to Winterbourne. 'Elle s'af-fiche. It's her revenge for my having ventured to remonstrate with her. When she comes I shall not speak to her.' Daisy came after eleven o'clock, but she was not, on such an occasion, a young lady to wait to be spoken to. She rustled forward in radiant loveliness, smiling and chattering, carrying a large bouquet, and attended by Mr. Giovanelli. Every one stopped talking, and turned and looked at her. She came straight to Mrs. Walker. 'I'm afraid you thought I never was coming, so I sent mother off to tell you. I wanted to make Mr. Giovanelli practise some things before he came; you know he sings beautifully, and I want you to ask him to sing. This is Mr. Gio-vanelli; you know I introduced him to you; he's got the most lovely voice, and he knows the most charming set of songs. I made him go over them this evening, on purpose; we had the greatest time at the hotel.' Of all this Daisy delivered herself with the sweetest, brightest audibleness looking now at her hostess and now round the room, while she gave a series of little pats, round her shoulders, to the edges of her dress, 'Is there any one I know?' she asked. 'I think every one knows you!' said Mrs. Walker, pregnantly, and she gave a very cursory greeting to Mr. Giovanelli. This gentleman bore himself gallantly. He smiled and bowed, and showed his white teeth, he curled his moustaches and rolled his eyes, and performed all the proper functions of a handsome Italian at an evening party. He sang, very prettily, half a dozen songs, 25

though Mrs. Walker afterwards declared that she had been quite unable to find out who asked him. It was apparently not Daisy who had given him his orders. Daisy sat at a distance from the piano, and though she had publicly, as it were, professed a high admiration for his singing, talked, not inaudibly, while it was going on. 'It's a pity these rooms are so small; we can't dance,' she said to Winterbourne, as if she had seen him five minutes before. 'I am not sorry we can't dance,' Winterbourne answered; 'I don't dance.' 'Of course you don't dance; you're too stiff,' said Miss Daisy. 'I hope you enjoyed your drive with Mrs. Walker.' 'No, I didn't enjoy it; I preferred walking with you.' 'We paired off, that was much better,' said Daisy. 'But did you ever hear anything so cool as Mrs. Walker's wanting me to get into her carriage and drop poor Mr. Giovanelli; and under the pretext that it was proper? People have different ideas! It would have been most unkind; he had been talking about that walk for ten days.' 'He should not have talked about it at all,' said Win-terbourne; 'he would never have proposed to a young lady of this country to walk about the streets with him.' 'About the streets?' cried Daisy, with her pretty stare. 'Where, then, would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio is not the streets either; and I, thank goodness, am not a young lady of this country. The young ladies of this country have a dreadfully poky time of it, so far as I can learn; I don't see why I should change my habits for them.' 'I am afraid your habits are those of a flirt,' said Win-terbourne, gravely.

'Of course they are,' she cried, giving him her little smiling stare again. 'I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not? But I suppose you will tell me now that I am not a nice girl.' 'You're a very nice girl, but I wish you would flirt with me, and me only,' said Winterbourne. 'Ah! thank you, thank you very much, you are the last man I should think of flirting with. As I have had the pleasure of informing you, you are too stiff.' 'You say that too often,' said Winterbourne. Daisy gave a delighted laugh. 'If I could have the sweet hope of making you angry, I would say it again.' 'Don't do that; when I am angry I'm stiffer than ever. But if you won't flirt with me, do cease at least to flirt with your friend at the piano; they don't understand that sort of thing here.' 'I thought they understood nothing else!' exclaimed Daisy. 'Not in young unmarried women.' 'It seems to me much more proper in young unmarried women than in old married ones,' Daisy declared. 'Well,' said Winterbourne, 'when you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom; it doesn't exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr. Giovanelli, and without your mother ' 'Gracious! poor mother!' interposed Daisy. 'Though you may be flirting, Mr. Giovanelli is not; he means something else.'

26

'He isn't preaching, at any rate,' said Daisy, with vivacity. 'And if you want very much to know, we are neither of us flirting; we are too good friends for that; we are very intimate friends.' 'Ah!' rejoined Winterbourne, 'if you are in love with each other it is another affair.' she had allowed him up to this point to talk so frankly that he had no expectation of shocking her by this ejaculation; but she immediately got up, blushing visibly, and leaving him to exclaim mentally that little American flirts were the queerest creatures in the world. 'Mr. Giovanelli, at least,' she said, giving her interlocutor a single glance, 'never says such very disagreeable things to me.' Winterbourne was bewildered; he stood staring. Mr. Giovanelli had finished singing; he left the piano and came over to Daisy. 'Won't you come into the other room and have some tea?' he asked, bending before her, with his decorative smile. Daisy turned to Winterbourne, beginning to smile again. He was still more perplexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear, though it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offences. 'It has never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea,' she said, with her little tormenting manner. 'I have offered you advice,' Winterbourne rejoined. 'I prefer weak tea!' cried Daisy, and she went off with the brilliant Giovanelli. she sat with him in the adjoining room, in the embrasure of the window, for the rest of the evening. There was an interesting performance at the piano, but neither of these young people gave heed to it. When Daisy came to take leave of Mrs. Walker, this lady conscientiously repaired the weakness of which she had been guilty at the moment of the young girl's arrival. She turned her back straight upon Miss Miller, and left her to

depart with what grace she might. Winterbourne was standing near the door; he saw it all. Daisy turned very pale and looked at her mother, but Mrs. Miller was humbly unconscious of any violation of the usual social forms. She appeared, indeed, to have felt an incongruous impulse to draw attention to her own striking observance of them. 'Good-night, Mrs. Walker,' she said; 'we've had a beautiful evening. You see if I let Daisy come to parties without me, I don't want her to go away without me.' Daisy turned away, looking with a pale grave face at the circle near the door; Winterbourne saw that, for the first moment, she was too much shocked and puzzled even for indignation. He on his side was greatly touched. 'That was very cruel,' he said to Mrs. Walker. 'She never enters my drawing-room again,' replied his hostess. Since Winterbourne was not to meet her in Mrs. Walker's drawing-room, he went as often as possible to Mrs. Miller's hotel. The ladies were rarely at home, but when he found them the devoted Giovanelli was always present. Very often the polished little Roman was in the drawing-room with Daisy alone, Mrs. Miller being apparently constantly of the opinion that discretion is the better part of surveillance. Winterbourne noted, at first with surprise, that Daisy on these occasions was never embarrassed or annoyed by his own entrance; but he very presently began to feel that she had no more surprises for him; the unexpected in her behaviour was the only thing to expect. She showed no displeasure at her tete-a-tete with Giovanelli being interrupted; she could chatter as freshly and freely with two gentlemen as with one; there was always in her conversation the same odd mixture of audacity and puerility. Winterbourne remarked to himself that, if she was seriously interested in Giovanelli, it was very singular that she should not take more trouble to preserve the sanctity of their interviews, and he liked her the more for her innocent-looking indifference and her apparently inexhaustible good-humour. He could hardly have said why, but she seemed to him a girl who would never 27

be jealous. At the risk of exciting a somewhat derisive smile on the reader's part, I may affirm that, with regard to the women who had hitherto interested him, it very often seemed to Winterbourne among the possibilities that, given certain contingencies, he should be afraid literally afraid of these ladies. He had a pleasant sense that he should never be afraid of Daisy Miller. It must be added that this sentiment was not altogether flattering to Daisy, it was part of his conviction, or rather of his apprehension, that she would prove a very light young person. But she was evidently very much interested in Gio-vanelli. she looked at him whenever he spoke; she was perpetually telling him to do this and to do that; she was constantly 'chaffing' and abusing him. she appeared completely to have forgotten that Winterbourne had said anything to displease her at Mrs. Walker's little party. One Sunday afternoon, having gone to St Peter's with his aunt, Winterbourne perceived Daisy strolling about the great church in company with the inevitable Giovanelli. Presently he pointed out the young girl and her cavalier to Mrs. Costello. This lady looked at them a moment through her eye-glass, and then she said: 'That's what makes you so pensive in these days, eh?' 'I had not the least idea I was pensive,' said the young man. 'You are very much preoccupied, you are thinking of something.' 'And what is it,' he asked, 'that you accuse me of thinking of?' 'Of that young lady's Miss Baker's, Miss Chandler's what's her name? Miss Miller's intrigue with that little barber's block.' 'Do you call it an intrigue,' Winterbourne asked 'an affair that goes on with such peculiar publicity?' 'That's their folly,' said Mrs. Costello, 'it's not their merit.'

'No,' rejoined Winterbourne, with something of that pensiveness to which his aunt had alluded. 'I don't believe that there is anything to be called an intrigue.' 'I have heard a dozen people speak of it; they say she is quite carried away by him.' 'They are certainly very intimate,' said Winterbourne. Mrs. Costello inspected the young couple again with her optical instrument. 'He is very handsome. One easily sees how it is. she thinks him the most elegant man in the world, the finest gentleman. she has never seen anything like him; he is better even than the courier. It was the courier, probably, who introduced him, and if he succeeds in marrying the young lady, the courier will come in for a magnificent commission.' 'I don't believe she thinks of marrying him,' said Winterbourne, 'and I don't believe he hopes to marry her.' 'You may be very sure she thinks of nothing. She goes on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more vulgar. And at the same time,' added Mrs. Costello, 'depend upon it that she may tell you any moment that she is "engaged." ' 'I think that is more than Giovanelli expects,' said Winterbourne. 'Who is Giovanelli?' 'The little Italian. I have asked questions about him and learned something. He is apparently a perfectly respectable little man. I believe he is in a small way a cava-liere avvocato. But he doesn't move in what are called the first circles. I think it is really not absolutely impossible that the courier introduced him. He is evidently immensely charmed with Miss Miller. If she thinks him the finest gentleman in the world, he, on his side, has never found himself in personal contact with such splendour, such opulence, such expensiveness, as this young 28

lady's. And then she must seem to him wonderfully pretty and interesting. I rather doubt whether he dreams of marrying her. That must appear to him too impossible a piece of luck. He has nothing but his handsome face to offer, and there is a substantial Mr. Miller in that mysterious land of dollars. Giovanelli knows that he hasn't a title to offer. If he were only a count or a marchese! He must wonder at his luck at the way they have taken him up.' 'He accounts for it by his handsome face, and thinks Miss Miller a young lady qui se passe ses fantaisies!' said Mrs. Costello. 'It is very true,' Winterbourne pursued, 'that Daisy and her mamma have not yet risen to that stage of what shall I call it? Of culture, at which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins. I believe that they are intellectually incapable of that conception.' 'Ah! but the cavaliere can't believe it,' said Mrs. Costello. Of the observation excited by Daisy's 'intrigue,' Win-terbourne gathered that day at st Peter's sufficient evidence. A dozen of the American colonists in Rome came to talk with Mrs. Costello, who sat on a little portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters. The vesper-service was going forward in splendid chants and organ-tones in the adjacent choir, and meanwhile, between Mrs. Costello and her friends, there was a great deal said about poor little Miss Miller's going really 'too far.' Winterbourne was not pleased with what he heard; but when, coming out upon the great steps of the church, he saw Daisy, who had emerged before him, get into an open cab with her accomplice and roll away through the cynical streets of Rome, he could not deny to himself that she was going very far indeed. He felt very sorry for her not exactly that he believed that she had completely lost her head, but because it was painful to hear so much that was pretty and undefended and natural assigned to a vulgar place among the categories of disorder. He made an attempt after this to give a hint to Mrs. Miller. He met one day in the Corso a friend a tourist like

himself who had just come out of the Doria Palace, where he had been walking through the beautiful gallery. His friend talked for a moment about the superb portrait of Innocent X. by Velasquez, which hangs in one of the cabinets of the palace, and then said, 'And in the same cabinet, by the way, I had the pleasure of contemplating a picture of a different kind that pretty American girl whom you pointed out to me last week.' In answer to Winterbourne's inquiries, his friend narrated that the pretty American girl prettier than ever was seated with a Companion in the secluded nook in which the great papal portrait is enshrined. 'Who was her companion?' asked Winterbourne. 'A little Italian with a bouquet in his button-hole. The girl is delightfully pretty, but I thought I understood from you the other day that she was a young lady du meilleur monde.' 'So she is!' answered Winterbourne; and having assured himself that his informant had seen Daisy and her companion but five minutes before, he jumped into a cab and went to call on Mrs. Miller. She was at home; but she apologised to him for receiving him in Daisy's absence. 'She's gone out somewhere with Mr. Giovanelli,' said Mrs. Miller. 'She's always going round with Mr. Gio-vanelli.' 'I have noticed that they are very intimate,' Winter-bourne observed. 'Oh! it seems as if they couldn't live without each other!' said Mrs. Miller. 'Well, he's a real gentleman, anyhow. I keep telling Daisy she's engaged!' 'And what does Daisy say?' 'Oh, she says she isn't engaged. But she might as well be!' this impartial parent resumed. 'She goes on as if she was. But I've made Mr. Giovanelli promise to tell me, if she doesn't. I should want to write to Mr Miller about it shouldn't you?' 29

Winterbourne replied that he certainly should; and the state of mind of Daisy's mamma struck him as so unprecedented in the annals of parental vigilance that he gave up as utterly irrelevant the attempt in place her upon her guard. After this Daisy was never at home, and Winter-bourne ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintance, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too far. They ceased to invite her, and they intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned towards her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence or from her being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class. It must be admitted that holding oneself to a belief in Daisy's 'innocence' came to seem to Winterbourne more and more a matter of finespun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady, he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal. From either view of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late. She was 'carried away' by Mr. Giovanelli. A few days after his brief interview with her mother, he encountered her in that beautiful abode of flowering desolation known as the Palace of the Caesars. The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender verdure. Daisy was

strolling along the top of one of those great mounds of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental inscriptions. It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as just then. He stood looking off at the enchanting harmony of line and colour that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odours, and feeling the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place reaffirm themselves in mysterious interfusion. It seemed to him also that Daisy had never looked so pretty, but this had been an observation of his whenever he met her. Giovanelli was at her side, and Giovanelli too wore an aspect of even unwonted brilliancy. 'Well,' said Daisy, 'I should think you would be lonesome!' 'Lonesome?' asked Winterbourne. 'You are always going round by yourself. Can't you get any one to walk with you?' 'I am not so fortunate,' said Winterbourne, 'as your companion.' Giovanelli, from the first, had treated Winterbourne with distinguished politeness; he listened with a deferential air to his remarks; he laughed, punctiliously, at his pleasantries; he seemed disposed to testify to his belief that Winterbourne was a superior young man. He carried himself in no degree like a jealous wooer; he had obviously a great deal of tact; he had no objection to your expecting a little humility of him. It even seemed to Winter-bourne at times that Giovanelli would find a certain mental relief in being able to have a private understanding with him to say to him, as an intelligent man, that, bless you, he knew how extraordinary was this young lady, and didn't flatter himself with delusive or at least too delusive hopes of matrimony and dollars. On this occasion he strolled away from his companion to pluck a sprig of almond-blossom, which he carefully arranged in his button-hole. 'I know why you say that,' said Daisy, watching Gio-vanelli. 'Because you think I go round too much with him!' And she nodded at her attendant. 30

'Every one thinks so if you care to know,' said Winterbourne. 'Of course I care to know!' Daisy exclaimed seriously. 'But I don't believe it. They are only pretending to be shocked. They don't really care a straw what I do. Besides, I don't go round so much.' 'I think you will find they do care. They will show it disagreeably.' Daisy looked at him a moment. 'How disagreeably?' 'Haven't you noticed anything?' Winterbourne asked. 'I have noticed you. But I noticed you were as stiff as an umbrella the first time I saw you.' 'You will find I am not so stiff as several others,' said Winterbourne, smiling. 'How shall I find it?' 'By going to see the others.' 'What will they do to me?' 'They will give you the cold shoulder. Do you know what that means?' Daisy was looking at him intently; she began to colour. 'Do you mean as Mrs. Walker did the other night.'' 'Exactly!' said Winterbourne. She looked away at Giovanelli, who was decorating himself with his almond-blossom. Then looking back at Winterbourne 'I shouldn't think you would let people be so unkind!' she said. 'How can I help it?' he asked. 'I should think you would say something.' 'I do say something,' and he paused a moment 'I say that your mother tells me that she believes you are engaged.' not!'

'Well, she does,' said Daisy, very simply. Winterbourne began to laugh. 'And does Randolph believe it.' he asked. 'I guess Randolph doesn't believe anything,' said Daisy. Randolph's scepticism excited Winterbourne to further hilarity, and he observed that Giovanelli was coming back to them. Daisy, observing it too, addressed herself again to her countryman. 'since you have mentioned it,' she said, 'I am engaged.'... Winterbourne looked at her; he had stopped laughing. 'You don't believe it!' she added. He was silent a moment; and then, 'Yes, I believe it!' he said. 'Oh no, you don't,' she answered 'Well, then I am The young girl and her cicerone were on their way to the gate of the enclosure, so that Winterbourne, who had but lately entered, presently took leave of them. A week afterwards he went to dine at a beautiful villa on the Caelian Hill, and, on arriving, dismissed his hired vehicle. The evening was charming, and he promised himself the satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past the vaguely-lighted monuments of the Forum. There was a waning moon in the sky, and her radiance was not brilliant, but she was veiled in a thin cloud-curtain which seemed to diffuse and equalise it. When, on his return from the villa (it was eleven o'clock) Winterbourne approached the dusky circle of the Colosseum, it occurred to him, as a lover of the picturesque, that the interior, in the pale moonshine, would be well worm a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches, near which, as he observed, an open carriage one of the little Roman street cabs was stationed. Then he passed in among the cavernous shadows of the great structure, and emerged upon the clear and silent arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One-half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade; the other was sleeping in the luminous dusk. As he stood there he 31

began to murmur Byron's famous lines, out of 'Manfred;' but before he had finished his quotation he remembered that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors. The historic atmosphere was there, certainly, but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma. Winterbourne walked to the middle of the arena, to take a more general glance, intending thereafter to make a hasty retreat. The great cross in the centre was covered with shadow; it was only as he drew near it that he made it out distinctly. Then he saw that two persons were stationed upon the low steps which formed its base. One of these was a woman, seated; her companion was standing in front of her. Presently the sound of the woman's voice came to him distinctly in the warm night air. 'Well, he looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers may have looked at the Christian martyrs!' These were the words he heard, in the familiar accent of Miss Daisy Miller. 'Let us hope he is not very hungry,' responded the ingenious Giovanelli. 'He will have to take me first; you will serve for dessert!' Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror; and, it must be added, with a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed upon the ambiguity of Daisy's behaviour and the riddle had become easy to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect. He stood there looking at her looking at her companion, and not reflecting that though he saw them vaguely, he himself must have been more brightly visible. He felt angry with himself that he had bothered so much about the right way of regarding Miss Daisy Miller. Then, as he was going to advance again, he checked himself; not from the fear that he was doing her injustice, but from a sense of the danger of appearing unbecomingly exhilarated by this sudden revulsion from cautious criticism. He turned away towards the entrance of the place; but as he did so he heard Daisy speak again.

'Why, it was Mr. Winterbourne! He saw me and he cuts me!' What a clever little reprobate she was, and how smartly she played an injured innocence! But he wouldn't cut her. Winterbourne came forward again, and went towards the great cross. Daisy had got up; Giovanelli lifted his hat Winterbourne had now begun to think simply of the craziness, from a sanitary point of view, of a delicate young girl lounging away the evening in this nest of malaria. What if she were a clever little reprobate? that was no reason for her dying of the pernicosa. 'How long have you been here?' he asked, almost brutally. Daisy, lovely in the flattering moonlight, looked at him a moment. Then 'All the evening,' she answered gently... 'I never saw anything so pretty.' 'I am afraid,' said Winterbourne, 'that you will not think Roman fever very pretty. This is the way people catch it I wonder,' he added, turning to Giovanelli, 'that you, a native Roman, should countenance such a terrible indiscretion.' 'Ah,' said the handsome native, 'for myself, I am not afraid.' 'Neither am I for you! I am speaking for this young lady.' Giovanelli lifted his well-shaped eyebrows and showed his brilliant teeth. But he took Winterbourne's rebuke with docility. 'I told the signorina it was a grave indiscretion; but when was the Signorina ever prudent?' 'I never was sick, and I don't mean to be!' the si-gnorina declared. 'I don't look like much, but I'm healthy! I was bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight; I shouldn't have wanted to go home without that; and we have had the most beautiful time, haven't we, Mr. Gio-vanelli? If there has been any danger, Eugenio can give me some pills. He has got some splendid pills.'

32

'I should advise you,' said Winterbourne, 'to drive home as fast as possible and take one!' 'What you say is very wise,' Giovanelli rejoined. 'I will go and make sure the carriage is at hand.' And he went forward rapidly. Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He kept looking at her, she seemed not in the least embarrassed. Winter-bourne said nothing, Daisy chattered about the beauty of the place. 'Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight!' she exclaimed. 'That's one good thing.' Then, noticing Winterbourne's silence, she asked him why he didn't speak. He made no answer; he only began to laugh. They passed under one of the dark archways; Gio-vanelli was in front with the carriage. Here Daisy stopped a moment, looking at the young American. 'Did you believe I was engaged the other day?' she asked. 'It doesn't matter what I believed the other day,' said Winterbourne, still laughing. 'Well, what do you believe now?' 'I believe that it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not!' He felt the young girl's pretty eyes fixed upon him through the thick gloom of the archway, she was apparently going to answer. But Giovanelli hurried her forward. 'Quick, quick,' he said; 'if we get in by midnight we are quite safe.' Daisy took her seat in the carriage, and the fortunate Italian placed himself beside her. 'Don't forget Eugenio's pills!' said Winterbourne, as he lifted his hat. 'I don't care,' said Daisy, in a little strange tone, 'whether I have Roman fever or not!' Upon this the cab driver cracked his whip, and they rolled away over the desultory patches of the antique pavement.

Winterbourne to do him justice, as it were mentioned to no one that he had encountered Miss Miller, at midnight, in the Colosseum with a gentleman; but nevertheless, a couple of days later, the fact of her having been there under these circumstances was known to every member of the little American circle, and commented accordingly. Winterbourne reflected that they had of course known it at the hotel, and that, after Daisy's return, there had been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the cab-driver. But the young man was conscious, at the same moment, that it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him that the little American flirt should be 'talked about' by low-minded menials. These people, a day or two later, had serious information to give: the little American flirt was alarmingly ill. Winterbourne, when the rumour came to him, immediately went to the hotel for more news. He found that two or three charitable friends had preceded him, and that they were being entertained in Mrs. Miller's salon by Randolph. 'It's going round at night,' said Randolph 'that's what made her sick. She's always going round at night. I shouldn't think she'd want to it's so plaguey dark. You can't see anything here at night, except when there's a moon. In America there's always a moon!' Mrs. Miller was invisible: she was now, at least, giving her daughter the advantage of her society. It was evident that Daisy was dangerously ill. Winterbourne went often to ask for news of her, and once he saw Mrs. Miller who, though deeply alarmed, was rather to his surprise perfectly composed, and, as it appeared, a most efficient and judicious nurse. She talked a good deal about Dr Davis, but Winterbourne paid her the compliment of saying to himself that she was not, after all, such a monstrous goose. 'Daisy spoke of you the other day,' she said to him. 'Half the time she doesn't know what she's saying, but that time I think she did. She gave me a message; she told me to tell you. She told me to tell you that she never was engaged to that handsome Italian. I am sure I am very glad; Mr. Giovanelli hasn't been near us since she was taken ill. I thought he was so much of a gentleman; but I don't call that very 33

polite! A lady told me that he was afraid I was angry with him for taking Daisy round at night. Well, so I am; but I suppose he knows I'm a lady. I would scorn to scold him. Any way, she says she's not engaged. I don't know why she wanted you to know; but she said to me three times "Mind you tell Mr. Winterbourne." And then she told me to ask if you remembered the time you went to that castle, in Switzerland. But I said I wouldn't give any such messages as that. Only, if she is not engaged, I'm sure I'm glad to know it.' But, as Winterbourne had said, it mattered very little. A week after this the poor girl died; it had been a terrible case of the fever. Daisy's grave was in the little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring flowers. Winter-bourne stood there beside it, with a number of other mourners; a number larger than the scandal excited by the young lady's career would have led you to expect. Near him stood Giovanelli, who came nearer still before Win-terbourne turned away. Giovanelli was very pale; on this occasion he had no flower in his button hole, he seemed to wish to say something. At last he said, 'she was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable.' And then he added in a moment, 'And she was the most innocent.' Winterbourne looked at him, and presently repeated his words, 'And the most innocent?' 'The most innocent!' Winterbourne felt sore and angry. 'Why the devil, 'he asked, 'did you take her to that fatal place?' Mr. Giovanelli's urbanity was apparently imperturbable. He looked on the ground a moment, and then he said, 'For myself, I had no fear; and she wanted to go.' 'That was no reason!' Winterbourne declared.

The subtle Roman again dropped his eyes. 'If she had lived, I should have got nothing. she would never have married me, I am sure.' 'she would never have married you?' 'For a moment I hoped so. But no. I am sure.'

34

Henry James - THE TURN OF THE SCREW

(1897) The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasionan appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglasnot immediately, but later in the eveninga reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind. "I quite agreein regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it wasthat its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children?" "We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them."

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it." "For sheer terror?" I remember asking. He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadfuldreadfulness!" "Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women. He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain." "Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin." He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send to town." There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written. It's in a locked drawerit has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it." It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound thisappeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early hearing; then I

asked him if the experience in question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thank God, no!" "And is the record yours? You took the thing down?" "Nothing but the impression. I took that HERE"he tapped his heart. "I've never lost it." "Then your manuscript?" "Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died." They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irritation. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister's governess," he quietly said. "She was the most agreeable woman I've ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer. I was much there that yearit was a beautiful one; and we had, in her offhours, some strolls and talks in the gardentalks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don't grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn't simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn't. I was sure; I could see. You'll easily judge why when you hear." "Because the thing had been such a scare?" He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "YOU will." I fixed him, too. "I see. She was in love."

He laughed for the first time. "You ARE acute. Yes, she was in love. That is, she had been. That came outshe couldn't tell her story without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it. I remember the time and the placethe corner of the lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn't a scene for a shudder; but oh!" He quitted the fire and dropped back into his chair. "You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired. "Probably not till the second post." "Well then; after dinner" "You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody going?" It was almost the tone of hope. "Everybody will stay!" "I will"and "I will!" cried the ladies whose departure had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. "Who was it she was in love with?" "The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply. "Oh, I can't wait for the story!" "The story WON'T tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way." "More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand." "Won't YOU tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired. He sprang to his feet again. "Yestomorrow. Now I must go to bed. Good night." And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the

stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she was in love with, I know who HE was." "She was ten years older," said her husband. "Raison de plusat that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence." "Forty years!" Griffin put in. "With this outbreak at last." "The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and "candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed. I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite ofor perhaps just on account ofthe eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death when it was in sightcommitted to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank

heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to a common thrill. The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposingthis prospective patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagantsaw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her immediately to proceed. He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the strangest

of chances for a man in his positiona lone man without the right sort of experience or a grain of patiencevery heavily on his hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there, from the first, with the best people he could find to look after them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his own affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their little establishmentbut below stairs onlyan excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority. She would also have, in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a term at school young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done?and who, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back from one day to the other. There had been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifullyshe was a most respectable persontill her death, the great awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as she could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.

So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. "And what did the former governess die of?of so much respectability?" Our friend's answer was prompt. "That will come out. I don't anticipate." "Excuse meI thought that was just what you ARE doing." "In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to learn if the office brought with it" "Necessary danger to life?" Douglas completed my thought. "She did wish to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned. Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little company, of really great loneliness. She hesitatedtook a couple of days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded her modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she engaged." And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved me to throw in "The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it." He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us. "She saw him only twice." "Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion." A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. "It WAS the beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't succumbed. He told her frankly all his difficultythat for several applicants the conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It sounded

dullit sounded strange; and all the more so because of his main condition." "Which was?" "That she should never trouble himbut never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded." "But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked. "She never saw him again." "Oh!" said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again, was the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he opened the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady put another question. "What is your title?" "I haven't one." "Oh, I have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author's hand.

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad daysfound myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome, my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue, encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so melancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a most pleasant impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a different affair from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be something beyond his promise. I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I slept little that

nightI was too much excited; and this astonished me, too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with which I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see myself from head to foot, all struck melike the extraordinary charm of my small chargeas so many things thrown in. It was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook might have made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being so glad to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so glad stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesome womanas to be positively on her guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy. But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without, but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, "form" little Flora would

too evidently be the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained, just this last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this timiditywhich the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine usI feel quite sure she would presently like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me, between them, over bread and milk. There were naturally things that in Flora's presence could pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions. "And the little boydoes he look like her? Is he too so very remarkable?" One wouldn't flatter a child. "Oh, miss, MOST remarkable. If you think well of this one!"and she stood there with a plate in her hand, beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us. "Yes; if I do?" "You WILL be carried away by the little gentleman!" "Well, that, I think, is what I came forto be carried away. I'm afraid, however," I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!"

I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley Street?" "In Harley Street." "Well, miss, you're not the firstand you won't be the last." "Oh, I've no pretension," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?" "Not tomorrowFriday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage." I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of comforting pledgenever falsified, thank heaven!that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was glad I was there! What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this agitation, certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming

immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all color out of storybooks and fairytales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!

II This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen apprehension. The postbag, that eveningit came latecontained a letter for me, which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found to be composed but of a few words

enclosing another, addressed to himself, with a seal still unbroken. "This, I recognize, is from the headmaster, and the headmaster's an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you don't report. Not a word. I'm off!" I broke the seal with a great effortso great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took the unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just before going to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me a second sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next day, I was full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me that I determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose. "What does it mean? The child's dismissed his school." She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. "But aren't they all?" "Sent homeyes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at all." Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. "They won't take him?" "They absolutely decline." At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them fill with good tears. "What has he done?" I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letterwhich, however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put her hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. "Such things are not for me, miss." My counselor couldn't read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. "Is he really BAD?"

The tears were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?" "They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning." Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what this meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went on: "That he's an injury to the others." At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed up. "Master Miles! HIM an injury?" There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea. I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot, sarcastically. "To his poor little innocent mates!" "It's too dreadful," cried Mrs. Grose, "to say such cruel things! Why, he's scarce ten years old." "Yes, yes; it would be incredible." She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, miss, first. THEN believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. "You might as well believe it of the little lady. Bless her," she added the next moment"LOOK at her!" I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had established in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil, and a copy of nice "round o's," now presented herself to view at the open door. She expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment from disagreeable duties,

looking to me, however, with a great childish light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she had conceived for my person, which had rendered necessary that she should follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force of Mrs. Grose's comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered her with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement. Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy she rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the staircase; we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her, holding her there with a hand on her arm. "I take what you said to me at noon as a declaration that YOU'VE never known him to be bad." She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very honestly, adopted an attitude. "Oh, never known himI don't pretend THAT!" I was upset again. "Then you HAVE known him?"

She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh. "Are you afraid he'll corrupt YOU?" She put the question with such a fine bold humor that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match her own, I gave way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule. But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in another place. "What was the lady who was here before?" "The last governess? She was also young and prettyalmost as young and almost as pretty, miss, even as you." "Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!" I recollect throwing off. "He seems to like us young and pretty!" "Oh, he DID," Mrs. Grose assented: "it was the way he liked everyone!" She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. "I mean that's HIS waythe master's." I was struck. "But of whom did you speak first?" She looked blank, but she colored. "Why, of HIM."

"Yes indeed, miss, thank God!" "Of the master?" On reflection I accepted this. "You mean that a boy who never is?" "Of who else?" "Is no boy for ME!" I held her tighter. "You like them with the spirit to be naughty?" Then, keeping pace with her answer, "So do I!" I eagerly brought out. "But not to the degree to contaminate" "To contaminate?"my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. "To corrupt." There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I merely asked what I wanted to know. "Did SHE see anything in the boy ?" "That wasn't right? She never told me." I had a scruple, but I overcame it. "Was she carefulparticular?"

Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. "About some things yes." "But not about all?" Again she considered. "Well, missshe's gone. I won't tell tales." "I quite understand your feeling," I hastened to reply; but I thought it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did she die here?" "Noshe went off." I don't know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose's that struck me as ambiguous. "Went off to die?" Mrs. Grose looked straight out of the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what young persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. "She was taken ill, you mean, and went home?" "She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it, at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday, to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We had then a young womana nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good girl and clever; and SHE took the children altogether for the interval. But our young lady never came back, and at the very moment I was expecting her I heard from the master that she was dead." I turned this over. "But of what?" "He never told me! But please, miss," said Mrs. Grose, "I must get to my work." III Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem. We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to me should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment, seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any childhis indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely bewildered so far, that is, as I was not outragedby the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque. She promptly understood me. "You mean the cruel charge?" "It doesn't live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!"

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She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. "I assure you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she immediately added. "In answer to the letter?" I had made up my mind. "Nothing." "And to his uncle?" I was incisive. "Nothing." "And to the boy himself?" I was wonderful. "Nothing." She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. "Then I'll stand by you. We'll see it out." "We'll see it out!" I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a vow. She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her detached hand. "Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom" "To kiss me? No!" I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant. This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the far and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on a great wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal with a boy whose education for the world was all on the point of beginning. I am unable even

to remember at this day what proposal I framed for the end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies. Lessons with me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my own. I learned somethingat first, certainlythat had not been one of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was considerationand consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trapnot designed, but deepto my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little troublethey were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate but even this with a dim disconnectednessas to how the rough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillnessthat hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast. In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest, gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils, teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all when, as the light fadedor rather, I should say, the day lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old treesI could take a turn into the

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grounds and enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasureif he ever thought of it!to the person to whose pressure I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and directly asked of me, and that I COULD, after all, do it proved even a greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign. It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than thatI only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to meby which I mean the face waswhen, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spotand with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed forwas the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of a pairsquare, incongruous, crenelated structuresthat were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in

a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place. It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me wasa few more seconds assured meas little anyone else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley StreetI had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact of its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took inwhat I did take inall the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame. That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and that he was not. We were

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confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants more became intense. The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the better, that I could see, in there having been in the houseand for how long, above all?a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this visitant, at all events and there was a touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hatseemed to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of the angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly changed his placepassed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned away; that was all I knew.

IV It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Blya mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? I can't say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singular part of it, in factsingular as the rest had beenwas the part I became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes back to me in the general train the impression, as I received it on my return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of my friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came to me straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot, accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for a reason that I couldn't then have phrased, achieved an inward resolutionoffered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the plea of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as soon as possible to my room.

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Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer affair enough. There were hours, from day to dayor at least there were moments, snatched even from clear dutieswhen I had to shut myself up to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the truth I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I could arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been so inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned. It took little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiry and without exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I had suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had not been practiced upon by the servants nor made the object of any "game." Of whatever it was that I knew, nothing was known around me. There was but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross. That was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to say to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some unscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses, had made his way in unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was that we should surely see no more of him. This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could throw myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was a constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming that presented itself as daily beauty? It

was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of the schoolroom. I don't mean by this, of course, that we studied only fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise the sort of interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that except by saying that instead of growing used to themand it's a marvel for a governess: I call the sisterhood to witness!I made constant fresh discoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which these discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy's conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted, to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the truth to say thatwithout a wordhe himself had cleared it up. He had made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean school world, and he had paid a price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majoritywhich could include even stupid, sordid headmastersturn infallibly to the vindictive. Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it never made Miles a muff) that kept themhow shall I express it?almost impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs of the anecdote, who hadmorally, at any ratenothing to whack! I remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a second suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really been chastised. If he had been wicked he would have "caught" it, and I should have caught it by the reboundI should have found the trace. I found nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, was quite too much disgusted to allude to them.

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Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But with my children, what things in the world mattered? That was the question I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by their loveliness. There was a Sundayto get onwhen it rained with such force and for so many hours that there could be no procession to church; in consequence of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that, should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the late service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which, through the park and by the good road to the village, would be a matter of twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall, I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and that had received themwith a publicity perhaps not edifyingwhile I sat with the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in that cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the "grown-up" dining room. The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them. The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chair near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight in. One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous; it was all there. The person looking straight in was the person who had already appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won't say greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same he was the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the

glass, yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how intense the former had been. He remained but a few secondslong enough to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however, happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face, through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else. The flash of this knowledgefor it was knowledge in the midst of dreadproduced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stood there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of the door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon the drive, and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing nowmy visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real relief of this; but I took in the whole sceneI gave him time to reappear. I call it time, but how long was it? I can't speak to the purpose today of the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have left me: they couldn't have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last. The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs.

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Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just MY lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take space to mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared.

"Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?" "Through this window? Dreadful!" "Well," I said, "I've been frightened." Mrs. Grose's eyes expressed plainly that SHE had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her place not to be ready to share with me any marked inconvenience. Oh, it was quite settled that she MUST share! "Just what you saw from the dining room a minute ago was the effect of that. What I sawjust beforewas much worse." Her hand tightened. "What was it?" "An extraordinary man. Looking in."

V Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she loomed again into view. "What in the name of goodness is the matter?" She was now flushed and out of breath. I said nothing till she came quite near. "With me?" I must have made a wonderful face. "Do I show it?" "You're as white as a sheet. You look awful." I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My need to respect the bloom of Mrs. Grose's had dropped, without a rustle, from my shoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard a little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind of support in the shy heave of her surprise. "You came for me for church, of course, but I can't go." "Has anything happened?"

"What extraordinary man?" "I haven't the least idea." Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. "Then where is he gone?" "I know still less." "Have you seen him before?" "Yesonce. On the old tower." She could only look at me harder. "Do you mean he's a stranger?" "Oh, very much!" "Yet you didn't tell me?" "Nofor reasons. But now that you've guessed"

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Mrs. Grose's round eyes encountered this charge. "Ah, I haven't guessed!" she said very simply. "How can I if YOU don't imagine?" "I don't in the very least." "You've seen him nowhere but on the tower?" "And on this spot just now." Mrs. Grose looked round again. "What was he doing on the tower?" "Only standing there and looking down at me." She thought a minute. "Was he a gentleman?" I found I had no need to think. "No." She gazed in deeper wonder. "No." "Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?"

"It won't do THEM! I nodded at the house. "The children?" "I can't leave them now." "You're afraid?" I spoke boldly. "I'm afraid of HIM." Mrs. Grose's large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the faraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that was as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought instantly of this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to be connected with the desire she presently showed to know more. "When was iton the tower?" "About the middle of the month. At this same hour."

"Nobodynobody. I didn't tell you, but I made sure." "Almost at dark," said Mrs. Grose. She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It only went indeed a little way. "But if he isn't a gentleman" "What IS he? He's a horror." "A horror?" "He'sGod help me if I know WHAT he is!" "He only peeps?" Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier distance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt inconsequence. "It's time we should be at church." "Oh, I'm not fit for church!" Slowly she faced me again. "Do you fear for them?" "Won't it do you good?" "I hope it will be confined to that!" She had now let go my hand; she turned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: "Go to church. Goodbye. I must watch." "Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you." "Then how did he get in?" "And how did he get out?" I laughed. "I had no opportunity to ask him! This evening, you see," I pursued, "he has not been able to get in."

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We met in another long look. "Don't YOU?" Instead of answering she came nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to the glass. "You see how he could see," I meanwhile went on. She didn't move. "How long was he here?" "Till I came out. I came to meet him." Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face. "I couldn't have come out." "Neither could I!" I laughed again. "But I did come. I have my duty." "So have I mine," she replied; after which she added: "What is he like?" "I've been dying to tell you. But he's like nobody." "Nobody?" she echoed. "He has no hat." Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with a deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke to stroke. "He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strangeawfully; but I only know clearly that they're rather small and very fixed. His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor." "An actor!" It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs. Grose at that moment.

"I've never seen one, but so I suppose them. He's tall, active, erect," I continued, "but neverno, never!a gentleman." My companion's face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started and her mild mouth gaped. "A gentleman?" she gasped, confounded, stupefied: "a gentleman HE?" "You know him then?" She visibly tried to hold herself. "But he IS handsome?" I saw the way to help her. "Remarkably!" "And dressed?" "In somebody's clothes." "They're smart, but they're not his own." She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: "They're the master's!" I caught it up. "You DO know him?" She faltered but a second. "Quint!" she cried. "Quint?" "Peter Quinthis own man, his valet, when he was here!" "When the master was?" Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. "He never wore his hat, but he did wearwell, there were waistcoats missed. They were both herelast year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone." I followed, but halting a little. "Alone?" "Alone with US." Then, as from a deeper depth, "In charge," she added.

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"And what became of him?" She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. "He went, too," she brought out at last. "Went where?" Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. "God knows where! He died." "Died?" I almost shrieked. She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter the wonder of it. "Yes. Mr. Quint is dead."

of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the governess's plight; yet she accepted without directly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by showing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expression of the sense of my more than questionable privilege, of which the very breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities. What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that, in spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so compromising a contract. I was queer company enoughquite as queer as the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune, COULD steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I could take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me. Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to me before we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of what I had seen. "He was looking for someone else, you saysomeone who was not you?" "He was looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed me. "THAT'S whom he was looking for." "But how do you know?" "I know, I know, I know!" My exaltation grew. "And YOU know, my dear!"

VI It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we couldmy dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my companion's knowledge, hencefortha knowledge half consternation and half compassionof that liability. There had been, this evening, after the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostratethere had been, for either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow

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She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if HE should see him?" "Little Miles? That's what he wants!" She looked immensely scared again. "The child?" "Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to THEM." That he might was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim and guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last things I said that night to Mrs. Grose. "It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned" She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. "His having been here and the time they were with him?" "The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history, in any way." "Oh, the little lady doesn't remember. She never heard or knew." "The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity. "Perhaps not. But Miles would rememberMiles would know." "Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.

I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid." I continued to think. "It IS rather odd." "That he has never spoken of him?" "Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were 'great friends'?" "Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint's own fancy. To play with him, I meanto spoil him." She paused a moment; then she added: "Quint was much too free." This gave me, straight from my vision of his faceSUCH a face!a sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?" "Too free with everyone!" I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. "I have it from you thenfor it's of great importancethat he was definitely and admittedly bad?" "Oh, not admittedly. I knew itbut the master didn't." "And you never told him?" "Well, he didn't like tale-bearinghe hated complaints. He was terribly short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM"

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"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you I would have told!" She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was afraid." "Afraid of what?" "Of things that man could do. Quint was so cleverhe was so deep." I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid of anything else? Not of his effect?" "His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I faltered. "On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge." "No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned. "The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say. Yes"she let me have it"even about THEM." "Themthat creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could bear it!" "No. I couldn'tand I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into tears. A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them; yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the immediate later hours in especialfor it may be imagined whether I

sleptstill haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister figure of the living manthe dead one would keep awhile!and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explainedsuperficially at leastby a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been producedand as, on the final evidence, HAD beenby a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for muchpractically, in the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but there had been matters in his lifestrange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspectedthat would have accounted for a good deal more. I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seenoh, in the right quarter! that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed. It was an immense help to meI confess I rather applaud myself as I look back! that I saw my service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most

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lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and Iwell, I had THEM. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screenI was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as suspenseit was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yesfrom the moment I really took hold. This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrivedit was the charming thing in both childrento let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention they had no occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something very

important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof. Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the worldthe strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of workfor I was something or other that could sit on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in viewa figure whose right of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman's boy, from the village. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude as I was consciousstill even without lookingof its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not. Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right second;

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meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first placeand there is something more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relateI was determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water. This was her attitude when I at last looked at her looked with the confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyesI faced what I had to face.

"And what on earth?" I felt her incredulity as she held me. "Why, all that WE knowand heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"I could scarce articulate"Flora SAW!" Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She has told you?" she panted. "Not a wordthat's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, THAT child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of it. Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. "Then how do you know?" "I was thereI saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware." "Do you mean aware of HIM?" "Noof HER." I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion's face. "Another personthis time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadfulwith such an air also, and such a face!on the other side of the lake. I was there with the child quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came." "Came howfrom where?" "From where they come from! She just appeared and stood therebut not so near." "And without coming nearer?" "Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as you!"

VII I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They KNOWit's too monstrous: they know, they know!"

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My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. "Was she someone you've never seen?" "Yes. But someone the child has. Someone YOU have." Then, to show how I had thought it all out: "My predecessorthe one who died." "Miss Jessel?" "Miss Jessel. You don't believe me?" I pressed. She turned right and left in her distress. "How can you be sure?" This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience. "Then ask FloraSHE'S sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught myself up. "No, for God's sake, DON'T! She'll say she isn'tshe'll lie!" Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how CAN you?" "Because I'm clear. Flora doesn't want me to know." "It's only then to spare you."

"Why, it's that the child may keep it upand that the child assuredly WILLwithout my knowing it." At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to give way to. "Dear, dearwe must keep our heads! And after all, if she doesn't mind it!" She even tried a grim joke. "Perhaps she likes it!" "Likes SUCH thingsa scrap of an infant!" "Isn't it just a proof of her blessed innocence?" my friend bravely inquired. She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at THATwe must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a proof ofGod knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors." Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said. "Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.

"No, nothere are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I DON'T seewhat I DON'T fear!" Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeing her again?" "Oh, no; that's nothingnow!" Then I explained. "It's of NOT seeing her." But my companion only looked wan. "I don't understand you."

"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated. "Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked." "At you, do you meanso wickedly?" "Dear me, noI could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She only fixed the child." Mrs. Grose tried to see it. "Fixed her?" "Ah, with such awful eyes!"

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She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you mean of dislike?" "God help us, no. Of something much worse." "Worse than dislike?this left her indeed at a loss. "With a determinationindescribable. With a kind of fury of intention." I made her turn pale. "Intention?" "To get hold of her." Mrs. Groseher eyes just lingering on mine gave a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking out I completed my statement. "THAT'S what Flora knows." After a little she turned round. "The person was in black, you say?" "In mourningrather poor, almost shabby. Butyeswith extraordinary beauty." I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed this. "Oh, handsomevery, very," I insisted; "wonderfully handsome. But infamous." She slowly came back to me. "Miss JesselWAS infamous." She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. "They were both infamous," she finally said. So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. "I appreciate," I said, "the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has certainly come to give me the whole thing." She appeared to assent to this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: "I must have it now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them."

"There was everything." "In spite of the difference?" "Oh, of their rank, their condition"she brought it woefully out. "SHE was a lady." I turned it over; I again saw. "Yesshe was a lady." "And he so dreadfully below," said Mrs. Grose. I felt that I doubtless needn't press too hard, in such company, on the place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an acceptance of my companion's own measure of my predecessor's abasement. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my full visionon the evidenceof our employer's late clever, goodlooking "own" man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. "The fellow was a hound." Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades. "I've never seen one like him. He did what he wished." "With HER?" "With them all." It was as if now in my friend's own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared. I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision: "It must have been also what SHE wished!" Mrs. Grose's face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the same time: "Poor womanshe paid for it!" "Then you do know what she died of?" I asked.

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"NoI know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn't; and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!" "Yet you had, then, your idea" "Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yesas to that. She couldn't have stayed. Fancy it herefor a governess! And afterward I imaginedand I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful." "Not so dreadful as what I do," I replied; on which I must have shown heras I was indeed but too consciousa front of miserable defeat. It brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly breast, and my lamentation overflowed. "I don't do it!" I sobbed in despair; "I don't save or shield them! It's far worse than I dreamedthey're lost!"

of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had "made it up," I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marksa portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named them. She wished of coursesmall blame to her!to sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that with recurrencefor recurrence we took for grantedI should get used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought a little ease. On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh into Flora's special society and there become awareit was almost a luxury!that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation and then had accused me to my face of having "cried." I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literallyfor the time, at all events rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Groseas I did there, over and over, in the small hoursthat with their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart, and their fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to

VIII What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing elsedifficult indeed as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her perfectly in the pinch

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settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of selfpossession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn't, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the portentous little activity by which she sought to divert my attentionthe perceptible increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp. Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certainwhich was so much to the goodthat I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mindI scarce know what to call itto invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasionfor the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to helpI felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. "I don't believe anything so horrible," I recollect saying; "no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I did, you know, there's a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit moreoh, not a scrap, come!to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our

distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn't pretend for him that he had not literally EVER been 'bad'? He has NOT literally 'ever,' in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?" It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner, requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this, directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I pressed, was that SHE liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station. I pressed again, of course, at this. "You reminded him that Quint was only a base menial?" "As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad." "And for another thing?" I waited. "He repeated your words to Quint?" "No, not that. It's just what he WOULDN'T!" she could still impress upon me. "I was sure, at any rate," she added, "that he didn't. But he denied certain occasions."

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"What occasions?" "When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor and a very grand oneand Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him." "He then prevaricated about ithe said he hadn't?" Her assent was clear enough to cause me to add in a moment: "I see. He lied." "Oh!" Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn't matter; which indeed she backed up by a further remark. "You see, after all, Miss Jessel didn't mind. She didn't forbid him." I considered. "Did he put that to you as a justification?" At this she dropped again. "No, he never spoke of it." "Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?" She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. "Well, he didn't show anything. He denied," she repeated; "he denied." Lord, how I pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what was between the two wretches?" "I don't knowI don't know!" the poor woman groaned. "You do know, you dear thing," I replied; "only you haven't my dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable. But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that suggested to you," I continued, "that he covered and concealed their relation." "Oh, he couldn't prevent"

"Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens," I fell, with vehemence, athinking, "what it shows that they must, to that extent, have succeeded in making of him!" "Ah, nothing that's not nice NOW!" Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded. "I don't wonder you looked queer," I persisted, "when I mentioned to you the letter from his school!" "I doubt if I looked as queer as you!" she retorted with homely force. "And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel now?" "Yes, indeedand if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well," I said in my torment, "you must put it to me again, but I shall not be able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!" I cried in a way that made my friend stare. "There are directions in which I must not for the present let myself go." Meanwhile I returned to her first examplethe one to which she had just previously referredof the boy's happy capacity for an occasional slip. "If Quinton your remonstrance at the time you speak ofwas a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another." Again her admission was so adequate that I continued: "And you forgave him that?" "Wouldn't YOU?" "Oh, yes!" And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the oddest amusement. Then I went on: "At all events, while he was with the man" "Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!" It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression of

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this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. "His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of the little natural man. Still," I mused, "They must do, for they make me feel more than ever that I must watch." It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend's face how much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. "Surely you don't accuse HIM" "Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody." Then, before shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, "I must just wait," I wound up.

would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they WERE so immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could only beblameless and foredoomed as they werea reason the more for taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: "What will they think of that? Doesn't it betray too much?" It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn't see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations. They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me; which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; I meanthough they got their lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her mostin the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the "pieces" they had secretly

IX I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my new lights; it

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got by heart and could interminably recite. I should never get to the bottomwere I to let myself go even nowof the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day, I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural composure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement. If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been "kicked out" by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me add that in their company nowand I was careful almost never to be out of itI could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order to "come in" as something

new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarily at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of little understandings between them by which one of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter that, after a lull, the grossness broke out. I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the most liberal faithfor which I little care; butand this is another matterI renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to advance. One evening with nothing to lead up or to prepare itI felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Blylast-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to

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looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora's little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself long before, the perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet, and, taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door. I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite

another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him. I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had notI found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should ceasefor the time, at least to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can't express what followed it save by saying that the silence itselfwhich was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strengthbecame the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.

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I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the candle I had left burning was that Flora's little bed was empty; and on this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before, I had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward; then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down, emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a reproach. "You naughty: where HAVE you been?"instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back into my chairfeeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given herself to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. "You were looking for me out of the window?" I said. "You thought I might be walking in the grounds?" "Well, you know, I thought someone was"she never blanched as she smiled out that at me.

Oh, how I looked at her now! "And did you see anyone?" "Ah, NO!" she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little drawl of the negative. At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up. One of these, for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?give it to her straight in her lovely little lighted face? "You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly confess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means?" This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could immediately have succumbed to it I might have spared myselfwell, you'll see what. Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the curtain over the place to make me think you were still there?" Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile: "Because I don't like to frighten you!" "But if I had, by your idea, gone out?" She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know," she quite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear, and that you HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for a long

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time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that I recognized the pertinence of my return. You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights. I repeatedly sat up till I didn't know when; I selected moments when my roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase, on the other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it from the top I once recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to me, her body half-bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an instant, however, when she vanished without looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless, exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead of being above I had been below, I should have had, for going up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest encounter with that gentlemanthey were all numbered nowI had an alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was precisely the first night during this series that, weary with watching, I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterward knew, till about one o'clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet and straight, in the darkness, to her bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the window enlightened me further, and the striking of a match completed the picture.

The child had again got upthis time blowing out the taper, and had again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now sawas she had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous timewas proved to me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sillthe casement opened forwardand gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicate with it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some other window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for some sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her brother's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS window?what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter of my boldness? This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the groundsa figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice. There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing the right one. The

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right one suddenly presented itself to me as the lower onethough high above the gardensin the solid corner of the house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appearedlooking, that is, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person above methere was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawnI felt sick as I made it outwas poor little Miles himself.

great security in this particular from her mere smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she hadn't I don't know what would have become of me, for I couldn't have borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our little charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she would doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them; as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them, with her large white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her look, thank the Lord's mercy that if they were ruined the pieces would still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the development of the conviction thatas time went on without a public accidentour young things could, after all, look out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could engage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself anxious about hers. At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance, but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us, over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle of lurid things,

XI It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not provoking on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the childrenany suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of mysteries. I drew a

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but there was an odd recognition of my superioritymy accomplishments and my functionin her patience under my pain. She offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch's broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point of what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gone down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentrated need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal more resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to his forsaken room. Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered oh, HOW I had wondered!if he were groping about in his little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it? There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce I should. I was confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no need of striking a matchI remember how I

suddenly dropped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he really, as they say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form at least, to put it to him. "You must tell me nowand all the truth. What did you go out for? What were you doing there?" I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes, and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. "If I tell you why, will you understand?" My heart, at this, leaped into my mouth. WOULD he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it, and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod. He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to tell me? "Well," he said at last, "just exactly in order that you should do this." "Do what?"

