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THE BIRD-CATCHERS.
Drawn by Winslow Homer.]          [See Bird-Catching, page 461.

I.

bright sun shone on the little village of Rockdale; a bright glare was on the little bay close by, as on a silver mirror; three bright children were descending by a winding path towards the little village; a bright old man was coming up from the little village by the same winding path.

The three children were named William Earnest, Fred Frazer, and Alice. Alice was William Earnest’s sister, while Fred Frazer was his cousin. William Earnest was the eldest, and he was something more than eleven and something less than twelve years old. His cousin Fred Frazer was nearly a year younger, while his sister Alice was a little more than two years younger still. Fred Frazer was on a holiday visit to his relatives, it being vacation time from school; and the three children were ready for any kind of adventure, and for every sort of fun.

The children saw the old man before the old man saw the children; for the children were looking down the hill, while the old man, coming up the hill, was looking at his footsteps. As soon as the children saw the old man, the eldest recognized him as a friend, and no sooner had his eyes lighted on him than, much excited, he shouted loudly, “Hurrah, there comes the ancient mariner!”

His cousin, much surprised, asked quickly, “Who’s the ancient mariner?” And his sister, more surprised, asked timidly, “What’s the ancient mariner?”

Then the eldest, much elated, asked derisively, “Why, don’t you know?” And then he said, instructively: “He’s been about here for ever so long a time; but he went away last year, and I haven’t seen him for a great while. He’s the most wonderful man you ever saw,—tells such splendid stories,—all about shipwrecks, pirates, savages, Chinamen, bear-hunts, bull-fights, and everything else that you can think of. I call him the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ but that isn’t his right name. He’s Captain Hardy; but he looks like an ancient mariner, as he is, and I got the name out of a book. Some of the fellows call him ‘Old Father Neptune.’ ”

“What a funny name!” cried Fred.

“What do they call him Father Neptune for?” inquired Alice.

“Because,” answered William, looking very wise,—“because, you know, Neptune, he’s god of the sea, and Captain Hardy looks just like the pictures of him in the story-books. That’s why they call him Old Father Neptune.”

By this time the subject of the colloquy had come quite near, and William, suddenly leaving his companions, darted forward to meet the object of his admiration.

“O Captain Hardy, I’m so glad to see you!” exclaimed the little fellow, as he rushed upon him. “Where did you come from? Where have you been so long? How are you? Quite well, I hope,”—and he grasped the old man’s hand with both of his own, and shook it heartily.

“Well, my lad,” replied the old man, kindly, “I’m right glad to see you, and will be right glad to answer all your questions, if you’ll let them off easy like, and not all in a broadside”;—and as they walked on up the path together, William’s questions were answered to his entire satisfaction.

Then they came presently to Fred and Alice, who were introduced by William, very much to the delight of Fred; but Alice was inclined to be a little frightened, until the strange old man spoke to her in such a gentle way that it banished all timidity; and then, taking the hand which he held out to her, she trudged on beside him, happy and pleased as she could be.

The party were not long in reaching the gate leading up to the house of William’s father. A large old-fashioned country-house it was, standing among great tall trees, a good way up from the high-road; and William asked his friend to come up with them and see his father, “he will be so delighted”; but the old man said he “would call and see Mr. Earnest some other time; now he must be hurrying home.”

“But this isn’t your way home, Captain Hardy, is it?” exclaimed William, much surprised. “Why, I thought you lived away down below the village.”

“So I did once,” replied the old man; “that is, when I lived anywhere at all; but you see I’ve got a new home now, and a snug one, too. See, down there where the smoke curls up among the trees,—that’s from my kitchen.”

“But,” said William, “that’s Mother Podger’s house where the smoke is.”

“So it was once, my lad,” answered the old man; “but it’s mine now; for I’ve bought it and paid for it, too; and now I mean to quit roaming about the world, and to settle down there for the remainder of my days. You must all come down and see me; and if you do, I’ll give you a sail in my boat.”

“O, won’t that be grand!” exclaimed William; and Fred and Alice both said it would be “grand”; and then they all put a bold front on, and asked the old man if he wouldn’t take them to see the boat now, they would like so much to see it.