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"Think mefor a changeBAD!" I shall never forget the sweetness and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I presently glanced about the room, I could say "Then you didn't undress at all?" He fairly glittered in the gloom. "Not at all. I sat up and read." "And when did you go down?" "At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!" "I see, I seeit's charming. But how could you be sure I would know it?" "Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness! "She was to get up and look out." "Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap! "So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also lookedyou saw." "While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!" He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly to assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked. Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my

recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had been able to draw upon.

XII The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made before we separated. "It all lies in half a dozen words," I said to her, "words that really settle the matter. 'Think, you know, what I MIGHT do!' He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to the ground what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of at school." "Lord, you do change!" cried my friend. "I don't changeI simply make it out. The four, depend upon it, perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched and waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He's not reading to her," I declared; "they're talking of THEMthey're talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not. What I've seen would have made YOU so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things."

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My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still with her eyes. "Of what other things have you got hold?" "Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It's a game," I went on; "it's a policy and a fraud!" "On the part of little darlings?" "As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!" The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace itfollow it all up and piece it all together. "They haven't been goodthey've only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading a life of their own. They're not minethey're not ours. They're his and they're hers!" "Quint's and that woman's?"

her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she brought out after a moment: "They WERE rascals! But what can they now do?" she pursued. "Do?" I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. "Don't they do enough?" I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We were held by it a minute; then I answered: "They can destroy them!" At this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. "They don't know, as yet, quite howbut they're trying hard. They're seen only across, as it were, and beyondin strange places and on high places, the top of towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools; but there's a deep design, on either side, to shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is only a question of time. They've only to keep to their suggestions of danger." "For the children to come?"

"Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them." Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! "But for what?" "For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back." "Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad timefor there had been a worse even than this!must have occurred. There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent of "And perish in the attempt!" Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I scrupulously added: "Unless, of course, we can prevent!" Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things over. "Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away." "And who's to make him?" She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish face. "You, miss."

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"By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and niece mad?" "But if they ARE, miss?" "And if I am myself, you mean? That's charming news to be sent him by a governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry." Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. "Yes, he do hate worry. That was the great reason" "Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference must have been awful. As I'm not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn't take him in." My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and grasped my arm. "Make him at any rate come to you." I stared. "To ME?" I had a sudden fear of what she might do. "'Him'?" "He ought to BE herehe ought to help." I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than ever yet. "You see me asking him for a visit?" No, with her eyes on my face she evidently couldn't. Instead of it evenas a woman reads anothershe could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms. She didn't knowno one knewhow proud I had been to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. "If you should so lose your head as to appeal to him for me" She was really frightened. "Yes, miss?"

"I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."

XIII It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strengthoffered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I don't mean that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each otherfor, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intendedthe doors we had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost. There were days when I could have sworn

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that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other: "She thinks she'll do it this timebut she WON'T!" To "do it" would have been to indulge for instanceand for once in a wayin some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation of the old women of our village. There were things enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over MY life, MY past, and MY friends alone that we could take anything like our easea state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders. I was invitedwith no visible connectionto repeat afresh Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony. It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way, would have

favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized the signs, the portentsI recognized the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Flora's by the lakeand had perplexed her by so sayingthat it would from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really saw or notsince, that is, it was not yet definitely provedI greatly preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened. Well, my eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at presenta consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have thanked him with all my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the secret of my pupils. How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they had

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visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken out. "They're here, they're here, you little wretches," I would have cried, "and you can't deny it now!" The little wretches denied it with all the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just the crystal depths of whichlike the flash of a fish in a streamthe mockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see either Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with himhad straightway, there, turned it on methe lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion had scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of nerves produced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed me so that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearseit was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despairthe manner in which I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and the other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known. When I said to myself: "THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!" I felt myself crimson and I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurredI can call them nothing elsethe strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we might be engaged in making and that I could hear through

any deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though they were not angels, they "passed," as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to their younger victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than they had thought good enough for myself. What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw MOREthings terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through the very same movements. It was striking of the children, at all events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to failone or the otherof the precious question that had helped us through many a peril. "When do you think he WILL come? Don't you think we OUGHT to write?"there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. "He" of course was their uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he might at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to have given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to themthat may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand that their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this hour. This

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was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I didn't in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.

mean their magnificent little surrenderjust to the special array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncle's tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles's whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated. "Look here, my dear, you know," he charmingly said, "when in the world, please, am I going back to school?" Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them that always made one "catch," and I caught, at any rate, now so effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot, between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though, to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: "You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady ALWAYS!" His "my dear" was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy. But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the

XIV Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose's, well in sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time; the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me, I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all this belongedI

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beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. "And always with the same lady?" I returned. He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. "Ah, of course, she's a jolly, 'perfect' lady; but, after all, I'm a fellow, don't you see? that'swell, getting on." I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. "Yes, you're getting on." Oh, but I felt helpless! I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not been awfully good, can you?" I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. "No, I can't say that, Miles." "Except just that one night, you know!" "That one night?" I couldn't look as straight as he. "Why, when I went downwent out of the house." "Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for." "You forget?"he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. "Why, it was to show you I could!" "Oh, yes, you could." "And I can again." I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits about me. "Certainly. But you won't."

"No, not THAT again. It was nothing." "It was nothing," I said. "But we must go on." He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. "Then when AM I going back?" I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. "Were you very happy at school?" He just considered. "Oh, I'm happy enough anywhere!" "Well, then," I quavered, "if you're just as happy here!" "Ah, but that isn't everything! Of course YOU know a lot" "But you hint that you know almost as much?" I risked as he paused. "Not half I want to!" Miles honestly professed. "But it isn't so much that." "What is it, then?" "WellI want to see more life." "I see; I see." We had arrived within sight of the church and of various persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out

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"I want my own sort!" It literally made me bound forward. "There are not many of your own sort, Miles!" I laughed. "Unless perhaps dear little Flora!" "You really compare me to a baby girl?" This found me singularly weak. "Don't you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?" "If I didn'tand you, too; if I didn't!" he repeated as if retreating for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb. "Yes, if you didn't?" He looked, while I waited, at the graves. "Well, you know what!" But he didn't move, and he presently produced something that made me drop straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. "Does my uncle think what YOU think?" I markedly rested. "How do you know what I think?" "Ah, well, of course I don't; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I mean does HE know?" "Know what, Miles?" "Why, the way I'm going on."

I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make that venial. "I don't think your uncle much cares." Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can be made to?" "In what way?" "Why, by his coming down." "But who'll get him to come down?" "I will!" the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off alone into church.

XV The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out of me that there

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was something I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me: "Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that's so unnatural for a boy." What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan. That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already, with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thing up turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again, for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What was it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, at

the end of whichI had the acute previsionmy little pupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in their train. "What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us soand take our thoughts off, too, don't you know?did you desert us at the very door?" I couldn't meet such questions nor, as they asked them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last let myself go. I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircasesuddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight back upon my resistance. Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom, without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the schoolroom

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table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted. Then it waswith the very act of its announcing itselfthat her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her"You terrible, miserable woman!"I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.

caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs. Grose's odd face. I did this to such purpose that I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence that, however, I would engage to break down on the first private opportunity. This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes with her in the housekeeper's room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her best: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the "put away"of drawers closed and locked and rest without a remedy. "Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please themso long as they were thereof course I promised. But what had happened to you?" "I only went with you for the walk," I said. "I had then to come back to meet a friend." She showed her surprise. "A friendYOU?" "Oh, yes, I have a couple!" I laughed. "But did the children give you a reason?" "For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it better. Do you like it better?" My face had made her rueful. "No, I like it worse!" But after an instant I added: "Did they say why I should like it better?"

XVI "No; Master Miles only said, 'We must do nothing but what she likes!'" I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily denouncing and "I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?"

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"Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, 'Oh, of course, of course!'and I said the same." I thought a moment. "You were too sweet, tooI can hear you all. But nonetheless, between Miles and me, it's now all out." "All out?" My companion stared. "But what, miss?" "Everything. It doesn't matter. I've made up my mind. I came home, my dear," I went on, "for a talk with Miss Jessel." I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively firm. "A talk! Do you mean she spoke?" "It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom." "And what did she say?" I can hear the good woman still, and the candor of her stupefaction. "That she suffers the torments!" It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture, gape. "Do you mean," she faltered, "of the lost?" "Of the lost. Of the damned. And that's why, to share them-" I faltered myself with the horror of it. But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. "To share them?" "She wants Flora." Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to show I was. "As I've told you, however, it doesn't matter."

"Because you've made up your mind? But to what?" "To everything." "And what do you call 'everything'?" "Why, sending for their uncle." "Oh, miss, in pity do," my friend broke out. "ah, but I will, I WILL! I see it's the only way. What's 'out,' as I told you, with Miles is that if he thinks I'm afraid toand has ideas of what he gains by thathe shall see he's mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if I'm to be reproached with having done nothing again about more school" "Yes, miss" my companion pressed me. "Well, there's that awful reason." There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she was excusable for being vague. "Butawhich?" "Why, the letter from his old place." "You'll show it to the master?" "I ought to have done so on the instant." "Oh, no!" said Mrs. Grose with decision. "I'll put it before him," I went on inexorably, "that I can't undertake to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled" "For we've never in the least known what!" Mrs. Grose declared.

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"For wickedness. For what elsewhen he's so clever and beautiful and perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? He's exquisiteso it can be only THAT; and that would open up the whole thing. After all," I said, "it's their uncle's fault. If he left here such people !" "He didn't really in the least know them. The fault's mine." She had turned quite pale. "Well, you shan't suffer," I answered. "The children shan't!" she emphatically returned. I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. "Then what am I to tell him?" "You needn't tell him anything. I'll tell him." I measured this. "Do you mean you'll write?" Remembering she couldn't, I caught myself up. "How do you communicate?" "I tell the bailiff. HE writes." "And should you like him to write our story?" My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were again in her eyes. "Ah, miss, YOU write!" "Welltonight," I at last answered; and on this we separated.

XVII I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute at Miles's door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected. His voice tinkled out. "I say, you therecome in." It was a gaiety in the gloom! I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but very much at his ease. "Well, what are YOU up to?" he asked with a grace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was "out." I stood over him with my candle. "How did you know I was there?" "Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You're like a troop of cavalry!" he beautifully laughed. "Then you weren't asleep?" "Not much! I lie awake and think." I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. "What is it," I asked, "that you think of?" "What in the world, my dear, but YOU?" "Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn't insist on that! I had so far rather you slept."

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"Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours." I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. "Of what queer business, Miles?" "Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!" I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow. "What do you mean by all the rest?" "Oh, you know, you know!" I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. "Certainly you shall go back to school," I said, "if it be that that troubles you. But not to the old placewe must find another, a better. How could I know it did trouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it at all?" His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children's hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him. Well, even as it was, I perhaps might help! "Do you know you've never said a word to me about your schoolI mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way?" He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. "Haven't I?" It wasn't for ME to help himit was for the thing I had met!

Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known; so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and consistency. "No, neverfrom the hour you came back. You've never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades, nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at school. Never, little Milesno, neverhave you given me an inkling of anything that MAY have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I'm in the dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in your previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the present." It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older personimposed him almost as an intellectual equal. "I thought you wanted to go on as you are." It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate, like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. "I don'tI don't. I want to get away." "You're tired of Bly?" "Oh, no, I like Bly." "Well, then?" "Oh, YOU know what a boy wants!" I felt that I didn't know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge. "You want to go to your uncle?"

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Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the pillow. "Ah, you can't get off with that!" I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color. "My dear, I don't want to get off!" "You can't, even if you do. You can't, you can't!"he lay beautifully staring. "My uncle must come down, and you must completely settle things." "If we do," I returned with some spirit, "you may be sure it will be to take you quite away." "Well, don't you understand that that's exactly what I'm working for? You'll have to tell himabout the way you've let it all drop: you'll have to tell him a tremendous lot!" The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the instant, to meet him rather more. "And how much will YOU, Miles, have to tell him? There are things he'll ask you!" He turned it over. "Very likely. But what things?" "The things you've never told me. To make up his mind what to do with you. He can't send you back" "Oh, I don't want to go back!" he broke in. "I want a new field." He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more dishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear that, and it made me let myself

go. I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. "Dear little Miles, dear little Miles!" My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with indulgent good humor. "Well, old lady?" "Is there nothingnothing at all that you want to tell me?" He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. "I've told youI told you this morning." Oh, I was sorry for him! "That you just want me not to worry you?" He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him; then ever so gently, "To let me alone," he replied. There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me release him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows I never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him. "I've just begun a letter to your uncle," I said. "Well, then, finish it!" I waited a minute. "What happened before?" He gazed up at me again. "Before what?" "Before you came back. And before you went away." For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. "What happened?"

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It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of consenting consciousnessit made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance of possessing him. "Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you KNEW how I want to help you! It's only that, it's nothing but that, and I'd rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrongI'd rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles"oh, I brought it out now even if I SHOULD go too far"I just want you to help me to save you!" But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. "Why, the candle's out!" I then cried. "It was I who blew it, dear!" said Miles.

send it before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhile there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, more exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to gloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY feeble range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate; there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD been opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proof that it could ever have flowered into an act. He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after our early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if I shouldn't like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite tantamount to his saying outright: "The true knights we love to read about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you mean thatto be let alone yourself and not followed upyou'll cease to worry and spy upon me, won't keep me so close to you, will let me go and come. Well, I 'come,' you seebut I don't go! There'll be plenty of time for that. I do really delight in your society, and I only want to show you that I contended for a principle." It may be imagined whether I resisted this appeal or failed to

XVIII The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me quietly: "Have you written, miss?" "YesI've written." But I didn't addfor the hourthat my letter, sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough to

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accompany him again, hand in hand, to the schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never played; and if there are those who think he had better have been kicking a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, I started up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It was after luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn't really, in the least, slept: I had only done something much worse I had forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to Miles, he played on a minute before answering and then could only say: "Why, my dear, how do I know?"breaking moreover into a happy laugh which, immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he prolonged into incoherent, extravagant song. I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before going downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere about she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that theory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I had found her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank, scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I had carried off both the children; as to which she was quite in her right, for it was the very first time I had allowed the little girl out of my sight without some special provision. Of course now indeed she might be with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look for her without an air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us; but when, ten minutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the hall, it was only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries we had altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from observation, we exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high interest my friend returned me all those I had from the first given her.

"She'll be above," she presently said"in one of the rooms you haven't searched." "No; she's at a distance." I had made up my mind. "She has gone out." Mrs. Grose stared. "Without a hat?" I naturally also looked volumes. "Isn't that woman always without one?" "She's with HER?" "She's with HER!" I declared. "We must find them." My hand was on my friend's arm, but she failed for the moment, confronted with such an account of the matter, to respond to my pressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with her uneasiness. "And where's Master Miles?" "Oh, HE'S with Quint. They're in the schoolroom." "Lord, miss!" My view, I was myself awareand therefore I suppose my tonehad never yet reached so calm an assurance. "The trick's played," I went on; "they've successfully worked their plan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she went off." "'Divine'?" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed. "Infernal, then!" I almost cheerfully rejoined. "He has provided for himself as well. But come!" She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. "You leave him?" "So long with Quint? YesI don't mind that now."

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She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand, and in this manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping an instant at my sudden resignation, "Because of your letter?" she eagerly brought out. I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it up, and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table. "Luke will take it," I said as I came back. I reached the house door and opened it; I was already on the steps. My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early morning had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to the drive while she stood in the doorway. "You go with nothing on?" "What do I care when the child has nothing? I can't wait to dress," I cried, "and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself, upstairs." "With THEM?" Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me!

embarkation was half a mile from the house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might be, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any small adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had shared with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to which she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Grose's steps so marked a directiona direction that made her, when she perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshly mystified. "You're going to the water, Miss?you think she's IN?" "She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But what I judge most likely is that she's on the spot from which, the other day, we saw together what I told you." "When she pretended not to see?" "With that astounding self-possession? I've always been sure she wanted to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her." Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. "You suppose they really TALK of them?" "I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard them, would simply appall us."

XIX We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its agitation. The usual place of

"And if she IS there" "Yes?" "Then Miss Jessel is?" "Beyond a doubt. You shall see."

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"Oh, thank you!" my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however, she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension, might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the greater part of the water without a sight of the child. There was no trace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank where my observation of her had been most startling, and none on the opposite edge, where, save for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick copse came down to the water. The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant compared to its length that, with its ends out of view, it might have been taken for a scant river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I felt the suggestion of my friend's eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a negative headshake. "No, no; wait! She has taken the boat." My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across the lake. "Then where is it?" "Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go over, and then has managed to hide it." "All alonethat child?" "She's not alone, and at such times she's not a child: she's an old, old woman." I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again, into the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of submission; then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a small refuge formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, for the hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump of trees growing close to the water.

"But if the boat's there, where on earth's SHE?" my colleague anxiously asked. "That's exactly what we must learn." And I started to walk further. "By going all the way round?" "Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it's far enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight over." "Laws!" cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too much for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got halfway rounda devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by a path choked with overgrowthI paused to give her breath. I sustained her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had supposed it. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of sight and was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just there, down to the brink and that had been an assistance to disembarking. I recognized, as I looked at the pair of short, thick oars, quite safely drawn up, the prodigious character of the feat for a little girl; but I had lived, by this time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many livelier measures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, and that brought us, after a trifling interval, more into the open. Then, "There she is!" we both exclaimed at once. Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to stoop straight down and pluckquite as if it were all she was there fora big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done in a silence by this

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time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender, yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watch itwhich I did the more intently when I saw Flora's face peep at me over our companion's shoulder. It was serious nowthe flicker had left it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs. Grose the simplicity of HER relation. Still, all this while, nothing more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern again drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other was that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept the child's hand, so that the two were still before me; and the singular reticence of our communion was even more marked in the frank look she launched me. "I'll be hanged," it said, "if I'll speak!" It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first. She was struck with our bareheaded aspect. "Why, where are your things?" "Where yours are, my dear!" I promptly returned. She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an answer quite sufficient. "And where's Miles?" she went on. There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me: these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow in a deluge. "I'll tell you if you'll tell ME" I heard myself say, then heard the tremor in which it broke. "Well, what?" Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I brought the thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?"

XX Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us, been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child's face now received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow, that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violencethe shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my colleague's arm. "She's there, she's there!" Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to herwith the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and understand itan inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds, during which Mrs. Grose's dazed blink across to where I pointed struck me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it would have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct

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dismay was of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the particular one for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at ME an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge methis was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presence that could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude that she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness. "She's there, you little unhappy thingthere, there, THERE, and you see her as well as you see me!" I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this timeif I can put the whole thing at all togethermore appalled at what I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though it was simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next moment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and her loud, shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. "What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?" I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my pointing hand.

"You don't see her exactly as WE see?you mean to say you don't now NOW? She's as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest woman, LOOK !" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassionthe mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemptiona sense, touching to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I feltI sawmy livid predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was conscious, more than all, of what I should have from this instant to deal with in the astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose immediately and violently entered, breaking, even while there pierced through my sense of ruin a prodigious private triumph, into breathless reassurance. "She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's thereand you never see nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jesselwhen poor Miss Jessel's dead and buried? WE know, don't we, love?"and she appealed, blundering in, to the child. "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a jokeand we'll go home as fast as we can!" Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to our friend's dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite vanished. I've said it alreadyshe was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. "I don't know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think you're cruel. I don't like you!" Then, after this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely

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and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face. In this position she produced an almost furious wail. "Take me away, take me awayoh, take me away from HER!" "From ME?" I panted. "From youfrom you!" she cried. Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to do but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank, without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was not there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but sadly shake my head at her. "If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would at present have gone. I've been living with the miserable truth, and now it has only too much closed round me. Of course I've lost you: I've interfered, and you've seenunder HER dictation"with which I faced, over the pool again, our infernal witness "the easy and perfect way to meet it. I've done my best, but I've lost you. Goodbye." For Mrs. Grose I had an imperative, an almost frantic "Go, go!" before which, in infinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as fast as she could move. Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent memory. I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there long and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day was almost done.

I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the fence the boat, to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh reflection to make on Flora's extraordinary command of the situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I should add, were not the word so grotesque a false note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I sawI can use no other phraseso much of him that it was as if it were more than it had ever been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of whichand in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my feetthere was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much as looked for the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to change what I was wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material testimony to Flora's rupture. Her little belongings had all been removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom nowhe might have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it consistedin part at least of his coming in at about eight o'clock and sitting down with me in silence. On the removal of the tea things I had blown out the candles and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and felt as if I should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as if to look at me; thenas if to share themcame to the other side of the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.

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XXI Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs. Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had for their subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present, governess. It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that she protestedit was conspicuously and passionately against mine. I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense deal to ask; the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of her sense of the child's sincerity as against my own. "She persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?" My visitor's trouble, truly, was great. "Ah, miss, it isn't a matter on which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old." "Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as it were, her respectability. 'Miss Jessel indeedSHE!' Ah, she's 'respectable,' the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any of the others. I DID put my foot in it! She'll never speak to me again." Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent; then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more behind it. "I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grand manner about it!"

"And that manner"I summed it up"is practically what's the matter with her now!" Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little else besides! "She asks me every three minutes if I think you're coming in." "I seeI see." I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it out. "Has she said to you since yesterdayexcept to repudiate her familiarity with anything so dreadfula single other word about Miss Jessel?" "Not one, miss. And of course you know," my friend added, "I took it from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there WAS nobody." "Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still." "I don't contradict her. What else can I do?" "Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal with. They've made themtheir two friends, I meanstill cleverer even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora has now her grievance, and she'll work it to the end." "Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?" "Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to him the lowest creature!" I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face; she looked for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. "And him who thinks so well of you!" "He has an odd wayit comes over me now," I laughed,"of proving it! But that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of me."

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My companion bravely concurred. "Never again to so much as look at you." "So that what you've come to me now for," I asked, "is to speed me on my way?" Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. "I've a better ideathe result of my reflections. My going WOULD seem the right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won't do. It's YOU who must go. You must take Flora." My visitor, at this, did speculate. "But where in the world?" "Away from here. Away from THEM. Away, even most of all, now, from me. Straight to her uncle." "Only to tell on you?" "No, not 'only'! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy." She was still vague. "And what IS your remedy?" "Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles's." She looked at me hard. "Do you think he?" "Won't, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as possible and leave me with him alone." I was amazed, myself, at the spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it, she hesitated. "There's one thing, of course," I went on: "they mustn't, before she goes, see each other for three seconds." Then it came over me that, in spite of Flora's presumable sequestration from the instant of her return from the pool, it might already be too late. "Do you mean," I anxiously asked, "that they HAVE met?"

At this she quite flushed. "Ah, miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If I've been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each time with one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's locked in safe. And yetand yet!" There were too many things. "And yet what?" "Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?" "I'm not sure of anything but YOU. But I have, since last evening, a new hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe thatpoor little exquisite wretch!he wants to speak. Last evening, in the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were just coming." Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray, gathering day. "And did it come?" "No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn't, and it was without a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister's condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All the same," I continued, "I can't, if her uncle sees her, consent to his seeing her brother without my having given the boyand most of all because things have got so bada little more time." My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite understand. "What do you mean by more time?" "Well, a day or tworeally to bring it out. He'll then be on MY sideof which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible." So I put it before her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed that I came again to her aid. "Unless, indeed," I wound up, "you really want NOT to go."

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I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand to me as a pledge. "I'll goI'll go. I'll go this morning." I wanted to be very just. "If you SHOULD wish still to wait, I would engage she shouldn't see me." "No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it." She held me a moment with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. "Your idea's the right one. I myself, miss" "Well?" "I can't stay." The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. "You mean that, since yesterday, you HAVE seen?" She shook her head with dignity. "I've HEARD!" "Heard?" "From that childhorrors! There!" she sighed with tragic relief. "On my honor, miss, she says things!" But at this evocation she broke down; she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do before, gave way to all the grief of it. It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. "Oh, thank God!" She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. "'Thank God'?" "It so justifies me!" "It does that, miss!"

I couldn't have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. "She's so horrible?" I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. "Really shocking." "And about me?" "About you, misssince you must have it. It's beyond everything, for a young lady; and I can't think wherever she must have picked up" "The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!" I broke in with a laugh that was doubtless significant enough. It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. "Well, perhaps I ought to alsosince I've heard some of it before! Yet I can't bear it," the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on my dressing table, at the face of my watch. "But I must go back." I kept her, however. "Ah, if you can't bear it!" "How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just FOR that: to get her away. Far from this," she pursued, "far from THEM-" "She may be different? She may be free?" I seized her almost with joy. "Then, in spite of yesterday, you BELIEVE" "In such doings?" Her simple description of them required, in the light of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole thing as she had never done. "I believe." Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might continue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My support in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had been in my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for my honesty, I

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would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave of her, nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. "There's one thing, of courseit occurs to meto remember. My letter, giving the alarm, will have reached town before you." I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and how weary at last it had made her. "Your letter won't have got there. Your letter never went." "What then became of it?" "Goodness knows! Master Miles" "Do you mean HE took it?" I gasped. She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. "I mean that I saw yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn't where you had put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and he declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it." We could only exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs. Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated "You see!" "Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it and destroyed it."

I turned it overI tried to be more judicial. "Wellperhaps." She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. "He stole LETTERS!" She couldn't know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so I showed them off as I might. "I hope then it was to more purpose than in this case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday," I pursued, "will have given him so scant an advantagefor it contained only the bare demand for an interviewthat he is already much ashamed of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mind last evening was precisely the need of confession." I seemed to myself, for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. "Leave us, leave us"I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. "I'll get it out of him. He'll meet mehe'll confess. If he confesses, he's saved. And if he's saved" "Then YOU are?" The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her farewell. "I'll save you without him!" she cried as she went.

XXII "And don't you see anything else?" I faced her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this time your eyes are open even wider than mine." They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show it. "I make out now what he must have done at school." And she gave, in her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. "He stole!" Yet it was when she had got offand I missed her on the spotthat the great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the gates. Now I WAS, I said to myself, face to face with the elements, and for

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much of the rest of the day, while I fought my weakness, I could consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a tighter place still than I had yet turned round in; all the more that, for the first time, I could see in the aspect of others a confused reflection of the crisis. What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there was too little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness of my colleague's act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect of which on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of making it a positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching the helm that I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up at all, I became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the next hour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, for the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded with a sick heart. The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner, little Miles himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora's interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by her confinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered in by our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He had already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, and I learned below that he had breakfastedin the presence of a couple of the maidswith Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What he would not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a queer relief, at all eventsI mean for myself in especialin the renouncement of one pretension. If so

much had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night, I had uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither challenge nor hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow. To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at present I felt afreshfor I had felt it again and againhow my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, ALL the nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after a time, had come to me, and it was so far

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confirmed as that I was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found even nowas he had so often found at lessonsstill some other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn't there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?the fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence been given him for but to save him? Mightn't one, to reach his mind, risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we were face to face in the dining room, he had literally shown me the way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with attendance. Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: "I say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?" "Little Flora? Not so bad but that she'll presently be better. London will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take your mutton." He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and, when he was established, went on. "Did Bly disagree with her so terribly suddenly?" "Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on." "Then why didn't you get her off before?" "Before what?"

I found myself prompt. "She's NOT too ill to travel: she only might have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The journey will dissipate the influence"oh, I was grand!"and carry it off." "I see, I see"Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to his repast with the charming little "table manner" that, from the day of his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably more conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of the briefestmine a vain pretense, and I had the things immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his little pockets and his back to mestood and looked out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. "Wellso we're alone!"

XXIII "Oh, more or less." I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. We shouldn't like that!" I went on. "NoI suppose we shouldn't. Of course we have the others."

"Before she became too ill to travel." "We have the otherswe have indeed the others," I concurred.

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"Yet even though we have them," he returned, still with his hands in his pockets and planted there in front of me, "they don't much count, do they?" I made the best of it, but I felt wan. "It depends on what you call 'much'!" "Yes"with all accommodation"everything depends!" On this, however, he faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague, restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of "work," behind which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as the moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a meaning from the boy's embarrassed backnone other than the impression that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it was positively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window were a kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn't he looking, through the haunted pane, for something he couldn't see?and wasn't it the first time in the whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had been anxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his small strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed. "Well, I think I'm glad Bly agrees with ME!"

"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good deal more of it than for some time before. I hope," I went on bravely, "that you've been enjoying yourself." "Oh, yes, I've been ever so far; all round aboutmiles and miles away. I've never been so free." He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with him. "Well, do you like it?" He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words"Do YOU?"more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. "Nothing could be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we're alone together now it's you that are alone most. But I hope," he threw in, "you don't particularly mind!" "Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help minding? Though I've renounced all claim to your companyyou're so beyond meI at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?" He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stay on just for THAT?" "Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth your while. That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible to suppress the shake. "Don't you remember how I told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you?"

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"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Only that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!" "It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded. "But, you know, you didn't do it." "Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted me to tell you something." "That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know." "Ah, then, is THAT what you've stayed over for?" He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest little quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express the effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. "Well, yesI may as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for that." He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said was: "Do you mean nowhere?" "There couldn't be a better place or time." He looked round him uneasily, and I had the rareoh, the queer!impression of the very first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly afraid of mewhich struck me indeed as perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be almost grotesque. "You want so to go out again?"

"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. "I'll tell you everything," Miles said"I mean I'll tell you anything you like. You'll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I WILL tell youI WILL. But not now." "Why not now?" My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop. Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside, someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. "I have to see Luke." I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. "Well, then, go to Luke, and I'll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request."

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He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a little to bargain. "Very much smaller?" "Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me"oh, my work preoccupied me, and I was offhand!"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the hall, you took, you know, my letter."

soulheld out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's lengthhad a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was close to mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of it presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance. "YesI took it." At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather the prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however, was such that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the window, the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time, of the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on. "What did you take it for?" "To see what you said about me." "You opened the letter?" "I opened it." My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles's own face, in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage of uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes went back to the window only to see that the air was clear again andby my

XXIV My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attentiona stroke that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon us that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into view like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that, from outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to the glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room his white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made; yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time recovered her grasp of the ACT. It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspirationI can call it by no other namewas that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human

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personal triumphthe influence quenched? There was nothing there. I felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL. "And you found nothing!"I let my elation out. He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. "Nothing." "Nothing, nothing!" I almost shouted in my joy. "Nothing, nothing," he sadly repeated. I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. "So what have you done with it?" "I've burned it." "Burned it?" It was now or never. "Is that what you did at school?"

"Everything. Therefore DID you?" But I couldn't say it again. Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal." My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands but it was for pure tendernessshook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. "What then did you do?" He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight. "WellI said things." "Only that?"

Oh, what this brought up! "At school?" "They thought it was enough!" "Did you take letters?or other things?" "To turn you out for?" "Other things?" He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reach him. "Did I STEAL?" I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the world. "Was it for that you mightn't go back?" The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did you know I mightn't go back?" "I know everything." He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?" Never, truly, had a person "turned out" shown so little to explain it as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner quite detached and almost helpless. "Well, I suppose I oughtn't." "But to whom did you say them?" He evidently tried to remember, but it droppedhe had lost it. "I don't know!" He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. But I was infatuatedI was blind with victory, though even then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of added separation. "Was it to everyone?" I asked.

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"No; it was only to" But he gave a sick little headshake. "I don't remember their names." "Were they then so many?" "Noonly a few. Those I liked." Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then on earth was I? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. "And did they repeat what you said?" I went on after a moment. He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against his will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable anxiety. "Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied"they must have repeated them. To those THEY liked," he added. There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it over. "And these things came round?" "To the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't know they'd tell." "The masters? They didn'tthey've never told. That's why I ask you." He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. "Yes, it was too bad."

"Too bad?" "What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home." I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myself throw off with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!" But the next after that I must have sounded stern enough. "What WERE these things?" My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woethe white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my visitant. "Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury gave me back. I seized, stupefied, his suppositionsome sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the windowstraight before us. It's THEREthe coward horror, there for the last time!"

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At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?" I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?" "Peter Quintyou devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. "WHERE?" They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?what will he EVER matter? I have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" I said to Miles. But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held himit may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

68

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now, p a l e r than ever, a n d her worn old frock is torn a n d tattered, a n d s m e a r e d with pine pitch. T h e g r a n d m o t h e r a n d the s p o r t s m a n s t a n d in the d o o r together a n d q u e s t i o n her, a n d the splendid m o m e n t has c o m e to s p e a k of the d e a d hemlock-tree by the green m a r s h . B u t Sylvia d o e s not s p e a k after all, t h o u g h the old g r a n d m o t h e r fretfully r e b u k e s her, a n d the y o u n g m a n ' s kind, a p p e a l i n g eyes are looking straight in her own. H e c a n m a k e t h e m rich with m o n e y ; he h a s p r o m i s e d it, a n d they are p o o r now. H e is s o well worth m a k i n g happy, a n d he waits to h e a r the story s h e c a n tell. N o , s h e m u s t keep s i l e n c e ! W h a t is it that s u d d e n l y forbids her a n d m a k e s her d u m b ? H a s s h e b e e n nine years g r o w i n g a n d now, w h e n the great world for the first time p u t s out a hand to her, m u s t she thrust it a s i d e for a bird's s a k e ? T h e m u r m u r of the pine's green b r a n c h e s is in her e a r s , s h e r e m e m b e r s how the white heron c a m e flying through the g o l d e n air a n d how they w a t c h e d the s e a a n d the m o r n i n g together, a n d Sylvia c a n n o t s p e a k ; s h e c a n n o t tell the heron's s e c r e t a n d give its life away. D e a r loyalty, that suffered a s h a r p p a n g a s the g u e s t went away d i s a p pointed later in the day, that c o u l d have served a n d followed him a n d loved him a s a d o g loves! M a n y a night Sylvia h e a r d the e c h o of his whistle h a u n t ing the p a s t u r e p a t h a s s h e c a m e h o m e with the loitering cow. S h e forgot even her sorrow at the s h a r p report of his g u n a n d the sight of t h r u s h e s a n d s p a r r o w s d r o p p i n g silent to the g r o u n d , their s o n g s h u s h e d a n d their pretty feathers stained a n d wet with blood. W e r e the birds better friends than their hunter might have b e e n , w h o c a n tell? W h a t e v e r t r e a s u r e s were lost to her, w o o d l a n d s a n d s u m m e r - t i m e , r e m e m b e r ! B r i n g your gifts a n d g r a c e s a n d tell your s e c r e t s to this lonely country child! 1886

KATE

CHOPIN

1850-1904
Katherine O'Flaherty seemed more likely as a young woman to become a consumer of literature than a producer of it. Her Irish immigrant father was a successful businessman who died in a tragic train wreck when his daughter was four years old. The family enjoyed a high place in St. Louis society; and her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were active, pious Catholics of French heritage. But in part under the influence of her strong-willed great-grandmother (who was also a compelling and tireless storyteller), and long before, in the late 1880s, she began to publish stories mainly about her experiences in Louisianathe young woman asserted her independence by smoking in company and going about the streets without a companion of either sexboth rather daring acts for the time. Kate O'Flaherty grew up in the company of strong, loving women from whom she learned independence and the power of language. Chopin was nine years old before she entered St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, but she was already well-read in English and French authors, and by the time

KATE CHOPIN

1595

she graduated from the academy in 1 8 6 8 she had absorbed Cervantes, Dante, Goethe, and many English novelists and poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Austen, the Brontes, and Coleridge among them. But it was French writers who most strongly influenced her sense of life and her craft as a writer. She read and admired French classical authors as well as more nearly contemporary figures such as Flaubert and de Stael; but it was Zola, and especially Maupassant who provided philosophical perspective and fictional method when she began to write in earnest in her late thirties. What she said of Maupassant she might have said of herself: "Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw." What Chopin sawwhether in St. Louis, New Orleans, or the Louisiana countrysidewas the tension between individual erotic inclination and the constraints placed on desireespecially on women's sexual desireby traditional social mores. What she told directlyand without moral judgmentwas how certain women were beginning to challenge the patriarchal rules that had sought not only to confine them to well-defined social and vocational domains but to control their inner life as well. At the age of nineteen she married Oscar Chopin (who pronounced his name Showpan) and spent the next decade in New Orleans, where her husband first prospered, then failed, in the cotton business. After spending a few years in Cloutierville, a village in northwest Louisiana, where her husband had opened a general store and taken over the management of a family cotton plantation, she returned to St. Louis permanently in 1 8 8 4 , a year after her husband's sudden death from swamp fever (probably malaria). A year later her mother died, and at the age of thirty-five Chopin was left essentially alone to raise her six young children and to fashion a literary career out of her experience of the Creole and Cajun cultures she had come to know so well. Chopin had the gifts of equanimity and focus and wrote on a lapboard in the midst of a busy household. Many of her stories she wrote in a single day. She claimed, moreover, that she wrote on impulse, that she was "completely at the mercy of unconscious selection" of subject, and that "the polishing up process . . . always proved disastrous." This method, although it ensured freshness and sincerity, made some of her stories seem anecdotal and sometimes too loose or thin. Though a score of the best of them have entered the canon, it is altogether remarkable that in the relatively few years of her writing careerscarcely more than a decadeshe completed three novels; more than 1 5 0 stories and sketches; and a substantial body of poetry, reviews, and criticism. A first novel, At Fault, was self-published in 1 8 9 0 , but it was her early stories of Louisiana rural life, especially the collection Bayou Folk ( 1 8 9 4 ) , that won her national recognition as a leading practitioner of local-color fiction. She made the Catholic Creoles and Cajuns with their old-fashioned European customs, their polyglot, witty speech, their sensuous and unself-conscious lives, and the rich agricultural landscape of picturesque Natchitoches Parish as familiar to Americans as Sarah Orne Jewett was making the more severe Protestant towns people of the rocky coastal region of Maine. A second collection of her stories, A Night in Acadie, was published three years later and increased her reputation as local colorist. Nina Baym has argued persuasively that local color writing, which flourished after the Civil War, was in part the product of anxiety over the loss of the familiar in a period of rapid change and dislocation (literal and figurative), nostalgia for more stable times, and the emergence of a mass-produced, homogenized national society. Perhaps, too, the long-lasting trauma of the most destructive war in American history made antebellum America seem like a golden age. "At the Cadian Ball," printed here, demonstrates Chopin's skill at the deft depiction of characters and advancement of plot through distinctive dialogue. The story also creates with great economy a believable physical world in which climate and culture and community and individual personalities exist in subtle reciprocal relation. But

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the hints of scandal and the undercurrent of flirtation of the story are still well within conventional limits. The explicit and unapologetic eroticism of its sequel, however, was another matter. It is not so much that adultery is committed under steamy conditions in "The Storm," but that no one in the end is left feeling guilty or unhappy by this violation of proprieties that almost certainly kept Chopin from submitting the story for publication after she wrote it on July 1 8 , 1 8 9 8 . In any event, "The Storm" was not published until 1 9 6 9 as part of Per Seyersted's edition of The Complete Works
of Kate Chopin.

Chopin's major work, The Awakening, was published in 1 8 9 9 . The novel, which traces the sensual and sexual coming to consciousness of a young woman, predictably aroused hostility among contemporary reviewers, just as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which Chopin admired, had done half a century earlier. The "new woman"demanding social, economic, and political equalitywas already a common topic of public discussion and subject for fiction. But the depiction of such an unrepentant (if ultimately deeply confused) sensualist as Edna Pontellier was more than many of the critics of the time could allow to pass. The book was described as "trite and sordid," "essentially vulgar," and "unhealthily introspective and morbid in feeling." Other critics and commentators found much to praise in The Awakening, but Chopin's only published response was to claim, tongue in cheek, "I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company." After the book was published, Chopin's health began to deteriorate and she wrote little. Though the novel and its author fell into obscurity for half a century, they have now secured an honored place in American literary history. In recent years, moreover, critics have begun to explore the intricacies of race, class, and ethnicity as subjects and contexts in this remarkable novel that once was thought to be only, or at least primarily, about constructions of gender and Edna's sexuality. In The Awakening, more impressively because on a grander scale than in a number of her shorter fictions, Chopin demonstrates her unusual capacity to make the alien, somewhat exotic world of New Orleans and the Gulf islands real and to people it with complex and often baffled men and women whose humanity she confirms by refusing either to judge it or to use it to support a thesis.

At the 'Cadian Ball 1

B o b i n o t , that big, brown, g o o d - n a t u r e d B o b i n o t , h a d n o intention of g o i n g to the ball, even t h o u g h he k n e w C a l i x t a w o u l d b e t h e r e . F o r what c a m e of t h o s e balls b u t h e a r t a c h e , a n d a s i c k e n i n g disinclination for work the w h o l e week t h r o u g h , till S a t u r d a y night c a m e again a n d his tortures b e g a n afresh? W h y c o u l d he not love O z e i n a , w h o w o u l d marry him t o m o r r o w ; or F r o n i e , or any o n e of a dozen o t h e r s , rather than that little S p a n i s h vixen? Calixta's slender foot h a d never t o u c h e d C u b a n soil; but her m o t h e r ' s h a d , a n d the S p a n i s h w a s in her blood all the s a m e . F o r that r e a s o n the prairie p e o p l e forgave her m u c h that they w o u l d not have overlooked in their own d a u g h t e r s or sisters. H e r e y e s , B o b i n o t t h o u g h t of her eyes, a n d w e a k e n e d , t h e b l u e s t , the drowsiest, m o s t tantalizing that ever looked into a m a n ' s ; h e t h o u g h t of her flaxen hair that kinked w o r s e t h a n a m u l a t t o ' s c l o s e to her h e a d ; that b r o a d ,
1. First published in Two Tales (October 1892); first published in book form in Bayou Folk ( 1 8 9 4 ) , the source of the text printed here.

The Awakening Chopin

The Awak ening akening and Selected Short Stories

by

Kate Chopin
THE AWAKENING I
A GREEN AND YELLOW PARROT, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! Thats all right! He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence. Mr. Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, arose with an expression and an exclamation of disgust. He walked down the gallery and across the narrow bridges which connected the Lebrun cottages one with the other. He had been seated before the door of the main house. The parrot and the mockingbird were the property of Madame Lebrun, and they had the right to make all the noise they wished. Mr. Pontellier had the privilege of quitting their society when they ceased to be entertaining. 3

He stopped before the door of his own cottage, which was the fourth one from the main building and next to the last. Seating himself in a wicker rocker which was there, he once more applied himself to the task of reading the newspaper. The day was Sunday; the paper was a day old. The Sunday papers had not yet reached Grand Isle. He was already acquainted with the market reports, and he glanced restlessly over the editorials and bits of news which he had not had time to read before quitting New Orleans the day before. Mr. Pontellier wore eye-glasses. He was a man of forty, of medium height and rather slender build; he stooped a little. His hair was brown and straight, parted on one side. His beard was neatly and closely trimmed. Once in a while he withdrew his glance from the newspaper and looked about him. There was more noise than ever over at the house. The main building was called the house, to distinguish it from the cottages. The chattering and whistling birds were still at it. Two young girls, the Farival twins, were playing a duet from Zampa upon the piano. Madame Lebrun was bustling in and out, giving orders in a high key to a yard-boy whenever she got inside the house, and directions in an equally high voice to a dining-room servant whenever she got outside. She was a fresh, pretty woman, clad always in white with elbow sleeves. Her starched skirts crinkled as she came and went. Farther down, before one of the cottages, a lady in black was walking demurely up and down, telling her beads. A good many persons of the pension had gone over to the Cheniere Caminada in Beaudelets lugger to hear mass. Some young people were out under the wateroaks playing croquet. Mr. Pontelliers two children were there sturdy little fellows of four and five. A quadroon nurse followed them about with a faraway, meditative air.

The Awakening Chopin

Mr. Pontellier finally lit a cigar and began to smoke, letting the paper drag idly from his hand. He fixed his gaze upon a white sunshade that was advancing at snails pace from the beach. He could see it plainly between the gaunt trunks of the water-oaks and across the stretch of yellow camomile. The gulf looked far away, melting hazily into the blue of the horizon. The sunshade continued to approach slowly. Beneath its pink-lined shelter were his wife, Mrs. Pontellier, and young Robert Lebrun. When they reached the cottage, the two seated themselves with some appearance of fatigue upon the upper step of the porch, facing each other, each leaning against a supporting post. What folly! to bathe at such an hour in such heat! exclaimed Mr. Pontellier. He himself had taken a plunge at daylight. That was why the morning seemed long to him. You are burnt beyond recognition, he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her fawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers. He sent back an answering smile. What is it? asked Pontellier, looking lazily and amused from one to the other. It was some utter nonsense; some adventure out there in the water, and they both tried to relate it at once. It did not seem half so amusing when told. They realized this, and so did Mr. Pontellier. He yawned and stretched himself. Then he got up, saying he had half a 4

mind to go over to Kleins hotel and play a game of billiards. Come go along, Lebrun, he proposed to Robert. But Robert admitted quite frankly that he preferred to stay where he was and talk to Mrs. Pontellier. Well, send him about his business when he bores you, Edna, instructed her husband as he prepared to leave. Here, take the umbrella, she exclaimed, holding it out to him. He accepted the sunshade, and lifting it over his head descended the steps and walked away. Coming back to dinner? his wife called after him. He halted a moment and shrugged his shoulders. He felt in his vest pocket; there was a ten-dollar bill there. He did not know; perhaps he would return for the early dinner and perhaps he would not. It all depended upon the company which he found over at Kleins and the size of the game. He did not say this, but she understood it, and laughed, nodding goodby to him. Both children wanted to follow their father when they saw him starting out. He kissed them and promised to bring them back bonbons and peanuts.

II
MRS. PONTELLIERS EYES were quick and bright; they were a yellowish brown, about the color of her hair. She had a way of turning them swiftly upon an object and holding them there as if lost in some inward maze of contemplation or thought. Her eyebrows were a shade darker than her hair. They were thick and almost horizontal, emphasizing the depth of her eyes. She was

The Awakening Chopin

rather handsome than beautiful. Her face was captivating by reason of a certain frankness of expression and a contradictory subtle play of features. Her manner was engaging. Robert rolled a cigarette. He smoked cigarettes because he could not afford cigars, he said. He had a cigar in his pocket which Mr. Pontellier had presented him with, and he was saving it for his after-dinner smoke. This seemed quite proper and natural on his part. In coloring he was not unlike his companion. A clean-shaved face made the resemblance more pronounced than it would otherwise have been. There rested no shadow of care upon his open countenance. His eyes gathered in and reflected the light and languor of the summer day. Mrs. Pontellier reached over for a palm-leaf fan that lay on the porch and began to fan herself, while Robert sent between his lips light puffs from his cigarette. They chatted incessantly: about the things around them; their amusing adventure out in the water-it had again assumed its entertaining aspect; about the wind, the trees, the people who had gone to the Cheniere; about the children playing croquet under the oaks, and the Farival twins, who were now performing the overture to The Poet and the Peasant. Robert talked a good deal about himself. He was very young, and did not know any better. Mrs. Pontellier talked a little about herself for the same reason. Each was interested in what the other said. Robert spoke of his intention to go to Mexico in the autumn, where fortune awaited him. He was always intending to go to Mexico, but some way never got there. Meanwhile he held on to his modest position in a mercantile house in New Orleans, where an equal familiarity with English, French and Spanish gave him no small value as a clerk and correspondent. 5

He was spending his summer vacation, as he always did, with his mother at Grand Isle. In former times, before Robert could remember, the house had been a summer luxury of the Lebruns. Now, flanked by its dozen or more cottages, which were always filled with exclusive visitors from the Quartier Francais, it enabled Madame Lebrun to maintain the easy and comfortable existence which appeared to be her birthright. Mrs. Pontellier talked about her fathers Mississippi plantation and her girlhood home in the old Kentucky bluegrass country. She was an American woman, with a small infusion of French which seemed to have been lost in dilution. She read a letter from her sister, who was away in the East, and who had engaged herself to be married. Robert was interested, and wanted to know what manner of girls the sisters were, what the father was like, and how long the mother had been dead. When Mrs. Pontellier folded the letter it was time for her to dress for the early dinner. I see Leonce isnt coming back, she said, with a glance in the direction whence her husband had disappeared. Robert supposed he was not, as there were a good many New Orleans club men over at Kleins. When Mrs. Pontellier left him to enter her room, the young man descended the steps and strolled over toward the croquet players, where, during the half-hour before dinner, he amused himself with the little Pontellier children, who were very fond of him.

The Awakening Chopin

III
IT WAS ELEVEN OCLOCK that night when Mr. Pontellier returned from Kleins hotel. He was in an excellent humor, in high spirits, and very talkative. His entrance awoke his wife, who was in bed and fast asleep when he came in. He talked to her while he undressed, telling her anecdotes and bits of news and gossip that he had gathered during the day. From his trousers pockets he took a fistful of crumpled bank notes and a good deal of silver coin, which he piled on the bureau indiscriminately with keys, knife, handkerchief, and whatever else happened to be in his pockets. She was overcome with sleep, and answered him with little half utterances. He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation. Mr. Pontellier had forgotten the bonbons and peanuts for the boys. Notwithstanding he loved them very much, and went into the adjoining room where they slept to take a look at them and make sure that they were resting comfortably. The result of his investigation was far from satisfactory. He turned and shifted the youngsters about in bed. One of them began to kick and talk about a basket full of crabs. MR. PONTELLIER RETURNED to his wife with the information that Raoul had a high fever and needed looking after. Then he lit a cigar and went and sat near the open door to smoke it. Mrs. Pontellier was quite sure Raoul had no fever. He had gone to bed perfectly well, she said, and nothing had ailed him all day. Mr. Pontellier was too well acquainted with fever symptoms to be mis6

taken. He assured her the child was consuming at that moment in the next room. He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mothers place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once; making a living for his family on the street, and staying at home to see that no harm befell them. He talked in a monotonous, insistent way. Mrs. Pontellier sprang out of bed and went into the next room. She soon came back and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning her head down on the pillow. She said nothing, and refused to answer her husband when he questioned her. When his cigar was smoked out he went to bed, and in half a minute he was fast asleep. Mrs. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake. She began to cry a little, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her peignoir. Blowing out the candle, which her husband had left burning, she slipped her bare feet into a pair of satin mules at the foot of the bed and went out on the porch, where she sat down in the wicker chair and began to rock gently to and fro. It was then past midnight. The cottages were all dark. A single faint light gleamed out from the hallway of the house. There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night. The tears came so fast to Mrs. Pontelliers eyes that the damp sleeve of her peignoir no longer served to dry them. She was holding the back of her chair with one hand; her loose sleeve had slipped almost to the shoulder of her uplifted arm. Turning, she thrust her face, steaming

The Awakening Chopin

and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her arms. She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life. They seemed never before to have weighed much against the abundance of her husbands kindness and a uniform devotion which had come to be tacit and self-understood. An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her souls summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself. The mosquitoes made merry over her, biting her firm, round arms and nipping at her bare insteps. The little stinging, buzzing imps succeeded in dispelling a mood which might have held her there in the darkness half a night longer. The following morning Mr. Pontellier was up in good time to take the rockaway which was to convey him to the steamer at the wharf. He was returning to the city to his business, and they would not see him again at the Island till the coming Saturday. He had regained his composure, which seemed to have been somewhat impaired the night before. He was eager to be gone, as he looked forward to a lively week in Carondelet Street. Mr. Pontellier gave his wife half of the money which he had brought away from Kleins hotel the evening before. She liked money as well as most women, and, accepted it with no little satisfaction. It will buy a handsome wedding present for Sister Janet! she exclaimed, smoothing out the bills as she counted them one by one. 7

Oh! well treat Sister Janet better than that, my dear, he laughed, as he prepared to kiss her good-by. The boys were tumbling about, clinging to his legs, imploring that numerous things be brought back to them. Mr. Pontellier was a great favorite, and ladies, men, children, even nurses, were always on hand to say goodby to him. His wife stood smiling and waving, the boys shouting, as he disappeared in the old rockaway down the sandy road. A few days later a box arrived for Mrs. Pontellier from New Orleans. It was from her husband. It was filled with friandises, with luscious and toothsome bitsthe finest of fruits, pates, a rare bottle or two, delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance. Mrs. Pontellier was always very generous with the contents of such a box; she was quite used to receiving them when away from home. The pates and fruit were brought to the dining-room; the bonbons were passed around. And the ladies, selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit that she knew of none better.

IV
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN a difficult matter for Mr. Pontellier to define to his own satisfaction or any one elses wherein his wife failed in her duty toward their children. It was something which he felt rather than perceived, and he never voiced the feeling without subsequent regret and ample atonement. If one of the little Pontellier boys took a tumble whilst at play, he was not apt to rush crying to his mothers arms for comfort; he would

The Awakening Chopin

more likely pick himself up, wipe the water out of his eves and the sand out of his mouth, and go on playing. Tots as they were, they pulled together and stood their ground in childish battles with doubled fists and uplifted voices, which usually prevailed against the other mother-tots. The quadroon nurse was looked upon as a huge encumbrance, only good to button up waists and panties and to brush and part hair; since it seemed to be a law of society that hair must be parted and brushed. In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The motherwomen seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. Many of them were delicious in the role; one of them was the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm. If her husband did not adore her, he was a brute, deserving of death by slow torture. Her name was Adele Ratignolle. There are no words to describe her save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams. There was nothing subtle or hidden about her charms; her beauty was all there, flaming and apparent: the spun-gold hair that comb nor confining pin could restrain; the blue eyes that were like nothing but sapphires; two lips that pouted, that were so red one could only think of cherries or some other delicious crimson fruit in looking at them. She was growing a little stout, but it did not seem to detract an iota from the grace of every step, pose, gesture. One would not have wanted her white neck a mite less full or her beautiful arms more slender. Never were hands more exquisite than 8

hers, and it was a joy to look at them when she threaded her needle or adjusted her gold thimble to her taper middle finger as she sewed away on the little night-drawers or fashioned a bodice or a bib. Madame Ratignolle was very fond of Mrs. Pontellier, and often she took her sewing and went over to sit with her in the afternoons. She was sitting there the afternoon of the day the box arrived from New Orleans. She had possession of the rocker, and she was busily engaged in sewing upon a diminutive pair of night-drawers. She had brought the pattern of the drawers for Mrs. Pontellier to cut outa marvel of construction, fashioned to enclose a babys body so effectually that only two small eyes might look out from the garment, like an Eskimos. They were designed for winter wear, when treacherous drafts came down chimneys and insidious currents of deadly cold found their way through key-holes. Mrs. Pontelliers mind was quite at rest concerning the present material needs of her children, and she could not see the use of anticipating and making winter night garments the subject of her summer meditations. But she did not want to appear unamiable and uninterested, so she had brought forth newspapers, which she spread upon the floor of the gallery, and under Madame Ratignolles directions she had cut a pattern of the impervious garment. Robert was there, seated as he had been the Sunday before, and Mrs. Pontellier also occupied her former position on the upper step, leaning listlessly against the post. Beside her was a box of bonbons, which she held out at intervals to Madame Ratignolle. That lady seemed at a loss to make a selection, but finally settled upon a stick of nougat, wondering if it were not too rich; whether it could possibly hurt her. Madame Ratignolle had been married seven

The Awakening Chopin

years. About every two years she had a baby. At that time she had three babies, and was beginning to think of a fourth one. She was always talking about her condition. Her condition was in no way apparent, and no one would have known a thing about it but for her persistence in making it the subject of conversation. Robert started to reassure her, asserting that he had known a lady who had subsisted upon nougat during the entirebut seeing the color mount into Mrs. Pontelliers face he checked himself and changed the subject. Mrs. Pontellier, though she had married a Creole, was not thoroughly at home in the society of Creoles; never before had she been thrown so intimately among them. There were only Creoles that summer at Lebruns. They all knew each other, and felt like one large family, among whom existed the most amicable relations. A characteristic which distinguished them and which impressed Mrs. Pontellier most forcibly was their entire absence of prudery. Their freedom of expression was at first incomprehensible to her, though she had no difficulty in reconciling it with a lofty chastity which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn and unmistakable. Never would Edna Pontellier forget the shock with which she heard Madame Ratignolle relating to old Monsieur Farival the harrowing story of one of her accouchements, withholding no intimate detail. She was growing accustomed to like shocks, but she could not keep the mounting color back from her cheeks. Oftener than once her coming had interrupted the droll story with which Robert was entertaining some amused group of married women. A book had gone the rounds of the pension. When it came her turn to read it, she did so with profound astonishment. She felt moved to read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done 9

so,to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps. It was openly criticised and freely discussed at table. Mrs. Pontellier gave over being astonished, and concluded that wonders would never cease.