“Certainly I will,” answered the old man. “Come along,”—and he led the way over the slope down to the little bay where the boat was lying.

“There she is!” exclaimed he, when the boat came in view. “Isn’t she a snug craft? She rides the water just like a duck,”—whereupon the children all declared that they had never, in all their lives, seen anything so pretty, and that “a duck could not ride the water half so well.”

It was, indeed, a very beautiful little boat, or rather yacht. It was half decked over, making a cosey little cabin in the centre, with space enough behind and outside of it for four persons to sit quite comfortably. The seat was a sort of semicircle. The yacht had but one mast, and was painted white, both inside and out, with only the faintest red streak running all the way around its sides, just a little way above the water-line.

Captain Hardy (for that was the old man’s proper name and title, and therefore we will give it to him) now drew his little yacht close in to a little wharf that he had made, and the children stepped into it and ran through the cosey cabin, which was but very little higher than their heads, and had crimson cushions all along its sides to sit down on. These crimson cushions were the lids of what the Captain called his “lockers,”—boxes where he kept his little “traps.” In this little cabin there was the daintiest little stove, on which the Captain said they might cook something when they went out sailing.

When they had finished looking at the yacht, they jumped ashore again, and then, after securing the craft of which he was so proud, the Captain took the children to his house. It was a cunning little house, this house of the Captain’s. It was only one story high, and had an odd bay-window at one end and two odd windows in the roof; and it was as white and clean as a new table-cloth, while the window-shutters were as green as the grass that grew around it. Tall trees surrounded it on every side, making shade for the Captain when the sun shone, and music for the Captain when the wind blew. In front there was a quaint porch, all covered over with honeysuckles, smelling sweet, and near by, in a cluster of trees, there was a rustic arbor, completely covered up with vines and flowers. Starting from the front of the house, a path wound among the trees down to the little bay where lay the yacht; and on the left-hand side of this path, as you went down, a spring of pure water gurgled up into the bright air, underneath a rich canopy of ferns and wild-flowers.

William was much surprised to find that this house, which everybody knew as “Mother Podger’s house,” should now really belong to Captain Hardy; and he said so.

“You’d hardly know it, would you, since I’ve fixed it up, and made it shipshape like?” said the Captain. “I’ve done it nearly all myself, too. And now what do you think I’ve called it?”

The children said they could never guess,—to save their lives, they never could.

“I call it ‘Mariner’s Rest,’ ” said the Captain.

“O, how beautiful! and so appropriate!” exclaimed William; and Fred and Alice chimed in and said the same.

“And now,” went on the Captain, “you must steer your course for the ‘Mariner’s Rest’ again,—right soon, too, and the old man will be glad to see you.”

“Thank you, Captain Hardy,” answered William, with a bow. “If we get our parents’ leave we’ll come to-morrow, if that will not too much trouble you.”

“It will not trouble me at all,” replied the Captain. “Let it be four o’clock, then,—come at four o’clock. That will suit me perfectly; and it may be that I’ll have,” continued he, “a bit of a story or two to tell you. Besides, I think I promised something of the kind before to William, when I came home this time twelvemonth ago. Do you remember it, my lad?”

William said he remembered it well, and his eyes opened wide with pleasure and surprise.

“Now what was it?” inquired the Captain, thoughtfully. “Was it a story about the hot regions, or the cold regions? for you see things don’t stick in my memory now as they used to.”

“It was about the cold regions, that I’m sure,” replied William; “for you said you would tell me the story you told Bob Benton and Dick Savery,—something, you know, about your being ‘cast away in the cold,’ as Dick Savery said you called it.”

“Ah, yes, that’s it, that’s it,” exclaimed the old man, as if recalling the occasion when he had made the promise with much pleasure. “I remember it very well. I promised to tell you how I first came to go to sea, and what happened to me when I got there. Eh? That was it, I think.”

“That was exactly it, only you said you were ‘cast away in the cold,’ ” said William.

“No matter for that, my lad,” replied the Captain, with a knowing look,—“no matter for that. If you know how a story’s going to end, it spoils the telling of it, don’t you see? Consider that I didn’t get cast away, in short, that you know nothing of what happened to me, only that I went to sea, and leave the rest to turn up as we go along. And now, good day to all of you, my dears. Come down to-morrow, and we’ll have the story, and may be a sail, if the wind’s fair and weather fine,—at any rate, the story.”