V
They formed a congenial group sitting there that summer afternoon Madame Ratignolle sewing away, often stopping to relate a story or incident with much expressive gesture of her perfect hands; Robert and Mrs. Pontellier sitting idle, exchanging occasional words, glances or smiles which indicated a certain advanced stage of intimacy and camaraderie. He had lived in her shadow during the past month. No one thought anything of it. Many had predicted that Robert would devote himself to Mrs. Pontellier when he arrived. Since the age of fifteen, which was eleven years before, Robert each summer at Grand Isle had constituted himself the devoted attendant of some fair dame or damsel. Sometimes it was a young girl, again a widow; but as often as not it was some interesting married woman. For two consecutive seasons he lived in the sunlight of Mademoiselle Duvignes presence. But she died between summers; then Robert posed as an inconsolable, prostrating himself at the feet of Madame Ratignolle for whatever crumbs of sympathy and comfort she might be pleased to vouchsafe. Mrs. Pontellier liked to sit and gaze at her fair companion as she might look upon a faultless Madonna. Could any one fathom the cruelty beneath that fair exterior? murmured Robert. She knew that I adored her once, and she let me adore

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her. It was Robert, come; go; stand up; sit down; do this; do that; see if the baby sleeps; my thimble, please, that I left God knows where. Come and read Daudet to me while I sew. Par exemple! I never had to ask. You were always there under my feet, like a troublesome cat. You mean like an adoring dog. And just as soon as Ratignolle appeared on the scene, then it was like a dog. Passez! Adieu! Allez vous-en! Perhaps I feared to make Alphonse jealous, she interjoined, with excessive naivete. That made them all laugh. The right hand jealous of the left! The heart jealous of the soul! But for that matter, the Creole husband is never jealous; with him the gangrene passion is one which has become dwarfed by disuse. Meanwhile Robert, addressing Mrs Pontellier, continued to tell of his one time hopeless passion for Madame Ratignolle; of sleepless nights, of consuming flames till the very sea sizzled when he took his daily plunge. While the lady at the needle kept up a little running, contemptuous comment: Blagueurfarceurgros bete, va! He never assumed this seriocomic tone when alone with Mrs. Pontellier. She never knew precisely what to make of it; at that moment it was impossible for her to guess how much of it was jest and what proportion was earnest. It was understood that he had often spoken words of love to Madame Ratignolle, without any thought of being taken seriously. Mrs. Pontellier was glad he had not assumed a similar role toward herself. It would have been unacceptable and annoying. Mrs. Pontellier had brought her sketching materials, which she sometimes dabbled with in an unprofessional way. She liked the dabbling. She felt in it satisfaction of a kind which no other employment afforded her. 10

She had long wished to try herself on Madame Ratignolle. Never had that lady seemed a more tempting subject than at that moment, seated there like some sensuous Madonna, with the gleam of the fading day enriching her splendid color. Robert crossed over and seated himself upon the step below Mrs. Pontellier, that he might watch her work. She handled her brushes with a certain ease and freedom which came, not from long and close acquaintance with them, but from a natural aptitude. Robert followed her work with close attention, giving forth little ejaculatory expressions of appreciation in French, which he addressed to Madame Ratignolle. Mais ce nest pas mal! Elle sy connait, elle a de la force, oui. During his oblivious attention he once quietly rested his head against Mrs. Pontelliers arm. As gently she repulsed him. Once again he repeated the offense. She could not but believe it to be thoughtlessness on his part; yet that was no reason she should submit to it. She did not remonstrate, except again to repulse him quietly but firmly. He offered no apology. The picture completed bore no resemblance to Madame Ratignolle. She was greatly disappointed to find that it did not look like her. But it was a fair enough piece of work, and in many respects satisfying. Mrs. Pontellier evidently did not think so. After surveying the sketch critically she drew a broad smudge of paint across its surface, and crumpled the paper between her hands. The youngsters came tumbling up the steps, the quadroon following at the respectful distance which they required her to observe. Mrs. Pontellier made them carry her paints and things into the house. She sought to detain them for a little talk and some pleasantry. But they were greatly in earnest. They had only come to investigate the contents of the bonbon box. They accepted without murmuring what she chose

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to give them, each holding out two chubby hands scoop-like, in the vain hope that they might be filled; and then away they went. The sun was low in the west, and the breeze soft and languorous that came up from the south, charged with the seductive odor of the sea. Children freshly befurbelowed, were gathering for their games under the oaks. Their voices were high and penetrating. Madame Ratignolle folded her sewing, placing thimble, scissors, and thread all neatly together in the roll, which she pinned securely. She complained of faintness. Mrs. Pontellier flew for the cologne water and a fan. She bathed Madame Ratignolles face with cologne, while Robert plied the fan with unnecessary vigor. The spell was soon over, and Mrs. Pontellier could not help wondering if there were not a little imagination responsible for its origin, for the rose tint had never faded from her friends face. She stood watching the fair woman walk down the long line of galleries with the grace and majesty which queens are sometimes supposed to possess. Her little ones ran to meet her. Two of them clung about her white skirts, the third she took from its nurse and with a thousand endearments bore it along in her own fond, encircling arms. Though, as everybody well knew, the doctor had forbidden her to lift so much as a pin! Are you going bathing? asked Robert of Mrs. Pontellier. It was not so much a question as a reminder. Oh, no, she answered, with a tone of indecision. Im tired; I think not. Her glance wandered from his face away toward the Gulf, whose sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty. Oh, come! he insisted. You mustnt miss your bath. Come on. The water must be delicious; it will not hurt you. Come. 11

He reached up for her big, rough straw hat that hung on a peg outside the door, and put it on her head. They descended the steps, and walked away together toward the beach. The sun was low in the west and the breeze was soft and warm.

VI
EDNA PONTELLIER COULD NOT have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her. A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,the light which, showing the way, forbids it. At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears. In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eightperhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman. But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of

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solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

VII
MRS. PONTELLIER WAS NOT a woman given to confidences, a characteristic hitherto contrary to her nature. Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual lifethat outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions. That summer at Grand Isle she began to loosen a little the mantle of reserve that had always enveloped her. There may have beenthere must have beeninfluences, both subtle and apparent, working in their several ways to induce her to do this; but the most obvious was the influence of Adele Ratignolle. The excessive physical charm of the Creole had first attracted her, for Edna had a sensuous susceptibility to beauty. Then the candor of the womans whole existence, which every one might read, and which formed so striking a contrast to her own habitual reservethis might have furnished a link. Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love. The two women went away one morning to the beach together, arm in arm, under the huge white sunshade. Edna had prevailed upon Madame Ratignolle to leave the children behind, though she could not induce her to relinquish a diminutive roll of needlework, which Adele begged to be allowed to slip into the depths of her pocket. In some unaccountable way they had escaped from Robert. 12

The walk to the beach was no inconsiderable one, consisting as it did of a long, sandy path, upon which a sporadic and tangled growth that bordered it on either side made frequent and unexpected inroads. There were acres of yellow camomile reaching out on either hand. Further away still, vegetable gardens abounded, with frequent small plantations of orange or lemon trees intervening. The dark green clusters glistened from afar in the sun. The women were both of goodly height, Madame Ratignolle possessing the more feminine and matronly figure. The charm of Edna Pontelliers physique stole insensibly upon you. The lines of her body were long, clean and symmetrical; it was a body which occasionally fell into splendid poses; there was no suggestion of the trim, stereotyped fashion-plate about it. A casual and indiscriminating observer, in passing, might not cast a second glance upon the figure. But with more feeling and discernment he would have recognized the noble beauty of its modeling, and the graceful severity of poise and movement, which made Edna Pontellier different from the crowd. She wore a cool muslin that morningwhite, with a waving vertical line of brown running through it; also a white linen collar and the big straw hat which she had taken from the peg outside the door. The hat rested any way on her yellow-brown hair, that waved a little, was heavy, and clung close to her head. Madame Ratignolle, more careful of her complexion, had twined a gauze veil about her head. She wore dogskin gloves, with gauntlets that protected her wrists. She was dressed in pure white, with a fluffiness of ruffles that became her. The draperies and fluttering things which she wore suited her rich, luxuriant beauty as a greater severity of line could not have done.

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There were a number of bath-houses along the beach, of rough but solid construction, built with small, protecting galleries facing the water. Each house consisted of two compartments, and each family at Lebruns possessed a compartment for itself, fitted out with all the essential paraphernalia of the bath and whatever other conveniences the owners might desire. The two women had no intention of bathing; they had just strolled down to the beach for a walk and to be alone and near the water. The Pontellier and Ratignolle compartments adjoined one another under the same roof. Mrs. Pontellier had brought down her key through force of habit. Unlocking the door of her bath-room she went inside, and soon emerged, bringing a rug, which she spread upon the floor of the gallery, and two huge hair pillows covered with crash, which she placed against the front of the building. The two seated themselves there in the shade of the porch, side by side, with their backs against the pillows and their feet extended. Madame Ratignolle removed her veil, wiped her face with a rather delicate handkerchief, and fanned herself with the fan which she always carried suspended somewhere about her person by a long, narrow ribbon. Edna removed her collar and opened her dress at the throat. She took the fan from Madame Ratignolle and began to fan both herself and her companion. It was very warm, and for a while they did nothing but exchange remarks about the heat, the sun, the glare. But there was a breeze blowing, a choppy, stiff wind that whipped the water into froth. It fluttered the skirts of the two women and kept them for a while engaged in adjusting, readjusting, tucking in, securing hair-pins and hat-pins. A few persons were sporting some distance away in the water. The beach was very still of human sound at that hour. The lady in black was reading her 13

morning devotions on the porch of a neighboring bathhouse. Two young lovers were exchanging their hearts yearnings beneath the childrens tent, which they had found unoccupied. Edna Pontellier, casting her eyes about, had finally kept them at rest upon the sea. The day was clear and carried the gaze out as far as the blue sky went; there were a few white clouds suspended idly over the horizon. A lateen sail was visible in the direction of Cat Island, and others to the south seemed almost motionless in the far distance. Of whomof what are you thinking? asked Adele of her companion, whose countenance she had been watching with a little amused attention, arrested by the absorbed expression which seemed to have seized and fixed every feature into a statuesque repose. Nothing, returned Mrs. Pontellier, with a start, adding at once: How stupid! But it seems to me it is the reply we make instinctively to such a question. Let me see, she went on, throwing back her head and narrowing her fine eyes till they shone like two vivid points of light. Let me see. I was really not conscious of thinking of anything; but perhaps I can retrace my thoughts. Oh! never mind! laughed Madame Ratignolle. I am not quite so exacting. I will let you off this time. It is really too hot to think, especially to think about thinking. But for the fun of it, persisted Edna. First of all, the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky, made a delicious picture that I just wanted to sit and look at. The hot wind beating in my face made me thinkwithout any connection that I can trace of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swim-

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ming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. Oh, I see the connection now! Where were you going that day in Kentucky, walking through the grass? I dont remember now. I was just walking diagonally across a big field. My sun-bonnet obstructed the view. I could see only the stretch of green before me, and I felt as if I must walk on forever, without coming to the end of it. I dont remember whether I was frightened or pleased. I must have been entertained. Likely as not it was Sunday, she laughed; and I was running away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, read in a spirit of gloom by my father that chills me yet to think of. And have you been running away from prayers ever since, ma chere? asked Madame Ratignolle, amused. No! oh, no! Edna hastened to say. I was a little unthinking child in those days, just following a misleading impulse without question. On the contrary, during one period of my life religion took a firm hold upon me; after I was twelve and until-untilwhy, I suppose until now, though I never thought much about itjust driven along by habit. But do you know, she broke off, turning her quick eyes upon Madame Ratignolle and leaning forward a little so as to bring her face quite close to that of her companion, sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided. Madame Ratignolle laid her hand over that of Mrs. Pontellier, which was near her. Seeing that the hand was not withdrawn, she clasped it firmly and warmly. She even stroked it a little, fondly, with the other hand, murmuring in an undertone, Pauvre cherie. 14

The action was at first a little confusing to Edna, but she soon lent herself readily to the Creoles gentle caress. She was not accustomed to an outward and spoken expression of affection, either in herself or in others. She and her younger sister, Janet, had quarreled a good deal through force of unfortunate habit. Her older sister, Margaret, was matronly and dignified, probably from having assumed matronly and housewifely responsibilities too early in life, their mother having died when they were quite young, Margaret was not effusive; she was practical. Edna had had an occasional girl friend, but whether accidentally or not, they seemed to have been all of one typethe self-contained. She never realized that the reserve of her own character had much, perhaps everything, to do with this. Her most intimate friend at school had been one of rather exceptional intellectual gifts, who wrote finesounding essays, which Edna admired and strove to imitate; and with her she talked and glowed over the English classics, and sometimes held religious and political controversies. Edna often wondered at one propensity which sometimes had inwardly disturbed her without causing any outward show or manifestation on her part. At a very early ageperhaps it was when she traversed the ocean of waving grassshe remembered that she had been passionately enamored of a dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer who visited her father in Kentucky. She could not leave his presence when he was there, nor remove her eyes from his face, which was something like Napoleons, with a lock of black hair failing across the forehead. But the cavalry officer melted imperceptibly out of her existence. At another time her affections were deeply engaged by a young gentleman who visited a lady on a neighboring plantation. It was after they went to Mississippi to live. The young man was engaged to be married

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to the young lady, and they sometimes called upon Margaret, driving over of afternoons in a buggy. Edna was a little miss, just merging into her teens; and the realization that she herself was nothing, nothing, nothing to the engaged young man was a bitter affliction to her. But he, too, went the way of dreams. She was a grown young woman when she was overtaken by what she supposed to be the climax of her fate. It was when the face and figure of a great tragedian began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses. The persistence of the infatuation lent it an aspect of genuineness. The hopelessness of it colored it with the lofty tones of a great passion. The picture of the tragedian stood enframed upon her desk. Any one may possess the portrait of a tragedian without exciting suspicion or comment. (This was a sinister reflection which she cherished.) In the presence of others she expressed admiration for his exalted gifts, as she handed the photograph around and dwelt upon the fidelity of the likeness. When alone she sometimes picked it up and kissed the cold glass passionately. Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. It was in the midst of her secret great passion that she met him. He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and an ardor which left nothing to be desired. He pleased her; his absolute devotion flattered her. She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken. Add to this the violent opposition of her father and her sister Margaret to her marriage with a Catholic, and we need seek no further for the motives which led her to accept Monsieur Pontellier. for her husband. 15

The acme of bliss, which would have been a marriage with the tragedian, was not for her in this world. As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams. But it was not long before the tragedian had gone to join the cavalry officer and the engaged young man and a few others; and Edna found herself face to face with the realities. She grew fond of her husband, realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection, thereby threatening its dissolution. She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them. The year before they had spent part of the summer with their grandmother Pontellier in Iberville. Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional intense longing. Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did not admit this, even to herself. It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her. Edna did not reveal so much as all this to Madame Ratignolle that summer day when they sat with faces turned to the sea. But a good part of it escaped her. She had put her head down on Madame Ratignolles shoulder. She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom. There was the sound of approaching voices. It was Robert, surrounded by a troop of children, searching for them. The two little Pontelliers

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were with him, and he carried Madame Ratignolles little girl in his arms. There were other children beside, and two nurse-maids followed, looking disagreeable and resigned. The women at once rose and began to shake out their draperies and relax their muscles. Mrs. Pontellier threw the cushions and rug into the bath-house. The children all scampered off to the awning, and they stood there in a line, gazing upon the intruding lovers, still exchanging their vows and sighs. The lovers got up, with only a silent protest, and walked slowly away somewhere else. The children possessed themselves of the tent, and Mrs. Pontellier went over to join them. Madame Ratignolle begged Robert to accompany her to the house; she complained of cramp in her limbs and stiffness of the joints. She leaned draggingly upon his arm as they walked.

VIII
Do me a favor, Robert, spoke the pretty woman at his side, almost as soon as she and Robert had started their slow, homeward way. She looked up in his face, leaning on his arm beneath the encircling shadow of the umbrella which he had lifted. Granted; as many as you like, he returned, glancing down into her eyes that were full of thoughtfulness and some speculation. I only ask for one; let Mrs. Pontellier alone. Tiens! he exclaimed, with a sudden, boyish laugh. Voila que Madame Ratignolle est jalouse! Nonsense! Im in earnest; I mean what I say. Let Mrs. Pontellier alone. 16

Why? he asked; himself growing serious at his companions solicitation. She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously. His face flushed with annoyance, and taking off his soft hat he began to beat it impatiently against his leg as he walked. Why shouldnt she take me seriously? he demanded sharply. Am I a comedian, a clown, a jack-in-the-box? Why shouldnt she? You Creoles! I have no patience with you! Am I always to be regarded as a feature of an amusing programme? I hope Mrs. Pontellier does take me seriously. I hope she has discernment enough to find in me something besides the blagueur. If I thought there was any doubt Oh, enough, Robert! she broke into his heated outburst. You are not thinking of what you are saying. You speak with about as little reflection as we might expect from one of those children down there playing in the sand. If your attentions to any married women here were ever offered with any intention of being convincing, you would not be the gentleman we all know you to be, and you would be unfit to associate with the wives and daughters of the people who trust you. Madame Ratignolle had spoken what she believed to be the law and the gospel. The young man shrugged his shoulders impatiently. Oh! well! That isnt it, slamming his hat down vehemently upon his head. You ought to feel that such things are not flattering to say to a fellow. Should our whole intercourse consist of an exchange of compliments? Ma foi! It isnt pleasant to have a woman tell you he went on, unheedingly, but breaking off suddenly: Now if I were like Arobinyou remember Alcee Arobin and that story of the consuls wife at

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Biloxi? And he related the story of Alcee Arobin and the consuls wife; and another about the tenor of the French Opera, who received letters which should never have been written; and still other stories, grave and gay, till Mrs. Pontellier and her possible propensity for taking young men seriously was apparently forgotten. Madame Ratignolle, when they had regained her cottage, went in to take the hours rest which she considered helpful. Before leaving her, Robert begged her pardon for the impatiencehe called it rudeness with which he had received her well-meant caution. You made one mistake, Adele, he said, with a light smile; there is no earthly possibility of Mrs. Pontellier ever taking me seriously. You should have warned me against taking myself seriously. Your advice might then have carried some weight and given me subject for some reflection. Au revoir. But you look tired, he added, solicitously. Would you like a cup of bouillon? Shall I stir you a toddy? Let me mix you a toddy with a drop of Angostura. She acceded to the suggestion of bouillon, which was grateful and acceptable. He went himself to the kitchen, which was a building apart from the cottages and lying to the rear of the house. And he himself brought her the golden-brown bouillon, in a dainty Sevres cup, with a flaky cracker or two on the saucer. She thrust a bare, white arm from the curtain which shielded her open door, and received the cup from his hands. She told him he was a bon garcon, and she meant it. Robert thanked her and turned away toward the house. The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the wateroaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet. Their heads might have 17

been turned upside-down, so absolutely did they tread upon blue ether. The lady in black, creeping behind them, looked a trifle paler and more jaded than usual. There was no sign of Mrs. Pontellier and the children. Robert scanned the distance for any such apparition. They would doubtless remain away till the dinner hour. The young man ascended to his mothers room. It was situated at the top of the house, made up of odd angles and a queer, sloping ceiling. Two broad dormer windows looked out toward the Gulf, and as far across it as a mans eye might reach. The furnishings of the room were light, cool, and practical. Madame Lebrun was busily engaged at the sewing-machine. A little black girl sat on the floor, and with her hands worked the treadle of the machine. The Creole woman does not take any chances which may be avoided of imperiling her health. Robert went over and seated himself on the broad sill of one of the dormer windows. He took a book from his pocket and began energetically to read it, judging by the precision and frequency with which he turned the leaves. The sewing-machine made a resounding clatter in the room; it was of a ponderous, by-gone make. In the lulls, Robert and his mother exchanged bits of desultory conversation. Where is Mrs. Pontellier? Down at the beach with the children. I promised to lend her the Goncourt. Dont forget to take it down when you go; its there on the bookshelf over the small table. Clatter, clatter, clatter, bang! for the next five or eight minutes. Where is Victor going with the rockaway? The rockaway? Victor? Yes; down there in front. He seems to be getting ready to drive away somewhere.

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Call him. Clatter, clatter! Robert uttered a shrill, piercing whistle which might have been heard back at the wharf. He wont look up. Madame Lebrun flew to the window. She called Victor! She waved a handkerchief and called again. The young fellow below got into the vehicle and started the horse off at a gallop. Madame Lebrun went back to the machine, crimson with annoyance. Victor was the younger son and brothera tete montee, with a temper which invited violence and a will which no ax could break. Whenever you say the word Im ready to thrash any amount of reason into him that hes able to hold. If your father had only lived! Clatter, clatter, clatter, clatter, bang! It was a fixed belief with Madame Lebrun that the conduct of the universe and all things pertaining thereto would have been manifestly of a more intelligent and higher order had not Monsieur Lebrun been removed to other spheres during the early years of their married life. What do you hear from Montel? Montel was a middleaged gentleman whose vain ambition and desire for the past twenty years had been to fill the void which Monsieur Lebruns taking off had left in the Lebrun household. Clatter, clatter, bang, clatter! I have a letter somewhere, looking in the machine drawer and finding the letter in the bottom of the workbasket. He says to tell you he will be in Vera Cruz the beginning of next month, clatter, clatter! and if you still have the intention of joining himbang! clatter, clatter, bang! Why didnt you tell me so before, mother? You know I wanted Clatter, clatter, clatter! 18

Do you see Mrs. Pontellier starting back with the children? She will be in late to luncheon again. She never starts to get ready for luncheon till the last minute. Clatter, clatter! Where are you going? Where did you say the Goncourt was?

IX
EVERY LIGHT IN THE HALL was ablaze; every lamp turned as high as it could be without smoking the chimney or threatening explosion. The lamps were fixed at intervals against the wall, encircling the whole room. Some one had gathered orange and lemon branches, and with these fashioned graceful festoons between. The dark green of the branches stood out and glistened against the white muslin curtains which draped the windows, and which puffed, floated, and flapped at the capricious will of a stiff breeze that swept up from the Gulf. It was Saturday night a few weeks after the intimate conversation held between Robert and Madame Ratignolle on their way from the beach. An unusual number of husbands, fathers, and friends had come down to stay over Sunday; and they were being suitably entertained by their families, with the material help of Madame Lebrun. The dining tables had all been removed to one end of the hall, and the chairs ranged about in rows and in clusters. Each little family group had had its say and exchanged its domestic gossip earlier in the evening. There was now an apparent disposition to relax; to widen the circle of confidences and give a more general tone to the conversation. Many of the children had been permitted to sit up beyond their usual bedtime. A small band of them were lying on their stomachs on the floor looking at the colored sheets of the comic papers which Mr.

The Awakening Chopin

Pontellier had brought down. The little Pontellier boys were permitting them to do so, and making their authority felt. Music, dancing, and a recitation or two were the entertainments furnished, or rather, offered. But there was nothing systematic about the programme, no appearance of prearrangement nor even premeditation. At an early hour in the evening the Farival twins were prevailed upon to play the piano. They were girls of fourteen, always clad in the Virgins colors, blue and white, having been dedicated to the Blessed Virgin at their baptism. They played a duet from Zampa, and at the earnest solicitation of every one present followed it with the overture to The Poet and the Peasant. Allez vous-en! Sapristi! shrieked the parrot outside the door. He was the only being present who possessed sufficient candor to admit that he was not listening to these gracious performances for the first time that summer. Old Monsieur Farival, grandfather of the twins, grew indignant over the interruption, and insisted upon having the bird removed and consigned to regions of darkness. Victor Lebrun objected; and his decrees were as immutable as those of Fate. The parrot fortunately offered no further interruption to the entertainment, the whole venom of his nature apparently having been cherished up and hurled against the twins in that one impetuous outburst. Later a young brother and sister gave recitations, which every one present had heard many times at winter evening entertainments in the city. A little girl performed a skirt dance in the center of the floor. The mother played her accompaniments and at the same time watched her daughter with greedy admiration and nervous apprehension. She need have had no apprehension. The child was mistress of the situation. She had been properly dressed for the occasion in black tulle and black silk 19

tights. Her little neck and arms were bare, and her hair, artificially crimped, stood out like fluffy black plumes over her head. Her poses were full of grace, and her little black-shod toes twinkled as they shot out and upward with a rapidity and suddenness which were bewildering. But there was no reason why every one should not dance. Madame Ratignolle could not, so it was she who gaily consented to play for the others. She played very well, keeping excellent waltz time and infusing an expression into the strains which was indeed inspiring. She was keeping up her music on account of the children, she said; because she and her husband both considered it a means of brightening the home and making it attractive. Almost every one danced but the twins, who could not be induced to separate during the brief period when one or the other should be whirling around the room in the arms of a man. They might have danced together, but they did not think of it. The children were sent to bed. Some went submissively; others with shrieks and protests as they were dragged away. They had been permitted to sit up till after the ice-cream, which naturally marked the limit of human indulgence. The ice-cream was passed around with cakegold and silver cake arranged on platters in alternate slices; it had been made and frozen during the afternoon back of the kitchen by two black women, under the supervision of Victor. It was pronounced a great successexcellent if it had only contained a little less vanilla or a little more sugar, if it had been frozen a degree harder, and if the salt might have been kept out of portions of it. Victor was proud of his achievement, and went about recommending it and urging every one to partake of it to excess. After Mrs. Pontellier had danced twice with her husband, once with

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Robert, and once with Monsieur Ratignolle, who was thin and tall and swayed like a reed in the wind when he danced, she went out on the gallery and seated herself on the low window-sill, where she commanded a view of all that went on in the hall and could look out toward the Gulf. There was a soft effulgence in the east. The moon was coming up, and its mystic shimmer was casting a million lights across the distant, restless water. Would you like to hear Mademoiselle Reisz play? asked Robert, coming out on the porch where she was. Of course Edna would like to hear Mademoiselle Reisz play; but she feared it would be useless to entreat her. Ill ask her, he said. Ill tell her that you want to hear her. She likes you. She will come. He turned and hurried away to one of the far cottages, where Mademoiselle Reisz was shuffling away. She was dragging a chair in and out of her room, and at intervals objecting to the crying of a baby, which a nurse in the adjoining cottage was endeavoring to put to sleep. She was a disagreeable little woman, no longer young, who had quarreled with almost every one, owing to a temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample upon the rights of others. Robert prevailed upon her without any too great difficulty. She entered the hall with him during a lull in the dance. She made an awkward, imperious little bow as she went in. She was a homely woman, with a small weazened face and body and eyes that glowed. She had absolutely no taste in dress, and wore a batch of rusty black lace with a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the side of her hair. Ask Mrs. Pontellier what she would like to hear me play, she requested of Robert. She sat perfectly still before the piano, not touching the keys, while Robert carried her message to Edna at the window. A 20

general air of surprise and genuine satisfaction fell upon every one as they saw the pianist enter. There was a settling down, and a prevailing air of expectancy everywhere. Edna was a trifle embarrassed at being thus signaled out for the imperious little womans favor. She would not dare to choose, and begged that Mademoiselle Reisz would please herself in her selections. Edna was what she herself called very fond of music. Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind. She sometimes liked to sit in the room of mornings when Madame Ratignolle played or practiced. One piece which that lady played Edna had entitled Solitude. It was a short, plaintive, minor strain. The name of the piece was something else, but she called it Solitude. When she heard it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him. Another piece called to her mind a dainty young woman clad in an Empire gown, taking mincing dancing steps as she came down a long avenue between tall hedges. Again, another reminded her of children at play, and still another of nothing on earth but a demure lady stroking a cat. The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontelliers spinal column. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth. She waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very pas-

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sions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her. Mademoiselle had finished. She arose, and bowing her stiff, lofty bow, she went away, stopping for neither, thanks nor applause. As she passed along the gallery she patted Edna upon the shoulder. Well, how did you like my music? she asked. The young woman was unable to answer; she pressed the hand of the pianist convulsively. Mademoiselle Reisz perceived her agitation and even her tears. She patted her again upon the shoulder as she said: You are the only one worth playing for. Those others? Bah! and she went shuffling and sidling on down the gallery toward her room. But she was mistaken about those others. Her playing had aroused a fever of enthusiasm. What passion! What an artist! I have always said no one could play Chopin like Mademoiselle Reisz! That last prelude! Bon Dieu! It shakes a man! It was growing late, and there was a general disposition to disband. But some one, perhaps it was Robert, thought of a bath at that mystic hour and under that mystic moon.

X
AT ALL EVENTS ROBERT proposed it, and there was not a dissenting voice. There was not one but was ready to follow when he led the way. He did not lead the way, however, he directed the way; and he himself loitered behind with the lovers, who had betrayed a disposition to linger and hold themselves apart. He walked between them, whether with malicious or mischievous intent was not wholly clear, even to himself. 21

The Pontelliers and Ratignolles walked ahead; the women leaning upon the arms of their husbands. Edna could hear Roberts voice behind them, and could sometimes hear what he said. She wondered why he did not join them. It was unlike him not to. Of late he had sometimes held away from her for an entire day, redoubling his devotion upon the next and the next, as though to make up for hours that had been lost. She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining. The people walked in little groups toward the beach. They talked and laughed; some of them sang. There was a band playing down at Kleins hotel, and the strains reached them faintly, tempered by the distance. There were strange, rare odors abroada tangle of the sea smell and of weeds and damp, new-plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfume of a field of white blossoms somewhere near. But the night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep. Most of them walked into the water as though into a native element. The sea was quiet now, and swelled lazily in broad billows that melted into one another and did not break except upon the beach in little foamy crests that coiled back like slow, white serpents. Edna had attempted all summer to learn to swim. She had received instructions from both the men and women; in some instances from the children. Robert had pursued a system of lessons almost daily; and he was nearly at the point of discouragement in realizing the futility of his efforts. A certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water, unless there was a hand near by that might reach out and reassure her.

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But that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence. She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water. A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before. Her unlooked-for achievement was the subject of wonder, applause, and admiration. Each one congratulated himself that his special teachings had accomplished this desired end. How easy it is! she thought. It is nothing, she said aloud; why did I not discover before that it was nothing. Think of the time I have lost splashing about like a baby! She would not join the groups in their sports and bouts, but intoxicated with her newly conquered power, she swam out alone. She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself. Once she turned and looked toward the shore, toward the people she had left there. She had not gone any great distance that is, what would have been a great distance for an experienced swimmer. But to her unaccustomed vision the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to overcome. A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her senses. But by an effort she rallied her 22

staggering faculties and managed to regain the land. She made no mention of her encounter with death and her flash of terror, except to say to her husband, I thought I should have perished out there alone. You were not so very far, my dear; I was watching you, he told her. Edna went at once to the bath-house, and she had put on her dry clothes and was ready to return home before the others had left the water. She started to walk away alone. They all called to her and shouted to her. She waved a dissenting hand, and went on, paying no further heed to their renewed cries which sought to detain her. Sometimes I am tempted to think that Mrs. Pontellier is capricious, said Madame Lebrun, who was amusing herself immensely and feared that Ednas abrupt departure might put an end to the pleasure. I know she is, assented Mr. Pontellier; sometimes, not often. Edna had not traversed a quarter of the distance on her way home before she was overtaken by Robert. Did you think I was afraid? she asked him, without a shade of annoyance. No; I knew you werent afraid. Then why did you come? Why didnt you stay out there with the others? I never thought of it. Thought of what? Of anything. What difference does it make? Im very tired, she uttered, complainingly. I know you are. You dont know anything about it. Why should you know? I never was so exhausted in my life. But it isnt unpleasant. A thousand emotions have

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swept through me to-night. I dont comprehend half of them. Dont mind what Im saying; I am just thinking aloud. I wonder if I shall ever be stirred again as Mademoiselle Reiszs playing moved me to-night. I wonder if any night on earth will ever again be like this one. It is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, halfhuman beings. There must be spirits abroad to-night. There are, whispered Robert, Didnt you know this was the twentyeighth of August? The twenty-eighth of August? Yes. On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is shiningthe moon must be shininga spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the semi-celestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But to-night he found Mrs. Pontellier. Perhaps he will never wholly release her from the spell. Perhaps she will never again suffer a poor, unworthy earthling to walk in the shadow of her divine presence. Dont banter me, she said, wounded at what appeared to be his flippancy. He did not mind the entreaty, but the tone with its delicate note of pathos was like a reproach. He could not explain; he could not tell her that he had penetrated her mood and understood. He said nothing except to offer her his arm, for, by her own admission, she was exhausted. She had been walking alone with her arms hanging limp, letting her white skirts trail along the dewy path. She took his arm, but she did not lean upon it. She let her hand lie listlessly, as though her thoughts were elsewhere somewhere in advance of her body, and she was striving to overtake them. 23

Robert assisted her into the hammock which swung from the post before her door out to the trunk of a tree. Will you stay out here and wait for Mr. Pontellier? he asked. Ill stay out here. Good-night. Shall I get you a pillow? Theres one here, she said, feeling about, for they were in the shadow. It must be soiled; the children have been tumbling it about. No matter. And having discovered the pillow, she adjusted it beneath her head. She extended herself in the hammock with a deep breath of relief. She was not a supercilious or an over-dainty woman. She was not much given to reclining in the hammock, and when she did so it was with no cat-like suggestion of voluptuous ease, but with a beneficent repose which seemed to invade her whole body. Shall I stay with you till Mr. Pontellier comes? asked Robert, seating himself on the outer edge of one of the steps and taking hold of the hammock rope which was fastened to the post. If you wish. Dont swing the hammock. Will you get my white shawl which I left on the window-sill over at the house? Are you chilly? No; but I shall be presently. Presently? he laughed. Do you know what time it is? How long are you going to stay out here? I dont know. Will you get the shawl? Of course I will, he said, rising. He went over to the house, walking along the grass. She watched his figure pass in and out of the strips of moonlight. It was past midnight. It was very quiet. When he returned with the shawl she took it and kept it in her hand. She did not put it around her.

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Did you say I should stay till Mr. Pontellier came back? I said you might if you wished to. He seated himself again and rolled a cigarette, which he smoked in silence. Neither did Mrs. Pontellier speak. No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire. When the voices of the bathers were heard approaching, Robert said good-night. She did not answer him. He thought she was asleep. Again she watched his figure pass in and out of the strips of moonlight as he walked away.

XI
WHAT ARE YOU DOING out here, Edna? I thought I should find you in bed, said her husband, when he discovered her lying there. He had walked up with Madame Lebrun and left her at the house. His wife did not reply. Are you asleep? he asked, bending down close to look at her. No. Her eyes gleamed bright and intense, with no sleepy shadows, as they looked into his. Do you know it is past one oclock? Come on, and he mounted the steps and went into their room. Edna! called Mr. Pontellier from within, after a few moments had gone by. Dont wait for me, she answered. He thrust his head through the door. You will take cold out there, he said, irritably. What folly is this? Why dont you come in? 24

It isnt cold; I have my shawl. The mosquitoes will devour you. There are no mosquitoes. She heard him moving about the room; every sound indicating impatience and irritation. Another time she would have gone in at his request. She would, through habit, have yielded to his desire; not with any sense of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly, as we walk, move, sit, stand, go through the daily treadmill of the life which has been portioned out to us. Edna, dear, are you not coming in soon? he asked again, this time fondly, with a note of entreaty. No; I am going to stay out here. This is more than folly, he blurted out. I cant permit you to stay out there all night. You must come in the house instantly. With a writhing motion she settled herself more securely in the hammock. She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did. Leonce, go to bed, she said I mean to stay out here. I dont wish to go in, and I dont intend to. Dont speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you. Mr. Pontellier had prepared for bed, but he slipped on an extra garment. He opened a bottle of wine, of which he kept a small and select supply in a buffet of his own. He drank a glass of the wine and went out on the gallery and offered a glass to his wife. She did not wish any.

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He drew up the rocker, hoisted his slippered feet on the rail, and proceeded to smoke a cigar. He smoked two cigars; then he went inside and drank another glass of wine. Mrs. Pontellier again declined to accept a glass when it was offered to her. Mr. Pontellier once more seated himself with elevated feet, and after a reasonable interval of time smoked some more cigars. Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul. The physical need for sleep began to overtake her; the exuberance which had sustained and exalted her spirit left her helpless and yielding to the conditions which crowded her in. The stillest hour of the night had come, the hour before dawn, when the world seems to hold its breath. The moon hung low, and had turned from silver to copper in the sleeping sky. The old owl no longer hooted, and the water-oaks had ceased to moan as they bent their heads. Edna arose, cramped from lying so long and still in the hammock. She tottered up the steps, clutching feebly at the post before passing into the house. Are you coming in, Leonce? she asked, turning her face toward her husband. Yes, dear, he answered, with a glance following a misty puff of smoke. Just as soon as I have finished my cigar.

XII
SHE SLEPT BUT A FEW HOURS. They were troubled and feverish hours, disturbed with dreams that were intangible, that eluded her, leaving only an impression upon her half-awakened senses of something unat25

tainable. She was up and dressed in the cool of the early morning. The air was invigorating and steadied somewhat her faculties. However, she was not seeking refreshment or help from any source, either external or from within. She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility. Most of the people at that early hour were still in bed and asleep. A few, who intended to go over to the Cheniere for mass, were moving about. The lovers, who had laid their plans the night before, were already strolling toward the wharf. The lady in black, with her Sunday prayer-book, velvet and gold-clasped, and her Sunday silver beads, was following them at no great distance. Old Monsieur Farival was up, and was more than half inclined to do anything that suggested itself. He put on his big straw hat, and taking his umbrella from the stand in the hall, followed the lady in black, never overtaking her. The little negro girl who worked Madame Lebruns sewing-machine was sweeping the galleries with long, absent-minded strokes of the broom. Edna sent her up into the house to awaken Robert. Tell him I am going to the Cheniere. The boat is ready; tell him to hurry. He had soon joined her. She had never sent for him before. She had never asked for him. She had never seemed to want him before. She did not appear conscious that she had done anything unusual in commanding his presence. He was apparently equally unconscious of anything extraordinary in the situation. But his face was suffused with a quiet glow when he met her. They went together back to the kitchen to drink coffee. There was no time to wait for any nicety of service. They stood outside the window

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and the cook passed them their coffee and a roll, which they drank and ate from the window-sill. Edna said it tasted good. She had not thought of coffee nor of anything. He told her he had often noticed that she lacked forethought. Wasnt it enough to think of going to the Cheniere and waking you up? she laughed. Do I have to think of everything?as Leonce says when hes in a bad humor. I dont blame him; hed never be in a bad humor if it werent for me. They took a short cut across the sands. At a distance they could see the curious procession moving toward the wharfthe lovers, shoulder to shoulder, creeping; the lady in black, gaining steadily upon them; old Monsieur Farival, losing ground inch by inch, and a young barefooted Spanish girl, with a red kerchief on her head and a basket on her arm, bringing up the rear. Robert knew the girl, and he talked to her a little in the boat. No one present understood what they said. Her name was Mariequita. She had a round, sly, piquant face and pretty black eyes. Her hands were small, and she kept them folded over the handle of her basket. Her feet were broad and coarse. She did not strive to hide them. Edna looked at her feet, and noticed the sand and slime between her brown toes. Beaudelet grumbled because Mariequita was there, taking up so much room. In reality he was annoyed at having old Monsieur Farival, who considered himself the better sailor of the two. But he he would not quarrel with so old a man as Monsieur Farival, so he quarreled with Mariequita. The girl was deprecatory at one moment, appealing to Robert. She was saucy the next, moving her head up and down, making eyes at Robert and making mouths at Beaudelet. The lovers were all alone. They saw nothing, they heard nothing. 26

The lady in black was counting her beads for the third time. Old Monsieur Farival talked incessantly of what he knew about handling a boat, and of what Beaudelet did not know on the same subject. Edna liked it all. She looked Mariequita up and down, from her ugly brown toes to her pretty black eyes, and back again. Why does she look at me like that? inquired the girl of Robert. Maybe she thinks you are pretty. Shall I ask her? No. Is she your sweetheart? Shes a married lady, and has two children. Oh! well! Francisco ran away with Sylvanos wife, who had four children. They took all his money and one of the children and stole his boat. Shut up! Does she understand? Oh, hush! Are those two married over thereleaning on each other? Of course not, laughed Robert. Of course not, echoed Mariequita, with a serious, confirmatory bob of the head. The sun was high up and beginning to bite. The swift breeze seemed to Edna to bury the sting of it into the pores of her face and hands. Robert held his umbrella over her. As they went cutting sidewise through the water, the sails bellied taut, with the wind filling and overflowing them. Old Monsieur Farival laughed sardonically at something as he looked at the sails, and Beaudelet swore at the old man under his breath. Sailing across the bay to the Cheniere Caminada, Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been looseninghad snapped the night before when

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the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails. Robert spoke to her incessantly; he no longer noticed Mariequita. The girl had shrimps in her bamboo basket. They were covered with Spanish moss. She beat the moss down impatiently, and muttered to herself sullenly. Let us go to Grande Terre to-morrow? said Robert in a low voice. What shall we do there? Climb up the hill to the old fort and look at the little wriggling gold snakes, and watch the lizards sun themselves. She gazed away toward Grande Terre and thought she would like to be alone there with Robert, in the sun, listening to the oceans roar and watching the slimy lizards writhe in and out among the ruins of the old fort. And the next day or the next we can sail to the Bayou Brulow, he went on. What shall we do there? Anythingcast bait for fish. No; well go back to Grande Terre. Let the fish alone. Well go wherever you like, he said. Ill have Tonie come over and help me patch and trim my boat. We shall not need Beaudelet nor any one. Are you afraid of the pirogue? Oh, no. Then Ill take you some night in the pirogue when the moon shines. Maybe your Gulf spirit will whisper to you in which of these islands the treasures are hiddendirect you to the very spot, perhaps. And in a day we should be rich! she laughed. Id give it all to you, the pirate gold and every bit of treasure we could dig up. I think you would know how to spend it. Pirate gold isnt a thing to be hoarded or 27

utilized. It is something to squander and throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the golden specks fly. Wed share it, and scatter it together, he said. His face flushed. They all went together up to the quaint little Gothic church of Our Lady of Lourdes, gleaming all brown and yellow with paint in the suns glare. Only Beaudelet remained behind, tinkering at his boat, and Mariequita walked away with her basket of shrimps, casting a look of childish ill humor and reproach at Robert from the corner of her eye.

XIII
A FEELING OF OPPRESSION and drowsiness overcame Edna during the service. Her head began to ache, and the lights on the altar swayed before her eyes. Another time she might have made an effort to regain her composure; but her one thought was to quit the stifling atmosphere of the church and reach the open air. She arose, climbing over Roberts feet with a muttered apology. Old Monsieur Farival, flurried, curious, stood up, but upon seeing that Robert had followed Mrs. Pontellier, he sank back into his seat. He whispered an anxious inquiry of the lady in black, who did not notice him or reply, but kept her eyes fastened upon the pages of her velvet prayer-book. I felt giddy and almost overcome, Edna said, lifting her hands instinctively to her head and pushing her straw hat up from her forehead. I couldnt have stayed through the service. They were outside in the shadow of the church. Robert was full of solicitude. It was folly to have thought of going in the first place, let alone staying. Come over to Madame Antoines; you can rest there. He took

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her arm and led her away, looking anxiously and continuously down into her face. How still it was, with only the voice of the sea whispering through the reeds that grew in the salt-water pools! The long line of little gray, weather-beaten houses nestled peacefully among the orange trees. It must always have been Gods day on that low, drowsy island, Edna thought. They stopped, leaning over a jagged fence made of sea-drift, to ask for water. A youth, a mild-faced Acadian, was drawing water from the cistern, which was nothing more than a rusty buoy, with an opening on one side, sunk in the ground. The water which the youth handed to them in a tin pail was not cold to taste, but it was cool to her heated face, and it greatly revived and refreshed her. Madame Antoines cot was at the far end of the village. She welcomed them with all the native hospitality, as she would have opened her door to let the sunlight in. She was fat, and walked heavily and clumsily across the floor. She could speak no English, but when Robert made her understand that the lady who accompanied him was ill and desired to rest, she was all eagerness to make Edna feel at home and to dispose of her comfortably. The whole place was immaculately clean, and the big, four-posted bed, snow-white, invited one to repose. It stood in a small side room which looked out across a narrow grass plot toward the shed, where there was a disabled boat lying keel upward. Madame Antoine had not gone to mass. Her son Tonie had, but she supposed he would soon be back, and she invited Robert to be seated and wait for him. But he went and sat outside the door and smoked. Madame Antoine busied herself in the large front room preparing dinner. She was boiling mullets over a few red coals in the huge fireplace. 28

Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing the greater part of them. She bathed her face, her neck and arms in the basin that stood between the windows. She took off her shoes and stockings and stretched herself in the very center of the high, white bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed, with its sweet country odor of laurel lingering about the sheets and mattress! She stretched her strong limbs that ached a little. She ran her fingers through her loosened hair for a while. She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh. She clasped her hands easily above her head, and it was thus she fell asleep. She slept lightly at first, half awake and drowsily attentive to the things about her. She could hear Madame Antoines heavy, scraping tread as she walked back and forth on the sanded floor. Some chickens were clucking outside the windows, scratching for bits of gravel in the grass. Later she half heard the voices of Robert and Tonie talking under the shed. She did not stir. Even her eyelids rested numb and heavily over her sleepy eyes. The voices went onTonies slow, Acadian drawl, Roberts quick, soft, smooth French. She understood French imperfectly unless directly addressed, and the voices were only part of the other drowsy, muffled sounds lulling her senses. When Edna awoke it was with the conviction that she had slept long and soundly. The voices were hushed under the shed. Madame Antoines step was no longer to be heard in the adjoining room. Even the chickens had gone elsewhere to scratch and cluck. The mosquito bar was drawn over her; the old woman had come in while she slept and let down the bar. Edna arose quietly from the bed, and looking between

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the curtains of the window, she saw by the slanting rays of the sun that the afternoon was far advanced. Robert was out there under the shed, reclining in the shade against the sloping keel of the overturned boat. He was reading from a book. Tonie was no longer with him. She wondered what had become of the rest of the party. She peeped out at him two or three times as she stood washing herself in the little basin between the windows. Madame Antoine had laid some coarse, clean towels upon a chair, and had placed a box of poudre de riz within easy reach. Edna dabbed the powder upon her nose and cheeks as she looked at herself closely in the little distorted mirror which hung on the wall above the basin. Her eyes were bright and wide awake and her face glowed. When she had completed her toilet she walked into the adjoining room. She was very hungry. No one was there. But there was a cloth spread upon the table that stood against the wall, and a cover was laid for one, with a crusty brown loaf and a bottle of wine beside the plate. Edna bit a piece from the brown loaf, tearing it with her strong, white teeth. She poured some of the wine into the glass and drank it down. Then she went softly out of doors, and plucking an orange from the low-hanging bough of a tree, threw it at Robert, who did not know she was awake and up. An illumination broke over his whole face when he saw her and joined her under the orange tree. How many years have I slept? she inquired. The whole island seems changed. A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics. How many ages ago did Madame Antoine and Tonie die? and when did our people from Grand Isle disappear from the earth? 29

He familiarly adjusted a ruffle upon her shoulder. You have slept precisely one hundred years. I was left here to guard your slumbers; and for one hundred years I have been out under the shed reading a book. The only evil I couldnt prevent was to keep a broiled fowl from drying up. If it has turned to stone, still will I eat it, said Edna, moving with him into the house. But really, what has become of Monsieur Farival and the others? Gone hours ago. When they found that you were sleeping they thought it best not to awake you. Any way, I wouldnt have let them. What was I here for? I wonder if Leonce will be uneasy! she speculated, as she seated herself at table. Of course not; he knows you are with me, Robert replied, as he busied himself among sundry pans and covered dishes which had been left standing on the hearth. Where are Madame Antoine and her son? asked Edna. Gone to Vespers, and to visit some friends, I believe. I am to take you back in Tonies boat whenever you are ready to go. He stirred the smoldering ashes till the broiled fowl began to sizzle afresh. He served her with no mean repast, dripping the coffee anew and sharing it with her. Madame Antoine had cooked little else than the mullets, but while Edna slept Robert had foraged the island. He was childishly gratified to discover her appetite, and to see the relish with which she ate the food which he had procured for her. Shall we go right away? she asked, after draining her glass and brushing together the crumbs of the crusty loaf. The sun isnt as low as it will be in two hours, he answered.

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The sun will be gone in two hours. Well, let it go; who cares! They waited a good while under the orange trees, till Madame Antoine came back, panting, waddling, with a thousand apologies to explain her absence. Tonie did not dare to return. He was shy, and would not willingly face any woman except his mother. It was very pleasant to stay there under the orange trees, while the sun dipped lower and lower, turning the western sky to flaming copper and gold. The shadows lengthened and crept out like stealthy, grotesque monsters across the grass. Edna and Robert both sat upon the groundthat is, he lay upon the ground beside her, occasionally picking at the hem of her muslin gown. Madame Antoine seated her fat body, broad and squat, upon a bench beside the door. She had been talking all the afternoon, and had wound herself up to the storytelling pitch. And what stories she told them! But twice in her life she had left the Cheniere Caminada, and then for the briefest span. All her years she had squatted and waddled there upon the island, gathering legends of the Baratarians and the sea. The night came on, with the moon to lighten it. Edna could hear the whispering voices of dead men and the click of muffled gold. When she and Robert stepped into Tonies boat, with the red lateen sail, misty spirit forms were prowling in the shadows and among the reeds, and upon the water were phantom ships, speeding to cover.

XIV
THE YOUNGEST BOY, Etienne, had been very naughty, Madame Ratignolle said, as she delivered him into the hands of his mother. He had been unwilling to go to bed and had made a scene; whereupon she had taken charge of him and pacified him as well as she could. Raoul had been in bed and asleep for two hours. The youngster was in his long white nightgown, that kept tripping him up as Madame Ratignolle led him along by the hand. With the other chubby fist he rubbed his eyes, which were heavy with sleep and ill humor. Edna took him in her arms, and seating herself in the rocker, began to coddle and caress him, calling him all manner of tender names, soothing him to sleep. It was not more than nine oclock. No one had yet gone to bed but the children. Leonce had been very uneasy at first, Madame Ratignolle said, and had wanted to start at once for the Cheniere. But Monsieur Farival had assured him that his wife was only overcome with sleep and fatigue, that Tonie would bring her safely back later in the day; and he had thus been dissuaded from crossing the bay. He had gone over to Kleins, looking up some cotton broker whom he wished to see in regard to securities, exchanges, stocks, bonds, or something of the sort, Madame Ratignolle did not remember what. He said he would not remain away late. She herself was suffering from heat and oppression, she said. She carried a bottle of salts and a large fan. She would not consent to remain with Edna, for Monsieur Ratignolle was alone, and he detested above all things to be left alone. When Etienne had fallen asleep Edna bore him into the back room, and Robert went and lifted the mosquito bar that she might lay the 30

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child comfortably in his bed. The quadroon had vanished. When they emerged from the cottage Robert bade Edna good-night. Do you know we have been together the whole livelong day, Robertsince early this morning? she said at parting. All but the hundred years when you were sleeping. Goodnight. He pressed her hand and went away in the direction of the beach. He did not join any of the others, but walked alone toward the Gulf. Edna stayed outside, awaiting her husbands return. She had no desire to sleep or to retire; nor did she feel like going over to sit with the Ratignolles, or to join Madame Lebrun and a group whose animated voices reached her as they sat in conversation before the house. She let her mind wander back over her stay at Grand Isle; and she tried to discover wherein this summer had been different from any and every other summer of her life. She could only realize that she herselfher present selfwas in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect. She wondered why Robert had gone away and left her. It did not occur to her to think he might have grown tired of being with her the livelong day. She was not tired, and she felt that he was not. She regretted that he had gone. It was so much more natural to have him stay when he was not absolutely required to leave her. As Edna waited for her husband she sang low a little song that Robert had sung as they crossed the bay. It began with Ah! Si tu savais, and every verse ended with si tu savais. Roberts voice was not pretentious. It was musical and true. The voice, the notes, the whole refrain haunted her memory. 31

XV
WHEN EDNA ENTERED the dining-room one evening a little late, as was her habit, an unusually animated conversation seemed to be going on. Several persons were talking at once, and Victors voice was predominating, even over that of his mother. Edna had returned late from her bath, had dressed in some haste, and her face was flushed. Her head, set off by her dainty white gown, suggested a rich, rare blossom. She took her seat at table between old Monsieur Farival and Madame Ratignolle. As she seated herself and was about to begin to eat her soup, which had been served when she entered the room, several persons informed her simultaneously that Robert was going to Mexico. She laid her spoon down and looked about her bewildered. He had been with her, reading to her all the morning, and had never even mentioned such a place as Mexico. She had not seen him during the afternoon; she had heard some one say he was at the house, upstairs with his mother. This she had thought nothing of, though she was surprised when he did not join her later in the afternoon, when she went down to the beach. She looked across at him, where he sat beside Madame Lebrun, who presided. Ednas face was a blank picture of bewilderment, which she never thought of disguising. He lifted his eyebrows with the pretext of a smile as he returned her glance. He looked embarrassed and uneasy. When is he going? she asked of everybody in general, as if Robert were not there to answer for himself. To-night! This very evening! Did you ever! What possesses him! were some of the replies she gathered, uttered simultaneously in French and English.

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Impossible! she exclaimed. How can a person start off from Grand Isle to Mexico at a moments notice, as if he were going over to Kleins or to the wharf or down to the beach? I said all along I was going to Mexico; Ive been saying so for years! cried Robert, in an excited and irritable tone, with the air of a man defending himself against a swarm of stinging insects. Madame Lebrun knocked on the table with her knife handle. Please let Robert explain why he is going, and why he is going tonight, she called out. Really, this table is getting to be more and more like Bedlam every day, with everybody talking at once. SometimesI hope God will forgive mebut positively, sometimes I wish Victor would lose the power of speech. Victor laughed sardonically as he thanked his mother for her holy wish, of which he failed to see the benefit to anybody, except that it might afford her a more ample opportunity and license to talk herself. Monsieur Farival thought that Victor should have been taken out in mid-ocean in his earliest youth and drowned. Victor thought there would be more logic in thus disposing of old people with an established claim for making themselves universally obnoxious. Madame Lebrun grew a trifle hysterical; Robert called his brother some sharp, hard names. Theres nothing much to explain, mother, he said; though he explained, neverthelesslooking chiefly at Ednathat he could only meet the gentleman whom he intended to join at Vera Cruz by taking such and such a steamer, which left New Orleans on such a day; that Beaudelet was going out with his lugger-load of vegetables that night, which gave him an opportunity of reaching the city and making his vessel in time. But when did you make up your mind to all this? demanded Monsieur Farival. 32

This afternoon, returned Robert, with a shade of annoyance. At what time this afternoon? persisted the old gentleman, with nagging determination, as if he were cross-questioning a criminal in a court of justice. At four oclock this afternoon, Monsieur Farival, Robert replied, in a high voice and with a lofty air, which reminded Edna of some gentleman on the stage. She had forced herself to eat most of her soup, and now she was picking the flaky bits of a court bouillon with her fork. The lovers were profiting by the general conversation on Mexico to speak in whispers of matters which they rightly considered were interesting to no one but themselves. The lady in black had once received a pair of prayer-beads of curious workmanship from Mexico, with very special indulgence attached to them, but she had never been able to ascertain whether the indulgence extended outside the Mexican border. Father Fochel of the Cathedral had attempted to explain it; but he had not done so to her satisfaction. And she begged that Robert would interest himself, and discover, if possible, whether she was entitled to the indulgence accompanying the remarkably curious Mexican prayer-beads. Madame Ratignolle hoped that Robert would exercise extreme caution in dealing with the Mexicans, who, she considered, were a treacherous people, unscrupulous and revengeful. She trusted she did them no injustice in thus condemning them as a race. She had known personally but one Mexican, who made and sold excellent tamales, and whom she would have trusted implicitly, so softspoken was he. One day he was arrested for stabbing his wife. She never knew whether he had been hanged or not.

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Victor had grown hilarious, and was attempting to tell an anecdote about a Mexican girl who served chocolate one winter in a restaurant in Dauphine Street. No one would listen to him but old Monsieur Farival, who went into convulsions over the droll story. Edna wondered if they had all gone mad, to be talking and clamoring at that rate. She herself could think of nothing to say about Mexico or the Mexicans. At what time do you leave? she asked Robert. At ten, he told her. Beaudelet wants to wait for the moon. Are you all ready to go? Quite ready. I shall only take a hand-bag, and shall pack my trunk in the city. He turned to answer some question put to him by his mother, and Edna, having finished her black coffee, left the table. She went directly to her room. The little cottage was close and stuffy after leaving the outer air. But she did not mind; there appeared to be a hundred different things demanding her attention indoors. She began to set the toilet-stand to rights, grumbling at the negligence of the quadroon, who was in the adjoining room putting the children to bed. She gathered together stray garments that were hanging on the backs of chairs, and put each where it belonged in closet or bureau drawer. She changed her gown for a more comfortable and commodious wrapper. She rearranged her hair, combing and brushing it with unusual energy. Then she went in and assisted the quadroon in getting the boys to bed. They were very playful and inclined to talkto do anything but lie quiet and go to sleep. Edna sent the quadroon away to her supper and told her she need not return. Then she sat and told the children a story. Instead of soothing it excited them, and added to their wakefulness. 33

She left them in heated argument, speculating about the conclusion of the tale which their mother promised to finish the following night. The little black girl came in to say that Madame Lebrun would like to have Mrs. Pontellier go and sit with them over at the house till Mr. Robert went away. Edna returned answer that she had already undressed, that she did not feel quite well, but perhaps she would go over to the house later. She started to dress again, and got as far advanced as to remove her peignoir. But changing her mind once more she resumed the peignoir, and went outside and sat down before her door. She was overheated and irritable, and fanned herself energetically for a while. Madame Ratignolle came down to discover what was the matter. All that noise and confusion at the table must have upset me, replied Edna, and moreover, I hate shocks and surprises. The idea of Robert starting off in such a ridiculously sudden and dramatic way! As if it were a matter of life and death! Never saying a word about it all morning when he was with me. Yes, agreed Madame Ratignolle. I think it was showing us all you especiallyvery little consideration. It wouldnt have surprised me in any of the others; those Lebruns are all given to heroics. But I must say I should never have expected such a thing from Robert. Are you not coming down? Come on, dear; it doesnt look friendly. No, said Edna, a little sullenly. I cant go to the trouble of dressing again; I dont feel like it. You neednt dress; you look all right; fasten a belt around your waist. Just look at me! No, persisted Edna; but you go on. Madame Lebrun might be offended if we both stayed away. Madame Ratignolle kissed Edna good-night, and went away, being

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in truth rather desirous of joining in the general and animated conversation which was still in progress concerning Mexico and the Mexicans. Somewhat later Robert came up, carrying his hand-bag. Arent you feeling well? he asked. Oh, well enough. Are you going right away? He lit a match and looked at his watch. In twenty minutes, he said. The sudden and brief flare of the match emphasized the darkness for a while. He sat down upon a stool which the children had left out on the porch. Get a chair, said Edna. This will do, he replied. He put on his soft hat and nervously took it off again, and wiping his face with his handkerchief, complained of the heat. Take the fan, said Edna, offering it to him. Oh, no! Thank you. It does no good; you have to stop fanning some time, and feel all the more uncomfortable afterward. Thats one of the ridiculous things which men always say. I have never known one to speak otherwise of fanning. How long will you be gone? Forever, perhaps. I dont know. It depends upon a good many things. Well, in case it shouldnt be forever, how long will it be? I dont know. This seems to me perfectly preposterous and uncalled for. I dont like it. I dont understand your motive for silence and mystery, never saying a word to me about it this morning. He remained silent, not offering to defend himself. He only said, after a moment: Dont part from me in any ill humor. I never knew you to be out of patience with me before. 34

I dont want to part in any ill humor, she said. But cant you understand? Ive grown used to seeing you, to having you with me all the time, and your action seems unfriendly, even unkind. You dont even offer an excuse for it. Why, I was planning to be together, thinking of how pleasant it would be to see you in the city next winter. So was I, he blurted. Perhaps thats the He stood up suddenly and held out his hand. Good-by, my dear Mrs. Pontellier; good-by. You wontI hope you wont completely forget me. She clung to his hand, striving to detain him. Write to me when you get there, wont you, Robert? she entreated. I will, thank you. Good-by. How unlike Robert! The merest acquaintance would have said something more emphatic than I will, thank you; good-by, to such a request. He had evidently already taken leave of the people over at the house, for he descended the steps and went to join Beaudelet, who was out there with an oar across his shoulder waiting for Robert. They walked away in the darkness. She could only hear Beaudelets voice; Robert had apparently not even spoken a word of greeting to his companion. Edna bit her handkerchief convulsively, striving to hold back and to hide, even from herself as she would have hidden from another, the emotion which was troublingtearingher. Her eyes were brimming with tears. For the first time she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to

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penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

XVI
DO YOU MISS YOUR friend greatly? asked Mademoiselle Reisz one morning as she came creeping up behind Edna, who had just left her cottage on her way to the beach. She spent much of her time in the water since she had acquired finally the art of swimming. As their stay at Grand Isle drew near its close, she felt that she could not give too much time to a diversion which afforded her the only real pleasurable moments that she knew. When Mademoiselle Reisz came and touched her upon the shoulder and spoke to her, the woman seemed to echo the thought which was ever in Ednas mind; or, better, the feeling which constantly possessed her. Roberts going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing. She sought him everywherein others whom she induced to talk about him. She went up in the mornings to Madame Lebruns room, braving the clatter of the old sewing-machine. She sat there and chatted at intervals as Robert had done. She gazed around the room at the pictures and photographs hanging upon the wall, and discovered in some corner an old family album, which she examined with the keenest interest, appealing to Madame Lebrun for enlightenment concerning the many figures and faces which she discovered between its pages. 35

There was a picture of Madame Lebrun with Robert as a baby, seated in her lap, a round-faced infant with a fist in his mouth. The eyes alone in the baby suggested the man. And that was he also in kilts, at the age of five, wearing long curls and holding a whip in his hand. It made Edna laugh, and she laughed, too, at the portrait in his first long trousers; while another interested her, taken when he left for college, looking thin, long-faced, with eyes full of fire, ambition and great intentions. But there was no recent picture, none which suggested the Robert who had gone away five days ago, leaving a void and wilderness behind him. Oh, Robert stopped having his pictures taken when he had to pay for them himself! He found wiser use for his money, he says, explained Madame Lebrun. She had a letter from him, written before he left New Orleans. Edna wished to see the letter, and Madame Lebrun told her to look for it either on the table or the dresser, or perhaps it was on the mantelpiece. The letter was on the bookshelf. It possessed the greatest interest and attraction for Edna; the envelope, its size and shape, the post-mark, the handwriting. She examined every detail of the outside before opening it. There were only a few lines, setting forth that he would leave the city that afternoon, that he had packed his trunk in good shape, that he was well, and sent her his love and begged to be affectionately remembered to all. There was no special message to Edna except a postscript saying that if Mrs. Pontellier desired to finish the book which he had been reading to her, his mother would find it in his room, among other books there on the table. Edna experienced a pang of jealousy because he had written to his mother rather than to her. Every one seemed to take for granted that she missed him. Even her husband, when he came down the Saturday following Roberts

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departure, expressed regret that he had gone. How do you get on without him, Edna? he asked. Its very dull without him, she admitted. Mr. Pontellier had seen Robert in the city, and Edna asked him a dozen questions or more. Where had they met? On Carondelet Street, in the morning. They had gone in and had a drink and a cigar together. What had they talked about? Chiefly about his prospects in Mexico, which Mr. Pontellier thought were promising. How did he look? How did he seemgrave, or gay, or how? Quite cheerful, and wholly taken up with the idea of his trip, which Mr. Pontellier found altogether natural in a young fellow about to seek fortune and adventure in a strange, queer country. Edna tapped her foot impatiently, and wondered why the children persisted in playing in the sun when they might be under the trees. She went down and led them out of the sun, scolding the quadroon for not being more attentive. It did not strike her as in the least grotesque that she should be making of Robert the object of conversation and leading her husband to speak of him. The sentiment which she entertained for Robert in no way resembled that which she felt for her husband, or had ever felt, or ever expected to feel. She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself. Edna had once told Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for any one. Then had followed a rather heated argument; the two women did not appear to understand each other or to be talking the same language. Edna tried to appease her friend, to explain. 36

I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldnt give myself. I cant make it more clear; its only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me. I dont know what you would call the essential, or what you mean by the unessential, said Madame Ratignolle, cheerfully; but a woman who would give her life for her children could do no more than that your Bible tells you so. Im sure I couldnt do more than that. Oh, yes you could! laughed Edna. She was not surprised at Mademoiselle Reiszs question the morning that lady, following her to the beach, tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she did not greatly miss her young friend. Oh, good morning, Mademoiselle; is it you? Why, of course I miss Robert. Are you going down to bathe? Why should I go down to bathe at the very end of the season when I havent been in the surf all summer, replied the woman, disagreeably. I beg your pardon, offered Edna, in some embarrassment, for she should have remembered that Mademoiselle Reiszs avoidance of the water had furnished a theme for much pleasantry. Some among them thought it was on account of her false hair, or the dread of getting the violets wet, while others attributed it to the natural aversion for water sometimes believed to accompany the artistic temperament. Mademoiselle offered Edna some chocolates in a paper bag, which she took from her pocket, by way of showing that she bore no ill feeling. She habitually ate chocolates for their sustaining quality; they contained much nutriment in small compass, she said. They saved her from starvation, as Madame Lebruns table was utterly impossible; and no one

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save so impertinent a woman as Madame Lebrun could think of offering such food to people and requiring them to pay for it. She must feel very lonely without her son, said Edna, desiring to change the subject. Her favorite son, too. It must have been quite hard to let him go. Mademoiselle laughed maliciously. Her favorite son! Oh, dear! Who could have been imposing such a tale upon you? Aline Lebrun lives for Victor, and for Victor alone. She has spoiled him into the worthless creature he is. She worships him and the ground he walks on. Robert is very well in a way, to give up all the money he can earn to the family, and keep the barest pittance for himself. Favorite son, indeed! I miss the poor fellow myself, my dear. I liked to see him and to hear him about the place the only Lebrun who is worth a pinch of salt. He comes to see me often in the city. I like to play to him. That Victor! hanging would be too good for him. Its a wonder Robert hasnt beaten him to death long ago. I thought he had great patience with his brother, offered Edna, glad to be talking about Robert, no matter what was said. Oh! he thrashed him well enough a year or two ago, said Mademoiselle. It was about a Spanish girl, whom Victor considered that he had some sort of claim upon. He met Robert one day talking to the girl, or walking with her, or bathing with her, or carrying her basketI dont remember what;and he became so insulting and abusive that Robert gave him a thrashing on the spot that has kept him comparatively in order for a good while. Its about time he was getting another. Was her name Mariequita? asked Edna. Mariequitayes, that was it; Mariequita. I had forgotten. Oh, shes a sly one, and a bad one, that Mariequita! 37

Edna looked down at Mademoiselle Reisz and wondered how she could have listened to her venom so long. For some reason she felt depressed, almost unhappy. She had not intended to go into the water; but she donned her bathing suit, and left Mademoiselle alone, seated under the shade of the childrens tent. The water was growing cooler as the season advanced. Edna plunged and swam about with an abandon that thrilled and invigorated her. She remained a long time in the water, half hoping that Mademoiselle Reisz would not wait for her. But Mademoiselle waited. She was very amiable during the walk back, and raved much over Ednas appearance in her bathing suit. She talked about music. She hoped that Edna would go to see her in the city, and wrote her address with the stub of a pencil on a piece of card which she found in her pocket. When do you leave? asked Edna. Next Monday; and you? The following week, answered Edna, adding, It has been a pleasant summer, hasnt it, Mademoiselle? Well, agreed Mademoiselle Reisz, with a shrug, rather pleasant, if it hadnt been for the mosquitoes and the Farival twins.

XVII
THE PONTELLIERS POSSESSED a very charming home on Esplanade Street in New Orleans. It was a large, double cottage, with a broad front veranda, whose round, fluted columns supported the sloping roof. The house was painted a dazzling white; the outside shutters, or jalousies, were green. In the yard, which was kept scrupulously neat, were flowers and plants of every description which flourishes in South Louisiana.

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Within doors the appointments were perfect after the conventional type. The softest carpets and rugs covered the floors; rich and tasteful draperies hung at doors and windows. There were paintings, selected with judgment and discrimination, upon the walls. The cut glass, the silver, the heavy damask which daily appeared upon the table were the envy of many women whose husbands were less generous than Mr. Pontellier. Mr. Pontellier was very fond of walking about his house examining its various appointments and details, to see that nothing was amiss. He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtainno matter whatafter he had bought it and placed it among his household gods. On Tuesday afternoonsTuesday being Mrs. Pontelliers reception daythere was a constant stream of callerswomen who came in carriages or in the street cars, or walked when the air was soft and distance permitted. A light-colored mulatto boy, in dress coat and bearing a diminutive silver tray for the reception of cards, admitted them. A maid, in white fluted cap, offered the callers liqueur, coffee, or chocolate, as they might desire. Mrs. Pontellier, attired in a handsome reception gown, remained in the drawing-room the entire afternoon receiving her visitors. Men sometimes called in the evening with their wives. This had been the programme which Mrs. Pontellier had religiously followed since her marriage, six years before. Certain evenings during the week she and her husband attended the opera or sometimes the play. Mr. Pontellier left his home in the mornings between nine and ten oclock, and rarely returned before half-past six or seven in the eveningdinner being served at half-past seven. He and his wife seated themselves at table one Tuesday evening, a 38

few weeks after their return from Grand Isle. They were alone together. The boys were being put to bed; the patter of their bare, escaping feet could be heard occasionally, as well as the pursuing voice of the quadroon, lifted in mild protest and entreaty. Mrs. Pontellier did not wear her usual Tuesday reception gown; she was in ordinary house dress. Mr. Pontellier, who was observant about such things, noticed it, as he served the soup and handed it to the boy in waiting. Tired out, Edna? Whom did you have? Many callers? he asked. He tasted his soup and began to season it with pepper, salt, vinegar, mustardeverything within reach. There were a good many, replied Edna, who was eating her soup with evident satisfaction. I found their cards when I got home; I was out. Out! exclaimed her husband, with something like genuine consternation in his voice as he laid down the vinegar cruet and looked at her through his glasses. Why, what could have taken you out on Tuesday? What did you have to do? Nothing. I simply felt like going out, and I went out. Well, I hope you left some suitable excuse, said her husband, somewhat appeased, as he added a dash of cayenne pepper to the soup. No, I left no excuse. I told Joe to say I was out, that was all. Why, my dear, I should think youd understand by this time that people dont do such things; weve got to observe les convenances if we ever expect to get on and keep up with the procession. If you felt that you had to leave home this afternoon, you should have left some suitable explanation for your absence. This soup is really impossible; its strange that woman hasnt learned yet to make a decent soup. Any free-lunch stand in town serves a better one. Was Mrs. Belthrop here? Bring the tray with the cards, Joe. I dont remember who was here.

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The boy retired and returned after a moment, bringing the tiny silver tray, which was covered with ladies visiting cards. He handed it to Mrs. Pontellier. Give it to Mr. Pontellier, she said. Joe offered the tray to Mr. Pontellier, and removed the soup. Mr. Pontellier scanned the names of his wifes callers, reading some of them aloud, with comments as he read. `The Misses Delasidas. I worked a big deal in futures for their father this morning; nice girls; its time they were getting married. Mrs. Belthrop. I tell you what it is, Edna; you cant afford to snub Mrs. Belthrop. Why, Belthrop could buy and sell us ten times over. His business is worth a good, round sum to me. Youd better write her a note. Mrs. James Highcamp. Hugh! the less you have to do with Mrs. Highcamp, the better. Madame Laforce. Came all the way from Carrolton, too, poor old soul. Miss Wiggs, `Mrs. Eleanor Boltons. He pushed the cards aside. Mercy! exclaimed Edna, who had been fuming. Why are you taking the thing so seriously and making such a fuss over it? Im not making any fuss over it. But its just such seeming trifles that weve got to take seriously; such things count. The fish was scorched. Mr. Pontellier would not touch it. Edna said she did not mind a little scorched taste. The roast was in some way not to his fancy, and he did not like the manner in which the vegetables were served. It seems to me, he said, we spend money enough in this house to procure at least one meal a day which a man could eat and retain his self-respect. You used to think the cook was a treasure, returned Edna, indifferently. 39

Perhaps she was when she first came; but cooks are only human. They need looking after, like any other class of persons that you employ. Suppose I didnt look after the clerks in my office, just let them run things their own way; theyd soon make a nice mess of me and my business. Where are you going? asked Edna, seeing that her husband arose from table without having eaten a morsel except a taste of the highlyseasoned soup. Im going to get my dinner at the club. Good night. He went into the hall, took his hat and stick from the stand, and left the house. She was somewhat familiar with such scenes. They had often made her very unhappy. On a few previous occasions she had been completely deprived of any desire to finish her dinner. Sometimes she had gone into the kitchen to administer a tardy rebuke to the cook. Once she went to her room and studied the cookbook during an entire evening, finally writing out a menu for the week, which left her harassed with a feeling that, after all, she had accomplished no good that was worth the name. But that evening Edna finished her dinner alone, with forced deliberation. Her face was flushed and her eyes flamed with some inward fire that lighted them. After finishing her dinner she went to her room, having instructed the boy to tell any other callers that she was indisposed. It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet,

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half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope. She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet. In a sweeping passion she seized a glass vase from the table and flung it upon the tiles of the hearth. She wanted to destroy something. The crash and clatter were what she wanted to hear. A maid, alarmed at the din of breaking glass, entered the room to discover what was the matter. A vase fell upon the hearth, said Edna. Never mind; leave it till morning. Oh! you might get some of the glass in your feet, maam, insisted the young woman, picking up bits of the broken vase that were scattered upon the carpet. And heres your ring, maam, under the chair. Edna held out her hand, and taking the ring, slipped it upon her finger. XVIII THE FOLLOWING MORNING Mr. Pontellier, upon leaving for his office, asked Edna if she would not meet him in town in order to look at some new fixtures for the library. 40

I hardly think we need new fixtures, Leonce. Dont let us get anything new; you are too extravagant. I dont believe you ever think of saving or putting by. The way to become rich is to make money, my dear Edna, not to save it, he said. He regretted that she did not feel inclined to go with him and select new fixtures. He kissed her good-by, and told her she was not looking well and must take care of herself. She was unusually pale and very quiet. She stood on the front veranda as he quitted the house, and absently picked a few sprays of jessamine that grew upon a trellis near by. She inhaled the odor of the blossoms and thrust them into the bosom of her white morning gown. The boys were dragging along the banquette a small express wagon, which they had filled with blocks and sticks. The quadroon was following them with little quick steps, having assumed a fictitious animation and alacrity for the occasion. A fruit vender was crying his wares in the street. Edna looked straight before her with a self-absorbed expression upon her face. She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic. She went back into the house. She had thought of speaking to the cook concerning her blunders of the previous night; but Mr. Pontellier had saved her that disagreeable mission, for which she was so poorly fitted. Mr. Pontelliers arguments were usually convincing with those whom he employed. He left home feeling quite sure that he and Edna would sit down that evening, and possibly a few subsequent evenings, to a dinner deserving of the name.

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Edna spent an hour or two in looking over some of her old sketches. She could see their shortcomings and defects, which were glaring in her eyes. She tried to work a little, but found she was not in the humor. Finally she gathered together a few of the sketchesthose which she considered the least discreditable; and she carried them with her when, a little later, she dressed and left the house. She looked handsome and distinguished in her street gown. The tan of the seashore had left her face, and her forehead was smooth, white, and polished beneath her heavy, yellow-brown hair. There were a few freckles on her face, and a small, dark mole near the under lip and one on the temple, half-hidden in her hair. As Edna walked along the street she was thinking of Robert. She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing. Edna was on her way to Madame Ratignolles. Their intimacy, begun at Grand Isle, had not declined, and they had seen each other with some frequency since their return to the city. The Ratignolles lived at no great distance from Ednas home, on the corner of a side street, where Monsieur Ratignolle owned and conducted a drug store which enjoyed a steady and prosperous trade. His father had been in the business before him, and Monsieur Ratignolle stood well in the community and bore an enviable reputation for integrity and clearheadedness. 41

His family lived in commodious apartments over the store, having an entrance on the side within the porte cochere. There was something which Edna thought very French, very foreign, about their whole manner of living. In the large and pleasant salon which extended across the width of the house, the Ratignolles entertained their friends once a fortnight with a soiree musicale, sometimes diversified by card-playing. There was a friend who played upon the cello. One brought his flute and another his violin, while there were some who sang and a number who performed upon the piano with various degrees of taste and agility. The Ratignolles soirees musicales were widely known, and it was considered a privilege to be invited to them. Edna found her friend engaged in assorting the clothes which had returned that morning from the laundry. She at once abandoned her occupation upon seeing Edna, who had been ushered without ceremony into her presence. `Cite can do it as well as I; it is really her business, she explained to Edna, who apologized for interrupting her. And she summoned a young black woman, whom she instructed, in French, to be very careful in checking off the list which she handed her. She told her to notice particularly if a fine linen handkerchief of Monsieur Ratignolles, which was missing last week, had been returned; and to be sure to set to one side such pieces as required mending and darning. Then placing an arm around Ednas waist, she led her to the front of the house, to the salon, where it was cool and sweet with the odor of great roses that stood upon the hearth in jars. Madame Ratignolle looked more beautiful than ever there at home, in a neglige which left her arms almost wholly bare and exposed the rich, melting curves of her white throat.

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Perhaps I shall be able to paint your picture some day, said Edna with a smile when they were seated. She produced the roll of sketches and started to unfold them. I believe I ought to work again. I feel as if I wanted to be doing something. What do you think of them? Do you think it worth while to take it up again and study some more? I might study for a while with Laidpore. She knew that Madame Ratignolles opinion in such a matter would be next to valueless, that she herself had not alone decided, but determined; but she sought the words of praise and encouragement that would help her to put heart into her venture. Your talent is immense, dear! Nonsense! protested Edna, well pleased. Immense, I tell you, persisted Madame Ratignolle, surveying the sketches one by one, at close range, then holding them at arms length, narrowing her eyes, and dropping her head on one side. Surely, this Bavarian peasant is worthy of framing; and this basket of apples! never have I seen anything more lifelike. One might almost be tempted to reach out a hand and take one. Edna could not control a feeling which bordered upon complacency at her friends praise, even realizing, as she did, its true worth. She retained a few of the sketches, and gave all the rest to Madame Ratignolle, who appreciated the gift far beyond its value and proudly exhibited the pictures to her husband when he came up from the store a little later for his midday dinner. Mr. Ratignolle was one of those men who are called the salt of the earth. His cheerfulness was unbounded, and it was matched by his goodness of heart, his broad charity, and common sense. He and his wife spoke English with an accent which was only discernible through 42

its un-English emphasis and a certain carefulness and deliberation. Ednas husband spoke English with no accent whatever. The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union. As Edna seated herself at table with them she thought, Better a dinner of herbs, though it did not take her long to discover that it was no dinner of herbs, but a delicious repast, simple, choice, and in every way satisfying. Monsieur Ratignolle was delighted to see her, though he found her looking not so well as at Grand Isle, and he advised a tonic. He talked a good deal on various topics, a little politics, some city news and neighborhood gossip. He spoke with an animation and earnestness that gave an exaggerated importance to every syllable he uttered. His wife was keenly interested in everything he said, laying down her fork the better to listen, chiming in, taking the words out of his mouth. Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle,a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of lifes delirium. Edna vaguely wondered what she meant by lifes delirium. It had crossed her thought like some unsought, extraneous impression.

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XIX
Edna could not help but think that it was very foolish, very childish, to have stamped upon her wedding ring and smashed the crystal vase upon the tiles. She was visited by no more outbursts, moving her to such futile expedients. She began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked. She completely abandoned her Tuesdays at home, and did not return the visits of those who had called upon her. She made no ineffectual efforts to conduct her household en bonne menagere, going and coming as it suited her fancy, and, so far as she was able, lending herself to any passing caprice. Mr. Pontellier had been a rather courteous husband so long as he met a certain tacit submissiveness in his wife. But her new and unexpected line of conduct completely bewildered him. It shocked him. Then her absolute disregard for her duties as a wife angered him. When Mr. Pontellier became rude, Edna grew insolent. She had resolved never to take another step backward. It seems to me the utmost folly for a woman at the head of a household, and the mother of children, to spend in an atelier days which would be better employed contriving for the comfort of her family. I feel like painting, answered Edna. Perhaps I shant always feel like it. Then in Gods name paint! but dont let the family go to the devil. Theres Madame Ratignolle; because she keeps up her music, she doesnt let everything else go to chaos. And shes more of a musician than you are a painter. She isnt a musician, and Im not a painter. It isnt on account of painting that I let things go. 43

On account of what, then? Oh! I dont know. Let me alone; you bother me. It sometimes entered Mr. Pontelliers mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world. Her husband let her alone as she requested, and went away to his office. Edna went up to her ateliera bright room in the top of the house. She was working with great energy and interest, without accomplishing anything, however, which satisfied her even in the smallest degree. For a time she had the whole household enrolled in the service of art. The boys posed for her. They thought it amusing at first, but the occupation soon lost its attractiveness when they discovered that it was not a game arranged especially for their entertainment. The quadroon sat for hours before Ednas palette, patient as a savage, while the house-maid took charge of the children, and the drawing-room went undusted. But the housemaid, too, served her term as model when Edna perceived that the young womans back and shoulders were molded on classic lines, and that her hair, loosened from its confining cap, became an inspiration. While Edna worked she sometimes sang low the little air, Ah! si tu savais! It moved her with recollections. She could hear again the ripple of the water, the flapping sail. She could see the glint of the moon upon the bay, and could feel the soft, gusty beating of the hot south wind. A subtle current of desire passed through her body, weakening her hold upon the brushes and making her eyes burn. There were days when she was very happy without knowing why.

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She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested. There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.

XX
IT WAS DURING SUCH A MOOD that Edna hunted up Mademoiselle Reisz. She had not forgotten the rather disagreeable impression left upon her by their last interview; but she nevertheless felt a desire to see her above all, to listen while she played upon the piano. Quite early in the afternoon she started upon her quest for the pianist. Unfortunately she had mislaid or lost Mademoiselle Reiszs card, and looking up her address in the city directory, she found that the woman lived on Bienville Street, some distance away. The directory which fell into her hands was a year or more old, however, and upon reaching the number indicated, Edna discovered that the house was occupied by a respectable family of mulattoes who had chambres garnies to let. They had been living there for six months, and knew absolutely nothing of a Mademoiselle Reisz. In fact, they knew nothing of any of their neighbors; 44

their lodgers were all people of the highest distinction, they assured Edna. She did not linger to discuss class distinctions with Madame Pouponne, but hastened to a neighboring grocery store, feeling sure that Mademoiselle would have left her address with the proprietor. He knew Mademoiselle Reisz a good deal better than he wanted to know her, he informed his questioner. In truth, he did not want to know her at all, or anything concerning herthe most disagreeable and unpopular woman who ever lived in Bienville Street. He thanked heaven she had left the neighborhood, and was equally thankful that he did not know where she had gone. Ednas desire to see Mademoiselle Reisz had increased tenfold since these unlooked-for obstacles had arisen to thwart it. She was wondering who could give her the information she sought, when it suddenly occurred to her that Madame Lebrun would be the one most likely to do so. She knew it was useless to ask Madame Ratignolle, who was on the most distant terms with the musician, and preferred to know nothing concerning her. She had once been almost as emphatic in expressing herself upon the subject as the corner grocer. Edna knew that Madame Lebrun had returned to the city, for it was the middle of November. And she also knew where the Lebruns lived, on Chartres Street. Their home from the outside looked like a prison, with iron bars before the door and lower windows. The iron bars were a relic of the old regime, and no one had ever thought of dislodging them. At the side was a high fence enclosing the garden. A gate or door opening upon the street was locked. Edna rang the bell at this side garden gate, and stood upon the banquette, waiting to be admitted. It was Victor who opened the gate for her. A black woman, wiping

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her hands upon her apron, was close at his heels. Before she saw them Edna could hear them in altercation, the womanplainly an anomaly claiming the right to be allowed to perform her duties, one of which was to answer the bell. Victor was surprised and delighted to see Mrs. Pontellier, and he made no attempt to conceal either his astonishment or his delight. He was a dark-browed, good-looking youngster of nineteen, greatly resembling his mother, but with ten times her impetuosity. He instructed the black woman to go at once and inform Madame Lebrun that Mrs. Pontellier desired to see her. The woman grumbled a refusal to do part of her duty when she had not been permitted to do it all, and started back to her interrupted task of weeding the garden. Whereupon Victor administered a rebuke in the form of a volley of abuse, which, owing to its rapidity and incoherence, was all but incomprehensible to Edna. Whatever it was, the rebuke was convincing, for the woman dropped her hoe and went mumbling into the house. Edna did not wish to enter. It was very pleasant there on the side porch, where there were chairs, a wicker lounge, and a small table. She seated herself, for she was tired from her long tramp; and she began to rock gently and smooth out the folds of her silk parasol. Victor drew up his chair beside her. He at once explained that the black womans offensive conduct was all due to imperfect training, as he was not there to take her in hand. He had only come up from the island the morning before, and expected to return next day. He stayed all winter at the island; he lived there, and kept the place in order and got things ready for the summer visitors. But a man needed occasional relaxation, he informed Mrs. Pontellier, and every now and again he drummed up a pretext to bring him to the 45

city. My! but he had had a time of it the evening before! He wouldnt want his mother to know, and he began to talk in a whisper. He was scintillant with recollections. Of course, he couldnt think of telling Mrs. Pontellier all about it, she being a woman and not comprehending such things. But it all began with a girl peeping and smiling at him through the shutters as he passed by. Oh! but she was a beauty! Certainly he smiled back, and went up and talked to her. Mrs. Pontellier did not know him if she supposed he was one to let an opportunity like that escape him. Despite herself, the youngster amused her. She must have betrayed in her look some degree of interest or entertainment. The boy grew more daring, and Mrs. Pontellier might have found herself, in a little while, listening to a highly colored story but for the timely appearance of Madame Lebrun. That lady was still clad in white, according to her custom of the summer. Her eyes beamed an effusive welcome. Would not Mrs. Pontellier go inside? Would she partake of some refreshment? Why had she not been there before? How was that dear Mr. Pontellier and how were those sweet children? Had Mrs. Pontellier ever known such a warm November? Victor went and reclined on the wicker lounge behind his mothers chair, where he commanded a view of Ednas face. He had taken her parasol from her hands while he spoke to her, and he now lifted it and twirled it above him as he lay on his back. When Madame Lebrun complained that it was so dull coming back to the city; that she saw so few people now; that even Victor, when he came up from the island for a day or two, had so much to occupy him and engage his time; then it was that the youth went into contortions on the lounge and winked mischievously at Edna. She somehow felt like a confederate in crime, and tried to look severe and disapproving.

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There had been but two letters from Robert, with little in them, they told her. Victor said it was really not worth while to go inside for the letters, when his mother entreated him to go in search of them. He remembered the contents, which in truth he rattled off very glibly when put to the test. One letter was written from Vera Cruz and the other from the City of Mexico. He had met Montel, who was doing everything toward his advancement. So far, the financial situation was no improvement over the one he had left in New Orleans, but of course the prospects were vastly better. He wrote of the City of Mexico, the buildings, the people and their habits, the conditions of life which he found there. He sent his love to the family. He inclosed a check to his mother, and hoped she would affectionately remember him to all his friends. That was about the substance of the two letters. Edna felt that if there had been a message for her, she would have received it. The despondent frame of mind in which she had left home began again to overtake her, and she remembered that she wished to find Mademoiselle Reisz. Madame Lebrun knew where Mademoiselle Reisz lived. She gave Edna the address, regretting that she would not consent to stay and spend the remainder of the afternoon, and pay a visit to Mademoiselle Reisz some other day. The afternoon was already well advanced. Victor escorted her out upon the banquette, lifted her parasol, and held it over her while he walked to the car with her. He entreated her to bear in mind that the disclosures of the afternoon were strictly confidential. She laughed and bantered him a little, remembering too late that she should have been dignified and reserved. How handsome Mrs. Pontellier looked! said Madame Lebrun to her son. 46

Ravishing! he admitted. The city atmosphere has improved her. Some way she doesnt seem like the same woman.

XXI
SOME PEOPLE CONTENDED that the reason Mademoiselle Reisz always chose apartments up under the roof was to discourage the approach of beggars, peddlars and callers. There were plenty of windows in her little front room. They were for the most part dingy, but as they were nearly always open it did not make so much difference. They often admitted into the room a good deal of smoke and soot; but at the same time all the light and air that there was came through them. From her windows could be seen the crescent of the river, the masts of ships and the big chimneys of the Mississippi steamers. A magnificent piano crowded the apartment. In the next room she slept, and in the third and last she harbored a gasoline stove on which she cooked her meals when disinclined to descend to the neighboring restaurant. It was there also that she ate, keeping her belongings in a rare old buffet, dingy and battered from a hundred years of use. When Edna knocked at Mademoiselle Reiszs front room door and entered, she discovered that person standing beside the window, engaged in mending or patching an old prunella gaiter. The little musician laughed all over when she saw Edna. Her laugh consisted of a contortion of the face and all the muscles of the body. She seemed strikingly homely, standing there in the afternoon light. She still wore the shabby lace and the artificial bunch of violets on the side of her head. So you remembered me at last, said Mademoiselle. I had said to myself, `Ah, bah! she will never come.

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Did you want me to come? asked Edna with a smile. I had not thought much about it, answered Mademoiselle. The two had seated themselves on a little bumpy sofa which stood against the wall. I am glad, however, that you came. I have the water boiling back there, and was just about to make some coffee. You will drink a cup with me. And how is la belle dame? Always handsome! always healthy! always contented! She took Ednas hand between her strong wiry fingers, holding it loosely without warmth, and executing a sort of double theme upon the back and palm. Yes, she went on; I sometimes thought: `She will never come. She promised as those women in society always do, without meaning it. She will not come. For I really dont believe you like me, Mrs. Pontellier. I dont know whether I like you or not, replied Edna, gazing down at the little woman with a quizzical look. The candor of Mrs. Pontelliers admission greatly pleased Mademoiselle Reisz. She expressed her gratification by repairing forthwith to the region of the gasoline stove and rewarding her guest with the promised cup of coffee. The coffee and the biscuit accompanying it proved very acceptable to Edna, who had declined refreshment at Madame Lebruns and was now beginning to feel hungry. Mademoiselle set the tray which she brought in upon a small table near at hand, and seated herself once again on the lumpy sofa. I have had a letter from your friend, she remarked, as she poured a little cream into Ednas cup and handed it to her. My friend? Yes, your friend Robert. He wrote to me from the City of Mexico. Wrote to you? repeated Edna in amazement, stirring her coffee absently. 47

Yes, to me. Why not? Dont stir all the warmth out of your coffee; drink it. Though the letter might as well have been sent to you; it was nothing but Mrs. Pontellier from beginning to end. Let me see it, requested the young woman, entreatingly. No; a letter concerns no one but the person who writes it and the one to whom it is written. Havent you just said it concerned me from beginning to end? It was written about you, not to you. `Have you seen Mrs. Pontellier? How is she looking? he asks. As Mrs. Pontellier says, or as Mrs. Pontellier once said. If Mrs. Pontellier should call upon you, play for her that Impromptu of Chopins, my favorite. I heard it here a day or two ago, but not as you play it. I should like to know how it affects her, and so on, as if he supposed we were constantly in each others society. Let me see the letter. Oh, no. Have you answered it? No. Let me see the letter. No, and again, no. Then play the Impromptu for me. It is growing late; what time do you have to be home? Time doesnt concern me. Your question seems a little rude. Play the Impromptu. But you have told me nothing of yourself. What are you doing? Painting! laughed Edna. I am becoming an artist. Think of it! Ah! an artist! You have pretensions, Madame. Why pretensions? Do you think I could not become an artist?

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I do not know you well enough to say. I do not know your talent or your temperament. To be an artist includes much; one must possess many giftsabsolute giftswhich have not been acquired by ones own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul. What do you mean by the courageous soul? Courageous, ma foi! The brave soul. The soul that dares and defies. Show me the letter and play for me the Impromptu. You see that I have persistence. Does that quality count for anything in art? It counts with a foolish old woman whom you have captivated, replied Mademoiselle, with her wriggling laugh. The letter was right there at hand in the drawer of the little table upon which Edna had just placed her coffee cup. Mademoiselle opened the drawer and drew forth the letter, the topmost one. She placed it in Ednas hands, and without further comment arose and went to the piano. Mademoiselle played a soft interlude. It was an improvisation. She sat low at the instrument, and the lines of her body settled into ungraceful curves and angles that gave it an appearance of deformity. Gradually and imperceptibly the interlude melted into the soft opening minor chords of the Chopin Impromptu. Edna did not know when the Impromptu began or ended. She sat in the sofa corner reading Roberts letter by the fading light. Mademoiselle had glided from the Chopin into the quivering lovenotes of Isoldes song, and back again to the Impromptu with its soulful and poignant longing. The shadows deepened in the little room. The music grew strange and fantasticturbulent, insistent, plaintive and soft with entreaty. The shadows grew deeper. The music filled the room. It floated out upon the night, over the housetops, the crescent of the river, losing itself in 48

the silence of the upper air. Edna was sobbing, just as she had wept one midnight at Grand Isle when strange, new voices awoke in her. She arose in some agitation to take her departure. May I come again, Mademoiselle? she asked at the threshold. Come whenever you feel like it. Be careful; the stairs and landings are dark; dont stumble. Mademoiselle reentered and lit a candle. Roberts letter was on the floor. She stooped and picked it up. It was crumpled and damp with tears. Mademoiselle smoothed the letter out, restored it to the envelope, and replaced it in the table drawer.

XXII
ONE MORNING ON HIS WAY into town Mr. Pontellier stopped at the house of his old friend and family physician, Doctor Mandelet. The Doctor was a semi-retired physician, resting, as the saying is, upon his laurels. He bore a reputation for wisdom rather than skillleaving the active practice of medicine to his assistants and younger contemporaries and was much sought for in matters of consultation. A few families, united to him by bonds of friendship, he still attended when they required the services of a physician. The Pontelliers were among these. Mr. Pontellier found the Doctor reading at the open window of his study. His house stood rather far back from the street, in the center of a delightful garden, so that it was quiet and peaceful at the old gentlemans study window. He was a great reader. He stared up disapprovingly over his eye-glasses as Mr. Pontellier entered, wondering who had the temerity to disturb him at that hour of the morning.

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Ah, Pontellier! Not sick, I hope. Come and have a seat. What news do you bring this morning? He was quite portly, with a profusion of gray hair, and small blue eyes which age had robbed of much of their brightness but none of their penetration. Oh! Im never sick, Doctor. You know that I come of tough fiber of that old Creole race of Pontelliers that dry up and finally blow away. I came to consultno, not precisely to consultto talk to you about Edna. I dont know what ails her. Madame Pontellier not well, marveled the Doctor. Why, I saw herI think it was a week agowalking along Canal Street, the picture of health, it seemed to me. Yes, yes; she seems quite well, said Mr. Pontellier, leaning forward and whirling his stick between his two hands; but she doesnt act well. Shes odd, shes not like herself. I cant make her out, and I thought perhaps youd help me. How does she act? inquired the Doctor. Well, it isnt easy to explain, said Mr. Pontellier, throwing himself back in his chair. She lets the housekeeping go to the dickens. Well, well; women are not all alike, my dear Pontellier. Weve got to consider I know that; I told you I couldnt explain. Her whole attitude toward me and everybody and everythinghas changed. You know I have a quick temper, but I dont want to quarrel or be rude to a woman, especially my wife; yet Im driven to it, and feel like ten thousand devils after Ive made a fool of myself. Shes making it devilishly uncomfortable for me, he went on nervously. Shes got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women; andyou understandwe meet in the morning at the breakfast table. 49

The old gentleman lifted his shaggy eyebrows, protruded his thick nether lip, and tapped the arms of his chair with his cushioned fingertips. What have you been doing to her, Pontellier? Doing! Parbleu! Has she, asked the Doctor, with a smile, has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual womensuper-spiritual superior beings? My wife has been telling me about them. Thats the trouble, broke in Mr. Pontellier, she hasnt been associating with any one. She has abandoned her Tuesdays at home, has thrown over all her acquaintances, and goes tramping about by herself, moping in the street-cars, getting in after dark. I tell you shes peculiar. I dont like it; I feel a little worried over it. This was a new aspect for the Doctor. Nothing hereditary? he asked, seriously. Nothing peculiar about her family antecedents, is there? Oh, no, indeed! She comes of sound old Presbyterian Kentucky stock. The old gentleman, her father, I have heard, used to atone for his weekday sins with his Sunday devotions. I know for a fact, that his race horses literally ran away with the prettiest bit of Kentucky farming land I ever laid eyes upon. Margaretyou know Margaretshe has all the Presbyterianism undiluted. And the youngest is something of a vixen. By the way, she gets married in a couple of weeks from now. Send your wife up to the wedding, exclaimed the Doctor, foreseeing a happy solution. Let her stay among her own people for a while; it will do her good. Thats what I want her to do. She wont go to the marriage. She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth. Nice

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thing for a woman to say to her husband! exclaimed Mr. Pontellier, fuming anew at the recollection. Pontellier, said the Doctor, after a moments reflection, let your wife alone for a while. Dont bother her, and dont let her bother you. Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organisma sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or causes which you and I neednt try to fathom. But it will pass happily over, especially if you let her alone. Send her around to see me. Oh! I couldnt do that; thered be no reason for it, objected Mr. Pontellier. Then Ill go around and see her, said the Doctor. Ill drop in to dinner some evening en bon ami. Do! by all means, urged Mr. Pontellier. What evening will you come? Say Thursday. Will you come Thursday? he asked, rising to take his leave. Very well; Thursday. My wife may possibly have some engagement for me Thursday. In case she has, I shall let you know. Otherwise, you may expect me. Mr. Pontellier turned before leaving to say: I am going to New York on business very soon. I have a big scheme on hand, and want to be on the field proper to pull the ropes and handle the ribbons. Well let you in on the inside if you say so, Doctor, he laughed. 50

No, I thank you, my dear sir, returned the Doctor. I leave such ventures to you younger men with the fever of life still in your blood. What I wanted to say, continued Mr. Pontellier, with his hand on the knob; I may have to be absent a good while. Would you advise me to take Edna along? By all means, if she wishes to go. If not, leave her here. Dont contradict her. The mood will pass, I assure you. It may take a month, two, three monthspossibly longer, but it will pass; have patience. Well, good-by, a jeudi, said Mr. Pontellier, as he let himself out. The Doctor would have liked during the course of conversation to ask, Is there any man in the case? but he knew his Creole too well to make such a blunder as that. He did not resume his book immediately, but sat for a while meditatively looking out into the garden. XXIII EDNAS FATHER WAS in the city, and had been with them several days. She was not very warmly or deeply attached to him, but they had certain tastes in common, and when together they were companionable. His coming was in the nature of a welcome disturbance; it seemed to furnish a new direction for her emotions. He had come to purchase a wedding gift for his daughter, Janet, and an outfit for himself in which he might make a creditable appearance at her marriage. Mr. Pontellier had selected the bridal gift, as every one immediately connected with him always deferred to his taste in such matters. And his suggestions on the question of dresswhich too often assumes the nature of a problemwere of inestimable value to his

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father-in-law. But for the past few days the old gentleman had been upon Ednas hands, and in his society she was becoming acquainted with a new set of sensations. He had been a colonel in the Confederate army, and still maintained, with the title, the military bearing which had always accompanied it. His hair and mustache were white and silky, emphasizing the rugged bronze of his face. He was tall and thin, and wore his coats padded, which gave a fictitious breadth and depth to his shoulders and chest. Edna and her father looked very distinguished together, and excited a good deal of notice during their perambulations. Upon his arrival she began by introducing him to her atelier and making a sketch of him. He took the whole matter very seriously. If her talent had been ten-fold greater than it was, it would not have surprised him, convinced as he was that he had bequeathed to all of his daughters the germs of a masterful capability, which only depended upon their own efforts to be directed toward successful achievement. Before her pencil he sat rigid and unflinching, as he had faced the cannons mouth in days gone by. He resented the intrusion of the children, who gaped with wondering eyes at him, sitting so stiff up there in their mothers bright atelier. When they drew near he motioned them away with an expressive action of the foot, loath to disturb the fixed lines of his countenance, his arms, or his rigid shoulders. Edna, anxious to entertain him, invited Mademoiselle Reisz to meet him, having promised him a treat in her piano playing; but Mademoiselle declined the invitation. So together they attended a soiree musicale at the Ratignolles. Monsieur and Madame Ratignolle made much of the Colonel, installing him as the guest of honor and engaging him at once to dine with them the following Sunday, or any day which he might select. Madame coquetted with him in the most captivating and 51

naive manner, with eyes, gestures, and a profusion of compliments, till the Colonels old head felt thirty years younger on his padded shoulders. Edna marveled, not comprehending. She herself was almost devoid of coquetry. There were one or two men whom she observed at the soiree musicale; but she would never have felt moved to any kittenish display to attract their noticeto any feline or feminine wiles to express herself toward them. Their personality attracted her in an agreeable way. Her fancy selected them, and she was glad when a lull in the music gave them an opportunity to meet her and talk with her. Often on the street the glance of strange eyes had lingered in her memory, and sometimes had disturbed her. Mr. Pontellier did not attend these soirees musicales. He considered them bourgeois, and found more diversion at the club. To Madame Ratignolle he said the music dispensed at her soirees was too heavy, too far beyond his untrained comprehension. His excuse flattered her. But she disapproved of Mr. Pontelliers club, and she was frank enough to tell Edna so. Its a pity Mr. Pontellier doesnt stay home more in the evenings. I think you would be morewell, if you dont mind my saying it more united, if he did. Oh! dear no! said Edna, with a blank look in her eyes. What should I do if he stayed home? We wouldnt have anything to say to each other. She had not much of anything to say to her father, for that matter; but he did not antagonize her. She discovered that he interested her, though she realized that he might not interest her long; and for the first time in her life she felt as if she were thoroughly acquainted with him.

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He kept her busy serving him and ministering to his wants. It amused her to do so. She would not permit a servant or one of the children to do anything for him which she might do herself. Her husband noticed, and thought it was the expression of a deep filial attachment which he had never suspected. The Colonel drank numerous toddies during the course of the day, which left him, however, imperturbed. He was an expert at concocting strong drinks. He had even invented some, to which he had given fantastic names, and for whose manufacture he required diverse ingredients that it devolved upon Edna to procure for him. When Doctor Mandelet dined with the Pontelliers on Thursday he could discern in Mrs. Pontellier no trace of that morbid condition which her husband had reported to him. She was excited and in a manner radiant. She and her father had been to the race course, and their thoughts when they seated themselves at table were still occupied with the events of the afternoon, and their talk was still of the track. The Doctor had not kept pace with turf affairs. He had certain recollections of racing in what he called the good old times when the Lecompte stables flourished, and he drew upon this fund of memories so that he might not be left out and seem wholly devoid of the modern spirit. But he failed to impose upon the Colonel, and was even far from impressing him with this trumped-up knowledge of bygone days. Edna had staked her father on his last venture, with the most gratifying results to both of them. Besides, they had met some very charming people, according to the Colonels impressions. Mrs. Mortimer Merriman and Mrs. James Highcamp, who were there with Alcee Arobin, had joined them and had enlivened the hours in a fashion that warmed him to think of. Mr. Pontellier himself had no particular leaning toward horseracing, 52

and was even rather inclined to discourage it as a pastime, especially when he considered the fate of that blue-grass farm in Kentucky. He endeavored, in a general way, to express a particular disapproval, and only succeeded in arousing the ire and opposition of his father-in-law. A pretty dispute followed, in which Edna warmly espoused her fathers cause and the Doctor remained neutral. He observed his hostess attentively from under his shaggy brows, and noted a subtle change which had transformed her from the listless woman he had known into a being who, for the moment, seemed palpitant with the forces of life. Her speech was warm and energetic. There was no repression in her glance or gesture. She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun. The dinner was excellent. The claret was warm and the champagne was cold, and under their beneficent influence the threatened unpleasantness melted and vanished with the fumes of the wine. Mr. Pontellier warmed up and grew reminiscent. He told some amusing plantation experiences, recollections of old Iberville and his youth, when he hunted possum in company with some friendly darky; thrashed the pecan trees, shot the grosbec, and roamed the woods and fields in mischievous idleness. The Colonel, with little sense of humor and of the fitness of things, related a somber episode of those dark and bitter days, in which he had acted a conspicuous part and always formed a central figure. Nor was the Doctor happier in his selection, when he told the old, ever new and curious story of the waning of a womans love, seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of fierce unrest. It was one of the many little human documents which had been unfolded to him during his long career as a physician. The story did

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not seem especially to impress Edna. She had one of her own to tell, of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back. They were lost amid the Baratarian Islands, and no one ever heard of them or found trace of them from that day to this. It was a pure invention. She said that Madame Antoine had related it to her. That, also, was an invention. Perhaps it was a dream she had had. But every glowing word seemed real to those who listened. They could feel the hot breath of the Southern night; they could hear the long sweep of the pirogue through the glistening moonlit water, the beating of birds wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown. The champagne was cold, and its subtle fumes played fantastic tricks with Ednas memory that night. Outside, away from the glow of the fire and the soft lamplight, the night was chill and murky. The Doctor doubled his old-fashioned cloak across his breast as he strode home through the darkness. He knew his fellow-creatures better than most men; knew that inner life which so seldom unfolds itself to unanointed* eyes. He was sorry he had accepted Pontelliers invitation. He was growing old, and beginning to need rest and an imperturbed spirit. He did not want the secrets of other lives thrust upon him. I hope it isnt Arobin, he muttered to himself as he walked. I hope to heaven it isnt Alcee Arobin.

XXIV
EDNA AND HER FATHER had a warm, and almost violent dispute upon the subject of her refusal to attend her sisters wedding. Mr. Pontellier declined to interfere, to interpose either his influence or his authority. He was following Doctor Mandelets advice, and letting her do as she liked. The Colonel reproached his daughter for her lack of filial kindness and respect, her want of sisterly affection and womanly consideration. His arguments were labored and unconvincing. He doubted if Janet would accept any excuseforgetting that Edna had offered none. He doubted if Janet would ever speak to her again, and he was sure Margaret would not. Edna was glad to be rid of her father when he finally took himself off with his wedding garments and his bridal gifts, with his padded shoulders, his Bible reading, his toddies and ponderous oaths. Mr. Pontellier followed him closely. He meant to stop at the wedding on his way to New York and endeavor by every means which money and love could devise to atone somewhat for Ednas incomprehensible action. You are too lenient, too lenient by far, Leonce, asserted the Colonel. Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife. Take my word for it. The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave. Mr. Pontellier had a vague suspicion of it which he thought it needless to mention at that late day. Edna was not so consciously gratified at her husbands leaving home as she had been over the departure of her father. As the day approached when he was to leave her for a comparatively long stay, she grew melt53

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ing and affectionate, remembering his many acts of consideration and his repeated expressions of an ardent attachment. She was solicitous about his health and his welfare. She bustled around, looking after his clothing, thinking about heavy underwear, quite as Madame Ratignolle would have done under similar circumstances. She cried when he went away, calling him her dear, good friend, and she was quite certain she would grow lonely before very long and go to join him in New York. But after all, a radiant peace settled upon her when she at last found herself alone. Even the children were gone. Old Madame Pontellier had come herself and carried them off to Iberville with their quadroon. The old madame did not venture to say she was afraid they would be neglected during Leonces absence; she hardly ventured to think so. She was hungry for themeven a little fierce in her attachment. She did not want them to be wholly children of the pavement, she always said when begging to have them for a space. She wished them to know the country, with its streams, its fields, its woods, its freedom, so delicious to the young. She wished them to taste something of the life their father had lived and known and loved when he, too, was a little child. When Edna was at last alone, she breathed a big, genuine sigh of relief. A feeling that was unfamiliar but very delicious came over her. She walked all through the house, from one room to another, as if inspecting it for the first time. She tried the various chairs and lounges, as if she had never sat and reclined upon them before. And she perambulated around the outside of the house, investigating, looking to see if windows and shutters were secure and in order. The flowers were like new acquaintances; she approached them in a familiar spirit, and made herself at home among them. The garden walks were damp, and Edna called to the maid to bring out her rubber sandals. And there she stayed, 54

and stooped, digging around the plants, trimming, picking dead, dry leaves. The childrens little dog came out, interfering, getting in her way. She scolded him, laughed at him, played with him. The garden smelled so good and looked so pretty in the afternoon sunlight. Edna plucked all the bright flowers she could find, and went into the house with them, she and the little dog. Even the kitchen assumed a sudden interesting character which she had never before perceived. She went in to give directions to the cook, to say that the butcher would have to bring much less meat, that they would require only half their usual quantity of bread, of milk and groceries. She told the cook that she herself would be greatly occupied during Mr. Pontelliers absence, and she begged her to take all thought and responsibility of the larder upon her own shoulders. That night Edna dined alone. The candelabra, with a few candies in the center of the table, gave all the light she needed. Outside the circle of light in which she sat, the large dining-room looked solemn and shadowy. The cook, placed upon her mettle, served a delicious repast a luscious tenderloin broiled a point. The wine tasted good; the marron glace seemed to be just what she wanted. It was so pleasant, too, to dine in a comfortable peignoir. She thought a little sentimentally about Leonce and the children, and wondered what they were doing. As she gave a dainty scrap or two to the doggie, she talked intimately to him about Etienne and Raoul. He was beside himself with astonishment and delight over these companionable advances, and showed his appreciation by his little quick, snappy barks and a lively agitation. Then Edna sat in the library after dinner and read Emerson until she grew sleepy. She realized that she had neglected her reading, and de-

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termined to start anew upon a course of improving studies, now that her time was completely her own to do with as she liked. After a refreshing bath, Edna went to bed. And as she snuggled comfortably beneath the eiderdown a sense of restfulness invaded her, such as she had not known before.

XXV
WHEN THE WEATHER was dark and cloudy Edna could not work. She needed the sun to mellow and temper her mood to the sticking point. She had reached a stage when she seemed to be no longer feeling her way, working, when in the humor, with sureness and ease. And being devoid of ambition, and striving not toward accomplishment, she drew satisfaction from the work in itself. On rainy or melancholy days Edna went out and sought the society of the friends she had made at Grand Isle. Or else she stayed indoors and nursed a mood with which she was becoming too familiar for her own comfort and peace of mind. It was not despair; but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promise broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth held out to her. She went again to the races, and again. Alcee Arobin and Mrs. Highcamp called for her one bright afternoon in Arobins drag. Mrs. Highcamp was a worldly but unaffected, intelligent, slim, tall blonde woman in the forties, with an indifferent manner and blue eyes that stared. She had a daughter who served her as a pretext for cultivating the society of young men of fashion. Alcee Arobin was one of them. He was a familiar figure at the race course, the opera, the fashionable 55

clubs. There was a perpetual smile in his eyes, which seldom failed to awaken a corresponding cheerfulness in any one who looked into them and listened to his good-humored voice. His manner was quiet, and at times a little insolent. He possessed a good figure, a pleasing face, not overburdened with depth of thought or feeling; and his dress was that of the conventional man of fashion. He admired Edna extravagantly, after meeting her at the races with her father. He had met her before on other occasions, but she had seemed to him unapproachable until that day. It was at his instigation that Mrs. Highcamp called to ask her to go with them to the Jockey Club to witness the turf event of the season. There were possibly a few track men out there who knew the race horse as well as Edna, but there was certainly none who knew it better. She sat between her two companions as one having authority to speak. She laughed at Arobins pretensions, and deplored Mrs. Highcamps ignorance. The race horse was a friend and intimate associate of her childhood. The atmosphere of the stables and the breath of the blue grass paddock revived in her memory and lingered in her nostrils. She did not perceive that she was talking like her father as the sleek geldings ambled in review before them. She played for very high stakes, and fortune favored her. The fever of the game flamed in her cheeks and eves, and it got into her blood and into her brain like an intoxicant. People turned their heads to look at her, and more than one lent an attentive car to her utterances, hoping thereby to secure the elusive but ever-desired tip. Arobin caught the contagion of excitement which drew him to Edna like a magnet. Mrs. Highcamp remained, as usual, unmoved, with her indifferent stare and uplifted eyebrows. Edna stayed and dined with Mrs. Highcamp upon being urged to do

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so. Arobin also remained and sent away his drag. The dinner was quiet and uninteresting, save for the cheerful efforts of Arobin to enliven things. Mrs. Highcamp deplored the absence of her daughter from the races, and tried to convey to her what she had missed by going to the Dante reading instead of joining them. The girl held a geranium leaf up to her nose and said nothing, but looked knowing and noncommittal. Mr. Highcamp was a plain, bald-headed man, who only talked under compulsion. He was unresponsive. Mrs. Highcamp was full of delicate courtesy and consideration toward her husband. She addressed most of her conversation to him at table. They sat in the library after dinner and read the evening papers together under the droplight; while the younger people went into the drawingroom near by and talked. Miss Highcamp played some selections from Grieg upon the piano. She seemed to have apprehended all of the composers coldness and none of his poetry. While Edna listened she could not help wondering if she had lost her taste for music. When the time came for her to go home, Mr. Highcamp grunted a lame offer to escort her, looking down at his slippered feet with tactless concern. It was Arobin who took her home. The car ride was long, and it was late when they reached Esplanade Street. Arobin asked permission to enter for a second to light his cigarettehis match safe was empty. He filled his match safe, but did not light his cigarette until he left her, after she had expressed her willingness to go to the races with him again. Edna was neither tired nor sleepy. She was hungry again, for the Highcamp dinner, though of excellent quality, had lacked abundance. She rummaged in the larder and brought forth a slice of Gruyere and some crackers. She opened a bottle of beer which she found in the 56

icebox. Edna felt extremely restless and excited. She vacantly hummed a fantastic tune as she poked at the wood embers on the hearth and munched a cracker. She wanted something to happensomething, anything; she did not know what. She regretted that she had not made Arobin stay a half hour to talk over the horses with her. She counted the money she had won. But there was nothing else to do, so she went to bed, and tossed there for hours in a sort of monotonous agitation. In the middle of the night she remembered that she had forgotten to write her regular letter to her husband; and she decided to do so next day and tell him about her afternoon at the Jockey Club. She lay wide awake composing a letter which was nothing like the one which she wrote next day. When the maid awoke her in the morning Edna was dreaming of Mr. Highcamp playing the piano at the entrance of a music store on Canal Street, while his wife was saying to Alcee Arobin, as they boarded an Esplanade Street car: What a pity that so much talent has been neglected! but I must go. When, a few days later, Alcee Arobin again called for Edna in his drag, Mrs. Highcamp was not with him. He said they would pick her up. But as that lady had not been apprised of his intention of picking her up, she was not at home. The daughter was just leaving the house to attend the meeting of a branch Folk Lore Society, and regretted that she could not accompany them. Arobin appeared nonplused, and asked Edna if there were any one else she cared to ask. She did not deem it worth while to go in search of any of the fashionable acquaintances from whom she had withdrawn herself. She thought of Madame Ratignolle, but knew that her fair friend did not leave the house, except to take a languid walk around the block with

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her husband after nightfall. Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed at such a request from Edna. Madame Lebrun might have enjoyed the outing, but for some reason Edna did not want her. So they went alone, she and Arobin. The afternoon was intensely interesting to her. The excitement came back upon her like a remittent fever. Her talk grew familiar and confidential. It was no labor to become intimate with Arobin. His manner invited easy confidence. The preliminary stage of becoming acquainted was one which he always endeavored to ignore when a pretty and engaging woman was concerned. He stayed and dined with Edna. He stayed and sat beside the wood fire. They laughed and talked; and before it was time to go he was telling her how different life might have been if he had known her years before. With ingenuous frankness he spoke of what a wicked, illdisciplined boy he had been, and impulsively drew up his cuff to exhibit upon his wrist the scar from a saber cut which he had received in a duel outside of Paris when he was nineteen. She touched his hand as she scanned the red cicatrice on the inside of his white wrist. A quick impulse that was somewhat spasmodic impelled her fingers to close in a sort of clutch upon his hand. He felt the pressure of her pointed nails in the flesh of his palm. She arose hastily and walked toward the mantel. The sight of a wound or scar always agitates and sickens me, she said. I shouldnt have looked at it. I beg your pardon, he entreated, following her; it never occurred to me that it might be repulsive. He stood close to her, and the effrontery in his eyes repelled the old, vanishing self in her, yet drew all her awakening sensuousness. He saw 57

enough in her face to impel him to take her hand and hold it while he said his lingering good night. Will you go to the races again? he asked. No, she said. Ive had enough of the races. I dont want to lose all the money Ive won, and Ive got to work when the weather is bright, instead of Yes; work; to be sure. You promised to show me your work. What morning may I come up to your atelier? To-morrow? No! Day after? No, no. Oh, please dont refuse me! I know something of such things. I might help you with a stray suggestion or two. No. Good night. Why dont you go after you have said good night? I dont like you, she went on in a high, excited pitch, attempting to draw away her hand. She felt that her words lacked dignity and sincerity, and she knew that he felt it. Im sorry you dont like me. Im sorry I offended you. How have I offended you? What have I done? Cant you forgive me? And he bent and pressed his lips upon her hand as if he wished never more to withdraw them. Mr. Arobin, she complained, Im greatly upset by the excitement of the afternoon; Im not myself. My manner must have misled you in some way. I wish you to go, please. She spoke in a monotonous, dull tone. He took his hat from the table, and stood with eyes turned from her, looking into the dying fire. For a moment or two he kept an impressive silence. Your manner has not misled me, Mrs. Pontellier, he said finally.

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My own emotions have done that. I couldnt help it. When Im near you, how could I help it? Dont think anything of it, dont bother, please. You see, I go when you command me. If you wish me to stay away, I shall do so. If you let me come back, Ioh! you will let me come back? He cast one appealing glance at her, to which she made no response. Alcee Arobins manner was so genuine that it often deceived even himself. Edna did not care or think whether it were genuine or not. When she was alone she looked mechanically at the back of her hand which he had kissed so warmly. Then she leaned her head down on the mantelpiece. She felt somewhat like a woman who in a moment of passion is betrayed into an act of infidelity, and realizes the significance of the act without being wholly awakened from its glamour. The thought was passing vaguely through her mind, What would he think? She did not mean her husband; she was thinking of Robert Lebrun. Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse. She lit a candle and went up to her room. Alcee Arobin was absolutely nothing to her. Yet his presence, his manners, the warmth of his glances, and above all the touch of his lips upon her hand had acted like a narcotic upon her. She slept a languorous sleep, interwoven with vanishing dreams.

XXVI
ALCEE AROBIN WROTE Edna an elaborate note of apology, palpitant with sincerity. It embarrassed her; for in a cooler, quieter moment it appeared to her, absurd that she should have taken his action so seriously, so dramatically. She felt sure that the significance of the whole occurrence had lain in her own self-consciousness. If she ignored his note it would give undue importance to a trivial affair. If she replied to it in a serious spirit it would still leave in his mind the impression that she had in a susceptible moment yielded to his influence. After all, it was no great matter to have ones hand kissed. She was provoked at his having written the apology. She answered in as light and bantering a spirit as she fancied it deserved, and said she would be glad to have him look in upon her at work whenever he felt the inclination and his business gave him the opportunity. He responded at once by presenting himself at her home with all his disarming naivete. And then there was scarcely a day which followed that she did not see him or was not reminded of him. He was prolific in pretexts. His attitude became one of good-humored subservience and tacit adoration. He was ready at all times to submit to her moods, which were as often kind as they were cold. She grew accustomed to him. They became intimate and friendly by imperceptible degrees, and then by leaps. He sometimes talked in a way that astonished her at first and brought the crimson into her face; in a way that pleased her at last, appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her. There was nothing which so quieted the turmoil of Ednas senses as a visit to Mademoiselle Reisz. It was then, in the presence of that personality which was offensive to her, that the woman, by her divine art, seemed to reach Ednas spirit and set it free. 58

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It was misty, with heavy, lowering atmosphere, one afternoon, when Edna climbed the stairs to the pianists apartments under the roof. Her clothes were dripping with moisture. She felt chilled and pinched as she entered the room. Mademoiselle was poking at a rusty stove that smoked a little and warmed the room indifferently. She was endeavoring to heat a pot of chocolate on the stove. The room looked cheerless and dingy to Edna as she entered. A bust of Beethoven, covered with a hood of dust, scowled at her from the mantelpiece. Ah! here comes the sunlight! exclaimed Mademoiselle, rising from her knees before the stove. Now it will be warm and bright enough; I can let the fire alone. She closed the stove door with a bang, and approaching, assisted in removing Ednas dripping mackintosh. You are cold; you look miserable. The chocolate will soon be hot. But would you rather have a taste of brandy? I have scarcely touched the bottle which you brought me for my cold. A piece of red flannel was wrapped around Mademoiselles throat; a stiff neck compelled her to hold her head on one side. I will take some brandy, said Edna, shivering as she removed her gloves and overshoes. She drank the liquor from the glass as a man would have done. Then flinging herself upon the uncomfortable sofa she said, Mademoiselle, I am going to move away from my house on Esplanade Street. Ah! ejaculated the musician, neither surprised nor especially interested. Nothing ever seemed to astonish her very much. She was endeavoring to adjust the bunch of violets which had become loose from its fastening in her hair. Edna drew her down upon the sofa, and taking a pin from her own hair, secured the shabby artificial flowers in their accustomed place. 59

Arent you astonished? Passably. Where are you going? to New York? to Iberville? to your father in Mississippi? where? Just two steps away, laughed Edna, in a little four-room house around the corner. It looks so cozy, so inviting and restful, whenever I pass by; and its for rent. Im tired looking after that big house. It never seemed like mine, anywaylike home. Its too much trouble. I have to keep too many servants. I am tired bothering with them. That is not your true reason, ma belle. There is no use in telling me lies. I dont know your reason, but you have not told me the truth. Edna did not protest or endeavor to justify herself. The house, the money that provides for it, are not mine. Isnt that enough reason? They are your husbands, returned Mademoiselle, with a shrug and a malicious elevation of the eyebrows. Oh! I see there is no deceiving you. Then let me tell you: It is a caprice. I have a little money of my own from my mothers estate, which my father sends me by driblets. I won a large sum this winter on the races, and I am beginning to sell my sketches. Laidpore is more and more pleased with my work; he says it grows in force and individuality. I cannot judge of that myself, but I feel that I have gained in ease and confidence. However, as I said, I have sold a good many through Laidpore. I can live in the tiny house for little or nothing, with one servant. Old Celestine, who works occasionally for me, says she will come stay with me and do my work. I know I shall like it, like the feeling of freedom and independence. What does your husband say? I have not told him yet. I only thought of it this morning. He will think I am demented, no doubt. Perhaps you think so.

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Mademoiselle shook her head slowly. Your reason is not yet clear to me, she said. Neither was it quite clear to Edna herself; but it unfolded itself as she sat for a while in silence. Instinct had prompted her to put away her husbands bounty in casting off her allegiance. She did not know how it would be when he returned. There would have to be an understanding, an explanation. Conditions would some way adjust themselves, she felt; but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself. I shall give a grand dinner before I leave the old house! Edna exclaimed. You will have to come to it, Mademoiselle. I will give you everything that you like to eat and to drink. We shall sing and laugh and be merry for once. And she uttered a sigh that came from the very depths of her being. If Mademoiselle happened to have received a letter from Robert during the interval of Ednas visits, she would give her the letter unsolicited. And she would seat herself at the piano and play as her humor prompted her while the young woman read the letter. The little stove was roaring; it was red-hot, and the chocolate in the tin sizzled and sputtered. Edna went forward and opened the stove door, and Mademoiselle rising, took a letter from under the bust of Beethoven and handed it to Edna. Another! so soon! she exclaimed, her eyes filled with delight. Tell me, Mademoiselle, does he know that I see his letters? Never in the world! He would be angry and would never write to me again if he thought so. Does he write to you? Never a line. Does he send you a message? Never a word. It is because he loves you, poor fool, and is trying to forget you, since you are not free to listen to him or to belong to him. 60

Why do you show me his letters, then? Havent you begged for them? Can I refuse you anything? Oh! you cannot deceive me, and Mademoiselle approached her beloved instrument and began to play. Edna did not at once read the letter. She sat holding it in her hand, while the music penetrated her whole being like an effulgence, warming and brightening the dark places of her soul. It prepared her for joy and exultation. Oh! she exclaimed, letting the letter fall to the floor. Why did you not tell me? She went and grasped Mademoiselles hands up from the keys. Oh! unkind! malicious! Why did you not tell me? That he was coming back? No great news, ma foi. I wonder he did not come long ago. But when, when? cried Edna, impatiently. He does not say when. He says `very soon. You know as much about it as I do; it is all in the letter. But why? Why is he coming? Oh, if I thought and she snatched the letter from the floor and turned the pages this way and that way, looking for the reason, which was left untold. If I were young and in love with a man, said Mademoiselle, turning on the stool and pressing her wiry hands between her knees as she looked down at Edna, who sat on the floor holding the letter, it seems to me he would have to be some grand esprit; a man with lofty aims and ability to reach them; one who stood high enough to attract the notice of his fellow-men. It seems to me if I were young and in love I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion. Now it is you who are telling lies and seeking to deceive me, Mademoiselle; or else you have never been in love, and know nothing about it. Why, went on Edna, clasping her knees and looking up into

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Mademoiselles twisted face, do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself: Go to! Here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him. Or, I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue? Or, This financier, who controls the worlds money markets? You are purposely misunderstanding me, ma reine. Are you in love with Robert? Yes, said Edna. It was the first time she had admitted it, and a glow overspread her face, blotching it with red spots. Why? asked her companion. Why do you love him when you ought not to? Edna, with a motion or two, dragged herself on her knees before Mademoiselle Reisz, who took the glowing face between her two hands. Why? Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing; because he has two lips and a square chin, and a little finger which he cant straighten from having played baseball too energetically in his youth. Because Because you do, in short, laughed Mademoiselle. What will you do when he comes back? she asked. Do? Nothing, except feel glad and happy to be alive. She was already glad and happy to be alive at the mere thought of his return. The murky, lowering sky, which had depressed her a few hours before, seemed bracing and invigorating as she splashed through the streets on her way home. She stopped at a confectioners and ordered a huge box of bonbons for the children in Iberville. She slipped a card in the box, on which 61

she scribbled a tender message and sent an abundance of kisses. Before dinner in the evening Edna wrote a charming letter to her husband, telling him of her intention to move for a while into the little house around the block, and to give a farewell dinner before leaving, regretting that he was not there to share it, to help out with the menu and assist her in entertaining the guests. Her letter was brilliant and brimming with cheerfulness.

XXVII
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? asked Arobin that evening. I never found you in such a happy mood. Edna was tired by that time, and was reclining on the lounge before the fire. Dont you know the weather prophet has told us we shall see the sun pretty soon? Well, that ought to be reason enough, he acquiesced. You wouldnt give me another if I sat here all night imploring you. He sat close to her on a low tabouret, and as he spoke his fingers lightly touched the hair that fell a little over her forehead. She liked the touch of his fingers through her hair, and closed her eyes sensitively. One of these days, she said, Im going to pull myself together for a while and thinktry to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I dont know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I cant convince myself that I am. I must think about it. Dont. Whats the use? Why should you bother thinking about it when I can tell you what manner of woman you are. His fingers strayed occasionally down to her warm, smooth cheeks and firm chin, which

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was growing a little full and double. Oh, yes! You will tell me that I am adorable; everything that is captivating. Spare yourself the effort. No; I shant tell you anything of the sort, though I shouldnt be lying if I did. Do you know Mademoiselle Reisz? she asked irrelevantly. The pianist? I know her by sight. Ive heard her play. She says queer things sometimes in a bantering way that you dont notice at the time and you find yourself thinking about afterward. For instance? Well, for instance, when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth. Whither would you soar? Im not thinking of any extraordinary flights. I only half comprehend her. Ive heard shes partially demented, said Arobin. She seems to me wonderfully sane, Edna replied. Im told shes extremely disagreeable and unpleasant. Why have you introduced her at a moment when I desired to talk of you? Oh! talk of me if you like, cried Edna, clasping her hands beneath her head; but let me think of something else while you do. Im jealous of your thoughts tonight. Theyre making you a little kinder than usual; but some way I feel as if they were wandering, as if they were not here with me. She only looked at him and smiled. His eyes were very near. He leaned upon the lounge with an arm extended

across her, while the other hand still rested upon her hair. They continued silently to look into each others eyes. When he leaned forward and kissed her, she clasped his head, holding his lips to hers. It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire.

XXVIII
EDNA CRIED A LITTLE that night after Arobin left her. It was only one phase of the multitudinous emotions which had assailed her. There was with her an overwhelming feeling of irresponsibility. There was the shock of the unexpected and the unaccustomed. There was her husbands reproach looking at her from the external things around her which he had provided for her external existence. There was Roberts reproach making itself felt by a quicker, fiercer, more overpowering love, which had awakened within her toward him. Above all, there was understanding. She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to took upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality. But among the conflicting sensations which assailed her, there was neither shame nor remorse. There was a dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips.

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XXIX
WITHOUT EVEN WAITING for an answer from her husband regarding his opinion or wishes in the matter, Edna hastened her preparations for quitting her home on Esplanade Street and moving into the little house around the block. A feverish anxiety attended her every action in that direction. There was no moment of deliberation, no interval of repose between the thought and its fulfillment. Early upon the morning following those hours passed in Arobins society, Edna set about securing her new abode and hurrying her arrangements for occupying it. Within the precincts of her home she felt like one who has entered and lingered within the portals of some forbidden temple in which a thousand muffled voices bade her begone. Whatever was her own in the house, everything which she had acquired aside from her husbands bounty, she caused to be transported to the other house, supplying simple and meager deficiencies from her own resources. Arobin found her with rolled sleeves, working in company with the house-maid when he looked in during the afternoon. She was splendid and robust, and had never appeared handsomer than in the old blue gown, with a red silk handkerchief knotted at random around her head to protect her hair from the dust. She was mounted upon a high stepladder, unhooking a picture from the wall when he entered. He had found the front door open, and had followed his ring by walking in unceremoniously. Come down! he said. Do you want to kill yourself? She greeted him with affected carelessness, and appeared absorbed in her occupation. 63

If he had expected to find her languishing, reproachful, or indulging in sentimental tears, he must have been greatly surprised. He was no doubt prepared for any emergency, ready for any one of the foregoing attitudes, just as he bent himself easily and naturally to the situation which confronted him. Please come down, he insisted, holding the ladder and looking up at her. No, she answered; Ellen is afraid to mount the ladder. Joe is working over at the pigeon housethats the name Ellen gives it, because its so small and looks like a pigeon houseand some one has to do this. Arobin pulled off his coat, and expressed himself ready and willing to tempt fate in her place. Ellen brought him one of her dust-caps, and went into contortions of mirth, which she found it impossible to control, when she saw him put it on before the mirror as grotesquely as he could. Edna herself could not refrain from smiling when she fastened it at his request. So it was he who in turn mounted the ladder, unhooking pictures and curtains, and dislodging ornaments as Edna directed. When he had finished he took off his dust-cap and went out to wash his hands. Edna was sitting on the tabouret, idly brushing the tips of a feather duster along the carpet when he came in again. Is there anything more you will let me do? he asked. That is all, she answered. Ellen can manage the rest. She kept the young woman occupied in the drawing-room, unwilling to be left alone with Arobin. What about the dinner? he asked; the grand event, the coup detat? It will be day after to-morrow. Why do you call it the `coup detat? Oh! it will be very fine; all my best of everythingcrystal, silver and old, Sevres, flowers, music, and champagne to swim in. Ill let Leonce

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pay the bills. I wonder what hell say when he sees the bills. And you ask me why I call it a coup detat? Arobin had put on his coat, and he stood before her and asked if his cravat was plumb. She told him it was, looking no higher than the tip of his collar. When do you go to the `pigeon house?with all due acknowledgment to Ellen. Day after to-morrow, after the dinner. I shall sleep there. Ellen, will you very kindly get me a glass of water? asked Arobin. The dust in the curtains, if you will pardon me for hinting such a thing, has parched my throat to a crisp. While Ellen gets the water, said Edna, rising, I will say good-by and let you go. I must get rid of this grime, and I have a million things to do and think of. When shall I see you? asked Arobin, seeking to detain her, the maid having left the room. At the dinner, of course. You are invited. Not before?not to-night or to-morrow morning or tomorrow noon or night? or the day after morning or noon? Cant you see yourself, without my telling you, what an eternity it is? He had followed her into the hall and to the foot of the stairway, looking up at her as she mounted with her face half turned to him. Not an instant sooner, she said. But she laughed and looked at him with eyes that at once gave him courage to wait and made it torture to wait.

XXX
THOUGH EDNA HAD SPOKEN of the dinner as a very grand affair, it was in truth a very small affair and very select, in so much as the guests invited were few and were selected with discrimination. She had counted upon an even dozen seating themselves at her round mahogany board, forgetting for the moment that Madame Ratignolle was to the last degree souffrante and unpresentable, and not foreseeing that Madame Lebrun would send a thousand regrets at the last moment. So there were only ten, after all, which made a cozy, comfortable number. There were Mr. and Mrs. Merriman, a pretty, vivacious little woman in the thirties; her husband, a jovial fellow, something of a shallowpate, who laughed a good deal at other peoples witticisms, and had thereby made himself extremely popular. Mrs. Highcamp had accompanied them. Of course, there was Alcee Arobin; and Mademoiselle Reisz had consented to come. Edna had sent her a fresh bunch of violets with black lace trimmings for her hair. Monsieur Ratignolle brought himself and his wifes excuses. Victor Lebrun, who happened to be in the city, bent upon relaxation, had accepted with alacrity. There was a Miss Mayblunt, no longer in her teens, who looked at the world through lorgnettes and with the keenest interest. It was thought and said that she was intellectual; it was suspected of her that she wrote under a nom de guerre. She had come with a gentleman by the name of Gouvernail, connected with one of the daily papers, of whom nothing special could be said, except that he was observant and seemed quiet and inoffensive. Edna herself made the tenth, and at half-past eight they seated themselves at table, Arobin and Monsieur Ratignolle on either side of their hostess. 64

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Mrs. Highcamp sat between Arobin and Victor Lebrun. Then came Mrs. Merriman, Mr. Gouvernail, Miss Mayblunt, Mr. Merriman, and Mademoiselle Reisz next to Monsieur Ratignolle. There was something extremely gorgeous about the appearance of the table, an effect of splendor conveyed by a cover of pale yellow satin under strips of lace-work. There were wax candles, in massive brass candelabra, burning softly under yellow silk shades; full, fragrant roses, yellow and red, abounded. There were silver and gold, as she had said there would be, and crystal which glittered like the gems which the women wore. The ordinary stiff dining chairs had been discarded for the occasion and replaced by the most commodious and luxurious which could be collected throughout the house. Mademoiselle Reisz, being exceedingly diminutive, was elevated upon cushions, as small children are sometimes hoisted at table upon bulky volumes. Something new, Edna? exclaimed Miss Mayblunt, with lorgnette directed toward a magnificent cluster of diamonds that sparkled, that almost sputtered, in Ednas hair, just over the center of her forehead. Quite new; `brand new, in fact; a present from my husband. It arrived this morning from New York. I may as well admit that this is my birthday, and that I am twenty-nine. In good time I expect you to drink my health. Meanwhile, I shall ask you to begin with this cocktail, composedwould you say composed? with an appeal to Miss Mayblunt composed by my father in honor of Sister Janets wedding. Before each guest stood a tiny glass that looked and sparkled like a garnet gem. Then, all things considered, spoke Arobin, it might not be amiss to start out by drinking the Colonels health in the cocktail which he 65

composed, on the birthday of the most charming of womenthe daughter whom he invented. Mr. Merrimans laugh at this sally was such a genuine outburst and so contagious that it started the dinner with an agreeable swing that never slackened. Miss Mayblunt begged to be allowed to keep her cocktail untouched before her, just to look at. The color was marvelous! She could compare it to nothing she had ever seen, and the garnet lights which it emitted were unspeakably rare. She pronounced the Colonel an artist, and stuck to it. Monsieur Ratignolle was prepared to take things seriously; the mets, the entre-mets, the service, the decorations, even the people. He looked up from his pompano and inquired of Arobin if he were related to the gentleman of that name who formed one of the firm of Laitner and Arobin, lawyers. The young man admitted that Laitner was a warm personal friend, who permitted Arobins name to decorate the firms letterheads and to appear upon a shingle that graced Perdido Street. There are so many inquisitive people and institutions abounding, said Arobin, that one is really forced as a matter of convenience these days to assume the virtue of an occupation if he has it not. Monsieur Ratignolle stared a little, and turned to ask Mademoiselle Reisz if she considered the symphony concerts up to the standard which had been set the previous winter. Mademoiselle Reisz answered Monsieur Ratignolle in French, which Edna thought a little rude, under the circumstances, but characteristic. Mademoiselle had only disagreeable things to say of the symphony concerts, and insulting remarks to make of all the musicians of New Orleans, singly and collectively. All her interest seemed to be centered upon the delicacies placed before her.

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Mr. Merriman said that Mr. Arobins remark about inquisitive people reminded him of a man from Waco the other day at the St. Charles Hotelbut as Mr. Merrimans stories were always lame and lacking point, his wife seldom permitted him to complete them. She interrupted him to ask if he remembered the name of the author whose book she had bought the week before to send to a friend in Geneva. She was talking books with Mr. Gouvernail and trying to draw from him his opinion upon current literary topics. Her husband told the story of the Waco man privately to Miss Mayblunt, who pretended to be greatly amused and to think it extremely clever. Mrs. Highcamp hung with languid but unaffected interest upon the warm and impetuous volubility of her left-hand neighbor, Victor Lebrun. Her attention was never for a moment withdrawn from him after seating herself at table; and when he turned to Mrs. Merriman, who was prettier and more vivacious than Mrs. Highcamp, she waited with easy indifference for an opportunity to reclaim his attention. There was the occasional sound of music, of mandolins, sufficiently removed to be an agreeable accompaniment rather than an interruption to the conversation. Outside the soft, monotonous splash of a fountain could be heard; the sound penetrated into the room with the heavy odor of jessamine that came through the open windows. The golden shimmer of Ednas satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. It was the color of her skin, without the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh. There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone. 66

But as she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords waited. There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable. The moments glided on, while a feeling of good fellowship passed around the circle like a mystic cord, holding and binding these people together with jest and laughter. Monsieur Ratignolle was the first to break the pleasant charm. At ten oclock he excused himself. Madame Ratignolle was waiting for him at home. She was bien souffrante, and she was filled with vague dread, which only her husbands presence could allay. Mademoiselle Reisz arose with Monsieur Ratignolle, who offered to escort her to the car. She had eaten well; she had tasted the good, rich wines, and they must have turned her head, for she bowed pleasantly to all as she withdrew from table. She kissed Edna upon the shoulder, and whispered: Bonne nuit, ma reine; soyez sage. She had been a little bewildered upon rising, or rather, descending from her cushions, and Monsieur Ratignolle gallantly took her arm and led her away. Mrs. Highcamp was weaving a garland of roses, yellow and red. When she had finished the garland, she laid it lightly upon Victors black curls. He was reclining far back in the luxurious chair, holding a glass of champagne to the light. As if a magicians wand had touched him, the garland of roses transformed him into a vision of Oriental beauty. His cheeks were the color

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of crushed grapes, and his dusky eyes glowed with a languishing fire. Sapristi! exclaimed Arobin. But Mrs. Highcamp had one more touch to add to the picture. She took from the back of her chair a white silken scarf, with which she had covered her shoulders in the early part of the evening. She draped it across the boy in graceful folds, and in a way to conceal his black, conventional evening dress. He did not seem to mind what she did to him, only smiled, showing a faint gleam of white teeth, while he continued to gaze with narrowing eyes at the light through his glass of champagne. Oh! to be able to paint in color rather than in words! exclaimed Miss Mayblunt, losing herself in a rhapsodic dream as she looked at him, `There was a graven image of Desire Painted with red blood on a ground of gold. murmured Gouvernail, under his breath. The effect of the wine upon Victor was to change his accustomed volubility into silence. He seemed to have abandoned himself to a reverie, and to be seeing pleasing visions in the amber bead. Sing, entreated Mrs. Highcamp. Wont you sing to us? Let him alone, said Arobin. Hes posing, offered Mr. Merriman; let him have it out. I believe hes paralyzed, laughed Mrs. Merriman. And leaning over the youths chair, she took the glass from his hand and held it to his lips. He sipped the wine slowly, and when he had drained the glass she laid it upon the table and wiped his lips with her little filmy handkerchief. Yes, Ill sing for you, he said, turning in his chair toward Mrs. Highcamp. He clasped his hands behind his head, and looking up at 67

the ceiling began to hum a little, trying his voice like a musician tuning an instrument. Then, looking at Edna, he began to sing: Ah! si tu savais! Stop! she cried, dont sing that. I dont want you to sing it, and she laid her glass so impetuously and blindly upon the table as to shatter it against a carafe. The wine spilled over Arobins legs and some of it trickled down upon Mrs. Highcamps black gauze gown. Victor had lost all idea of courtesy, or else he thought his hostess was not in earnest, for he laughed and went on: Ah! si tu savais Ce que tes yeux me disent Oh! you mustnt! you mustnt, exclaimed Edna, and pushing back her chair she got up, and going behind him placed her hand over his mouth. He kissed the soft palm that pressed upon his lips. No, no, I wont, Mrs. Pontellier. I didnt know you meant it, looking up at her with caressing eyes. The touch of his lips was like a pleasing sting to her hand. She lifted the garland of roses from his head and flung it across the room. Come, Victor; youve posed long enough. Give Mrs. Highcamp her scarf. Mrs. Highcamp undraped the scarf from about him with her own hands. Miss Mayblunt and Mr. Gouvernail suddenly conceived the notion that it was time to say good night. And Mr. and Mrs. Merriman wondered how it could be so late.

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Before parting from Victor, Mrs. Highcamp invited him to call upon her daughter, who she knew would be charmed to meet him and talk French and sing French songs with him. Victor expressed his desire and intention to call upon Miss Highcamp at the first opportunity which presented itself. He asked if Arobin were going his way. Arobin was not. The mandolin players had long since stolen away. A profound stillness had fallen upon the broad, beautiful street. The voices of Ednas disbanding guests jarred like a discordant note upon the quiet harmony of the night.

XXXI
WELL? QUESTIONED AROBIN, who had remained with Edna after the others had departed. Well, she reiterated, and stood up, stretching her arms, and feeling the need to relax her muscles after having been so long seated. What next? he asked. The servants are all gone. They left when the musicians did. I have dismissed them. The house has to be closed and locked, and I shall trot around to the pigeon house, and shall send Celestine over in the morning to straighten things up. He looked around, and began to turn out some of the lights. What about upstairs? he inquired. I think it is all right; but there may be a window or two unlatched. We had better look; you might take a candle and see. And bring me my wrap and hat on the foot of the bed in the middle room. He went up with the light, and Edna began closing doors and win68

dows. She hated to shut in the smoke and the fumes of the wine. Arobin found her cape and hat, which he brought down and helped her to put on. When everything was secured and the lights put out, they left through the front door, Arobin locking it and taking the key, which he carried for Edna. He helped her down the steps. Will you have a spray of jessamine? he asked, breaking off a few blossoms as he passed. No; I dont want anything. She seemed disheartened, and had nothing to say. She took his arm, which he offered her, holding up the weight of her satin train with the other hand. She looked down, noticing the black line of his leg moving in and out so close to her against the yellow shimmer of her gown. There was the whistle of a railway train somewhere in the distance, and the midnight bells were ringing. They met no one in their short walk. The pigeon house stood behind a locked gate, and a shallow parterre that had been somewhat neglected. There was a small front porch, upon which a long window and the front door opened. The door opened directly into the parlor; there was no side entry. Back in the yard was a room for servants, in which old Celestine had been ensconced. Edna had left a lamp burning low upon the table. She had succeeded in making the room look habitable and homelike. There were some books on the table and a lounge near at hand. On the floor was a fresh matting, covered with a rug or two; and on the walls hung a few tasteful pictures. But the room was filled with flowers. These were a surprise to her. Arobin had sent them, and had had Celestine distribute them during Ednas absence. Her bedroom was adjoining, and across a

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small passage were the diningroom and kitchen. Edna seated herself with every appearance of discomfort. Are you tired? he asked. Yes, and chilled, and miserable. I feel as if I had been wound up to a certain pitchtoo tightand something inside of me had snapped. She rested her head against the table upon her bare arm. You want to rest, he said, and to be quiet. Ill go; Ill leave you and let you rest. Yes, she replied. He stood up beside her and smoothed her hair with his soft, magnetic hand. His touch conveyed to her a certain physical comfort. She could have fallen quietly asleep there if he had continued to pass his hand over her hair. He brushed the hair upward from the nape of her neck. I hope you will feel better and happier in the morning, he said. You have tried to do too much in the past few days. The dinner was the last straw; you might have dispensed with it. Yes, she admitted; it was stupid. No, it was delightful; but it has worn you out. His hand had strayed to her beautiful shoulders, and he could feel the response of her flesh to his touch. He seated himself beside her and kissed her lightly upon the shoulder. I thought you were going away, she said, in an uneven voice. I am, after I have said good night. Good night, she murmured. He did not answer, except to continue to caress her. He did not say good night until she had become supple to his gentle, seductive entreaties. 69

XXXII
When Mr. Pontellier learned of his wifes intention to abandon her home and take up her residence elsewhere, he immediately wrote her a letter of unqualified disapproval and remonstrance. She had given reasons which he was unwilling to acknowledge as adequate. He hoped she had not acted upon her rash impulse; and he begged her to consider first, foremost, and above all else, what people would say. He was not dreaming of scandal when he uttered this warning; that was a thing which would never have entered into his mind to consider in connection with his wifes name or his own. He was simply thinking of his financial integrity. It might get noised about that the Pontelliers had met with reverses, and were forced to conduct their menage on a humbler scale than heretofore. It might do incalculable mischief to his business prospects. But remembering Ednas whimsical turn of mind of late, and foreseeing that she had immediately acted upon her impetuous determination, he grasped the situation with his usual promptness and handled it with his well-known business tact and cleverness. The same mail which brought. to Edna his letter of disapproval carried instructionsthe most minute instructionsto a well-known architect concerning the remodeling of his home, changes which he had long contemplated, and which he desired carried forward during his temporary absence. Expert and reliable packers and movers were engaged to convey the furniture, carpets, pictures everything movable, in shortto places of security. And in an incredibly short time the Pontellier house was turned over to the artisans. There was to be an additiona small

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snuggery; there was to be frescoing, and hardwood flooring was to be put into such rooms as had not yet been subjected to this improvement. Furthermore, in one of the daily papers appeared a brief notice to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier were contemplating a summer sojourn abroad, and that their handsome residence on Esplanade Street was undergoing sumptuous alterations, and would not be ready for occupancy until their return. Mr. Pontellier had saved appearances! Edna admired the skill of his maneuver, and avoided any occasion to balk his intentions. When the situation as set forth by Mr. Pontellier was accepted and taken for granted, she was apparently satisfied that it should be so. The pigeon house pleased her. It at once assumed the intimate character of a home, while she herself invested it with a charm which it reflected like a warm glow. There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to feed upon opinion when her own soul had invited her. After a little while, a few days, in fact, Edna went up and spent a week with her children in Iberville. They were delicious February days, with all the summers promise hovering in the air. How glad she was to see the children! She wept for very pleasure when she felt their little arms clasping her; their hard, ruddy cheeks pressed against her own glowing cheeks. She looked into their faces with hungry eyes that could not be satisfied with looking. And what stories they had to tell their mother! About the pigs, the cows, the 70

mules! About riding to the mill behind Gluglu; fishing back in the lake with their Uncle Jasper; picking pecans with Lidies little black brood, and hauling chips in their express wagon. It was a thousand times more fun to haul real chips for old lame Susies real fire than to drag painted blocks along the banquette on Esplanade Street! She went with them herself to see the pigs and the cows, to look at the darkies laying the cane, to thrash the pecan trees, and catch fish in the back lake. She lived with them a whole week long, giving them all of herself, and gathering and filling herself with their young existence. They listened, breathless, when she told them the house in Esplanade Street was crowded with workmen, hammering, nailing, sawing, and filling the place with clatter. They wanted. to know where their bed was; what had been done with their rocking-horse; and where did Joe sleep, and where had Ellen gone, and the cook? But, above all, they were fired with a desire to see the little house around the block. Was there any place to play? Were there any boys next door? Raoul, with pessimistic foreboding, was convinced that there were only girls next door. Where would they sleep, and where would papa sleep? She told them the fairies would fix it all right. The old Madame was charmed with Ednas visit, and showered all manner of delicate attentions upon her. She was delighted to know that the Esplanade Street house was in a dismantled condition. It gave her the promise and pretext to keep the children indefinitely. It was with a wrench and a pang that Edna left her children. She carried away with her the sound of their voices and the touch of their cheeks. All along the journey homeward their presence lingered with her like the memory of a delicious song. But by the time she had regained the city the song no longer echoed in her soul. She was again alone.

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XXXIII
IT HAPPENED SOMETIMES when Edna went to see Mademoiselle Reisz that the little musician was absent, giving a lesson or making some small necessary household purchase. The key was always left in a secret hiding-place in the entry, which Edna knew. If Mademoiselle happened to be away, Edna would usually enter and wait for her return. When she knocked at Mademoiselle Reiszs door one afternoon there was no response; so unlocking the door, as usual, she entered and found the apartment deserted, as she had expected. Her day had been quite filled up, and it was for a rest, for a refuge, and to talk about Robert, that she sought out her friend. She had worked at her canvasa young Italian character studyall the morning, completing the work without the model; but there had been many interruptions, some incident to her modest housekeeping, and others of a social nature. Madame Ratignolle had dragged herself over, avoiding the too public thoroughfares, she said. She complained that Edna had neglected her much of late. Besides, she was consumed with curiosity to see the little house and the manner in which it was conducted. She wanted to hear all about the dinner party; Monsieur Ratignolle had left so early. What had happened after he left? The champagne and grapes which Edna sent over were TOO delicious. She had so little appetite; they had refreshed and toned her stomach. Where on earth was she going to put Mr. Pontellier in that little house, and the boys? And then she made Edna promise to go to her when her hour of trial overtook her. At any timeany time of the day or night, dear, Edna assured her. Before leaving Madame Ratignolle said: 71

In some way you seem to me like a child, Edna. You seem to act without a certain amount of reflection which is necessary in this life. That is the reason I want to say you mustnt mind if I advise you to be a little careful while you are living here alone. Why dont you have some one come and stay with you? Wouldnt Mademoiselle Reisz come? No; she wouldnt wish to come, and I shouldnt want her always with me. Well, the reasonyou know how evil-minded the world issome one was talking of Alcee Arobin visiting you. Of course, it wouldnt matter if Mr. Arobin had not such a dreadful reputation. Monsieur Ratignolle was telling me that his attentions alone are considered enough to ruin a woman s name. Does he boast of his successes? asked Edna, indifferently, squinting at her picture. No, I think not. I believe he is a decent fellow as far as that goes. But his character is so well known among the men. I shant be able to come back and see you; it was very, very imprudent to-day. Mind the step! cried Edna. Dont neglect me, entreated Madame Ratignolle; and dont mind what I said about Arobin, or having some one to stay with you. Of course not, Edna laughed. You may say anything you like to me. They kissed each other good-by. Madame Ratignolle had not far to go, and Edna stood on the porch a while watching her walk down the street. Then in the afternoon Mrs. Merriman and Mrs. Highcamp had made their party call. Edna felt that they might have dispensed with the formality. They had also come to invite her to play vingt-et-un one

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evening at Mrs. Merrimans. She was asked to go early, to dinner, and Mr. Merriman or Mr. Arobin would take her home. Edna accepted in a half-hearted way. She sometimes felt very tired of Mrs. Highcamp and Mrs. Merriman. Late in the afternoon she sought refuge with Mademoiselle Reisz, and stayed there alone, waiting for her, feeling a kind of repose invade her with the very atmosphere of the shabby, unpretentious little room. Edna sat at the window, which looked out over the house-tops and across the river. The window frame was filled with pots of flowers, and she sat and picked the dry leaves from a rose geranium. The day was warm, and the breeze which blew from the river was very pleasant. She removed her hat and laid it on the piano. She went on picking the leaves and digging around the plants with her hat pin. Once she thought she heard Mademoiselle Reisz approaching. But it was a young black girl, who came in, bringing a small bundle of laundry, which she deposited in the adjoining room, and went away. Edna seated herself at the piano, and softly picked out with one hand the bars of a piece of music which lay open before her. A half-hour went by. There was the occasional sound of people going and coming in the lower hall. She was growing interested in her occupation of picking out the aria, when there was a second rap at the door. She vaguely wondered what these people did when they found Mademoiselles door locked. Come in, she called, turning her face toward the door. And this time it was Robert Lebrun who presented himself. She attempted to rise; she could not have done so without betraying the agitation which mastered her at sight of him, so she fell back upon the stool, only exclaiming, Why, Robert! 72

He came and clasped her hand, seemingly without knowing what he was saying or doing. Mrs. Pontellier! How do you happenoh! how well you look! Is Mademoiselle Reisz not here? I never expected to see you. When did you come back? asked Edna in an unsteady voice, wiping her face with her handkerchief. She seemed ill at ease on the piano stool, and he begged her to take the chair by the window. She did so, mechanically, while he seated himself on the stool. I returned day before yesterday, he answered, while he leaned his arm on the keys, bringing forth a crash of discordant sound. Day before yesterday! she repeated, aloud; and went on thinking to herself, day before yesterday, in a sort of an uncomprehending way. She had pictured him seeking her at the very first hour, and he had lived under the same sky since day before yesterday; while only by accident had he stumbled upon her. Mademoiselle must have lied when she said, Poor fool, he loves you. Day before yesterday, she repeated, breaking off a spray of Mademoiselles geranium; then if you had not met me here to-day you wouldntwhenthat is, didnt you mean to come and see me? Of course, I should have gone to see you. There have been so many things he turned the leaves of Mademoiselles music nervously. I started in at once yesterday with the old firm. After all there is as much chance for me here as there was therethat is, I might find it profitable some day. The Mexicans were not very congenial. So he had come back because the Mexicans were not congenial; because business was as profitable here as there; because of any reason, and not because he cared to be near her. She remembered the day she sat on the floor, turning the pages of his letter, seeking the reason which was left untold.

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She had not noticed how he lookedonly feeling his presence; but she turned deliberately and observed him. After all, he had been absent but a few months, and was not changed. His hairthe color of hers waved back from his temples in the same way as before. His skin was not more burned than it had been at Grand Isle. She found in his eyes, when he looked at her for one silent moment, the same tender caress, with an added warmth and entreaty which had not been there before the same glance which had penetrated to the sleeping places of her soul and awakened them. A hundred times Edna had pictured Roberts return, and imagined their first meeting. It was usually at her home, whither he had sought her out at once. She always fancied him expressing or betraying in some way his love for her. And here, the reality was that they sat ten feet apart, she at the window, crushing geranium leaves in her hand and smelling them, he twirling around on the piano stool, saying: I was very much surprised to hear of Mr. Pontelliers absence; its a wonder Mademoiselle Reisz did not tell me; and your movingmother told me yesterday. I should think you would have gone to New York with him, or to Iberville with the children, rather than be bothered here with housekeeping. And you are going abroad, too, I hear. We shant have you at Grand Isle next summer; it wont seemdo you see much of Mademoiselle Reisz? She often spoke of you in the few letters she wrote. Do you remember that you promised to write to me when you went away? A flush overspread his whole face. I couldnt believe that my letters would be of any interest to you. That is an excuse; it isnt the truth. Edna reached for her hat on the piano. She adjusted it, sticking the hat pin through the heavy coil of hair with some deliberation. 73

Are you not going to wait for Mademoiselle Reisz? asked Robert. No; I have found when she is absent this long, she is liable not to come back till late. She drew on her gloves, and Robert picked up his hat. Wont you wait for her? asked Edna. Not if you think she will not be back till late, adding, as if suddenly aware of some discourtesy in his speech, and I should miss the pleasure of walking home with you. Edna locked the door and put the key back in its hiding-place. They went together, picking their way across muddy streets and sidewalks encumbered with the cheap display of small tradesmen. Part of the distance they rode in the car, and after disembarking, passed the Pontellier mansion, which looked broken and half torn asunder. Robert had never known the house, and looked at it with interest. I never knew you in your home, he remarked. I am glad you did not. Why? She did not answer. They went on around the corner, and it seemed as if her dreams were coming true after all, when he followed her into the little house. You must stay and dine with me, Robert. You see I am all alone, and it is so long since I have seen you. There is so much I want to ask you. She took off her hat and gloves. He stood irresolute, making some excuse about his mother who expected him; he even muttered something about an engagement. She struck a match and lit the lamp on the table; it was growing dusk. When he saw her face in the lamp-light, looking pained, with all the soft lines gone out of it, he threw his hat aside and seated himself. Oh! you know I want to stay if you will let me! he exclaimed. All the softness came back. She laughed, and went and put her hand on his shoulder.

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This is the first moment you have seemed like the old Robert. Ill go tell Celestine. She hurried away to tell Celestine to set an extra place. She even sent her off in search of some added delicacy which she had not thought of for herself. And she recommended great care in dripping the coffee and having the omelet done to a proper turn. When she reentered, Robert was turning over magazines, sketches, and things that lay upon the table in great disorder. He picked up a photograph, and exclaimed: Alcee Arobin! What on earth is his picture doing here? I tried to make a sketch of his head one day, answered Edna, and he thought the photograph might help me. It was at the other house. I thought it had been left there. I must have packed it up with my drawing materials. I should think you would give it back to him if you have finished with it. Oh! I have a great many such photographs. I never think of returning them. They dont amount to anything. Robert kept on looking at the picture. It seems to medo you think his head worth drawing? Is he a friend of Mr. Pontelliers? You never said you knew him. He isnt a friend of Mr. Pontelliers; hes a friend of mine. I always knew himthat is, it is only of late that I know him pretty well. But Id rather talk about you, and know what you have been seeing and doing and feeling out there in Mexico. Robert threw aside the picture. Ive been seeing the waves and the white beach of Grand Isle; the quiet, grassy street of the Cheniere; the old fort at Grande Terre. Ive been working like a machine, and feeling like a lost soul. There was nothing interesting. 74

She leaned her head upon her hand to shade her eyes from the light. And what have you been seeing and doing and feeling all these days? he asked. Ive been seeing the waves and the white beach of Grand Isle; the quiet, grassy street of the Cheniere Caminada; the old sunny fort at Grande Terre. Ive been working with a little more comprehension than a machine, and still feeling like a lost soul. There was nothing interesting. Mrs. Pontellier, you are cruel, he said, with feeling, closing his eyes and resting his head back in his chair. They remained in silence till old Celestine announced dinner. XXXIV THE DINING-ROOM WAS very small. Ednas round mahogany would have almost filled it. As it was there was but a step or two from the little table to the kitchen, to the mantel, the small buffet, and the side door that opened out on the narrow brick-paved yard. A certain degree of ceremony settled upon them with the announcement of dinner. There was no return to personalities. Robert related incidents of his sojourn in Mexico, and Edna talked of events likely to interest him, which had occurred during his absence. The dinner was of ordinary quality, except for the few delicacies which she had sent out to purchase. Old Celestine, with a bandana tignon twisted about her head, hobbled in and out, taking a personal interest in everything; and she lingered occasionally to talk patois with Robert, whom she had known as a boy. He went out to a neighboring cigar stand to purchase cigarette pa-

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pers, and when he came back he found that Celestine had served the black coffee in the parlor. Perhaps I shouldnt have come back, he said. When you are tired of me, tell me to go. You never tire me. You must have forgotten the hours and hours at Grand Isle in which we grew accustomed to each other and used to being together. I have forgotten nothing at Grand Isle, he said, not looking at her, but rolling a cigarette. His tobacco pouch, which he laid upon the table, was a fantastic embroidered silk affair, evidently the handiwork of a woman. You used to carry your tobacco in a rubber pouch, said Edna, picking up the pouch and examining the needlework. Yes; it was lost. Where did you buy this one? In Mexico? It was given to me by a Vera Cruz girl; they are very generous, he replied, striking a match and lighting his cigarette. They are very handsome, I suppose, those Mexican women; very picturesque, with their black eyes and their lace scarfs. Some are; others are hideous. just as you find women everywhere. What was she likethe one who gave you the pouch? You must have known her very well. She was very ordinary. She wasnt of the slightest importance. I knew her well enough. Did you visit at her house? Was it interesting? I should like to know and hear about the people you met, and the impressions they made on you. There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water. 75

Was she such a one? It would be ungenerous for me to admit that she was of that order and kind. He thrust the pouch back in his pocket, as if to put away the subject with the trifle which had brought it up. Arobin dropped in with a message from Mrs. Merriman, to say that the card party was postponed on account of the illness of one of her children. How do you do, Arobin? said Robert, rising from the obscurity. Oh! Lebrun. To be sure! I heard yesterday you were back. How did they treat you down in Mexique? Fairly well. But not well enough to keep you there. Stunning girls, though, in Mexico. I thought I should never get away from Vera Cruz when I was down there a couple of years ago. Did they embroider slippers and tobacco pouches and hat-bands and things for you? asked Edna. Oh! my! no! I didnt get so deep in their regard. I fear they made more impression on me than I made on them. You were less fortunate than Robert, then. I am always less fortunate than Robert. Has he been imparting tender confidences? Ive been imposing myself long enough, said Robert, rising, and shaking hands with Edna. Please convey my regards to Mr. Pontellier when you write. He shook hands with Arobin and went away. Fine fellow, that Lebrun, said Arobin when Robert had gone. I never heard you speak of him. I knew him last summer at Grand Isle, she replied. Here is that photograph of yours. Dont you want it?

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What do I want with it? Throw it away. She threw it back on the table. Im not going to Mrs. Merrimans, she said. If you see her, tell her so. But perhaps I had better write. I think I shall write now, and say that I am sorry her child is sick, and tell her not to count on me. It would be a good scheme, acquiesced Arobin. I dont blame you; stupid lot! Edna opened the blotter, and having procured paper and pen, began to write the note. Arobin lit a cigar and read the evening paper, which he had in his pocket. What is the date? she asked. He told her. Will you mail this for me when you go out? Certainly. He read to her little bits out of the newspaper, while she straightened things on the table. What do you want to do? he asked, throwing aside the paper. Do you want to go out for a walk or a drive or anything? It would be a fine night to drive. No; I dont want to do anything but just be quiet. You go away and amuse yourself. Dont stay. Ill go away if I must; but I shant amuse myself. You know that I only live when I am near you. He stood up to bid her good night. Is that one of the things you always say to women? I have said it before, but I dont think I ever came so near meaning it, he answered with a smile. There were no warm lights in her eyes; only a dreamy, absent look. Good night. I adore you. Sleep well, he said, and he kissed her hand and went away. 76

She stayed alone in a kind of reveriea sort of stupor. Step by step she lived over every instant of the time she had been with Robert after he had entered Mademoiselle Reiszs door. She recalled his words, his looks. How few and meager they had been for her hungry heart! A visiona transcendently seductive vision of a Mexican girl arose before her. She writhed with a jealous pang. She wondered when he would come back. He had not said he would come back. She had been with him, had heard his voice and touched his hand. But some way he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico.

XXXV
THE MORNING WAS FULL of sunlight and hope. Edna could see before her no denialonly the promise of excessive joy. She lay in bed awake, with bright eyes full of speculation. He loves you, poor fool. If she could but get that conviction firmly fixed in her mind, what mattered about the rest? She felt she had been childish and unwise the night before in giving herself over to despondency. She recapitulated the motives which no doubt explained Roberts reserve. They were not insurmountable; they would not hold if he really loved her; they could not hold against her own passion, which he must come to realize in time. She pictured him going to his business that morning. She even saw how he was dressed; how he walked down one street, and turned the corner of another; saw him bending over his desk, talking to people who entered the office, going to his lunch, and perhaps watching for her on the street. He would come to her in the afternoon or evening, sit and roll his cigarette, talk a little, and go away as he had done the night before. But how delicious it would be to have him there with her! She

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would have no regrets, nor seek to penetrate his reserve if he still chose to wear it. Edna ate her breakfast only half dressed. The maid brought her a delicious printed scrawl from Raoul, expressing his love, asking her to send him some bonbons, and telling her they had found that morning ten tiny white pigs all lying in a row beside Lidies big white pig. A letter also came from her husband, saying he hoped to be back early in March, and then they would get ready for that journey abroad which he had promised her so long, which he felt now fully able to afford; he felt able to travel as people should, without any thought of small economiesthanks to his recent speculations in Wall Street. Much to her surprise she received a note from Arobin, written at midnight from the club. It was to say good morning to her, to hope she had slept well, to assure her of his devotion, which he trusted she in some faintest manner returned. All these letters were pleasing to her. She answered the children in a cheerful frame of mind, promising them bonbons, and congratulating them upon their happy find of the little pigs. She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness, not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference. To Arobins note she made no reply. She put it under Celestines stove-lid. Edna worked several hours with much spirit. She saw no one but a picture dealer, who asked her if it were true that she was going abroad to study in Paris. She said possibly she might, and he negotiated with her for some Pa77

risian studies to reach him in time for the holiday trade in December. Robert did not come that day. She was keenly disappointed. He did not come the following day, nor the next. Each morning she awoke with hope, and each night she was a prey to despondency. She was tempted to seek him out. But far from yielding to the impulse, she avoided any occasion which might throw her in his way. She did not go to Mademoiselle Reiszs nor pass by Madame Lebruns, as she might have done if he had still been in Mexico. When Arobin, one night, urged her to drive with him, she wentout to the lake, on the Shell Road. His horses were full of mettle, and even a little unmanageable. She liked the rapid gait at which they spun along, and the quick, sharp sound of the horses hoofs on the hard road. They did not stop anywhere to eat or to drink. Arobin was not needlessly imprudent. But they ate and they drank when they regained Ednas little dining-roomwhich was comparatively early in the evening. It was late when he left her. It was getting to be more than a passing whim with Arobin to see her and be with her. He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her natures requirements like a torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom. There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning.

XXXVI
THERE WAS A GARDEN out in the suburbs; a small, leafy corner, with a few green tables under the orange trees. An old cat slept all day on the stone step in the sun, and an old mulatresse slept her idle hours away in her chair at the open window, till, some one happened to knock on one

The Awakening Chopin

of the green tables. She had milk and cream cheese to sell, and bread and butter. There was no one who could make such excellent coffee or fry a chicken so golden brown as she. The place was too modest to attract the attention of people of fashion, and so quiet as to have escaped the notice of those in search of pleasure and dissipation. Edna had discovered it accidentally one day when the high-board gate stood ajar. She caught sight of a little green table, blotched with the checkered sunlight that filtered through the quivering leaves overhead. Within she had found the slumbering mulatresse, the drowsy cat, and a glass of milk which reminded her of the milk she had tasted in Iberville. She often stopped there during her perambulations; sometimes taking a book with her, and sitting an hour or two under the trees when she found the place deserted. Once or twice she took a quiet dinner there alone, having instructed Celestine beforehand to prepare no dinner at home. It was the last place in the city where she would have expected to meet any one she knew. Still she was not astonished when, as she was partaking of a modest dinner late in the afternoon, looking into an open book, stroking the cat, which had made friends with hershe was not greatly astonished to see Robert come in at the tall garden gate. I am destined to see you only by accident, she said, shoving the cat off the chair beside her. He was surprised, ill at ease, almost embarrassed at meeting her thus so unexpectedly. Do you come here often? he asked. I almost live here, she said. I used to drop in very often for a cup of Catiches good coffee. This is the first time since I came back. 78

Shell bring you a plate, and you will share my dinner. Theres always enough for twoeven three. Edna had intended to be indifferent and as reserved as he when she met him; she had reached the determination by a laborious train of reasoning, incident to one of her despondent moods. But her resolve melted when she saw him before designing Providence had led him into her path. Why have you kept away from me, Robert? she asked, closing the book that lay open upon the table. Why are you so personal, Mrs. Pontellier? Why do you force me to idiotic subterfuges? he exclaimed with sudden warmth. I suppose theres no use telling you Ive been very busy, or that Ive been sick, or that Ive been to see you and not found you at home. Please let me off with any one of these excuses. You are the embodiment of selfishness, she said. You save yourself somethingI dont know whatbut there is some selfish motive, and in sparing yourself you never consider for a moment what I think, or how I feel your neglect and indifference. I suppose this is what you would call unwomanly; but I have got into a habit of expressing myself. It doesnt matter to me, and you may think me unwomanly if you like. No; I only think you cruel, as I said the other day. Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it. Im spoiling your dinner, Robert; never mind what I say. You havent eaten a morsel. I only came in for a cup of coffee. His sensitive face was all disfigured with excitement.

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Isnt this a delightful place? she remarked. I am so glad it has never actually been discovered. It is so quiet, so sweet, here. Do you notice there is scarcely a sound to be heard? Its so out of the way; and a good walk from the car. However, I dont mind walking. I always feel so sorry for women who dont like to walk; they miss so much so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole. Catiches coffee is always hot. I dont know how she manages it, here in the open air. Celestines coffee gets cold bringing it from the kitchen to the dining-room. Three lumps! How can you drink it so sweet? Take some of the cress with your chop; its so biting and crisp. Then theres the advantage of being able to smoke with your coffee out here. Now, in the cityarent you going to smoke? After a while, he said, laying a cigar on the table. Who gave it to you? she laughed. I bought it. I suppose Im getting reckless; I bought a whole box. She was determined not to be personal again and make him uncomfortable. The cat made friends with him, and climbed into his lap when he smoked his cigar. He stroked her silky fur, and talked a little about her. He looked at Ednas book, which he had read; and he told her the end, to save her the trouble of wading through it, he said. Again he accompanied her back to her home; and it was after dusk when they reached the little pigeon-house. She did not ask him to remain, which he was grateful for, as it permitted him to stay without the discomfort of blundering through an excuse which he had no intention of considering. He helped her to light the lamp; then she went into her room to take off her hat and to bathe her face and hands. 79

When she came back Robert was not examining the pictures and magazines as before; he sat off in the shadow, leaning his head back on the chair as if in a reverie. Edna lingered a moment beside the table, arranging the books there. Then she went across the room to where he sat. She bent over the arm of his chair and called his name. Robert, she said, are you asleep? No, he answered, looking up at her. She leaned over and kissed hima soft, cool, delicate kiss, whose voluptuous sting penetrated his whole being-then she moved away from him. He followed, and took her in his arms, just holding her close to him. She put her hand up to his face and pressed his cheek against her own. The action was full of love and tenderness. He sought her lips again. Then he drew her down upon the sofa beside him and held her hand in both of his. Now you know, he said, now you know what I have been fighting against since last summer at Grand Isle; what drove me away and drove me back again. Why have you been fighting against it? she asked. Her face glowed with soft lights. Why? Because you were not free; you were Leonce Pontelliers wife. I couldnt help loving you if you were ten times his wife; but so long as I went away from you and kept away I could help telling you so. She put her free hand up to his shoulder, and then against his cheek, rubbing it softly. He kissed her again. His face was warm and flushed. There in Mexico I was thinking of you all the time, and longing for you. But not writing to me, she interrupted.

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Something put into my head that you cared for me; and I lost my senses. I forgot everything but a wild dream of your some way becoming my wife. Your wife! Religion, loyalty, everything would give way if only you cared. Then you must have forgotten that I was Leonce Pontelliers wife. Oh! I was demented, dreaming of wild, impossible things, recalling men who had set their wives free, we have heard of such things. Yes, we have heard of such things. I came back full of vague, mad intentions. And when I got here When you got here you never came near me! She was still caressing his cheek. I realized what a cur I was to dream of such a thing, even if you had been willing. She took his face between her hands and looked into it as if she would never withdraw her eyes more. She kissed him on the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, and the lips. You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontelliers possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours, I should laugh at you both. His face grew a little white. What do you mean? he asked. There was a knock at the door. Old Celestine came in to say that Madame Ratignolles servant had come around the back way with a message that Madame had been taken sick and begged Mrs. Pontellier to go to her immediately. Yes, yes, said Edna, rising; I promised. Tell her yesto wait for 80

me. Ill go back with her. Let me walk over with you, offered Robert. No, she said; I will go with the servant. She went into her room to put on her hat, and when she came in again she sat once more upon the sofa beside him. He had not stirred. She put her arms about his neck. Good-by, my sweet Robert. Tell me good-by. He kissed her with a degree of passion which had not before entered into his caress, and strained her to him. I love you, she whispered, only you; no one but you. It was you who awoke me last summer out of a life-long, stupid dream. Oh! you have made me so unhappy with your indifference. Oh! I have suffered, suffered! Now you are here we shall love each other, my Robert. We shall be everything to each other. Nothing else in the world is of any consequence. I must go to my friend; but you will wait for me? No matter how late; you will wait for me, Robert? Dont go; dont go! Oh! Edna, stay with me, he pleaded. Why should you go? Stay with me, stay with me. I shall come back as soon as I can; I shall find you here. She buried her face in his neck, and said good-by again. Her seductive voice, together with his great love for her, had enthralled his senses, had deprived him of every impulse but the longing to hold her and keep her.

XXXVII
EDNA LOOKED IN at the drug store. Monsieur Ratignolle was putting up a mixture himself, very carefully, dropping a red liquid into a tiny glass. He was grateful to Edna for having come; her presence would be a comfort to his wife. Madame Ratignolles sister, who had always

The Awakening Chopin

been with her at such trying times, had not been able to come up from the plantation, and Adele had been inconsolable until Mrs. Pontellier so kindly promised to come to her. The nurse had been with them at night for the past week, as she lived a great distance away. And Dr. Mandelet had been coming and going all the afternoon. They were then looking for him any moment. Edna hastened upstairs by a private stairway that led from the rear of the store to the apartments above. The children were all sleeping in a back room. Madame Ratignolle was in the salon, whither she had strayed in her suffering impatience. She sat on the sofa, clad in an ample white peignoir, holding a handkerchief tight in her hand with a nervous clutch. Her face was drawn and pinched, her sweet blue eyes haggard and unnatural. All her beautiful hair had been drawn back and plaited. It lay in a long braid on the sofa pillow, coiled like a golden serpent. The nurse, a comfortable looking Griffe woman in white apron and cap, was urging her to return to her bedroom. There is no use, there is no use, she said at once to Edna. We must get rid of Mandelet; he is getting too old and careless. He said he would be here at half-past seven; now it must be eight. See what time it is, Josephine. The woman was possessed of a cheerful nature, and refused to take any situation too seriously, especially a situation withwhich she was so familiar. She urged Madame to have courage and patience. But Madame only set her teeth hard into her under lip, and Edna saw the sweat gather in beads on her white forehead. After a moment or two she uttered a profound sigh and wiped her face with the handkerchief rolled in a ball. She appeared exhausted. The nurse gave her a fresh handkerchief, sprinkled with cologne water. 81

This is too much! she cried. Mandelet ought to be killed! Where is Alphonse? Is it possible I am to be abandoned like this-neglected by every one? Neglected, indeed! exclaimed the nurse. Wasnt she there? And here was Mrs. Pontellier leaving, no doubt, a pleasant evening at home to devote to her? And wasnt Monsieur Ratignolle coming that very instant through the hall? And Josephine was quite sure she had heard Doctor Mandelets coupe. Yes, there it was, down at the door. Adele consented to go back to her room. She sat on the edge of a little low couch next to her bed. Doctor Mandelet paid no attention to Madame Ratignolles upbraidings. He was accustomed to them at such times, and was too well convinced of her loyalty to doubt it. He was glad to see Edna, and wanted her to go with him into the salon and entertain him. But Madame Ratignolle would not consent that Edna should leave her for an instant. Between agonizing moments, she chatted a little, and said it took her mind off her sufferings. Edna began to feel uneasy. She was seized with a vague dread. Her own like experiences seemed far away, unreal, and only half remembered. She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go. She began to wish she had not come; her presence was not necessary. She might have invented a pretext for staying away; she might even invent a pretext now for going. But Edna did not go. With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture.

The Awakening Chopin

She was still stunned and speechless with emotion when later she leaned over her friend to kiss her and softly say good-by. Adele, pressing her cheek, whispered in an exhausted voice: Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!

XXXVIII
EDNA STILL FELT DAZED when she got outside in the open air. The Doctors coupe had returned for him and stood before the porte cochere. She did not wish to enter the coupe, and told Doctor Mandelet she would walk; she was not afraid, and would go alone. He directed his carriage to meet him at Mrs. Pontelliers, and he started to walk home with her. Upaway up, over the narrow street between the tall houses, the stars were blazing. The air was mild and caressing, but cool with the breath of spring and the night. They walked slowly, the Doctor with a heavy, measured tread and his hands behind him; Edna, in an absentminded way, as she had walked one night at Grand Isle, as if her thoughts had gone ahead of her and she was striving to overtake them. You shouldnt have been there, Mrs. Pontellier, he said. That was no place for you. Adele is full of whims at such times. There were a dozen women she might have had with her, unimpressionable women. I felt that it was cruel, cruel. You shouldnt have gone. Oh, well! she answered, indifferently. I dont know that it matters after all. One has to think of the children some time or other; the sooner the better. When is Leonce coming back? Quite soon. Some time in March. And you are going abroad? 82

Perhapsno, I am not going. Im not going to be forced into doing things. I dont want to go abroad. I want to be let alone. Nobody has any rightexcept children, perhapsand even then, it seems to me or it did seem She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts, and stopped abruptly. The trouble is, sighed the Doctor, grasping her meaning intuitively, that youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost. Yes, she said. The years that are gone seem like dreamsif one might go on sleeping and dreamingbut to wake up and findoh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all ones life. It seems to me, my dear child, said the Doctor at parting, holding her hand, you seem to me to be in trouble. I am not going to ask for your confidence. I will only say that if ever you feel moved to give it to me, perhaps I might help you. I know I would understand, And I tell you there are not many who wouldnot many, my dear. Some way I dont feel moved to speak of things that trouble me. Dont think I am ungrateful or that I dont appreciate your sympathy. There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I dont want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of othersbut no matter-still, I shouldnt want to trample upon the little lives. Oh! I dont know what Im saying, Doctor. Good night. Dont blame me for anything. Yes, I will blame you if you dont come and see me soon. We will talk of things you never have dreamt of talking about before. It will do

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us both good. I dont want you to blame yourself, whatever comes. Good night, my child. She let herself in at the gate, but instead of entering she sat upon the step of the porch. The night was quiet and soothing. All the tearing emotion of the last few hours seemed to fall away from her like a somber, uncomfortable garment, which she had but to loosen to be rid of. She went back to that hour before Adele had sent for her; and her senses kindled afresh in thinking of Roberts words, the pressure of his arms, and the feeling of his lips upon her own. She could picture at that moment no greater bliss on earth than possession of the beloved one. His expression of love had already given him to her in part. When she thought that he was there at hand, waiting for her, she grew numb with the intoxication of expectancy. It was so late; he would be asleep perhaps. She would awaken him with a kiss. She hoped he would be asleep that she might arouse him with her caresses. Still, she remembered Adeles voice whispering, Think of the children; think of them. She meant to think of them; that determination had driven into her soul like a death woundbut not to-night. Tomorrow would be time to think of everything. Robert was not waiting for her in the little parlor. He was nowhere at hand. The house was empty. But he had scrawled on a piece of paper that lay in the lamplight: I love you. Good-bybecause I love you. Edna grew faint when she read the words. She went and sat on the sofa. Then she stretched herself out there, never uttering a sound. She did not sleep. She did not go to bed. The lamp sputtered and went out. She was still awake in the morning, when Celestine unlocked the kitchen door and came in to light the fire.

XXXIX
VICTOR, WITH HAMMER AND NAILS and scraps of scantling, was patching a corner of one of the galleries. Mariequita sat near by, dangling her legs, watching him work, and handing him nails from the tool-box. The sun was beating down upon them. The girl had covered her head with her apron folded into a square pad. They had been talking for an hour or more. She was never tired of hearing Victor describe the dinner at Mrs. Pontelliers. He exaggerated every detail, making it appear a veritable Lucullean feast. The flowers were in tubs, he said. The champagne was quaffed from huge golden goblets. Venus rising from the foam could have presented no more entrancing a spectacle than Mrs. Pontellier, blazing with beauty and diamonds at the head of the board, while the other women were all of them youthful houris, possessed of incomparable charms. She got it into her head that Victor was in love with Mrs. Pontellier, and he gave her evasive answers, framed so as to confirm her belief. She grew sullen and cried a little, threatening to go off and leave him to his fine ladies. There were a dozen men crazy about her at the Cheniere; and since it was the fashion to be in love with married people, why, she could run away any time she liked to New Orleans with Celinas husband. Celinas husband was a fool, a coward, and a pig, and to prove it to her, Victor intended to hammer his head into a jelly the next time he encountered him. This assurance was very consoling to Mariequita. She dried her eyes, and grew cheerful at the prospect. They were still talking of the dinner and the allurements of city life when Mrs. Pontellier herself slipped around the corner of the house. The two youngsters stayed dumb with amazement before what they

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considered to be an apparition. But it was really she in flesh and blood, looking tired and a little travel-stained. I walked up from the wharf, she said, and heard the hammering. I supposed it was you, mending the porch. Its a good thing. I was always tripping over those loose planks last summer. How dreary and deserted everything looks! It took Victor some little time to comprehend that she had come in Beaudelets lugger, that she had come alone, and for no purpose but to rest. Theres nothing fixed up yet, you see. Ill give you my room; its the only place. Any corner will do, she assured him. And if you can stand Philomels cooking, he went on, though I might try to get her mother while you are here. Do you think she would come? turning to Mariequita. Mariequita thought that perhaps Philomels mother might come for a few days, and money enough. Beholding Mrs. Pontellier make her appearance, the girl had at once suspected a lovers rendezvous. But Victors astonishment was so genuine, and Mrs. Pontelliers indifference so apparent, that the disturbing notion did not lodge long in her brain. She contemplated with the greatest interest this woman who gave the most sumptuous dinners in America, and who had all the men in New Orleans at her feet. What time will you have dinner? asked Edna. Im very hungry; but dont get anything extra. Ill have it ready in little or no time, he said, bustling and packing away his tools. You may go to my room to brush up and rest yourself. Mariequita will show you. 84

Thank you, said Edna. But, do you know, I have a notion to go down to the beach and take a good wash and even a little swim, before dinner? The water is too cold! they both exclaimed. Dont think of it. Well, I might go down and trydip my toes in. Why, it seems to me the sun is hot enough to have warmed the very depths of the ocean. Could you get me a couple of towels? Id better go right away, so as to be back in time. It would be a little too chilly if I waited till this afternoon. Mariequita ran over to Victors room, and returned with some towels, which she gave to Edna. I hope you have fish for dinner, said Edna, as she started to walk away; but dont do anything extra if you havent. Run and find Philomels mother, Victor instructed the girl. Ill go to the kitchen and see what I can do. By Gimminy! Women have no consideration! She might have sent me word. Edna walked on down to the beach rather mechanically, not noticing anything special except that the sun was hot. She was not dwelling upon any particular train of thought. She had done all the thinking which was necessary after Robert went away, when she lay awake upon the sofa till morning. She had said over and over to herself: To-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be some one else. It makes no difference to me, it doesnt matter about Leonce Pontellierbut Raoul and Etienne! She understood now clearly what she had meant long ago when she said to Adele Ratignolle that she would give up the unessential, but she would never sacrifice herself for her children. Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night, and had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world that she desired.

The Awakening Chopin

There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the souls slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them. She was not thinking of these things when she walked down to the beach. The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water. Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded, upon its accustomed peg. She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bath-house. But when she was there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her. How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known. The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. 85

She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end. Her arms and legs were growing tired. She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul. How Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew! And you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies. Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her. Good-bybecause I love you. He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen himbut it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone. She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her fathers voice and her sister Margarets. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.

EDITH WHARTON

1671

T h a t s i l e n c e d him for a few m o m e n t s . T h e n he s a i d v e r y quietly i n d e e d " O p e n the door, my d a r l i n g ! " "I c a n ' t , " s a i d I. " T h e key is down by the front d o o r u n d e r a p l a n t a i n leaf!" A n d then I said it a g a i n , several t i m e s , very gently a n d slowly, a n d said it so often that h e h a d to go a n d s e e , a n d he got it of c o u r s e , a n d c a m e in. H e s t o p p e d short by the door. " W h a t is the m a t t e r ? " he cried. " F o r G o d ' s s a k e , what are you d o i n g ! " I kept on c r e e p i n g j u s t the s a m e , b u t I looked at him over my s h o u l d e r . "I've got o u t at l a s t , " s a i d I, "in spite of you a n d J a n e ! A n d I've pulled off m o s t of the p a p e r , s o you can't put m e b a c k ! " N o w why s h o u l d that m a n have fainted? B u t h e did, a n d right a c r o s s m y p a t h by the wall, s o that I h a d to c r e e p over h i m every t i m e !
1892

EDITH

WHARTON

1862-1937
Edith Wharton began to write as a very young woman, published some fifty varied volumes in her lifetime, and left a number of unpublished manuscripts and a voluminous correspondence at her death. The House of Mirth (1905), her second novel, was a best-seller; another novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), won the Pulitzer Prize; in 1930 she was awarded the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first woman to be so honored. Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York City on January 24, 1862, into a patriarchal, monied, cultivated, and rather rigid family that, like others in its small circle, disdained and feared the drastic social, cultural, and economic changes brought on by postCivil War expansionism. It is small wonder, then, that her work at its best deals with what she described as the tragic psychic and moral effects on its members of a frivolous society under pressure. She was educated by tutors and governesses, much of the time while the family resided in Europe. In 1885 she married the Bostonian Edward Wharton, a social equal thirteen years her senior. Though they lived together (in New York; Newport; Lenox, Massachusetts; and Paris) for twenty-eight years, their marriage was not happy. That Wharton did not seek a divorce until 1913 (on grounds of her husband's adultery) is more a tribute to what her biographer R. W. B. Lewis characterized as her "moral conservatism and her devotion to family ties and the sanctities of tradition" than to personal affection. The social circle in which Edith Wharton moved was not given to artistic or intellectual pursuits, and any careerespecially a career as a writerwas frowned on. A young woman from Wharton's background received little formal schooling. Her purpose in lifeto find a marriage partner from her own social classrequired constant attendance at balls and large parties from adolescence on, as well as much attention to fashion and etiquette. After marriage she took her place as a leisure-class wife, displaying her husband's wealth and inculcating class values in her children. Wharton rejected these values even as a young girl; she spent as much time as she could in her father's library at homeand in similar libraries of her friends. By the time she was fifteen she had writtenin secreta thirty-thousand-word novella titled Fast and Loose; at this time she also wrote a great deal of lyric poetrywith what she described as a "lamentable facility." When she was sixteen, two of her poems were

1672

EDITH

WHARTON

published, one in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. Although her intense interest in literature, ideas, and the arts never abated, she was not to publish again until 1889, when three recently composed poems were sent out to Scrihner's, Harper's, and the Centuryand all were accepted. The next year, a sketch of hers was published by
Scrihner's.

It was not until the late 1890s, however, that Wharton, then in her late thirties, fully embraced authorship as a career. The decision was motivated partly by her increasing marital discontent and, perhaps, partly by the fact that she was childless. The first significant product of that commitment was a collection of stories titled The
Greater Inclination (1899). With the publication in 1905 of The House of Mirth

Wharton confirmed her unconventional choice to be a writer and immediately found an appreciative public. Although she was later to write about other subjects, she discovered in The House of Mirth her central settings, plots, and themes: the old aristocracy of New York in conflict with the nouveau riche; and the futile struggle of characters trapped by social forces larger and individuals morally smaller than themselves. Two novels that embody these themes are among those most critically acclaimed. The House of Mirth tells the story of the beautiful but hapless Lily Bart, trained to be a decorative upper-class wife but unable to sell herself like merchandise. In The Custom of the Country (1913), which Wharton considered her "masterpiece," the ruthless Undine Spragg from Ohio makes her way up the social ladder, stepping on Americans and Europeans alike in her pursuit of money and the power that goes with it. In 1911 Wharton separated from her husband and took dp residence in France, where she spent the rest of her life. Altogether she produced more than eighty short stories and twenty-two novellas and novels, including three very different but distinguished books: Ethan Frome (1911), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920). Her autobiography, A Backward Glance, was published in 1934. During World War I Wharton organized relief efforts for the refugees and orphans displaced by the advance of the German Army and was active in many other committees and organizations dealing with the devastation wrought by this most savage of modern wars. She also wrote extensively about her visits to the front line, and a collection of
these dispatches was published as Fighting France, from Dunkerque toBelfort (1915).

In recognition of her brave and generous effort on behalf of French citizens and soldiers alike, she was awarded the highest honor given by the French government to foreignersthe Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Wharton's early social training persisted throughout her life in the form of a constant sociability. She made and kept numerous friends, especially among the leading male intellectuals of her day. Some of them, Egerton Winthrop, Paul Bourget, and Walter Berry to name three, were important to her as she found her way to her profession as a writer. Others, including Henry James and art critics Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, she met as intellectual equals. Still others, including Jean Cocteau and Sinclair Lewis (who dedicated Babbitt to her), became her admirers late in her life. In this capacity for friendships among the most distinguished people of her time, Wharton is like Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather, also among the most important American writers of the early twentieth century. Her reputation continues to grow; along with HenryJames she Is considered a major contributor to the practice of psychological realism and a depicter of life among Americans of the leisure class at home and abroad.

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

the distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he came so punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging pocket. At intervals, however, the post-master would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs. Zenobiaor Mrs. Zeena-Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of his specific. These documents my neighbour would also pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their number and variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the post-master. Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien; but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker's face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb stiffly into his buggy, gather up the reins in his left hand and drive slowly away in the direction of his farm. "It was a pretty bad smash-up?" I questioned Harmon, looking after Frome's retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape. "Wust kind," my informant assented. "More'n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan'll likely touch a hundred." "Good God!" I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security of a wooden boxalso with a druggist's label on itwhich he had placed in the back of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought himself alone. "That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!" Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed it
1

Prologue
I HAD THE STORY, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line. "He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's twentyfour years ago come next February," Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses. The "smash-up" it wasI gathered from the same informantwhich, besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome's forehead, had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the few steps from his buggy to the post-office window. He used to drive in from his farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I often passed him in the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

into the leather pouch of his cheek. "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away." "Why didn't he? "Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn't ever anybody but Ethan. Fust his fatherthen his motherthen his wife." "And then the smash-up?" Harmon chuckled sardonically. "That's so. He had to stay then." "I see. And since then they've had to care for him?" Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. "Oh, as to that: I guess it's always Ethan done the caring." Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent inferences: "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters." Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. But when winter shut down on Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life thereor rather its negationmust have been in Ethan Frome's young manhood. I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with the big power-house at Corbury Junction, and a long-drawn carpenters' strike had so delayed the work that I found myself anchored at Starkfieldthe nearest habitable spotfor the best part of the winter. I chafed at first, and then, under the hypnotising effect of routine, gradually began to find a grim satisfaction in the life. During the early part of my stay I had been struck by the contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the community. Day by day, after the December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield. When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the. devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter. Twenty years earlier the means of resistance must have been far fewer, and the enemy in command of almost all the lines of access between the beleaguered villages; and, considering these things, I felt the sinister force of Harmon's phrase: "Most of the smart ones get away." But if that were the case, how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome? During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale. Mrs. Hale's father had been the village lawyer of the previous generation, and "lawyer Varnum's house," where my landlady still lived with her mother, was the most considerable mansion in the village. It stood at one end of the main street, its classic portico and small-paned windows looking down a flagged path between Norway spruces to the slim white steeple of the Congregational church. It was clear that the Varnum fortunes were at the ebb, but the two women did what they could to preserve a decent dignity; and Mrs. Hale, in particular, had a certain wan refinement not out of keeping with her pale old-fashioned house.
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In the "best parlour," with its black horse-hair and mahogany weakly illuminated by a gurgling Carcel lamp, I listened every evening to another and more delicately shaded version of the Starkfield chronicle. It was not that Mrs. Ned Hale felt, or affected, any social superiority to the people about her; it was only that the accident of a finer sensibility and a little more education had put just enough distance between herself and her neighbours to enable her to judge them with detachment. She was not unwilling to exercise this faculty, and I had great hopes of getting from her the missing facts of Ethan Frome's story, or rather such a key to his character as should coordinate the facts I knew. Her mind was a store-house of innocuous anecdote and any question about her acquaintances brought forth a volume of detail; but on the subject of Ethan Frome I found her unexpectedly reticent. There was no hint of disapproval in her reserve; I merely felt in her an insurmountable reluctance to speak of him or his affairs, a low "Yes, I knew them both.. .it was awful..." seeming to be the utmost concession that her distress could make to my curiosity. So marked was the change in her manner, such depths of sad initiation did it imply, that, with some doubts as to my delicacy, I put the case anew to my village oracle, Harmon Gow; but got for my pains only an uncomprehending grunt. "Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of it, she was the first one to see 'em after they was picked up. It happened right below lawyer Varnum's, down at the bend of the Corbury road, just round about the time that Ruth got engaged to Ned Hale. The young folks was all friends, and I guess she just can't bear to talk about it. She's had troubles enough of her own." All the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had troubles enough of their own to make them comparatively indifferent to those of their neighbours; and though all conceded that Ethan Frome's had been beyond the common measure, no one gave me an explanation of the look in his face which, as I persisted in thinking, neither poverty nor physical suffering could have put there. Nevertheless, I might have contented myself with the story pieced together from these hints had it not been for the provocation of Mrs. Hale's silence, anda little laterfor the accident of personal contact with the man. On my arrival at Starkfield, Denis Eady, the rich Irish grocer, who was the proprietor of Starkfield's nearest approach to a livery stable, had entered into an agreement to send me over daily to Corbury Flats, where I had to pick up my train for the Junction. But about the middle of the winter Eady's horses fell ill of a local epidemic. The illness spread to the other Starkfield stables and for a day or two I was put to it to find a means of transport. Then Harmon Gow suggested that Ethan Frome's bay was still on his legs and that his owner might be glad to drive me over. I stared at the suggestion. "Ethan Frome? But I've never even spoken to him. Why on earth should he put himself out for me?" Harmon's answer surprised me still more. "I don't know as he would; but I know he wouldn't be sorry to earn a dollar." I had been told that Frome was poor, and that the saw-mill and the arid acres of his farm yielded scarcely enough to keep his household through the winter; but I had not supposed him to be in such want as Harmon's words implied, and I expressed my wonder. "Well, matters ain't gone any too well with him," Harmon said. "When a man's been setting round like a hulk for twenty years or more, seeing things that want doing, it eats inter him, and he loses his grit. That Frome farm was always 'bout as bare's a milkpan when the cat's been round; and you know what one of them old water-mills is wuth nowadays. When Ethan could sweat over 'em both from sunup to dark he kinder choked a living out of 'em; but his folks ate up most everything, even then, and I don't see how he makes out now. Fust his father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible
3

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texts afore he died. Then his mother got queer and dragged along for years as weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she's always been the greatest hand at doctoring in the county. Sickness and trouble: that's what Ethan's had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping." The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin, made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield. The distance each way was barely three miles, but the old bay's pace was slow, and even with firm snow under the runners we were nearly an hour on the way. Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters. Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment; and the glimpses thus gained confirmed my desire to know more. Once I happened to speak of an engineering job I had been on the previous year in Florida, and of the contrast between the winter landscape about us and that in which I had found myself the year before; and to my surprise Frome said suddenly: "Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under." He said no more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his voice and his sharp relapse into silence. Another day, on getting into my train at the Flats, I missed a volume of popular sciencethink it was on some recent discoveries in bio-chemistrywhich I had carried with me to read on the way. I thought no more about it till I got into the sleigh again that evening, and saw the book in Frome's hand. "I found it after you were gone," he said. I put the volume into my pocket and we dropped back into our usual silence; but as we began to crawl up the long hill from Corbury Flats to the Starkfield ridge I became aware in the dusk that he had turned his face to mine. "There are things in that book that I didn't know the first word about," he said. I wondered less at his words than at the queer note of resentment in his voice. He was evidently surprised and slightly aggrieved at his own ignorance. "Does that sort of thing interest you?" I asked. "It used to." "There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been some big strides lately in that particular line of research." I waited a moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: "If you'd like to look the book through I'd be glad to leave it with you." He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, "Thank youI'll take it," he answered shortly. I hoped that this incident might set up some more direct communication between us. Frome was so simple and straightforward that I was sure his
4

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

curiosity about the book was based on a genuine interest in its subject. Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs, and I hoped that the chance of giving expression to the latter might at least unseal his lips. But something in his past history, or in his present way of living, had apparently driven him too deeply into himself for any casual impulse to draw him back to his kind. At our next meeting he made no allusion to the book, and our intercourse seemed fated to remain as negative and one-sided as if there had been no break in his reserve. Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one morning I looked out of my window into a thick snow-fall. The height of the white waves massed against the garden-fence and along the wall of the church showed that the storm must have been going on all night, and that the drifts were likely to be heavy in the open. I thought it probable that my train would be delayed; but I had to be at the power-house for an hour or two that afternoon, and I decided, if Frome turned up, to push through to the Flats and wait there till my train came in. I don't know why I put it in the conditional, however, for I never doubted that Frome would appear. He was not the kind of man to be turned from his business by any commotion of the elements; and at the appointed hour his sleigh glided up through the snow like a stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze. I was getting to know him too well to express either wonder or gratitude at his keeping his appointment; but I exclaimed in surprise as I saw him turn his horse in a direction opposite to that of the Corbury road. "The railroad's blocked by a freight-train that got stuck in a drift below the Flats," he explained, as we jogged off into the stinging whiteness. "But look herewhere are you taking me, then?" "Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way," he answered, pointing up School House Hill with his whip. "To the Junctionin this storm? Why, it's a good ten miles!" "The bay'll do it if you give him time. You said you had some business there this afternoon. I'll see you get there." He said it so quietly that I could only answer: "You're doing me the biggest kind of a favour." "That's all right," he rejoined. Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane to the left, between hemlock boughs bent inward to their trunks by the weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and knew that the solitary roof showing through bare branches near the bottom of the hill was that of Frome's saw-mill. It looked exanimate enough, with its idle wheel looming above the black stream dashed with yellow-white spume, and its cluster of sheds sagging under their white load. Frome did not even turn his head as we drove by, and still in silence we began to mount the next slope. About a mile farther, on a road I had never travelled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier. "That's my place," said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame elbow; and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not know what to answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow. "The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the 'L,' a while back," Frome continued, checking with a twitch of the left rein the bay's evident
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intention of turning in through the broken-down gate. I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as the "L": that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the wood-shed and cow-barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get to their morning's work without facing the weather, it is certain that the "L" rather than the house itself seems to be the centre, the actual hearth-stone, of the New England farm. Perhaps this connection of ideas, which had often occurred to me in my rambles about Starkfield, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome's words, and to see in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body. "We're kinder side-tracked here now," he added, "but there was considerable passing before the railroad was carried through to the Flats." He roused the lagging bay with another twitch; then, as if the mere sight of the house had let me too deeply into his confidence for any farther pretence of reserve, he went on slowly: "I've always set down the worst of mother's trouble to that. When she got the rheumatism so bad she couldn't move around she used to sit up there and watch the road by the hour; and one year, when they was six months mending the Bettsbridge pike after the floods, and Harmon Gow had to bring his stage round this way, she picked up so that she used to get down to the gate most days to see him. But after the trains begun running nobody ever come by here to speak of, and mother never could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died." As we turned into the Corbury road the snow began to fall again, cutting off our last glimpse of the house; and Frome's silence fell with it, letting down between us the old veil of reticence. This time the wind did not cease with the return of the snow. Instead, it sprang up to a gale which now and then, from a tattered sky, flung pale sweeps of sunlight over a landscape chaotically tossed. But the bay was as good as Frome's word, and we pushed on to the Junction through the wild white scene. In the afternoon the storm held off, and the clearness in the west seemed to my inexperienced eye the pledge of a fair evening. I finished my business as quickly as possible, and we set out for Starkfield with a good chance of getting there for supper. But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer. The small ray of Frome's lantern was soon lost in this smothering medium, in which even his sense of direction, and the bay's homing instinct, finally ceased to serve us. Two or three times some ghostly landmark sprang up to warn us that we were astray, and then was sucked back into the mist; and when we finally regained our road the old horse began to show signs of exhaustion. I felt myself to blame for having accepted Frome's offer, and after a short discussion I persuaded him to let me get out of the sleigh and walk along through the snow at the bay's side. In this way we struggled on for another mile or two, and at last reached a point where Frome, peering into what seemed to me formless night, said: "That's my gate down yonder." The last stretch had been the hardest part of the way. The bitter cold and the heavy going had nearly knocked the wind out of me, and I could feel the horse's side ticking like a clock under my hand. "Look here, Frome," I began, "there's no earthly use in your going any farther" but he interrupted me: "Nor you neither. There's been about enough of this for anybody."
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I understood that he was offering me a night's shelter at the farm, and without answering I turned into the gate at his side, and followed him to the barn, where I helped him to unharness and bed down the tired horse. When this was done he unhooked the lantern from the sleigh, stepped out again into the night, and called to me over his shoulder: "This way." Far off above us a square of light trembled through the screen of snow. Staggering along in Frome's wake I floundered toward it, and in the darkness almost fell into one of the deep drifts against the front of the house. Frome scrambled up the slippery steps of the porch, digging a way through the snow with his heavily booted foot. Then he lifted his lantern, found the latch, and led the way into the house. I went after him into a low unlit passage, at the back of which a ladder-like staircase rose into obscurity. On our right a line of light marked the door of the room which had sent its ray across the night; and behind the door I heard a woman's voice droning querulously. Frome stamped on the worn oil-cloth to shake the snow from his boots, and set down his lantern on a kitchen chair which was the only piece of furniture in the hall. Then he opened the door. "Come in," he said; and as he spoke the droning voice grew still... It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street, past the bank and Michael Eady's new brick store and Lawyer Varnum's house with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate, where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade along the side wall of the building, but from the lower openings, on the side where the ground sloped steeply down to the Corbury road, the light shot its long bars, illuminating many fresh furrows in the track leading to the basement door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, a line of sleighs with heavily blanketed horses. The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead. "It's like being in an exhausted receiver," he thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year's course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally different associations of thought in which he had since been living. His father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in his ...................................................................................................................................................................... brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp. At the end THE VILLAGE LAY under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. of the village he paused before the darkened front of the church. He stood there In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white another figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes spruces, was the favourite coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of the church corner rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a yellow light far across the endless undulations.
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sled darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay on the village, and all its waking life was gathered behind the church windows, from which strains of dancemusic flowed with the broad bands of yellow light. The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the revealing rays from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually approached the farther angle of the basement wall. Thence, still hugging the shadow, he edged his way cautiously forward to the nearest window, holding back his straight spare body and craning his neck till he got a glimpse of the room. Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of the gas-jets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and the iron flanks of the stove at the end of the hall looked as though they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged with girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window stood a row of kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen. By this time the music had stopped, and the musiciansa fiddler, and the young lady who played the harmonium on Sundayswere hastily refreshing themselves at one corner of the suppertable which aligned its devastated pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the platform at the end of the hall. The guests were preparing to leave, and the tide had already set toward the passage where coats and wraps were hung, when a young man with a sprightly foot and a shock of black hair shot into the middle of the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect. The musicians hurried to their instruments, the dancerssome already half-muffled for departurefell into line down each side of the room, the older spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young man, after diving about here and there in the throng, drew forth a girl who had already wound a cherry-coloured "fascinator" about her head, and, leading her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its length to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel. Frome's heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scarf and it vexed him that another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the reel, who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line, her light figure swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each turn, caught sight of her laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points in a maze of flying lines. The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing their mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the window that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his eyes from the girl's face to that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent ownership. Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of "smart" business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping. It was strange that the girl did not seem aware of it: that she could lift her rapt face to her dancer's, and drop her hands into his, without appearing to feel the offence of his look and touch. Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetch home his wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare evenings when some chance of amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had suggested, when the girl came to live with them, that such opportunities should be put in her way. Mattie Silver came from Stamford, and when she entered the Fromes' household to act as her cousin Zeena's aid it was thought best, as she came without pay, not to let
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"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

her feel too sharp a contrast between the life she had left and the isolation of a Starkfield farm. But for thisas Frome sardonically reflectedit would hardly have occurred to Zeena to take any thought for the girl's amusement. When his wife first proposed that they should give Mattie an occasional evening out he had inwardly demurred at having to do the extra two miles to the village and back after his hard day on the farm; but not long afterward he had reached the point of wishing that Starkfield might give all its nights to revelry. Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing her; but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long stride, they walked back through the night to the farm. He had taken to the girl from the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats to meet her, and she had smiled and waved to him from the train, crying out, "You must be Ethan!" as she jumped down with her bundles, while he reflected, looking over her slight person: "She don't look much on housework, but she ain't a fretter, anyhow." But it was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth. The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had thought her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will. It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder: that at his side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to whom he could say: "That's Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is Aldebaran, and the bunch of little oneslike bees swarmingthey're the Pleiades..." or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of granite thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the ice age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time. The fact that admiration for his learning mingled with Mattie's wonder at what he taught was not the least part of his pleasure. And there were other sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him once: "It looks just as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul.... As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her. The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears. His wife had never shown any jealousy of Mattie, but of late she had grumbled increasingly over the house-work and found oblique ways of attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency. Zeena had always been what Starkfield called "sickly," and Frome had to admit that, if she were as ailing as she believed, she needed the help of a stronger arm than the one which lay so lightly in his during
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"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

the night walks to the farm. Mattie had no natural turn for housekeeping, and her training had done nothing to remedy the defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful and dreamy, and not disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had an idea that if she were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant instinct would wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the county; but domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first she was so awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she laughed with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to supplement her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and neglecting the mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day. He even crept down on Saturday nights to scrub the kitchen floor after the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one day, had surprised him at the churn and had turned away silently, with one of her queer looks. Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but more disquieting. One cold winter morning, as he dressed in the dark, his candle flickering in the draught of the ill-fitting window, he had heard her speak from the bed behind him. "The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me," she said in her flat whine. He had supposed her to be asleep, and the sound of her voice had startled him, though she was given to abrupt explosions of speech after long intervals of secretive silence. He turned and looked at her where she lay indistinctly outlined under the dark calico quilt, her high-boned face taking a grayish tinge from the whiteness of the pillow. "Nobody to do for you?" he repeated. "If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes." That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about Denis
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Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch the reflection of his stretched cheek in the blotched looking-glass above the wash-stand. "Why on earth should Mattie go?" "Well, when she gets married, I mean," his wife's drawl came from behind him. "Oh, she'd never leave us as long as you needed her," he returned, scraping hard at his chin. "I wouldn't ever have it said that I stood in the way of a poor girl like Mattie marrying a smart fellow like Denis Eady," Zeena answered in a tone of plaintive self-effacement. Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude was an excuse for not making an immediate reply. "And the doctor don't want I should be left without anybody," Zeena continued. "He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he's heard about, that might come" Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh. "Denis Eady! If that's all, I guess there's no such hurry to look round for a girl." "Well, I'd like to talk to you about it," said Zeena obstinately. He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste. "All right. But I haven't got the time now; I'm late as it is," he returned, holding his old silver turnip watch to the candle. Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching him in silence while he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and jerked his arms into his coat; but as he went toward the door she said, suddenly and incisively: "I guess you're always late, now you shave every morning."

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

Eady. It was a fact that since Mattie Silver's coming he had taken to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be asleep when he left her side in the winter darkness, and he had stupidly assumed that she would not notice any change in his appearance. Once or twice in the past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia's way of letting things happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferences. Of late, however, there had been no room in his thoughts for such vague apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive of its being otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain... instead of making his presence known to her. It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days, when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a picnic. He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards of him. She was almost the last to leave the hall, and she stood looking uncertainly about her as if wondering why he did not show himself. Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to her that under their formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline. "Gentleman friend gone back on you? Say, Matt, that's tough! No, I wouldn't be mean enough to tell the other girls. I ain't as low-down as that." (How Frome hated his cheap banter!) "But look a here, ain't it lucky I got the old man's cutter down there waiting for us?" Frome heard the girl's voice, gaily incredulous: "What on earth's your father's cutter doin' down there?" "Why, waiting for me to take a ride. I got the roan colt too. I kinder knew I'd want to take a ride to-night," Eady, in his triumph, tried to put a sentimental note into his bragging voice. The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf irresolutely about her fingers. Not for the world would he have made a sign to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture. "Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt," Denis called to her, springing toward the shed. She stood perfectly still, looking after him, in an attitude of tranquil expectancy
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AS THE DANCERS poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a face flushed with food and dancing. The villagers, being afoot, were the first to climb the slope to the main street, while the country neighbours packed themselves more slowly into the sleighs under the shed. "Ain't you riding, Mattie?" a woman's voice called back from the throng about the shed, and Ethan's heart gave a jump. From where he stood he could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they had advanced a few steps beyond the wooden sides of the storm-door; but through its cracks he heard a clear voice answer: "Mercy no! Not on such a night." She was there, then, close to him, only a thin board between. In another moment she would step forth into the night, and his eyes, accustomed to the obscurity, would discern her as clearly as though she stood in daylight. A wave of shyness pulled him back into the dark angle of the wall, and he stood there in silence

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

torturing to the hidden watcher. Frome noticed that she no longer turned her head from side to side, as though peering through the night for another figure. She let Denis Eady lead out the horse, climb into the cutter and fling back the bearskin to make room for her at his side; then, with a swift motion of flight, she turned about and darted up the slope toward the front of the church. "Good-bye! Hope you'll have a lovely ride!" she called back to him over her shoulder. Denis laughed, and gave the horse a cut that brought him quickly abreast of her retreating figure. "Come along! Get in quick! It's as slippery as thunder on this turn," he cried, leaning over to reach out a hand to her. She laughed back at him: "Good-night! I'm not getting in." By this time they had passed beyond Frome's earshot and he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they continued to move along the crest of the slope above him. He saw Eady, after a moment, jump from the cutter and go toward the girl with the reins over one arm. The other he tried to slip through hers; but she eluded him nimbly, and Frome's heart, which had swung out over a black void, trembled back to safety. A moment later he heard the jingle of departing sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing alone toward the empty expanse of snow before the church. In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she turned with a quick "Oh!" "Think I'd forgotten you, Matt?" he asked with sheepish glee. She answered seriously: "I thought maybe you couldn't come back for me." "Couldn't? What on earth could stop me?" "I knew Zeena wasn't feeling any too good to-day." "Oh, she's in bed long ago." He paused, a question struggling in him. "Then you meant to walk home all alone?" "Oh, I ain't afraid!" she laughed. They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars. He brought his question out. "If you thought I hadn't come, why didn't you ride back with Denis Eady?" "Why, where were you? How did you know? I never saw you!" Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw. Ethan had the sense of having done something arch and ingenious. To prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in a growl of rapture: "Come along." He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was faintly pressed against her side, but neither of them moved. It was so dark under the spruces that he could barely see the shape of her head beside his shoulder. He longed to stoop his cheek and rub it against her scarf. He would have liked to stand there with her all night in the blackness. She moved forward a step or two and then paused again above the dip of the Corbury road. Its icy slope, scored by innumerable runners, looked like a mirror scratched by travellers at an inn. "There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set," she said. "Would you like to come in and coast with them some night?" he asked. "Oh, would you, Ethan? It would be lovely!" "We'll come to-morrow if there's a moon." She lingered, pressing closer to his side. "Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum came just as near running into the big elm at the bottom. We were all sure they were killed." Her shiver ran down his arm. "Wouldn't it have been too awful? They're so happy!"
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"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

"Oh, Ned ain't much at steering. I guess I can take you down all right!" he said disdainfully. He was aware that he was "talking big," like Denis Eady; but his reaction of joy had unsteadied him, and the inflection with which she had said of the engaged couple "They're so happy!" made the words sound as if she had been thinking of herself and him. "The elm is dangerous, though. It ought to be cut down," she insisted. "Would you be afraid of it, with me?" "I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid" she tossed back, almost indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk on with a rapid step. These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone. Now he thought she understood him, and feared; now he was sure she did not, and despaired. To-night the pressure of accumulated misgivings sent the scale drooping toward despair, and her indifference was the more chilling after the flush of joy into which she had plunged him by dismissing Denis Eady. He mounted School House Hill at her side and walked on in silence till they reached the lane leading to the saw-mill; then the need of some definite assurance grew too strong for him. "You'd have found me right off if you hadn't gone back to have that last reel with Denis," he brought out awkwardly. He could not pronounce the name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat. "Why, Ethan, how could I tell you were there?" "I suppose what folks say is true," he jerked out at her, instead of answering. She stopped short, and he felt, in the darkness, that her face was lifted quickly to his. "Why, what do folks say?" "It's natural enough you should be leaving us," he floundered on, following his thought. "Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a sudden drop of her sweet treble: "You mean that Zeenaain't suited with me any more?" she faltered. Their arms had slipped apart and they stood motionless, each seeking to distinguish the other's face. "I know I ain't anything like as smart as I ought to be," she went on, while he vainly struggled for expression. "There's lots of things a hired girl could do that come awkward to me stilland I haven't got much strength in my arms. But if she'd only tell me I'd try. You know she hardly ever says anything, and sometimes I can see she ain't suited, and yet I don't know why." She turned on him with a sudden flash of indignation. "You'd ought to tell me, Ethan Fromeyou'd ought to! Unless you want me to go too" Unless he wanted her to go too! The cry was balm to his raw wound. The iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness. Again he struggled for the all-expressive word, and again, his arm in hers, found only a deep "Come along." They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlock-shaded lane, where Ethan's sawmill gloomed through the night, and out again into the comparative clearness of the fields. On the farther side of the hemlock belt the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely under the stars. Sometimes their way led them under the shade of an overhanging bank or through the thin obscurity of a clump of leafless trees. Here and there a farmhouse stood far back among the fields, mute and cold as a grave-stone. The
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"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

night was so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under their feet. The crash of a loaded branch falling far off in the woods reverberated like a musket-shot, and once a fox barked, and Mattie shrank closer to Ethan, and quickened her steps. At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan's gate, and as they drew near it the sense that the walk was over brought back his words. "Then you don't want to leave us, Matt?" He had to stoop his head to catch her stifled whisper: "Where'd I go, if I did?" The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with joy. He forgot what else he had meant to say and pressed her against him so closely that he seemed to feel her warmth in his veins. "You ain't crying are you, Matt?" "No, of course I'm not," she quavered. They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. "We never got awayhow should you?" seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: "I shall just go on living here till I join them." But now all desire for change had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability. "I guess we'll never let you go, Matt," he whispered, as though even the dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and brushing by the graves, he They walked around to the back of the house, between the rigid gooseberry bushes. It was Zeena's habit, when they came back late from the village, to leave the key of the kitchen door under the mat. Ethan stood before the door, his head heavy with dreams, his arm still about Mattie. "Matt" he began, not knowing what he meant to say. She slipped out of his hold without speaking, and he stooped down and felt for the key. "It's not there!" he said, straightening himself with a start. They strained their eyes at each other through the icy darkness. Such a thing had never happened before. "Maybe she's forgotten it," Mattie said in a tremulous whisper; but both of them knew that it was not like Zeena to forget. "It might have fallen off into the snow," Mattie continued, after a pause during which they had stood intently listening.
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thought: "We'll always go on living here together, and some day she'll lie there beside me." He let the vision possess him as they climbed the hill to the house. He was never so happy with her as when he abandoned himself to these dreams. Half-way up the slope Mattie stumbled against some unseen obstruction and clutched his sleeve to steady herself. The wave of warmth that went through him was like the prolongation of his vision. For the first time he stole his arm about her, and she did not resist. They walked on as if they were floating on a summer stream. Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the shutterless windows of the house were dark. A dead cucumber-vine dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and the thought flashed through Ethan's brain: "If it was there for Zeena" Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in their bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed...

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

"It must have been pushed off, then," he rejoined in the same tone. Another wild thought tore through him. What if tramps had been there what if... Again he listened, fancying he heard a distant sound in the house; then he felt in his pocket for a match, and kneeling down, passed its light slowly over the rough edges of snow about the doorstep. He was still kneeling when his eyes, on a level with the lower panel of the door, caught a faint ray beneath it. Who could be stirring in that silent house? He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an instant the thought of tramps tore through him. Then the door opened and he saw his wife. Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins. To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream before waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like. She drew aside without speaking, and Mattie and Ethan passed into the kitchen, which had the deadly chill of a vault after the dry cold of the night. "Guess you forgot about us, Zeena," Ethan joked, stamping the snow from his boots. "No. I just felt so mean I couldn't sleep." Mattie came forward, unwinding her wraps, the colour of the cherry scarf in her fresh lips and cheeks. "I'm so sorry, Zeena! Isn't there anything I can do?" "No; there's nothing." Zeena turned away from her. "You might 'a' shook off that snow outside," she said to her husband. THERE WAS SOME hauling to be done at the lower end of the wood-lot, and Ethan was out early the next day. The winter morning was as clear as crystal. The sunrise burned red in a pure
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She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs. Ethan paused also, affecting to fumble for the peg on which he hung his coat and cap. The doors of the two bedrooms faced each other across the narrow upper landing, and to-night it was peculiarly repugnant to him that Mattie should see him follow Zeena. "I guess I won't come up yet awhile," he said, turning as if to go back to the kitchen. Zeena stopped short and looked at him. "For the land's sakewhat you going to do down here?" "I've got the mill accounts to go over." She continued to stare at him, the flame of the unshaded lamp bringing out with microscopic cruelty the fretful lines of her face. "At this time o' night? You'll ketch your death. The fire's out long ago. " Without answering he moved away toward the kitchen. As he did so his glance crossed Mattie's and he fancied that a fugitive warning gleamed through her lashes. The next moment they sank to her flushed cheeks and she began to mount the stairs ahead of Zeena. "That's so. It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and with lowered head he went up in his wife's wake, and followed her across the threshold of their room.

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sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly blue, and beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest hung like smoke. It was in the early morning stillness, when his muscles were swinging to their familiar task and his lungs expanding with long draughts of mountain air, that Ethan did his clearest thinking. He and Zeena had not exchanged a word after the door of their room had closed on them. She had measured out some drops from a medicine-bottle on a chair by the bed and, after swallowing them, and wrapping her head in a piece of yellow flannel, had lain down with her face turned away. Ethan undressed hurriedly and blew out the light so that he should not see her when he took his place at her side. As he lay there he could hear Mattie moving about in her room, and her candle, sending its small ray across the landing, drew a scarcely perceptible line of light under his door. He kept his eyes fixed on the light till it vanished. Then the room grew perfectly black, and not a sound was audible but Zeena's asthmatic breathing. Ethan felt confusedly that there were many things he ought to think about, but through his tingling veins and tired brain only one sensation throbbed: the warmth of Mattie's shoulder against his. Why had he not kissed her when he held her there? A few hours earlier he would not have asked himself the question. Even a few minutes earlier, when they had stood alone outside the house, he would not have dared to think of kissing her. But since he had seen her lips in the lamplight he felt that they were his. Now, in the bright morning air, her face was still before him. It was part of the sun's red and of the pure glitter on the snow. How the girl had changed since she had come to Starkfield! He remembered what a colourless slip of a thing she had looked the day he had met her at the station. And all the first winter, how she had shivered with cold when the northerly gales shook the thin clapboards and the snow beat like hail against the loose-hung windows! He had been afraid that she would hate the hard life, the cold and loneliness; but not a sign of discontent escaped her. Zeena took the view that Mattie was bound to make the best of Starkfield since she hadn't any other place to go to; but this did not strike Ethan as conclusive. Zeena, at any rate, did not apply the principle in her own case. He felt all the more sorry for the girl because misfortune had, in a sense, indentured her to them. Mattie Silver was the daughter of a cousin of Zenobia Frome's, who had inflamed his clan with mingled sentiments of envy and admiration by descending from the hills to Connecticut, where he had married a Stamford girl and succeeded to her father's thriving "drug" business. Unhappily Orin Silver, a man of far-reaching aims, had died too soon to prove that the end justifies the means. His accounts revealed merely what the means had been; and these were such that it was fortunate for his wife and daughter that his books were examined only after his impressive funeral. His wife died of the disclosure, and Mattie, at twenty, was left alone to make her way on the fifty dollars obtained from the sale of her piano. For this purpose her equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite "Curfew shall not ring to-night," and play "The Lost Chord" and a pot-pourri from "Carmen." When she tried to extend the field of her activities in the direction of stenography and bookkeeping her health broke down, and six months on her feet behind the counter of a department store did not tend to restore it. Her nearest relations had been induced to place their savings in her father's hands, and though, after his death, they ungrudgingly acquitted themselves of the Christian duty of returning good for evil by giving his daughter all the advice at their disposal, they could hardly be expected to supplement it by material aid. But when Zenobia's doctor recommended her looking about for some one to help her with the house-work the clan instantly saw the chance of exacting a compensation from Mattie. Zenobia, though doubtful of the girl's efficiency, was tempted by the freedom to find fault without much risk of losing her; and so Mattie came to Starkfield. Zenobia's fault-finding was of the silent kind, but not the less penetrating for that. During the first months Ethan alternately burned with the desire to see
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Mattie defy her and trembled with fear of the result. Then the situation grew less strained. The pure air, and the long summer hours in the open, gave back life and elasticity to Mattie, and Zeena, with more leisure to devote to her complex ailments, grew less watchful of the girl's omissions; so that Ethan, struggling on under the burden of his barren farm and failing sawmill, could at least imagine that peace reigned in his house. There was really, even now, no tangible evidence to the contrary; but since the previous night a vague dread had hung on his sky-line. It was formed of Zeena's obstinate silence, of Mattie's sudden look of warning, of the memory of just such fleeting imperceptible signs as those which told him, on certain stainless mornings, that before night there would be rain. His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty. The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on foot, and drive the load down to the village himself. He had scrambled up on the logs, and was sitting astride of them, close over his shaggy grays, when, coming between him and their streaming necks, he had a vision of the warning look that Mattie had given him the night before. "If there's going to be any trouble I want to be there," was his vague reflection, as he threw to Jotham the unexpected order to unhitch the team and lead them back to the barn. It was a slow trudge home through the heavy fields, and when the two men entered the kitchen Mattie was lifting the coffee from the stove and Zeena was already at the table. Her husband stopped short at sight of her. Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her best dress of brown merino, and above her thin strands of hair, which still preserved the tight undulations of the crimping-pins, rose a hard perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's clearest notion was that he had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge Emporium. On the floor beside her stood his old valise and a bandbox wrapped in newspapers. "Why, where are you going, Zeena?" he exclaimed. "I've got my shooting pains so bad that I'm going over to Bettsbridge to spend the night with Aunt Martha Pierce and see that new doctor," she answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had said she was going into the store-room to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go over the blankets. In spite of her sedentary habits such abrupt decisions were not without precedent in Zeena's history. Twice or thrice before she had suddenly packed Ethan's valise and started off to Bettsbridge, or even Springfield, to seek the advice of some new doctor, and her husband had grown to dread these expeditions because of their cost. Zeena always came back laden with expensive remedies, and her last visit to Springfield had been commemorated by her paying twenty dollars for an electric battery of which she had never been able to learn the use. But for the moment his sense of relief was so great as to preclude all other feelings. He had now no doubt that Zeena had spoken the truth in saying, the night before, that she had sat up because she felt "too mean" to sleep: her abrupt resolve to seek medical advice showed that, as usual, she was wholly absorbed in her health. As if expecting a protest, she continued plaintively; "If you're too busy with the hauling I presume you can let Jotham Powell drive me over with the sorrel in time to ketch the train at the Hats." Her husband hardly heard what she was saying. During the winter months there was no stage between Starkfield and Bettsbridge, and the trains which stopped at Corbury Flats were slow and infrequent. A rapid calculation showed Ethan that Zeena could not be back at the farm before the following evening...
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"If I'd supposed you'd 'a' made any objection to Jotham Powell's driving me over" she began again, as though his silence had implied refusal. On the brink of departure she was always seized with a flux of words. "All I know is," she continued, "I can't go on the way I am much longer. The pains are clear away down to my ankles now, or I'd 'a' walked in to Starkfield on my own feet, sooner'n put you out, and asked Michael Eady to let me ride over on his wagon to the Flats, when he sends to meet the train that brings his groceries. I'd 'a' had two hours to wait in the station, but I'd sooner 'a' done it, even with this cold, than to have you say" "Of course Jotham'll drive you over," Ethan roused himself to answer. He became suddenly conscious that he was looking at Mattie while Zeena talked to him, and with an effort he turned his eyes to his wife. She sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth. Though she was but seven years her husband's senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was already an old woman. Ethan tried to say something befitting the occasion, but there was only one thought in his mind: the fact that, for the first time since Mattie had come to live with them, Zeena was to be away for a night. He wondered if the girl were thinking of it too... He knew that Zeena must be wondering why he did not offer to drive her to the Flats and let Jotham Powell take the lumber to Starkfield, and at first he could not think of a pretext for not doing so; then he said: "I'd take you over myself, only I've got to collect the cash for the lumber." As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them, not only because they were untruethere being no prospect of his receiving cash payment from Halebut also because he knew from experience the imprudence of letting Zeena think he was in funds on the eve of one of her therapeutic excursions. At the moment, however, his one desire was to avoid the long drive with her behind the ancient sorrel who never went out of a walk. Zeena made no reply: she did not seem to hear what he had said. She had already pushed her plate aside, and was measuring out a draught from a large bottle at her elbow. "It ain't done me a speck of good, but I guess I might as well use it up," she remarked; adding, as she pushed the empty bottle toward Mattie: "If you can get the taste out it'll do for pickles."

AS SOON AS HIS wife had driven off Ethan took his coat and cap from the peg. Mattie was washing up the dishes, humming one of the dance tunes of the night before. He said "So long, Matt," and she answered gaily "So long, Ethan"; and that was all. It was warm and bright in the kitchen. The sun slanted through the south window on the girl's moving figure, on the cat dozing in a chair, and on the geraniums brought in from the door-way, where Ethan had planted them in the summer to "make a garden" for Mattie. He would have liked to linger on, watching her tidy up and then settle down to her sewing; but he wanted still more to get the hauling done and be back at the farm before night. All the way down to the village he continued to think of his return to Mattie. The kitchen was a poor place, not "spruce" and shining as his mother had kept it in his boyhood; but it was surprising what a homelike look the mere fact of Zeena's absence gave it. And he pictured what it would be like that evening, when he and Mattie were there after supper. For the first time they would be alone together indoors, and they would sit there, one on each side of the stove, like a married couple, he in his stocking feet and smoking his pipe, she laughing
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and talking in that funny way she had, which was always as new to him as if he had never heard her before. The sweetness of the picture, and the relief of knowing that his fears of "trouble" with Zeena were unfounded, sent up his spirits with a rush, and he, who was usually so silent, whistled and sang aloud as he drove through the snowy fields. There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse. At Worcester, though he had the name of keeping to himself and not being much of a hand at a good time, he had secretly gloried in being clapped on the back and hailed as "Old Ethe" or "Old Stiff; and the cessation of such familiarities had increased the chill of his return to Starkfield. There the silence had deepened about him year by year. Left alone, after his father's accident, to carry the burden of farm and mill, he had had no time for convivial loiterings in the village; and when his mother fell ill the loneliness of the house grew more oppressive than that of the fields. His mother had been a talker in her day, but after her "trouble" the sound of her voice was seldom heard, though she had not lost the power of speech. Sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when in desperation her son asked her why she didn't "say something," she would lift a finger and answer: "Because I'm listening"; and on stormy nights, when the loud wind was about the house, she would complain, if he spoke to her: "They're talking so out there that I can't hear you." It was only when she drew toward her last illness, and his cousin Zenobia Pierce came over from the next valley to help him nurse her, that human speech was heard again in the house. After the mortal silence of his long imprisonment Zeena's volubility was music in his ears. He felt that he might have "gone like his mother" if the sound of a new voice had not come to steady him. Zeena seemed to understand his case at a glance. She laughed at him for not knowing the simplest sick-bed duties and told him to "go right along out" and leave her to see to things. The mere fact of obeying her orders, of feeling free to go about his business again and talk with other men, restored his shaken balance and magnified his sense of what he owed her. Her efficiency shamed and dazzled him. She seemed to possess by instinct all the household wisdom that his long apprenticeship had not instilled in him. When the end came it was she who had to tell him to hitch up and go for the undertaker, and she thought it "funny" that he had not settled beforehand who was to have his mother's clothes and the sewing-machine. After the funeral, when he saw her preparing to go away, he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter... When they married it was agreed that, as soon as he could straighten out the difficulties resulting from Mrs. Frome's long illness, they would sell the farm and saw-mill and try their luck in a large town. Ethan's love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things." A slight engineering job in Florida, put in his way during his period of study at Worcester, increased his faith in his ability as well as his eagerness to see the world; and he felt sure that, with a "smart" wife like Zeena, it would not be long before he had made himself a place in it. Zeena's native village was slightly larger and nearer to the railway than Starkfield, and she had let her husband see from the first that life on an isolated farm was not what she had expected when she married. But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility of transplanting her. She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within a year of their marriage she developed the "sickliness" which had since made
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her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances. When she came to take care of his mother she had seemed to Ethan like the very genius of health, but he soon saw that her skill as a nurse had been acquired by the absorbed observation of her own symptoms. Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan "never listened." The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked. Of late, however, since he had reasons for observing her more closely, her silence had begun to trouble him. He recalled his mother's growing taciturnity, and wondered if Zeena were also turning "queer." Women did, he knew. Zeena, who had at her fingers' ends the pathological chart of the whole region, had cited many cases of the kind while she was nursing his mother; and he himself knew of certain lonely farm-houses in the neighbourhood where stricken creatures pined, and of others where sudden tragedy had come of their presence. At times, looking at Zeena's shut face, he felt the chill of such forebodings. At other times her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal far-reaching intentions, mysterious conclusions drawn from suspicions and resentments impossible to guess. That supposition was even more disturbing than the other; and it was the one which had come to him the night before, when he had seen her standing in the kitchen door. Now her departure for Bettsbridge had once more eased his mind, and all his thoughts were on the prospect of his evening with Mattie. Only one thing weighed on him, and that was his having told Zeena that he was to receive cash for the lumber. He foresaw so clearly the consequences of this imprudence that with considerable reluctance he decided to ask Andrew Hale for a small advance on his load. When Ethan drove into Hale's yard the builder was just getting out of his sleigh. "Hello, Ethe!" he said. "This comes handy." Andrew Hale was a ruddy man with a big gray moustache and a stubbly double-chin unconstrained by a collar; but his scrupulously clean shirt was always fastened by a small diamond stud. This display of opulence was misleading, for though he did a fairly good business it was known that his easygoing habits and the demands of his large family frequently kept him what Starkfield called "behind." He was an old friend of Ethan's family, and his house one of the few to which Zeena occasionally went, drawn there by the fact that Mrs. Hale, in her youth, had done more "doctoring" than any other woman in Starkfield, and was still a recognised authority on symptoms and treatment. Hale went up to the grays and patted their sweating flanks. "Well, sir," he said, "you keep them two as if they was pets." Ethan set about unloading the logs and when he had finished his job he pushed open the glazed door of the shed which the builder used as his office. Hale sat with his feet up on the stove, his back propped against a battered desk strewn with papers: the place, like the man, was warm, genial and untidy. "Sit right down and thaw out," he greeted Ethan. The latter did not know how to begin, but at length he managed to bring out his request for an advance of fifty dollars. The blood rushed to his thin skin under the sting of Hale's astonishment. It was the builder's custom to pay at the end of three months, and there was no precedent between the two men for a cash settlement. Ethan felt that if he had pleaded an urgent need Hale might have made shift to pay him; but pride, and an instinctive prudence, kept him from resorting to this
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argument. After his father's death it had taken time to get his head above water, and he did not want Andrew Hale, or any one else in Starkfield, to think he was going under again. Besides, he hated lying; if he wanted the money he wanted it, and it was nobody's business to ask why. He therefore made his demand with the awkwardness of a proud man who will not admit to himself that he is stooping; and he was not much surprised at Hale's refusal. The builder refused genially, as he did everything else: he treated the matter as something in the nature of a practical joke, and wanted to know if Ethan meditated buying a grand piano or adding a "cupolo" to his house; offering, in the latter case, to give his services free of cost. Ethan's arts were soon exhausted, and after an embarrassed pause he wished Hale good day and opened the door of the office. As he passed out the builder suddenly called after him: "See hereyou ain't in a tight place, are you?" "Not a bit," Ethan's pride retorted before his reason had time to intervene. "Well, that's good! Because I am, a shade. Fact is, I was going to ask you to give me a little extra time on that payment. Business is pretty slack, to begin with, and then I'm fixing up a little house for Ned and Ruth when they're married. I'm glad to do it for 'em, but it costs." His look appealed to Ethan for sympathy. "The young people like things nice. You know how it is yourself: it's not so long ago since you fixed up your own place for Zeena." Ethan left the grays in Hale's stable and went about some other business in the village. As he walked away the builder's last phrase lingered in his ears, and he reflected grimly that his seven years with Zeena seemed to Starkfield "not so long." The afternoon was drawing to an end, and here and there a lighted pane spangled the cold gray dusk and made the snow look whiter. The bitter weather had driven every one indoors and Ethan had the long rural street to himself. Suddenly he heard the brisk play of sleigh-bells and a cutter passed him, drawn by a free-going horse. Ethan recognised Michael Eady's roan colt, and young Denis Eady, in a handsome new fur cap, leaned forward and waved a greeting. "Hello, Ethe!" he shouted and spun on. The cutter was going in the direction of the Frome farm, and Ethan's heart contracted as he listened to the dwindling bells. What more likely than that Denis Eady had heard of Zeena's departure for Bettsbridge, and was profiting by the opportunity to spend an hour with Mattie? Ethan was ashamed of the storm of jealousy in his breast. It seemed unworthy of the girl that his thoughts of her should be so violent. He walked on to the church corner and entered the shade of the Varnum spruces, where he had stood with her the night before. As he passed into their gloom he saw an indistinct outline just ahead of him. At his approach it melted for an instant into two separate shapes and then conjoined again, and he heard a kiss, and a half-laughing "Oh!" provoked by the discovery of his presence. Again the outline hastily disunited and the Varnum gate slammed on one half while the other hurried on ahead of him. Ethan smiled at the discomfiture he had caused. What did it matter to Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum if they were caught kissing each other? Everybody in Starkfield knew they were engaged. It pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the spot where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt a pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness. He fetched the grays from Hale's stable and started on his long climb back to the farm. The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow. Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt
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the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep. Ethan's ears were alert for the jingle of sleigh-bells, but not a sound broke the silence of the lonely road. As he drew near the farm he saw, through the thin screen of larches at the gate, a light twinkling in the house above him. "She's up in her room," he said to himself, "fixing herself up for supper"; and he remembered Zeena's sarcastic stare when Mattie, on the evening of her arrival, had come down to supper with smoothed hair and a ribbon at her neck. He passed by the graves on the knoll and turned his head to glance at one of the older headstones, which had interested him deeply as a boy because it bore his name. SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ETHAN FROME AND ENDURANCE HIS WIFE, WHO DWELLED TOGETHER IN PEACE FOR FIFTY YEARS. He used to think that fifty years sounded like a long time to live together; but now it seemed to him that they might pass in a flash. Then, with a sudden dart of irony, he wondered if, when their turn came, the same epitaph would be written over him and Zeena. He opened the barn-door and craned his head into the obscurity, halffearing to discover Denis Eady's roan colt in the stall beside the sorrel. But the old horse was there alone, mumbling bis crib with toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers. His was not a tuneful throat, but harsh melodies burst from it as he locked the barn and sprang up the hill to the house. He reached the kitchen-porch and turned the door-handle; but the door did not yield to his touch. Startled at finding it locked he rattled the handle violently; then he reflected that Mattie was alone and that it was natural she should barricade herself at nightfall. He stood in the darkness expecting to hear her step. It did not come, and after vainly straining his ears he called out in a voice that shook with joy: "Hello, Matt!" Silence answered; but in a minute or two he caught a sound on the stairs and saw a line of light about the door-Frome, as he had seen it the night before. So strange was the precision with which the incidents of the previous evening were repeating themselves that he half expected, when he heard the key turn, to see his wife before him on the threshold; but the door opened, and Mattie faced him. She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black background of the kitchen. She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child's. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows. She wore her usual dress of darkish stuff, and there was no bow at her neck; but through her hair she had run a streak of crimson ribbon. This tribute to the unusual transformed and glorified her. She seemed to Ethan taller, fuller, more womanly in shape and motion. She stood aside, smiling silently, while he entered, and then moved away from him with something soft and flowing in her gait. She set the lamp on the table, and he saw that it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts, stewed blueberries and his favourite pickles in a dish of gay red glass. A bright fire glowed in the stove and the cat lay stretched before it, watching the table with a drowsy eye. Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being. He went out into the passage to hang up his coat and pull off his wet boots. When he came back Mattie had
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set the teapot on the table and the cat was rubbing itself persuasively against her ankles. "Why, Puss! I nearly tripped over you," she cried, the laughter sparkling through her lashes. Again Ethan felt a sudden twinge of jealousy. Could it be his coming that gave her such a kindled face? "Well, Matt, any visitors?" he threw off, stooping down carelessly to examine the fastening of the stove. She nodded and laughed "Yes, one," and he felt a blackness settling on his brows. "Who was that?" he questioned, raising himself up to slant a glance at her beneath his scowl. Her eyes danced with malice. "Why, Jotham Powell. He came in after he got back, and asked for a drop of coffee before he went down home." The blackness lifted and light flooded Ethan's brain. "That all? Well, I hope you made out to let him have it." And after a pause he felt it right to add: "I suppose he got Zeena over to the Flats all right?" "Oh, yes; in plenty of time." The name threw a chill between them, and they stood a moment looking sideways at each other before Mattie said with a shy laugh. "I guess it's about time for supper." They drew their seats up to the table, and the cat, unbidden, jumped between them into Zeena's empty chair. "Oh, Puss!" said Mattie, and they laughed again. Ethan, a moment earlier, had felt himself on the brink of eloquence; but the mention of Zeena had paralysed him. Mattie seemed to feel the contagion of his embarrassment, and sat with downcast lids, sipping her tea, while he feigned an Mattie, in an instant, had sprung from her chair and was down on her knees by the fragments. "Oh, Ethan, Ethanit's all to pieces! What will Zeena say?" But this time his courage was up. "Well, she'll have to say it to the cat, any way!" he rejoined with a laugh, kneeling down at Mattie's side to scrape up the swimming pickles. She lifted stricken eyes to him. "Yes, but, you see, she never meant it should be used, not even when there was company; and I had to get up on the step-ladder
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insatiable appetite for dough-nuts and sweet pickles. At last, after casting about for an effective opening, he took a long gulp of tea, cleared his throat, and said: "Looks as if there'd be more snow." She feigned great interest. "Is that so? Do you suppose it'll interfere with Zeena's getting back?" She flushed red as the question escaped her, and hastily set down the cup she was lifting. Ethan reached over for another helping of pickles. "You never can tell, this time of year, it drifts so bad on the Flats." The name had benumbed him again, and once more he felt as if Zeena were in the room between them. "Oh, Puss, you're too greedy!" Mattie cried. The cat, unnoticed, had crept up on muffled paws from Zeena's seat to the table, and was stealthily elongating its body in the direction of the milkjug, which stood between Ethan and Mattie. The two leaned forward at the same moment and their hands met on the handle of the jug. Mattie's hand was underneath, and Ethan kept his clasped on it a moment longer than was necessary. The cat, profiting by this unusual demonstration, tried to effect an unnoticed retreat, and in doing so backed into the pickle-dish, which fell to the floor with a crash.

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

to reach it down from the top shelf of the china-closet, where she keeps it with all her best things, and of course she'll want to know why I did it" The case was so serious that it called forth all of Ethan's latent resolution. "She needn't know anything about it if you keep quiet. I'll get another just like it to-morrow. Where did it come from? I'll go to Shadd's Falls for it if I have to!" "Oh, you'll never get another even there! It was a wedding present don't you remember? It came all the way from Philadelphia, from Zeena's aunt that married the minister. That's why she wouldn't ever use it. Oh, Ethan, Ethan, what in the world shall I do?" She began to cry, and he felt as if every one of her tears were pouring over him like burning lead. "Don't, Matt, don'toh, don'tl" he implored her. She struggled to her feet, and he rose and followed her helplessly while she spread out the pieces of glass on the kitchen dresser. It seemed to him as if the shattered fragments of their evening lay there. "Here, give them to me," he said in a voice of sudden authority. She drew aside, instinctively obeying his tone. "Oh, Ethan, what are you going to do?" Without replying he gathered the pieces of glass into his broad palm and walked out of the kitchen to the passage. There he lit a candle-end, opened the china-closet, and, reaching his long arm up to the highest shelf, laid the pieces together with such accuracy of touch that a close inspection convinced him of the impossibility of detecting from below that the dish was broken. If he glued it together the next morning months might elapse before his wife noticed what had happened, and meanwhile he might after all be able to match the dish at Shadd's Falls or Bettsbridge. Having satisfied himself that there was no risk of immediate discovery he went back to the kitchen with a lighter step, and found Mattie disconsolately removing the last scraps of pickle from the floor. "It's all right, Matt. Come back and finish supper," he commanded her. Completely reassured, she shone on him through tear-hung lashes, and his soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her. She did not even ask what he had done. Except when he was steering a big log down the mountain to his mill he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery.

THEY FINISHED SUPPER, and while Mattie cleared the table Ethan went to look at the cows and then took a last turn about the house. The earth lay dark under a muffled sky and the air was so still that now and then he heard a lump of snow come thumping down from a tree far off on the edge of the wood-lot. When he returned to the kitchen Mattie had pushed up his chair to the stove and seated herself near the lamp with a bit of sewing. The scene was just as he had dreamed of it that morning. He sat down, drew his pipe from his pocket and stretched his feet to the glow. His hard day's work in the keen air made him feel at once lazy and light of mood, and he had a confused sense of being in another world, where all was warmth and harmony and time could bring no change. The only drawback to his complete well-being was the fact that he could not see Mattie from where he sat; but he was too indolent to move and after a moment he said: "Come over here and sit by the stove." Zeena's empty rocking-chair stood facing him. Mattie rose obediently, and seated herself in it. As her young brown head detached itself against the patch-work cushion that habitually Fromed his wife's gaunt countenance, Ethan had a momentary shock. It was almost as if the other face, the face of the superseded woman, had obliterated that of the intruder. After a moment Mattie seemed to be affected by the same sense of constraint. She changed her
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position, leaning forward to bend her head above her work, so that he saw only the foreshortened tip of her nose and the streak of red in her hair; then she slipped to her feet, saying "I can't see to sew," and went back to her chair by the lamp. Ethan made a pretext of getting up to replenish the stove, and when he returned to his seat he pushed it sideways that he might get a view of her profile and of the lamplight falling on her hands. The cat, who had been a puzzled observer of these unusual movements, jumped up into Zeena's chair, rolled itself into a ball, and lay watching them with narrowed eyes. Deep quiet sank on the room. The clock ticked above the dresser, a piece of charred wood fell now and then in the stove, and the faint sharp scent of the geraniums mingled with the odour of Ethan's smoke, which began to throw a blue haze about the lamp and to hang its greyish cobwebs in the shadowy corners of the room. All constraint had vanished between the two, and they began to talk easily and simply. They spoke of every-day things, of the prospect of snow, of the next church sociable, of the loves and quarrels of Starkfield. The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of longestablished intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing so... "This is the night we were to have gone coasting. Matt," he said at length, with the rich sense, as he spoke, that they could go on any other night they chose, since they had all time before them. She smiled back at him. "I guess you forgot!" "No, I didn't forget; but it's as dark as Egypt outdoors. We might go tomorrow if there's a moon." She laughed with pleasure, her head tilted back, the lamplight sparkling on her lips and teeth. "That would be lovely, Ethan!" He kept his eyes fixed on her, marvelling at the way her face changed with each turn of their talk, like a wheat-field under a summer breeze. It was intoxicating to find such magic in his clumsy words, and he longed to try new ways of using it. "Would you be scared to go down the Corbury road with me on a night like this?" he asked. Her cheeks burned redder. "I ain't any more scared than you are!" "Well, I'd be scared, then; I wouldn't do it. That's an ugly corner down by the big elm. If a fellow didn't keep his eyes open he'd go plumb into it." He luxuriated in the sense of protection and authority which his words conveyed. To prolong and intensify the feeling he added: "I guess we're well enough here." She let her lids sink slowly, in the way he loved. "Yes, we're well enough here," she sighed. Her tone was so sweet that he took the pipe from his mouth and drew his chair up to the table. Leaning forward, he touched the farther end of the strip of brown stuff that she was hemming. "Say, Matt," he began with a smile, "what do you think I saw under the Varnum spruces, coming along home just now? I saw a friend of yours getting kissed." The words had been on his tongue all the evening, but now that he had spoken them they struck him as inexpressibly vulgar and out of place. Mattie blushed to the roots of her hair and pulled her needle rapidly twice or
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thrice through her work, insensibly drawing the end of it away from him. "I suppose it was Ruth and Ned," she said in a low voice, as though he had suddenly touched on something grave. Ethan had imagined that his allusion might open the way to the accepted pleasantries, and these perhaps in turn to a harmless caress, if only a mere touch on her hand. But now he felt as if her blush had set a flaming guard about her. He supposed it was his natural awkwardness that made him feel so. He knew that most young men made nothing at all of giving a pretty girl a kiss, and he remembered that the night before, when he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted. But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable. To ease his constraint he said: "I suppose they'll be setting a date before long." "Yes. I shouldn't wonder if they got married some time along in the summer." She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades. A pang shot through Ethan, and he said, twisting away from her in his chair: "It'll be your turn next, I wouldn't wonder." She laughed a little uncertainly. "Why do you keep on saying that?" He echoed her laugh. "I guess I do it to get used to the idea." He drew up to the table again and she sewed on in silence, with dropped lashes, while he sat in fascinated contemplation of the way in which her hands went up and down above the strip of stuff, just as he had seen a pair of birds make short perpendicular flights over a nest they were building. At length, without turning her head or lifting her lids, she said in a low tone: "It's not because you think Zeena's got anything against me, is it?" She tossed the hair back from her forehead with a laugh. "I guess I'm just nervous, then. I'm not going to think about it any more." "Oh, nodon't let's think about it, Matt!" The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart. She sat silent, her hands clasped on her work, and it seemed to him that a warm current flowed toward him along the strip of stuff that still lay unrolled between them. Cautiously he slid his hand palm-downward along the table till his finger-tips touched the end of the stuff. A faint vibration of her lashes seemed to show that she was aware of his gesture, and that it had sent a counter-current back to her; and she let her hands lie motionless on the other end of the strip. As they sat thus he heard a sound behind him and turned his head. The cat had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot, and as a result of
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His former dread started up full-armed at the suggestion. "Why, what do you mean?" he stammered. She raised distressed eyes to his, her work dropping on the table between them. "I don't know. I thought last night she seemed to have." "I'd like to know what," he growled. "Nobody can tell with Zeena." It was the first time they had ever spoken so openly of her attitude toward Mattie, and the repetition of the name seemed to carry it to the farther corners of the room and send it back to them in long repercussions of sound. Mattie waited, as if to give the echo time to drop, and then went on: "She hasn't said anything to you? He shook his head. "No, not a word."

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a spectral rocking. "She'll be rocking in it herself this time to-morrow," Ethan thought. "I've been in a dream, and this is the only evening we'll ever have together." The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain ached with indescribable weariness, and he could think of nothing to say or to do that should arrest the mad flight of the moments. His alteration of mood seemed to have communicated itself to Mattie. She looked up at him languidly, as though her lids were weighted with sleep and it cost her an effort to raise them. Her glance fell on his hand, which now completely covered the end of her work and grasped it as if it were a part of herself. He saw a scarcely perceptible tremor cross her face, and without knowing what he did he stooped his head and kissed the bit of stuff in his hold. As his lips rested on it he felt it glide slowly from beneath them, and saw that Mattie had risen and was silently rolling up her work. She fastened it with a pin, and then, finding her thimble and scissors, put them with the roll of stuff into the box covered with fancy paper which he had once brought to her from Bettsbridge. He stood up also, looking vaguely about the room. The clock above the dresser struck eleven. "Is the fire all right?" she asked in a low voice. He opened the door of the stove and poked aimlessly at the embers. When he raised himself again he saw that she was dragging toward the stove the old soap-box lined with carpet in which the cat made its bed. Then she recrossed the floor and lifted two of the geranium pots in her arms, moving them away from the cold window. He followed her and brought the other geraniums, the hyacinth bulbs in a cracked custard bowl and the German ivy trained over an old croquet hoop. When these nightly duties were performed there was nothing left to do but to bring in the tin candlestick from the passage, light the candle and blow out the lamp. Ethan put the candlestick in Mattie's hand and she went out of the kitchen ahead of him, the light that she carried before her making her dark hair look like a drift of mist on the moon. "Good night, Matt," he said as she put her foot on the first step of the stairs. She turned and looked at him a moment. "Good night, Ethan," she answered, and went up. When the door of her room had closed on her he remembered that he had not even touched her hand.

THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast Jotham Powell was between them, and Ethan tried to hide his joy under an air of exaggerated indifference, lounging back in his chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the weather, and not so much as offering to help Mattie when she rose to clear away the dishes. He did not know why he was so irrationally happy, for nothing was changed in his life or hers. He had not even touched the tip of her fingers or looked her full in the eyes. But their evening together had given him a vision of what life at her side might be, and he was glad now that he had done nothing to trouble the sweetness of the picture. He had a fancy that she knew what had restrained him... There was a last load of lumber to be hauled to the village, and Jotham Powellwho did not work regularly for Ethan in winterhad "come round" to help with the job. But a wet snow, melting to sleet, had fallen in the night and turned the roads to glass. There was more wet in the air and it seemed likely to both men that the weather would "milden" toward afternoon and make the going safer. Ethan therefore proposed to his assistant that they should load the sledge at the wood-lot, as they had done on the previous morning, and put off the "teaming" to Starkfield till later in the day. This plan had the advantage of enabling him to send Jotham to the Flats after dinner to meet Zenobia, while he himself took the lumber down to the village.
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He told Jotham to go out and harness up the greys, and for a moment he and Mattie had the kitchen to themselves. She had plunged the breakfast dishes into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms bared to the elbow, the steam from the hot water beading her forehead and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils on the traveller's joy. Ethan stood looking at her, his heart in his throat. He wanted to say: "We shall never be alone again like this." Instead, he reached down his tobaccopouch from a shelf of the dresser, put it into his pocket and said: "I guess I can make out to be home for dinner." She answered "All right, Ethan," and he heard her singing over the dishes as he went. As soon as the sledge was loaded he meant to send Jotham back to the farm and hurry on foot into the village to buy the glue for the pickle-dish. With ordinary luck he should have had time to carry out this plan; but everything went wrong from the start. On the way over to the wood-lot one of the greys slipped on a glare of ice and cut his knee; and when they got him up again Jotham had to go back to the barn for a strip of rag to bind the cut. Then, when the loading finally began, a sleety rain was coming down once more, and the tree trunks were so slippery that it took twice as long as usual to lift them and get them in place on the sledge. It was what Jotham called a sour morning for work, and the horses, shivering and stamping under their wet blankets, seemed to like it as little as the men. It was long past the dinnerhour when the job was done, and Ethan had to give up going to the village because he wanted to lead the injured horse home and wash the cut himself. He thought that by starting out again with the lumber as soon as he had finished his dinner he might get back to the farm with the glue before Jotham and the old sorrel had had time to fetch Zenobia from the Flats; but he knew the chance was a slight one. It turned on the state of the roads and on the possible lateness of the Bettsbridge train. He remembered afterward, with a grim flash of self-derision, what importance he had attached to the weighing of these probabilities... As soon as dinner was over he set out again for the wood-lot, not daring to linger till Jotham Powell left. The hired man was still drying his wet feet at the stove, and Ethan could only give Mattie a quick look as he said beneath his breath: "I'll be back early." He fancied that she nodded her comprehension; and with that scant solace he had to trudge off through the rain. He had driven his load half-way to the village when Jotham Powell overtook him, urging the reluctant sorrel toward the Flats. "I'll have to hurry up to do it," Ethan mused, as the sleigh dropped down ahead of him over the dip of the school-house hill. He worked like ten at the unloading, and when it was over hastened on to Michael Eady's for the glue. Eady and his assistant were both "down street," and young Denis, who seldom deigned to take their place, was lounging by the stove with a knot of the golden youth of Starkfield. They hailed Ethan with ironic compliment and offers of conviviality; but no one knew where to find the glue. Ethan, consumed with the longing for a last moment alone with Mattie, hung about impatiently while Denis made an ineffectual search in the obscurer corners of the store. "Looks as if we were all sold out. But if you'll wait around till the old man comes along maybe he can put his hand on it." "I'm obliged to you, but I'll try if I can get it down at Mrs. Homan's," Ethan answered, burning to be gone. Denis's commercial instinct compelled him to aver on oath that what Eady's store could not produce would never be found at the widow Homan's; but Ethan, heedless of this boast, had already climbed to the sledge and was driving on to the rival establishment. Here, after considerable search, and sympathetic
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questions as to what he wanted it for, and whether ordinary flour paste wouldn't do as well if she couldn't find it, the widow Homan finally hunted down her solitary bottle of glue to its hiding-place in a medley of cough-lozenges and corset-laces. "I hope Zeena ain't broken anything she sets store by," she called after him as he turned the greys toward home. The fitful bursts of sleet had changed into a steady rain and the horses had heavy work even without a load behind them. Once or twice, hearing sleigh-bells, Ethan turned his head, fancying that Zeena and Jotham might overtake him; but the old sorrel was not in sight, and he set his face against the rain and urged on his ponderous pair. The barn was empty when the horses turned into it and, after giving them the most perfunctory ministrations they had ever received from him, he strode up to the house and pushed open the kitchen door. Mattie was there alone, as he had pictured her. She was bending over a pan on the stove; but at the sound of his step she turned with a start and sprang to him. "See, here, Matt, I've got some stuff to mend the dish with! Let me get at it quick," he cried, waving the bottle in one hand while he put her lightly aside; but she did not seem to hear him. "Oh, EthanZeena's come," she said in a whisper, clutching his sleeve. They stood and stared at each other, pale as culprits. "But the sorrel's not in the barn!" Ethan stammered. "Jotham Powell brought some goods over from the Flats for his wife, and he drove right on home with them," she explained. He gazed blankly about the kitchen, which looked cold and squalid in the rainy winter twilight. "How is she?" he asked, dropping his voice to Mattie's whisper. She looked away from him uncertainly. "I don't know. She went right up to her room." "She didn't say anything?" "No." Ethan let out his doubts in a low whistle and thrust the bottle back into his pocket. "Don't fret; I'll come down and mend it in the night," he said. He pulled on his wet coat again and went back to the barn to feed the greys. While he was there Jotham Powell drove up with the sleigh, and when the horses had been attended to Ethan said to him: "You might as well come back up for a bite." He was not sorry to assure himself of Jotham's neutralising presence at the supper table, for Zeena was always "nervous" after a journey. But the hired man, though seldom loth to accept a meal not included in his wages, opened his stiff jaws to answer slowly: "I'm obliged to you, but I guess I'll go along back." Ethan looked at him in surprise. "Better come up and dry off. Looks as if there'd be something hot for supper." Jotham's facial muscles were unmoved by this appeal and, his vocabulary being limited, he merely repeated: "I guess I'll go along back." To Ethan there was something vaguely ominous in this stolid rejection of free food and warmth, and he wondered what had happened on the drive to nerve Jotham to such stoicism. Perhaps Zeena had failed to see the new doctor or had not liked his counsels: Ethan knew that in such cases the first person she met was likely to be held responsible for her grievance.

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When he re-entered the kitchen the lamp lit up the same scene of shining comfort as on the previous evening. The table had been as carefully laid, a clear fire glowed in the stove, the cat dozed in its warmth, and Mattie came forward carrying a plate of doughnuts. She and Ethan looked at each other in silence; then she said, as she had said the night before: "I guess it's about time for supper." She continued to gaze at him through the twilight with a mien of wan authority, as of one consciously singled out for a great fate. "I've got complications," she said. Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had "complications." To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People struggled on for years with "troubles," but they almost always succumbed to "complications." Ethan's heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts. "Is that what the new doctor told you?" he asked, instinctively lowering his voice. "Yes. He says any regular doctor would want me to have an operation." Ethan was aware that, in regard to the important question of surgical intervention, the female opinion of the neighbourhood was divided, some glorying in the prestige conferred by operations while others shunned them as indelicate. Ethan, from motives of economy, had always been glad that Zeena was of the latter faction. In the agitation caused by the gravity of her announcement he sought a consolatory short cut. "What do you know about this doctor anyway? Nobody ever told you that before." He saw his blunder before she could take it up: she wanted sympathy, not consolation. "I didn't need to have anybody tell me I was losing ground every day.
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ETHAN WENT OUT into the passage to hang up his wet garments. He listened for Zeena's step and, not hearing it, called her name up the stairs. She did not answer, and after a moment's hesitation he went up and opened her door. The room was almost dark, but in the obscurity he saw her sitting by the window, bolt upright, and knew by the rigidity of the outline projected against the pane that she had not taken off her travelling dress. "Well, Zeena," he ventured from the threshold. She did not move, and he continued: "Supper's about ready. Ain't you coming?" She replied: "I don't feel as if I could touch a morsel." It was the consecrated formula, and he expected it to be followed, as usual, by her rising and going down to supper. But she remained seated, and he could think of nothing more felicitous than: "I presume you're tired after the long ride." Turning her head at this, she answered solemnly: "I'm a great deal sicker than you think." Her words fell on his ear with a strange shock of wonder. He had often heard her pronounce them beforewhat if at last they were true? He advanced a step or two into the dim room. "I hope that's not so, Zeena," he said.

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

Everybody but you could see it. And everybody in Bettsbridge knows about Dr. Buck. He has his office in Worcester, and comes over once a fortnight to Shadd's Falls and Bettsbridge for consultations. Eliza Spears was wasting away with kidney trouble before she went to him, and now she's up and around, and singing in the choir." "Well, I'm glad of that. You must do just what he tells you," Ethan answered sympathetically. She was still looking at him. "I mean to," she said. He was struck by a new note in her voice. It was neither whining nor reproachful, but drily resolute. "What does he want you should do?" he asked, with a mounting vision of fresh expenses. "He wants I should have a hired girl. He says I oughtn't to have to do a single thing around the house." "A hired girl?" Ethan stood transfixed. "Yes. And Aunt Martha found me one right off. Everybody said I was lucky to get a girl to come away out here, and I agreed to give her a dollar extry to make sure. She'll be over to-morrow afternoon." Wrath and dismay contended in Ethan. He had foreseen an immediate demand for money, but not a permanent drain on his scant resources. He no longer believed what Zeena had told him of the supposed seriousness of her state: he saw in her expedition to Bettsbridge only a plot hatched between herself and her Pierce relations to foist on him the cost of a servant; and for the moment wrath predominated. "If you meant to engage a girl you ought to have told me before you started," he said. "How could I tell you before I started? How did I know what Dr. Buck would say?" "Oh, Dr. Buck" Ethan's incredulity escaped in a short laugh. "Did Dr. Buck tell you how I was to pay her wages?" Her voice rose furiously with his. "No, he didn't. For I'd 'a' been ashamed to tell him that you grudged me the money to get back my health, when I lost it nursing your own mother!" "You lost your health nursing mother?" "Yes; and my folks all told me at the time you couldn't do no less than marry me after" "Zeena!" Through the obscurity which hid their faces their thoughts seemed to dart at each other like serpents shooting venom. Ethan was seized with horror of the scene and shame at his own share in it. It was as senseless and savage as a physical fight between two enemies in the darkness. He turned to the shelf above the chimney, groped for matches and lit the one candle in the room. At first its weak flame made no impression on the shadows; then Zeena's face stood grimly out against the uncurtained pane, which had turned from grey to black. It was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years together, and Ethan felt as if he had lost an irretrievable advantage in descending to the level of recrimination. But the practical problem was there and had to be dealt with. "You know I haven't got the money to pay for a girl, Zeena. You'll have to send her back: I can't do it." "The doctor says it'll be my death if I go on slaving the way I've had to. He doesn't understand how I've stood it as long as I have."
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"Slaving!" He checked himself again, "You sha'n't lift a hand, if he says so. I'll do everything round the house myself" She broke in: "You're neglecting the farm enough already," and this being true, he found no answer, and left her time to add ironically: "Better send me over to the almshouse and done with it.. .1 guess there's been Fromes there afore now." The taunt burned into him, but he let it pass. "I haven't got the money. That settles it." There was a moment's pause in the struggle, as though the combatants were testing their weapons. Then Zeena said in a level voice: "I thought you were to get fifty dollars from Andrew Hale for that lumber." "Andrew Hale never pays under three months." He had hardly spoken when he remembered the excuse he had made for not accompanying his wife to the station the day before; and the blood rose to his frowning brows. "Why, you told me yesterday you'd fixed it up with him to pay cash down. You said that was why you couldn't drive me over to the Flats." Ethan had no suppleness in deceiving. He had never before been convicted of a lie, and all the resources of evasion failed him. "I guess that was a misunderstanding," he stammered. "You ain't got the money?" "No." "And you ain't going to get it?" "No." "Well, I couldn't know that when I engaged the girl, could I?" "No." He paused to control his voice. "But you know it now. I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. You're a poor man's wife, Zeena; but I'll do the best I can for you." For a while she sat motionless, as if reflecting, her arms stretched along the arms of her chair, her eyes fixed on vacancy. "Oh, I guess we'll make out," she said mildly. The change in her tone reassured him. "Of course we will! There's a whole lot more I can do for you, and Mattie" Zeena, while he spoke, seemed to be following out some elaborate mental calculation. She emerged from it to say: "There'll be Mattie's board less, any how" Ethan, supposing the discussion to be over, had turned to go down to supper. He stopped short, not grasping what he heard. "Mattie's board less-?" he began. Zeena laughed. It was on odd unfamiliar soundhe did not remember ever having heard her laugh before. "You didn't suppose I was going to keep two girls, did you? No wonder you were scared at the expense!" He still had but a confused sense of what she was saying. From the beginning of the discussion he had instinctively avoided the mention of Mattie's name, fearing he hardly knew what: criticism, complaints, or vague allusions to the imminent probability of her marrying. But the thought of a definite rupture had never come to him, and even now could not lodge itself in his mind. "I don't know what you mean," he said. "Mattie Silver's not a hired girl. She's your relation." "She's a pauper that's hung onto us all after her father'd done his best to ruin us. I've kep' her here a whole year: it's somebody else's turn now." As the shrill words shot out Ethan heard a tap on the door, which he had drawn shut when he turned back from the threshold.
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"EthanZeena!" Mattie's voice sounded gaily from the landing, "do you know what time it is? Supper's been ready half an hour." Inside the room there was a moment's silence; then Zeena called out from her seat: "I'm not coming down to supper." "Oh, I'm sorry! Aren't you well? Sha'n't I bring you up a bite of something?" Ethan roused himself with an effort and opened the door. "Go along down, Matt. Zeena's just a little tired. I'm coming." He heard her "All right!" and her quick step on the stairs; then he shut the door and turned back into the room. His wife's attitude was unchanged, her face inexorable, and he was seized with the despairing sense of his helplessness. "You ain't going to do it, Zeena?" "Do what?" she emitted between flattened lips. "Send Mattie awaylike this?" "I never bargained to take her for life!" He continued with rising vehemence: "You can't put her out of the house like a thiefa poor girl without friends or money. She's done her best for you and she's got no place to go to. You may forget she's your kin but everybody else'll remember it. If you do a thing like that what do you suppose folks'll say of you?" Zeena waited a moment, as if giving him time to feel the full force of the contrast between his own excitement and her composure. Then she replied in the same smooth voice: "I know well enough what they say of my having kep' her here as long as I have." Ethan's hand dropped from the door-knob, which he had held clenched since he had drawn the door shut on Mattie. His wife's retort was like a knifecut across the sinews and he felt suddenly weak and powerless. He had meant to humble himself, to argue that Mattie's keep didn't cost much, after all, that he could make out to buy a stove and fix up a place in the attic for the hired girlbut Zeena's words revealed the peril of such pleadings. "You mean to tell her she's got to goat once?" he faltered out, in terror of letting his wife complete her sentence. As if trying to make him see reason she replied impartially; "The girl will be over from Bettsbridge to-morrow, and I presume she's got to have somewheres to sleep." Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding. It was the sense of his helplessness that sharpened his antipathy. There had never been anything in her that one could appeal to; but as long as he could ignore and command he had remained indifferent. Now she had mastered him and he abhorred her. Mattie was her relation, not his: there were no means by which he could compel her to keep the girl under her roof. All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. For a moment such a flame of hate rose in him that it ran down his arm and clenched his fist against her. He took a wild step forward and then stopped. "You'reyou're not coming down?" he said in a bewildered voice. "No. I guess I'll lay down on the bed a little while," she answered mildly; and he turned and walked out of the room.

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In the kitchen Mattie was sitting by the stove, the cat curled up on her knees. She sprang to her feet as Ethan entered and carried the covered dish of meat-pie to the table. "I hope Zeena isn't sick?" she asked. "No." She shone at him across the table. "Well, sit right down then. You must be starving." She uncovered the pie and pushed it over to him. So they were to have one more evening together, her happy eyes seemed to say! He helped himself mechanically and began to eat; then disgust took him by the throat and he laid down his fork. Mattie's tender gaze was on him and she marked the gesture. "Why, Ethan, what's the matter? Don't it taste right?" "Yesit's first-rate. Only I" He pushed his plate away, rose from his chair, and walked around the table to her side. She started up with frightened eyes. "Ethan, there's something wrong! I knew there was!" She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies. "What is itwhat is it?" she stammered; but he had found her lips at last and was drinking unconsciousness of everything but the joy they gave him. She lingered a moment, caught in the same strong current; then she slipped from him and drew back a step or two, pale and troubled. Her look smote him with compunction, and he cried out, as if he saw her drowning in a dream: "You can't go, Matt! I'll never let you!" "Gogo?" she stammered. "Must I go?" The words went on sounding between them as though a torch of warning flew from hand to hand through a black landscape. Ethan was overcome with shame at his lack of self-control in flinging the news at her so brutally. His head reeled and he had to support himself against the table. All the while he felt as if he were still kissing her, and yet dying of thirst for her lips. "Ethan, what has happened? Is Zeena mad with me?" Her cry steadied him, though it deepened his wrath and pity. "No, no," he assured her, "it's not that. But this new doctor has scared her about herself. You know she believes all they say the first time she sees them. And this one's told her she won't get well unless she lays up and don't do a thing about the housenot for months" He paused, his eyes wandering from her miserably. She stood silent a moment, drooping before him like a broken branch. She was so small and weak-looking that it wrung his heart; but suddenly she lifted her head and looked straight at him. "And she wants somebody handier in my place? Is that it?" "That's what she says to-night." "If she says it to-night she'll say it to-morrow." Both bowed to the inexorable truth: they knew that Zeena never changed her mind, and that in her case a resolve once taken was equivalent to an act performed. There was a long silence between them; then Mattie said in a low voice: "Don't be too sorry, Ethan." "Oh, Godoh, God," he groaned. The glow of passion he had felt for her had
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melted to an aching tenderness. He saw her quick lids beating back the tears, and longed to take her in his arms and soothe her. "You're letting your supper get cold," she admonished him with a pale gleam of gaiety. "Oh, MattMattwhere'll you go to?" Her lids sank and a tremor crossed her face. He saw that for the first time the thought of the future came to her distinctly. "I might get something to do over at Stamford," she faltered, as if knowing that he knew she had no hope. He dropped back into his seat and hid his face in his hands. Despair seized him at the thought of her setting out alone to renew the weary quest for work. In the only place where she was known she was surrounded by indifference or animosity; and what chance had she, inexperienced and untrained, among the million bread-seekers of the cities? There came back to him miserable tales he had heard at Worcester, and the faces of girls whose lives had begun as hopefully as Mattie's.. .It was not possible to think of such things without a revolt of his whole being. He sprang up suddenly. "You can't go, Matt! I won't let you! She's always had her way, but I mean to have mine now" Mattie lifted her hand with a quick gesture, and he heard his wife's step behind him. Zeena came into the room with her dragging down-at-the-heel step, and quietly took her accustomed seat between them. "I felt a little mite better, and Dr. Buck says I ought to eat all I can to keep my stren'th up, even if I ain't got any appetite," she said in her flat whine, reaching across Mattie for the teapot. Her "good" dress had been replaced by the black Ethan sat speechless, not pretending to eat, but Mattie nibbled valiantly at her food and asked Zeena one or two questions about her visit to Bettsbridge. Zeena answered in her every-day tone and, warming to the theme, regaled them with several vivid descriptions of intestinal disturbances among her friends and relatives. She looked straight at Mattie as she spoke, a faint smile deepening the vertical lines between her nose and chin. When supper was over she rose from her seat and pressed her hand to the flat surface over the region of her heart. "That pie of yours always sets a mite heavy, Matt," she said, not ill-naturedly. She seldom abbreviated the girl's name, and when she did so it was always a sign of affability. "I've a good mind to go and hunt up those stomach powders I got last year over in Springfield," she continued. "I ain't tried them for quite a while, and maybe they'll help the heartburn." Mattie lifted her eyes. "Can't I get them for you, Zeena?" she ventured. "No. They're in a place you don't know about," Zeena answered darkly, with one of her secret looks. She went out of the kitchen and Mattie, rising, began to clear the dishes from the table. As she passed Ethan's chair their eyes met and clung together desolately. The warm still kitchen looked as peaceful as the night before. The cat had sprung to Zeena's rocking-chair, and the heat of the fire was beginning
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calico and brown knitted shawl which formed her daily wear, and with them she had put on her usual face and manner. She poured out her tea, added a great deal of milk to it, helped herself largely to pie and pickles, and made the familiar gesture of adjusting her false teeth before she began to eat. The cat rubbed itself ingratiatingly against her, and she said "Good Pussy," stooped to stroke it and gave it a scrap of meat from her plate.

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

to draw out the faint sharp scent of the geraniums. Ethan dragged himself wearily to his feet. "I'll go out and take a look around," he said, going toward the passage to get his lantern. As he reached the door he met Zeena coming back into the room, her lips twitching with anger, a flush of excitement on her sallow face. The shawl had slipped from her shoulders and was dragging at her down-trodden heels, and in her hands she carried the fragments of the red glass pickle-dish. "I'd like to know who done this," she said, looking sternly from Ethan to Mattie. There was no answer, and she continued in a trembling voice: "I went to get those powders I'd put away in father's old spectacle-case, top of the china-closet, where I keep the things I set store by, so's folks sha'n't meddle with them" Her voice broke, and two small tears hung on her lashless lids and ran slowly down her cheeks. "It takes the step-ladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt Philura Maple's pickle-dish up there o' purpose when we was married, and it's never been down since, 'cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always lifted it with my own hands, so's't it shouldn't get broke." She laid the fragments reverently on the table. "I want to know who done this," she quavered. At the challenge Ethan turned back into the room and faced her. "I can tell you, then. The cat done it." "The cat!" "That's what I said." She looked at him hard, and then turned her eyes to Mattie, who was carrying the dish-pan to the table. "I'd like to know how the cat got into my china-closet'" she said. "Chasin' mice, I guess," Ethan rejoined. "There was a mouse round the kitchen all last evening." Zeena continued to look from one to the other; then she emitted her small strange laugh. "I knew the cat was a smart cat," she said in a high voice, "but I didn't know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces of my pickle-dish and lay 'em edge to edge on the very shelf he knocked 'em off of." Mattie suddenly drew her arms out of the steaming water. "It wasn't Ethan's fault, Zeena! The cat did break the dish; but I got it down from the china-closet, and I'm the one to blame for its getting broken." Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony image of resentment, "You got down my pickle-dishwhat for?" A bright flush flew to Mattie's cheeks. "I wanted to make the supper-table pretty," she said. "You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I've got, and wouldn't never use it, not even when the minister come to dinner, or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge" Zeena paused with a gasp, as if terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege. "You're a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It's the way your father begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn't get at 'emand now you've took from me the one I cared for most of all" She broke off in a short spasm of sobs that passed and left her more than ever like a shape of stone. "If I'd 'a' listened to folks, you'd 'a' gone before now, and this wouldn't 'a' happened," she said; and gathering up the bits of broken glass she went out of the room as if she carried a dead body...

WHEN ETHAN WAS called back to the farm by his father's illness his mother gave him, for his own use, a small room behind the untenanted "best parlour." Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on a kitchen-table, hung on the rough
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plaster wall an engraving of Abraham Lincoln and a calendar with "Thoughts from the Poets," and tried, with these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a "minister" who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at Worcester. He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to live at the farm he had to give her his stove, and consequently the room was uninhabitable for several months of the year. To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena's steady breathing from the bed had assured him that there was to be no sequel to the scene in the kitchen. After Zeena's departure he and Mattie had stood speechless, neither seeking to approach the other. Then the girl had returned to her task of clearing up the kitchen for the night and he had taken his lantern and gone on his usual round outside the house. The kitchen was empty when he came back to it; but his tobacco-pouch and pipe had been laid on the table, and under them was a scrap of paper torn from the back of a seedsman's catalogue, on which three words were written: "Don't trouble, Ethan." Going into his cold dark "study" he placed the lantern on the table and, stooping to its light, read the message again and again. It was the first time that Mattie had ever written to him, and the possession of the paper gave him a strange new sense of her nearness; yet it deepened his anguish by reminding him that henceforth they would have no other way of communicating with each other. For the life of her smile, the warmth of her voice, only cold paper and dead words! Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman? Other possibilities had been in him, possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena's narrow-mindedness and ignorance. And what good had come of it? She was a hundred times bitterer and more discontented than when he had married her: the one pleasure left her was to inflict pain on him. All the healthy instincts of self-defence rose up in him against such waste... He bundled himself into his old coon-skin coat and lay down on the boxsofa to think. Under his cheek he felt a hard object with strange protuberances. It was a cushion which Zeena had made for him when they were engagedthe only piece of needlework he had ever seen her do. He flung it across the floor and propped his head against the wall... He knew a case of a man over the mountaina young fellow of about his own agewho had escaped from just such a life of misery by going West with the girl he cared for. His wife had divorced him, and he had married the girl and prospered. Ethan had seen the couple the summer before at Shadd's Falls, where they had come to visit relatives. They had a little girl with fair curls, who wore a gold locket and was dressed like a princess. The deserted wife had not done badly either. Her husband had given her the farm and she had managed to sell it, and with that and the alimony she had started a lunch-room at Bettsbridge and bloomed into activity and importance. Ethan was fired by the thought. Why should he not leave with Mattie the next day, instead of letting her go alone? He would hide his valise under the seat of the sleigh, and Zeena would suspect nothing till she went upstairs for her afternoon nap and found a letter on the bed... His impulses were still near the surface, and he sprang up, re-lit the lantern, and sat down at the table. He rummaged in the drawer for a sheet of paper, found one, and began to write. "Zeena, I've done all I could for you, and I don't see as it's been any use. I don't blame you, nor I don't blame myself. Maybe both of us will do better separate. I'm going to try my luck West, and you can sell the farm and mill, and keep the money" His pen paused on the word, which brought home to him the relentless
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conditions of his lot. If he gave the farm and mill to Zeena what would be left him to start his own life with? Once in the West he was sure of picking up workhe would not have feared to try his chance alone. But with Mattie depending on him the case was different. And what of Zeena's fate? Farm and mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and even if she found a purchaserin itself an unlikely chanceit was doubtful if she could clear a thousand dollars on the sale. Meanwhile, how could she keep the farm going? It was only by incessant labour and personal supervision that Ethan drew a meagre living from his land, and his wife, even if she were in better health than she imagined, could never carry such a burden alone. Well, she could go back to her people, then, and see what they would do for her. It was the fate she was forcing on Mattiewhy not let her try it herself? By the time she had discovered his whereabouts, and brought suit for divorce, he would probablywherever he wasbe earning enough to pay her a sufficient alimony. And the alternative was to let Mattie go forth alone, with far less hope of ultimate provision... He had scattered the contents of the table-drawer in his search for a sheet of paper, and as he took up his pen his eye fell on an old copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle. The advertising sheet was folded uppermost, and he read the seductive words: "Trips to the West: Reduced Rates." He drew the lantern nearer and eagerly scanned the fares; then the paper fell from his hand and he pushed aside his unfinished letter. A moment ago he had wondered what he and Mattie were to live on when they reached the West; now he saw that he had not even the money to take her there. Borrowing was out of the question: six months before he had given his only security to raise funds for necessary repairs to the mill, and he knew that without security no one at Starkfield would lend him ten dollars. The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders handcuffing a convict. There was no way out-none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished. He crept back heavily to the sofa, stretching himself out with limbs so leaden that he felt as if they would never move again. Tears rose in his throat and slowly burned their way to his lids. As he lay there, the window-pane that faced him, growing gradually lighter, inlaid upon the darkness a square of moon-suffused sky. A crooked tree-branch crossed it, a branch of the apple-tree under which, on summer evenings, he had sometimes found Mattie sitting when he came up from the mill. Slowly the rim of the rainy vapours caught fire and burnt away, and a pure moon swung into the blue. Ethan, rising on his elbow, watched the landscape whiten and shape itself under the sculpture of the moon. This was the night on which he was to have taken Mattie coasting, and there hung the lamp to light them! He looked out at the slopes bathed in lustre, the silveredged darkness of the woods, the spectral purple of the hills against the sky, and it seemed as though all the beauty of the night had been poured out to mock his wretchedness... He fell asleep, and when he woke the chill of the winter dawn was in the room. He felt cold and stiff and hungry, and ashamed of being hungry. He rubbed his eyes and went to the window. A red sun stood over the grey rim of the fields, behind trees that looked black and brittle. He said to himself: "This is Mart's last day," and tried to think what the place would be without her. As he stood there he heard a step behind him and she entered. "Oh, Ethanwere you here all night?" She looked so small and pinched, in her poor dress, with the red scarf wound about her, and the cold light turning her paleness sallow, that Ethan stood before her without speaking. "You must be frozen," she went on, fixing lustreless eyes on him. He drew a step nearer. "How did you know I was here?"
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"Because I heard you go down stairs again after I went to bed, and I listened all night, and you didn't come up." All his tenderness rushed to his lips. He looked at her and said: "I'll come right along and make up the kitchen fire." They went back to the kitchen, and he fetched the coal and kindlings and cleared out the stove for her, while she brought in the milk and the cold remains of the meat-pie. When warmth began to radiate from the stove, and the first ray of sunlight lay on the kitchen floor, Ethan's dark thoughts melted in the mellower air. The sight of Mattie going about her work as he had seen her on so many mornings made it seem impossible that she should ever cease to be a part of the scene. He said to himself that he had doubtless exaggerated the significance of Zeena's threats, and that she too, with the return of daylight, would come to a saner mood. He went up to Mattie as she bent above the stove, and laid his hand on her arm. "I don't want you should trouble either," he said, looking down into her eyes with a smile. She flushed up warmly and whispered back: "No, Ethan, I ain't going to trouble." "I guess things'll straighten out," he added. There was no answer but a quick throb of her lids, and he went on: "She ain't said anything this morning?" "No. I haven't seen her yet." "Don't you take any notice when you do." With this injunction he left her and went out to the cow-barn. He saw Jotham Powell walking up the hill through the morning mist, and the familiar sight added to his growing conviction of security. As the two men were clearing out the stalls Jotham rested on his pitchfork to say: "Dan'l Byrne's goin' over to the Flats to-day noon, an' he c'd take Mattie's trunk along, and make it easier ridin' when I take her over in the sleigh." Ethan looked at him blankly, and he continued: "Mis' Frome said the new girl'd be at the Flats at five, and I was to take Mattie then, so's't she could ketch the six o'clock train for Stamford." Ethan felt the blood drumming in his temples. He had to wait a moment before he could find voice to say: "Oh, it ain't so sure about Mattie's going-" "That so?" said Jotham indifferently; and they went on with their work. When they returned to the kitchen the two women were already at breakfast. Zeena had an air of unusual alertness and activity. She drank two cups of coffee and fed the cat with the scraps left in the pie-dish; then she rose from her seat and, walking over to the window, snipped two or three yellow leaves from the geraniums. "Aunt Martha's ain't got a faded leaf on 'em; but they pine away when they ain't cared for," she said reflectively. Then she turned to Jotham and asked: "What time'd you say Dan'l Byrne'd be along?" The hired man threw a hesitating glance at Ethan. "Round about noon," he said. Zeena turned to Mattie. "That trunk of yours is too heavy for the sleigh, and Dan'l Byrne'll be round to take it over to the Flats," she said. "I'm much obliged to you, Zeena," said Mattie. "I'd like to go over things with you first," Zeena continued in an unperturbed voice. "I know there's a huckabuck towel missing; and I can't take out what you done with that match-safe't used to stand behind the stuffed owl in the parlour." She went out, followed by Mattie, and when the men were alone Jotham said to
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his employer: "I guess I better let Dan'l come round, then." Ethan finished his usual morning tasks about the house and barn; then he said to Jotham: "I'm going down to Starkfield. Tell them not to wait dinner." The passion of rebellion had broken out in him again. That which had seemed incredible in the sober light of day had really come to pass, and he was to assist as a helpless spectator at Mattie's banishment. His manhood was humbled by the part he was compelled to play and by the thought of what Mattie must think of him. Confused impulses struggled in him as he strode along to the village. He had made up his mind to do something, but he did not know what it would be. The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring. Every yard of the road was alive with Mattie's presence, and there was hardly a branch against the sky or a tangle of brambles on the bank in which some bright shred of memory was not caught. Once, in the stillness, the call of a bird in a mountain ash was so like her laughter that his heart tightened and then grew large; and all these things made him see that something must be done at once. Suddenly it occurred to him that Andrew Hale, who was a kind-hearted man, might be induced to reconsider his refusal and advance a small sum on the lumber if he were told that Zeena's ill-health made it necessary to hire a servant. Hale, after all, knew enough of Ethan's situation to make it possible for the latter to renew his appeal without too much loss of pride; and, moreover, how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast? The more he considered his plan the more hopeful it seemed. If he could get Mrs. Hale's ear he felt certain of success, and with fifty dollars in his pocket nothing could keep him from Mattie... His first object was to reach Starkfield before Hale had started for his work; he knew the carpenter had a job down the Corbury road and was likely to leave his house early. Ethan's long strides grew more rapid with the accelerated beat of his thoughts, and as he reached the foot of School House Hill he caught sight of Hale's sleigh in the distance. He hurried forward to meet it, but as it drew nearer he saw that it was driven by the carpenter's youngest boy and that the figure at his side, looking like a large upright cocoon in spectacles, was that of Mrs. Hale. Ethan signed to them to stop, and Mrs. Hale leaned forward, her pink wrinkles twinkling with benevolence. "Mr. Hale? Why, yes, you'll find him down home now. He ain't going to his work this forenoon. He woke up with a touch o' lumbago, and I just made him put on one of old Dr. Kidder's plasters and set right up into the fire." Beaming maternally on Ethan, she bent over to add: "I on'y just heard from Mr. Hale 'bout Zeena's going over to Bettsbridge to see that new doctor. I'm real sorry she's feeling so bad again! I hope he thinks he can do something for her. I don't know anybody round here's had more sickness than Zeena. I always tell Mr. Hale I don't know what she'd 'a' done if she hadn't 'a' had you to look after her; and I used to say the same thing 'bout your mother. You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome." She gave him a last nod of sympathy while her son chirped to the horse; and Ethan, as she drove off, stood in the middle of the road and stared after the retreating sleigh. It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs. Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs. Hale had said, "You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome," and he felt less alone with his misery. If the Hales were sorry for him they would surely respond to his appeal...
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He started down the road toward their house, but at the end of a few yards he pulled up sharply, the blood in his face. For the first time, in the light of the words he had just heard, he saw what he was about to do. He was planning to take advantage of the Hales' sympathy to obtain money from them on false pretences. That was a plain statement of the cloudy purpose which had driven him in headlong to Starkfield. With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him. He turned and walked slowly back to the farm. moment on the landing. "Matt," he said in a low voice; but there was no answer, and he put his hand on the door-knob. He had never been in her room except once, in the early summer, when he had gone there to plaster up a leak in the eaves, but he remembered exactly how everything had looked: the red and white quilt on her narrow bed, the pretty pin-cushion on the chest of drawers, and over it the enlarged photograph of her mother, in an oxydized Frome, with a bunch of dyed grasses at the back. Now these and all other tokens of her presence had vanished, and the room looked as bare and comfortless as when Zeena had shown her into it on the day of her arrival. In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat in her Sunday dress, her back turned to the door and her face in her hands. She had not heard Ethan's call because she was sobbing; and she did not hear his step till he stood close behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders. "Mattoh, don'toh, MattV AT THE KITCHEN door Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh behind a bigboned grey who pawed the snow and swung his long head restlessly from side to side. Ethan went into the kitchen and found his wife by the stove. Her head was wrapped in her shawl, and she was reading a book called "Kidney Troubles and Their Cure" on which he had had to pay extra postage only a few days before. Zeena did not move or look up when he entered, and after a moment he asked: "Where's Mattie?" Without lifting her eyes from the page she replied: "I presume she's getting down her trunk." The blood rushed to his face. "Getting down her trunkalone?" "Jotham Powell's down in the wood-lot, and Dan'l Byrne says he darsn't leave that horse," she returned. Her husband, without stopping to hear the end of the phrase, had left the kitchen and sprung up the stairs. The door of Mattie's room was shut, and he wavered a She started up, lifting her wet face to his. "EthanI thought I wasn't ever going to see you again!" He took her in his arms, pressing her close, and with a trembling hand smoothed away the hair from her forehead. "Not see me again? What do you mean?" She sobbed out: "Jotham said you told him we wasn't to wait dinner for you, and I thought" "You thought I meant to cut it?" he finished for her grimly. She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair, which was soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun. Through the door they heard Zeena's voice calling out from below: "Dan'l Byrne says you better hurry up if you want him to take that trunk."
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They drew apart with stricken faces. Words of resistance rushed to Ethan's lips and died there. Mattie found her handkerchief and dried her eyes; then, bending down, she took hold of a handle of the trunk. Ethan put her aside. "You let go, Matt," he ordered her. She answered: "It takes two to coax it round the corner"; and submitting to this argument he grasped the other handle, and together they manoeuvred the heavy trunk out to the landing. "Now let go," he repeated; then he shouldered the trunk and carried it down the stairs and across the passage to the kitchen. Zeena, who had gone back to her seat by the stove, did not lift her head from her book as he passed. Mattie followed him out of the door and helped him to lift the trunk into the back of the sleigh. When it was in place they stood side by side on the door-step, watching Daniel Byrne plunge off behind his fidgety horse. It seemed to Ethan that his heart was bound with cords which an unseen hand was tightening with every tick of the clock. Twice he opened his lips to speak to Mattie and found no breath. At length, as she turned to re-enter the house, he laid a detaining hand on her. "I'm going to drive you over, Matt," he whispered. She murmured back: "I think Zeena wants I should go with Jotham." "I'm going to drive you over," he repeated; and she went into the kitchen without answering. At dinner Ethan could not eat. If he lifted his eyes they rested on Zeena's pinched face, and the corners of her straight lips seemed to quiver away into a smile. She ate well, declaring that the mild weather made her feel better, and pressed a second helping of beans on Jotham Powell, whose wants she generally ignored. On the threshold he turned back to say to Ethan: "What time'll I come round for Mattie?" Ethan was standing near the window, mechanically filling his pipe while he watched Mattie move to and fro. He answered: "You needn't come round; I'm going to drive her over myself." He saw the rise of the colour in Mattie's averted cheek, and the quick lifting of Zeena's head. "I want you should stay here this afternoon, Ethan," his wife said. "Jotham can drive Mattie over." Mattie flung an imploring glance at him, but he repeated curtly: "I'm going to drive her over myself." Zeena continued in the same even tone: "I wanted you should stay and fix up that stove in Mattie's room afore the girl gets here. It ain't been drawing right for nigh on a month now." Ethan's voice rose indignantly. "If it was good enough for Mattie I guess it's good enough for a hired girl." "That girl that's coming told me she was used to a house where they had a furnace," Zeena persisted with the same monotonous mildness. "She'd better ha' stayed there then," he flung back at her; and turning to Mattie he added in a hard voice: "You be ready by three, Matt; I've got business at Corbury." Jotham Powell had started for the barn, and Ethan strode down after him aflame
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Mattie, when the meal was over, went about her usual task of clearing the table and washing up the dishes. Zeena, after feeding the cat, had returned to her rocking-chair by the stove, and Jotham Powell, who always lingered last, reluctantly pushed back his chair and moved toward the door.

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

with anger. The pulses in his temples throbbed and a fog was in his eyes. He went about his task without knowing what force directed him, or whose hands and feet were fulfilling its orders. It was not till he led out the sorrel and backed him between the shafts of the sleigh that he once more became conscious of what he was doing. As he passed the bridle over the horse's head, and wound the traces around the shafts, he remembered the day when he had made the same preparations in order to drive over and meet his wife's cousin at the Flats. It was little more than a year ago, on just such a soft afternoon, with a "feel" of spring in the air. The sorrel, turning the same big ringed eye on him, nuzzled the palm of his hand in the same way; and one by one all the days between rose up and stood before him... He flung the bearskin into the sleigh, climbed to the seat, and drove up to the house. When he entered the kitchen it was empty, but Mattie's bag and shawl lay ready by the door. He went to the foot of the stairs and listened. No sound reached him from above, but presently he thought he heard some one moving about in his deserted study, and pushing open the door he saw Mattie, in her hat and jacket, standing with her back to him near the table. She started at his approach and turning quickly, said: "Is it time?" "What are you doing here, Matt?" he asked her. She looked at him timidly. "I was just taking a look roundthat's all," she answered, with a wavering smile. They went back into the kitchen without speaking, and Ethan picked up her bag and shawl. "Where's Zeena?" he asked. "She went upstairs right after dinner. She said she had those shooting pains again, and didn't want to be disturbed." "Didn't she say good-bye to you?" "No. That was all she said." Ethan, looking slowly about the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone. Then the sense of unreality overcame him once more, and he could not bring himself to believe that Mattie stood there for the last time before him. "Come on," he said almost gaily, opening the door and putting her bag into the sleigh. He sprang to his seat and bent over to tuck the rug about her as she slipped into the place at his side. "Now then, go 'long," he said, with a shake of the reins that sent the sorrel placidly jogging down the hill. "We got lots of time for a good ride, Matt!" he cried, seeking her hand beneath the fur and pressing it in his. His face tingled and he felt dizzy, as if he had stopped in at the Starkfield saloon on a zero day for a drink. At the gate, instead of making for Starkfield, he turned the sorrel to the right, up the Bettsbridge road. Mattie sat silent, giving no sign of surprise; but after a moment she said: "Are you going round by Shadow Pond?" He laughed and answered: "I knew you'd know!" She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his coat-sleeve, he could just catch the tip of her nose and a blown brown wave of hair. They drove slowly up the road between fields glistening under the pale sun, and then bent to the right down a lane edged with spruce and larch. Ahead of them, a long way off, a range of hills stained by mottlings of black forest flowed away in round white curves against the sky. The lane passed into a pine-wood with boles reddening in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows on the snow. As they entered it the breeze fell and a warm stillness seemed to drop from the branches with the dropping needles. Here the snow was so pure that the tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of bronze. Ethan drove on in silence till they reached a part of the wood where the pines were more widely spaced, then he drew up and helped Mattie to get out of the sleigh. They passed between the aromatic trunks, the snow breaking crisply under their feet, till they came to a small sheet of water with steep wooded sides. Across its frozen surface, from the farther bank, a single hill rising against the western sun threw the long conical shadow which gave the lake its
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name. It was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan felt in his heart. He looked up and down the little pebbly beach till his eye lit on a fallen tree-trunk half submerged in snow. "There's where we sat at the picnic," he reminded her. The entertainment of which he spoke was one of the few that they had taken part in together: a "church picnic" which, on a long afternoon of the preceding summer, had filled the retired place with merry-making. Mattie had begged him to go with her but he had refused. Then, toward sunset, coming down from the mountain where he had been felling timber, he had been caught by some strayed revellers and drawn into the group by the lake, where Mattie, encircled by facetious youths, and bright as a blackberry under her spreading hat, was brewing coffee over a gipsy fire. He remembered the shyness he had felt at approaching her in his uncouth clothes, and then the lighting up of her face, and the way she had broken through the group to come to him with a cup in her hand. They had sat for a few minutes on the fallen log by the pond, and she had missed her gold locket, and set the young men searching for it; and it was Ethan who had spied it in the moss.. .That was all; but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods... "It was right there I found your locket," he said, pushing his foot into a dense tuft of blueberry bushes. "I never saw anybody with such sharp eyes!" she answered. She sat down on the tree-trunk in the sun and he sat down beside her. "You were as pretty as a picture in that pink hat," he said. She laughed with pleasure. "Oh, I guess it was the hat!" she rejoined. They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things. Suddenly she rose to her feet and said: "We mustn't stay here any longer." He continued to gaze at her vaguely, only half-roused from his dream. "There's plenty of time," he answered. They stood looking at each other as if the eyes of each were straining to absorb and hold fast the other's image. There were things he had to say to her before they parted, but he could not say them in that place of summer memories, and he turned and followed her in silence to the sleigh. As they drove away the sun sank behind the hill and the pine-boles turned from red to grey. By a devious track between the fields they wound back to the Starkfield road. Under the open sky the light was still clear, with a reflection of cold red on the eastern hills. The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to draw together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their wings; and the sky, as it paled, rose higher, leaving the earth more alone. As they turned into the Starkfield road Ethan said: "Matt, what do you mean to do?" She did not answer at once, but at length she said: "I'll try to get a place in a store." "You know you can't do it. The bad air and the standing all day nearly killed you before." "I'm a lot stronger than I was before I came to Starkfield." "And now you're going to throw away all the good it's done you!" There seemed to be no answer to this, and again they drove on for a while without speaking. With every yard of the way some spot where they had stood, and laughed together or been silent, clutched at Ethan and dragged him back. "Isn't there any of your father's folks could help you?" "There isn't any of 'em I'd ask." He lowered his voice to say: "You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for you if I could." "I know there isn't." "But I can't" She was silent, but he felt a slight tremor in the shoulder against his. "Oh, Matt," he broke out, "if I could ha' gone with you now I'd ha' done it" She turned to him, pulling a scrap of paper from her breast. "EthanI found
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this," she stammered. Even in the failing light he saw it was the letter to his wife that he had begun the night before and forgotten to destroy. Through his astonishment there ran a fierce thrill of joy. "Matt" he cried; "if I could ha' done it, would you?" "Oh, Ethan, Ethanwhat's the use?" With a sudden movement she tore the letter in shreds and sent them fluttering off into the snow. "Tell me, Matt! Tell me!" he adjured her. She was silent for a moment; then she said, in such a low tone that he had to stoop his head to hear her: "I used to think of it sometimes, summer nights, when the moon was so bright I couldn't sleep." His heart reeled with the sweetness of it. "As long ago as that?" She answered, as if the date had long been fixed for her: "The first time was at Shadow Pond." "Was that why you gave me my coffee before the others?" "I don't know. Did I? I was dreadfully put out when you wouldn't go to the picnic with me; and then, when I saw you coming down the road, I thought maybe you'd gone home that way o' purpose; and that made me glad." They were silent again. They had reached the point where the road dipped to the hollow by Ethan's mill and as they descended the darkness descended with them, dropping down like a black veil from the heavy hemlock boughs. "I'm tied hand and foot, Matt. There isn't a thing I can do," he began again. "You must write to me sometimes, Ethan." "Why shouldn't we, when it's true? I've been wishing it every minute of the day." "Matt! You be quiet! Don't you say it." "There's never anybody been good to me but you." "Don't say that either, when I can't lift a hand for you!" "Yes; but it's true just the same." They had reached the top of School House Hill and Starkfield lay below them in the twilight. A cutter, mounting the road from the village, passed them by in a joyous flutter of bells, and they straightened themselves and looked ahead with rigid faces. Along the main street lights had begun to shine from the house-fronts and stray figures were turning in here and there at the gates. Ethan,
45

"Oh, what good'll writing do? I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome." "You mustn't think but what I'll do all right." "You won't need me, you mean? I suppose you'll marry!" "Oh, Ethan!" she cried. "I don't know how it is you make me feel, Matt. I'd a'most rather have you dead than that!" "Oh, I wish I was, I wish I was!" she sobbed. The sound of her weeping shook him out of his dark anger, and he felt ashamed. "Don't let's talk that way," he whispered.

"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

with a touch of his whip, roused the sorrel to a languid trot. As they drew near the end of the village the cries of children reached them, and they saw a knot of boys, with sleds behind them, scattering across the open space before the church. "I guess this'll be their last coast for a day or two," Ethan said, looking up at the mild sky. Mattie was silent, and he added: "We were to have gone down last night." Still she did not speak and, prompted by an obscure desire to help himself and her through their miserable last hour, he went on discursively: "Ain't it funny we haven't been down together but just that once last winter?" She answered: "It wasn't often I got down to the village." "That's so," he said. They had reached the crest of the Corbury road, and between the indistinct white glimmer of the church and the black curtain of the Varnum spruces the slope stretched away below them without a sled on its length. Some erratic impulse prompted Ethan to say: "How'd you like me to take you down now?" She forced a laugh. "Why, there isn't time!" "There's all the time we want. Come along!" His one desire now was to postpone the moment of turning the sorrel toward the Flats. "But the girl," she faltered. "The girl'll be waiting at the station." "Well, let her wait. You'd have to if she didn't. Come!" The note of authority in his voice seemed to subdue her, and when he had jumped from the sleigh she let him help her out, saying only, with a vague feint of reluctance: "But there isn't a sled round anywheres." "Yes, there is! Right over there under the spruces." He threw the bearskin over the sorrel, who stood passively by the roadside, hanging a meditative head. Then he caught Mattie's hand and drew her after him toward the sled. She seated herself obediently and he took his place behind her, so close that her hair brushed his face. "All right, Matt?" he called out, as if the width of the road had been between them. She turned her head to say: "It's dreadfully dark. Are you sure you can see?" He laughed contemptuously: "I could go down this coast with my eyes tied!" and she laughed with him, as if she liked his audacity. Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long hill, for it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances. "Now!" he cried. The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk, gathering smoothness and speed as they went, with the hollow night opening out below them and the air singing by like an organ. Mattie sat perfectly still, but as they reached the bend at the foot of the hill, where the big elm thrust out a deadly elbow, he fancied that she shrank a little closer. "Don't be scared, Matt!" he cried exultantly, as they spun safely past it and flew down the second slope; and when they reached the level ground beyond, and the
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speed of the sled began to slacken, he heard her give a little laugh of glee. They sprang off and started to walk back up the hill. Ethan dragged the sled with one hand and passed the other through Mattie's arm. "Were you scared I'd run you into the elm?" he asked with a boyish laugh. "I told you I was never scared with you," she answered. The strange exaltation of his mood had brought on one of his rare fits of boastfulness. "It is a tricky place, though. The least swerve, and we'd never ha' come up again. But I can measure distances to a hair's-breadth-always could." She murmured: "I always say you've got the surest eye..." Deep silence had fallen with the starless dusk, and they leaned on each other without speaking; but at every step of their climb Ethan said to himself: "It's the last time we'll ever walk together." They mounted slowly to the top of the hill. When they were abreast of the church he stooped his head to her to ask: "Are you tired?" and she answered, breathing quickly: "It was splendid!" With a pressure of his arm he guided her toward the Norway spruces. "I guess this sled must be Ned Hale's. Anyhow I'll leave it where I found it." He drew the sled up to the Varnum gate and rested it against the fence. As he raised himself he suddenly felt Mattie close to him among the shadows. "Is this where Ned and Ruth kissed each other?" she whispered breathlessly, and flung her arms about him. Her lips, groping for his, swept over his face, and he held her fast in a rapture of surprise. "Good-bye-good-bye," she stammered, and kissed him again. "Oh, Matt I can't let you go!" broke from him in the same old cry. She freed herself from his hold and he heard her sobbing. "Oh, I can't go either!" she wailed. "Matt! What'll we do? What'll we do?" They clung to each other's hands like children, and her body shook with desperate sobs. Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five. "Oh, Ethan, it's time!" she cried. He drew her back to him. "Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going to leave you now?" "If I missed my train where'd I go?" "Where are you going if you catch it?" She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his. "What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one now?" he said. She remained motionless, as if she had not heard him. Then she snatched her hands from his, threw her arms about his neck, and pressed a sudden drenched cheek against his face. "Ethan! Ethan! I want you to take me down again!" "Down where?" "The coast. Right off," she panted. "So't we'll never come up any more." "Matt! What on earth do you mean?" She put her lips close against his ear to say: "Right into the big elm. You said you could. So't we'd never have to leave each other any more." "Why, what are you talking of? You're crazy!" "I'm not crazy; but I will be if I leave you." "Oh, Matt, Matt" he groaned. She tightened her fierce hold about his neck. Her face lay close to his face. "Ethan, where'll I go if I leave you? I don't know how to get along alone. You said so yourself just now. Nobody but you was ever good to me. And there'll be that strange girl in the house... and she'll sleep in my bed, where I used to lay nights and listen to hear you come up the stairs..."
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"Ethan Frome" bv Edith Wharton

The words were like fragments torn from his heart. With them came the hated vision of the house he was going back toof the stairs he would have to go up every night, of the woman who would wait for him there. And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return to... Her pleadings still came to him between short sobs, but he no longer heard what she was saying. Her hat had slipped back and he was stroking her hair. He wanted to get the feeling of it into his hand, so that it would sleep there like a seed in winter. Once he found her mouth again, and they seemed to be by the pond together in the burning August sun. But his cheek touched hers, and it was cold and full of weeping, and he saw the road to the Flats under the night and heard the whistle of the train up the line. The spruces swathed them in blackness and silence. They might have been in their coffins underground. He said to himself: "Perhaps it'll feel like this..." and then again: "After this I sha'n't feel anything..." Suddenly he heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought: "He's wondering why he doesn't get his supper..." "Come!" Mattie whispered, tugging at his hand. Her sombre violence constrained him: she seemed the embodied instrument of fate. He pulled the sled out, blinking like a night-bird as he passed from the shade of the spruces into the transparent dusk of the open. The slope below them was deserted. All Starkfield was at supper, and not a figure crossed the open space before the church. The sky, swollen with the clouds that announce a thaw, hung as low as before a summer storm. He strained his eyes through the dimness, and they seemed less keen, less capable than usual. He took his seat on the sled and Mattie instantly placed herself in front of him. Her hat had fallen into the snow and his lips were in her hair. He stretched out his legs, drove his heels into the road to keep the sled from slipping forward, and bent her head back between his hands. Then suddenly he sprang up again. "Get up," he ordered her. It was the tone she always heeded, but she cowered down in her seat, repeating vehemently: "No, no, no!" "Get up!" "Why?" "I want to sit in front." "No, no! How can you steer in front?" "I don't have to. We'll follow the track." They spoke in smothered whispers, as though the night were listening. "Get up! Get up!" he urged her; but she kept on repeating: "Why do you want to sit in front?" "Because Ibecause I want to feel you holding me," he stammered, and dragged her to her feet. The answer seemed to satisfy her, or else she yielded to the power of his voice. He bent down, feeling in the obscurity for the glassy slide worn by preceding coasters, and placed the runners carefully between its edges. She waited while he seated himself with crossed legs in the front of the sled; then she crouched quickly down at his back and clasped her arms about him. Her breath in his neck set him shuddering again, and he almost sprang from his seat. But in a flash he remembered the alternative. She was right: this was better than parting. He leaned back and drew her mouth to his... Just as they started he heard the sorrel's whinny again, and the familiar wistful call, and all the confused images it brought with it, went with him down the first reach of the road. Half-way down there was a sudden drop, then a rise, and after that another long delirious descent. As they took wing for this it seemed to him that they were flying indeed, flying far up into the cloudy night, with Starkfield
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immeasurably below them, falling away like a speck in space.. .Then the big elm shot up ahead, lying in wait for them at the bend of the road, and he said between his teeth: "We can fetch it; I know we can fetch it" As they flew toward the tree Mattie pressed her arms tighter, and her blood seemed to be in his veins. Once or twice the sled swerved a little under them. He slanted his body to keep it headed for the elm, repeating to himself again and again: "I know we can fetch it"; and little phrases she had spoken ran through his head and danced before him on the air. The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it he thought: "It's waiting for us: it seems to know." But suddenly his wife's face, with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between him and his goal, and he made an instinctive movement to brush it aside. The sled swerved in response, but he righted it again, kept it straight, and drove down on the black projecting mass. There was a last instant when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires; and then the elm... The sky was still thick, but looking straight up he saw a single star, and tried vaguely to reckon whether it were Sirius, ororThe effort tired him too much, and he closed his heavy lids and thought that he would sleep.. .The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under his palm, which rested on something soft and springy. The thought of the animal's suffering was intolerable to him and he struggled to raise himself, and could not because a rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be lying on him. But he continued to finger about cautiously with his left hand, thinking he might get hold of the little creature and help it; and all at once he knew that the soft thing he had touched was Mattie's hair and that his hand was on her face. He dragged himself to his knees, the monstrous load on him moving with him as he moved, and his hand went over and over her face, and he felt that the twittering came from her lips... He got his face down close to hers, with his ear to her mouth, and in the darkness he saw her eyes open and heard her say his name. "Oh, Matt, I thought we'd fetched it," he moaned; and far off, up the hill, he heard the sorrel whinny, and thought: "I ought to be getting him his feed..."

Epilogue
THE QUERULOUS DRONE ceased as I entered Frome's kitchen, and of the two women sitting there I could not tell which had been the speaker. One of them, on my appearing, raised her tall bony figure from her seat, not as if to welcome mefor she threw me no more than a brief glance of surprisebut simply to set about preparing the meal which Frome's absence had delayed. A slatternly calico wrapper hung from her shoulders and the wisps of her thin grey hair were drawn away from a high forehead and fastened at the back by a broken comb. She had pale opaque eyes which revealed nothing and reflected nothing, and her narrow lips were of the same sallow colour as her face. The other woman was much smaller and slighter. She sat huddled in an arm-chair near the stove, and when I came in she turned her head quickly toward me, without the least corresponding movement of her body. Her hair was as grey as her companion's, her face as bloodless and shrivelled, but amber-tinted, with swarthy shadows sharpening the nose and hollowing the temples. Under her shapeless dress her body kept its limp immobility, and her
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dark eyes had the bright witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives. Even for that part of the country the kitchen was a poor-looking place. With the exception of the dark-eyed woman's chair, which looked like a soiled relic of luxury bought at a country auction, the furniture was of the roughest kind. Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple of strawbottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood meagrely against the plaster walls. "My, it's cold here! The fire must be 'most out," Frome said, glancing about him apologetically as he followed me in. The tall woman, who had moved away from us toward the dresser, took no notice; but the other, from her cushioned niche, answered complainingly, in a high thin voice. "It's on'y just been made up this very minute. Zeena fell asleep and slep' ever so long, and I thought I'd be frozen stiff before I could wake her up and get her to 'tend to it." I knew then that it was she who had been speaking when we entered. Her companion, who was just coming back to the table with the remains of a cold mince-pie in a battered pie-dish, set down her unappetising burden without appearing to hear the accusation brought against her. Frome stood hesitatingly before her as she advanced; then he looked at me and said: "This is my wife, Mis' Frome." After another interval he added, turning toward the figure in the arm-chair: "And this is Miss Mattie Silver..." Mrs. Hale, tender soul, had pictured me as lost in the Flats and buried under a snow-drift; and so lively was her satisfaction on seeing me safely restored to her the next morning that I felt my peril had caused me to advance several degrees in her favour. Great was her amazement, and that of old Mrs. Varnum, on learning that Ethan Frome's old horse had carried me to and from Corbury Junction through the worst blizzard of the winter; greater still their surprise when they heard that his master had taken me in for the night. Beneath their wondering exclamations I felt a secret curiosity to know what impressions I had received from my night in the Frome household, and divined that the best way of breaking down their reserve was to let them try to penetrate mine. I therefore confined myself to saying, in a matter-of-fact tone, that I had been received with great kindness, and that Frome had made a bed for me in a room on the ground-floor which seemed in happier days to have been fitted up as a kind of writing-room or study. "Well," Mrs. Hale mused, "in such a storm I suppose he felt he couldn't do less than take you inbut I guess it went hard with Ethan. I don't believe but what you're the only stranger has set foot in that house for over twenty years. He's that proud he don't even like his oldest friends to go there; and I don't know as any do, any more, except myself and the doctor..." "You still go there, Mrs. Hale?" I ventured. "I used to go a good deal after the accident, when I was first married; but after awhile I got to think it made 'em feel worse to see us. And then one thing and another came, and my own troubles.. .But I generally make out to drive over there round about New Year's, and once in the summer. Only I always try to pick a day when Ethan's off somewheres. It's bad enough to see the two women sitting therebut his face, when he looks round that bare place, just kills me.. .You see, I can look back and call it up in his mother's day, before their
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troubles." Old Mrs. Varnum, by this time, had gone up to bed, and her daughter and I were sitting alone, after supper, in the austere seclusion of the horse-hair parlour. Mrs. Hale glanced at me tentatively, as though trying to see how much footing my conjectures gave her; and I guessed that if she had kept silence till now it was because she had been waiting, through all the years, for some one who should see what she alone had seen. I waited to let her trust in me gather strength before I said: "Yes, it's pretty bad, seeing all three of them there together." She drew her mild brows into a frown of pain. "It was just awful from the beginning. I was here in the house when they were carried upthey laid Mattie Silver in the room you're in. She and I were great friends, and she was to have been my brides-maid in the spring.. .When she came to I went up to her and stayed all night. They gave her things to quiet her, and she didn't know much till to'rd morning, and then all of a sudden she woke up just like herself, and looked straight at me out of her big eyes, and said.. .Oh, I don't know why I'm telling you all this," Mrs. Hale broke off, crying. She took off her spectacles, wiped the moisture from them, and put them on again with an unsteady hand. "It got about the next day," she went on, "that Zeena Frome had sent Mattie off in a hurry because she had a hired girl coming, and the folks here could never rightly tell what she and Ethan were doing that night coasting, when they'd ought to have been on their way to the Flats to ketch the train.. .1 never knew myself what Zeena thoughtI don't to this day. Nobody knows Zeena's thoughts. Anyhow, when she heard o' the accident she came right in and stayed with Ethan over to the minister's, where they'd carried him. And as soon as the doctors said that Mattie could be moved, Zeena sent for her and took her back to the farm." "And there she's been ever since?" Mrs. Hale answered simply: "There was nowhere else fo her to go;" and my heart tightened at the thought of the hard compulsions of the poor. "Yes, there she's been," Mrs. Hale continued, "and Zeena's done for her, and done for Ethan, as good as she could. It was a miracle, considering how sick she wasbut she seemed to be raised right up just when the call came to her. Not as she's ever given up doctoring, and she's had sick spells right along; but she's had the strength given her to care for those two for over twenty years, and before the accident came she thought she couldn't even care for herself." Mrs. Hale paused a moment, and I remained silent, plunged in the vision of what her words evoked. "It's horrible for them all," I murmured. "Yes: it's pretty bad. And they ain't any of 'em easy people either. Mattie was, before the accident; I never knew a sweeter nature. But she's suffered too muchthat's what I always say when folks tell me how she's soured. And Zeena, she was always cranky. Not but what she bears with Mattie wonderfulI've seen that myself. But sometimes the two of them get going at each other, and then Ethan's face'd break your heart.. .When I see that, I think it's him that suffers most.. .anyhow it ain't Zeena, because she ain't got the time.. .It's a pity, though," Mrs. Hale ended, sighing, "that they're all shut up there'n that one kitchen. In the summertime, on pleasant days, they move Mattie into the parlour, or out in the door-yard, and that makes it easier.. .but winters there's the fires to be thought of; and there ain't a dime to spare up at the Fromes.' " Mrs. Hale drew a deep breath, as though her memory were eased of its long burden, and she had no more to say; but suddenly an impulse of complete avowal seized her. She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work
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table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: "There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't live. Well, I say it's a pity she did. I said it right out to our minister once, and he was shocked at me. Only he wasn't with me that morning when she first came to.. .And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived; and the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."

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1836

EDWIN ARLINGTON

ROBINSON

T h e c e n t e r of the nation's h o o p I have m a d e p l e a s a n t . With visible f a c e , b e h o l d m e ! T h e four-leggeds a n d two-leggeds, I have m a d e t h e m to walk; T h e wings of the air, I have m a d e t h e m to fly. With visible f a c e I a p p e a r . M y day, I have m a d e it holy." 2 W h e n the singing s t o p p e d , I w a s feeling lost a n d very lonely. T h e n a V o i c e a b o v e m e said: " L o o k b a c k ! " It w a s a s p o t t e d eagle that w a s h o v e r i n g over m e a n d s p o k e . I looked, a n d w h e r e the flaming r a i n b o w t e p e e , built a n d roofed with c l o u d , h a d b e e n , I s a w only the tall rock m o u n t a i n at the c e n t e r of the world. I w a s all a l o n e on a b r o a d plain now with my feet u p o n the e a r t h , a l o n e but for the s p o t t e d e a g l e g u a r d i n g m e . I c o u l d s e e my p e o p l e ' s village far a h e a d , a n d I walked very fast, for I w a s h o m e s i c k now. T h e n I s a w my own t e p e e , a n d inside I s a w my m o t h e r a n d my father b e n d i n g over a sick boy that w a s myself. A n d a s I e n t e r e d the t e p e e , s o m e o n e w a s saying: " T h e boy is c o m i n g to; you h a d better give him s o m e w a t e r . " 3 T h e n I w a s sitting u p ; a n d I w a s s a d b e c a u s e my m o t h e r a n d my father didn't s e e m to know I h a d b e e n so far away. 1932
2. This song does not appear at this point in the transcript. 3. Here Black Elk says, "They were giving me some medicine but it was not that that cured m e it was my vision that cured m e . "

EDWIN

ARLINGTON 1869-1935

ROBINSON

Like his own Miniver Cheevy, Edwin Arlington Robinson felt himself bom too late. He turned to poetry in search of an alternative world of elegance and beauty, but wrote his best poems about wasted, blighted, or impoverished lives. His brief story and portrait poems are in traditional form with metrically regular verse, rhymes, and elevated diction. Such techniques dignify the subject matter and also provide a contrast, where his subject is unpoetic according to traditional standards, that emphasizes its sadness and banality. Robinson was raised in Gardiner, Maine, the Tilbury Town of such poems as "Miniver Cheevy" and "Mr. Flood's Party." His father's lumber business and land speculations failed during the Great Panic of 1893. One of his brothers, a physician, became a drug addict; the other, a businessman, became an alcoholic. Robinson, by nature a scholar and book lover, was able to afford just two years at Harvard. Returning to Gardiner and trying to become a professional poet, he had to depend for support on friends and patrons, until a Pulitzer Prize in 1922 brought him some financial security. By this time he was over fifty. Robinson studied alone and with friends long after his formal schooling ended. He read classic works in many languages as well as such American writers as Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, and Henry James, whom he interpreted as individualistic idealists. He was also drawn to the bleak, tragic vision of the British novelist Thomas

LUKE HAVERGAL

1837

Hardy. These influences were distilled in the gloomy, austere, yet sonorous verse of his second book, Children of the Nig/it (1897 The Torrent and the Night Before had been published the previous year, at his own expense). Celebrating the pain of isolated lives, Robinson worked through to a residue of affirmation, an occasional "light" or "word" that is glimpsed in the "night" of these poems. Robinson moved to New York City around the turn of the century. The Town Down the River (1910) and The Man against the Sky (1916) won increasing numbers of readers and critics' awards. Avon's Harvest and Collected Poems (both 1922) were successful, as was a trilogy of long poems in imitation of medieval narratives, beginning with Merlin (1917). The last of these, Tristram (1927), brought a third Pulitzer Prize. To some of the tougher-minded critics of the 1920s, the escapism of the later work (precisely what may have made it attractive to a larger audience), uncorrected by the somber wit and sustained irony of the Tilbury poems, seemed overly sentimental. The prizes and honors represented, to a large extent, their belated recognition of his earlier poetry. Although in that earlier work Robinson was a New England regional poet like Robert Frost and a chronicler of small-town life like Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson, he thought of himself as estranged both from his time and from the practices of other poets. The difference between him and these others lay in his everpresent sense of a lost, glorious past. The text of the poems included here is that of Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1921, 1937).

Luke Havergal
G o to the w e s t e r n g a t e , 1 L u k e H a v e r g a l , T h e r e w h e r e the vines cling c r i m s o n on the w a l l , A n d in the twilight wait for what will c o m e . T h e wind will m o a n , the leaves will w h i s p e r s o m e , W h i s p e r of her, a n d strike you a s they fall; B u t g o , a n d if you trust her s h e will call. G o to the w e s t e r n g a t e , L u k e H a v e r g a l Luke Havergal. N o , there is not a d a w n in e a s t e r n skies T o rift the fiery night that's in your e y e s ; B u t t h e r e , w h e r e western g l o o m s a r e g a t h e r i n g , T h e dark will e n d the dark, if anything: G o d slays H i m s e l f with every leaf that flies, A n d hell is m o r e than half of p a r a d i s e . N o , there is not a d a w n in e a s t e r n s k i e s In e a s t e r n s k i e s . O u t of a grave I c o m e to tell you t h i s , O u t of a grave I c o m e to q u e n c h the kiss T h a t f l a m e s u p o n your f o r e h e a d with a glow T h a t blinds you to the way that you m u s t g o . Yes, there is yet o n e way to w h e r e s h e i s , Bitter, but o n e that faith m a y never m i s s .
1. T h e natural symbolism of nightfall and autumn associates "the western gate" with the end of life.

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is

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Edwin Arlington Robinson

1878

ROBERT

FROST

A n d faint spires of old m e e t i n g - h o u s e s F l a u n t their g o l d e n w e a t h e r - c o c k s in a brave s h o w of c h a l l e n g e at a s u n s e t sky. H e r e the heat stuffs d o w n with the t h i c k n e s s of boiled f e a t h e r s , T h e river runs in s t e a m . T h e r e , lilacs are in b l o o m , C o o l b l u e - p u r p l e s , wine-reds, whites, Flying c o l o u r to quiet dooryards. G r o w n year on year to a s u d d e n n e s s of old perfection, S a y i n g " B e f o r e ! B e f o r e ! " to e a c h new S p r i n g . H e r e is " N o w , " B u t " B e f o r e " is m i n e with the lilacs, With the white s e a of everywhither, With the h e r a l d i c , story-telling hills.

2s

so

1927

ROBERT

FROST

1874-1963
Although he identified himself with New England, Robert Frost was born in California and lived there until his father died, when Frost was eleven. The family then moved to New England where his mother supported them by teaching school. Frost graduated from high school in 1891 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, sharing the post of valedictorian with Elinor White, whom he married three years later. Occasional attendance at Dartmouth College and Harvard, and a variety of different jobs including an attempt to run a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, marked the next twenty years. Frost made a new start in 1912, taking his family, which included four children, to England. There he worked on his poetry and found a publisher for his first book, A Boy's Will (1913). Ezra Pound reviewed it favorably, excited (as he put it in a letter) by this "VURRY Amur'k'n talent." Pound recommended Frost's poems to American editors and helped get his second book, North of Boston, published in 1914. North of Boston was widely praised by critics in America and England when it appeared; the favorable reception persuaded Frost to return home. He bought another farm in New Hampshire and prospered financially through sales of his books and papers, along with teaching and lecturing at various colleges. The success he enjoyed for the rest of his life, however, came too late to cancel the bitterness left by his earlier struggles. Moreover, he endured personal tragedy: a son committed suicide, and a daughter had a complete mental collapse. The clarity of Frost's diction, the colloquial rhythms, the simplicity of his images, and above all the folksy speakerthese are intended to make the poems look natural, unplanned. In the context of the modernist movement, however, they can be seen as a thoughtful reply to high modernism's fondness for obscurity and difficulty. Although Frost's ruralism affirmed the modernist distaste for cities, he was writing the kind of traditional, accessible poetry that modernists argued could no longer be written. In addition, by investing in the New England terrain, he rejected modernist internationalism and revitalized the tradition of New England regionalism. Beaders who accepted

THE

PASTURE

1879

Frost's persona and his setting as typically American accepted the powerful myth that rural New England was the heart of America. Frost achieved an internal dynamic in his poems by playing the rhythms of ordinary speech against formal patterns of line and verse and containing them within traditional forms. The interaction of colloquial diction with blank verse is especially central to his dramatic monologues. To Frost traditional forms were the essence of poetry, material with which poets responded to flux and disorder (what, adopting scientific terminology, he called "decay") by forging something permanent. Poetry, he wrote, was "one step backward taken," resisting timea "momentary stay against confusion." Throughout the 1920s Frost's poetic practice changed very little; later books
including Mountain Interval (1916), Neiv Hampshire (1923), and West-Running

Brook (1928)confirmed the impression he had created in North of Boston. Most of his poems fall into a few types. Nature lyrics describing and commenting on a scene or eventlike "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Birches," and "After ApplePicking"are probably the best known and the most popular. There are also dramatic narratives in blank verse about the griefs of country people, like "The Death of the Hired Man," and poems of commentary or generalization, like "The Gift Outright," which he read at John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration in 1961. He could also be humorous or sardonic, as in "Fire and Ice." In the nature lyrics, a comparison often emerges between the outer scene and the psyche, a comparison of what Frost in one poem called "outer and inner weather." Because he worked so much with outdoor scenery, and because he presented himself as a New Englander, Frost is often interpreted as an ideological descendant of the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalists. But he is far less affirmative about the universe than they; for where they, looking at nature, discerned a benign creator, he saw "no expression, nothing to express." Frost did share with Emerson and Thoreau, however, the belief that everybody was a separate individuality and that collective enterprises could do nothing but weaken the self. Politically conservative, therefore, he avoided movements of the left and the right precisely because they were movements, group undertakings. In the 1930s when writers tended to be political activists, he was seen as one whose old-fashioned values were inappropriate, even dangerous, in modern times. Frost deeply resented this criticism, and responded to it with a newly hortatory, didactic kind of poetry. In the last twenty years of his life, Frost increased his activities as a teacher and lecturerat Amherst, at Dartmouth, at Harvard, at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, and in poetry readings and talks around the country. The text of the poems included here is that of The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969).

The Pasture
I'm g o i n g o u t to clean the p a s t u r e spring; I'll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch t h e water clear, I m a y ) : I shan't b e g o n e l o n g . Y o u c o m e t o o . I'm going o u t to fetch t h e little calf T h a t ' s s t a n d i n g by t h e m o t h e r . It's s o y o u n g It totters when s h e licks it with her t o n g u e . I shan't be g o n e long.You c o m e t o o . s

1913

Robert Frost