And the children were probably the happiest children that were ever seen, as they turned about for home, showering thanks upon the Captain with such tremendous earnestness that he was forced in self-defence to cry, “Enough, enough! run home and say no more.”

Captain Hardy, or Captain John Hardy, or Captain Jack Hardy, or plain Captain Jack, or simple Captain, as his neighbors pleased to name him, was a famous character in the village. Everybody knew the Captain, and everybody liked him. He was a mysterious sort of person,—here to-day and there to-morrow,—coming and going all the time, until he fairly tired out the public curiosity, so that even the greatest gossips in the town had to confess at length that there was no use trying to make anything of this strange man, and they gave up inquiring and bothering about him; but were glad to see him always, none the less.

The Captain was known as a great talker, and was always, in former years, brimful of stories of adventure to tell to any one he met, during his short stays in the village, who would listen to him; and, in truth, any one was glad to listen, he talked so well. Many and many a summer evening he spent seated on an old bench in front of the village inn, reciting tales of shipwrecks, and stories of the sea and land, to the wondering people. Of late years, however, he was not disposed to talk so much, and was not so often seen at his favorite haunt. “I’m getting too old,” he would say, “to tarry from home after nightfall.”

He had now grown to be fifty-nine years old, although he really looked much more aged, for he bore about him the marks of much hardship and privation. His hair was quite white, and fell in long silvery locks over his shoulders, while a heavy snow-white beard covered his breast. There was always something in his appearance denoting the sailor. Perhaps it was that he always wore loose pantaloons,—white in summer, and blue in winter,—and a sort of tarpaulin hat, with long blue ribbons tied round it, the ends flowing off behind like the pennant of a man-of-war.

Captain Hardy was known to everybody as a generous, warm-hearted, and harmless man; but he was thought to be equally improvident. The poor had a constant friend in him. No beggar ever asked the Captain for a shilling without getting it, if the Captain had it anywhere about him. Sometimes he had plenty of money, yet when at home he always lived in a frugal, homely way. Great was the rejoicing, therefore, among his friends (and they were many) when it was known that he had fallen in with a streak of good fortune. Having been chiefly instrumental in saving the British bark Dauntless from shipwreck, the insurance companies had awarded him a liberal salvage, and it was to secure this that he had gone away on his last voyage. As soon as he came home he went right off and bought the house which we have before described, with the money he brought back; and for once got the credit of doing a prudent thing.

The old man’s happiness seemed now complete. “Here,” exclaimed he, “Heaven willing, I will end my days in peace.” But after the excitement of fitting up his house and grounds, and getting his little yacht in order, had passed over, he began to feel a little lonely. He was so far away from the village that he could not see his old friends as often as he wished to. We have seen that he was a great talker; and he liked so much to talk, and thus to “fight his battles over again,” and had so much to talk about, that an audience was quite necessary to him. It is not improbable, therefore, that he looked upon his meeting with William and Fred and Alice as a fortunate event for him; and if the children were delighted, so was he. He was very fond of children, and these were children after his own heart. To them the coming story was a great event,—how great, the reader could scarcely understand, unless he knew how much every boy in Rockdale was envied by all the other boys, when he was known to have been specially picked out by Captain Hardy to be the listener to some tale of adventure on the sea.

As we may well suppose, the Captain’s little friends did not tarry at home next day beyond the appointed time; but, true as the hands of the clock to mark the hour and minute on the dial-plate, they set out for Captain Hardy’s house as fast as they could go,—as if their very lives depended on their speed. They found the Captain seated in the shady arbor, smoking a long clay pipe. “I’m glad to see you, children,” was his greeting to them; and glad enough he was too,—much more glad, may be, than he would care to own,—as glad, perhaps, as the children were themselves.

“And now, my dears,” continued he, “shall we have the story? There is no wind you see, so we cannot have a sail.”

“O, the story! yes, yes, the story,” cried the children, all at once.

“Then the story it shall be,” replied the old man; “but first you must sit down,”—and the children sat down upon the rustic seat, and closed their mouths, and opened wide their ears, prepared to listen; while the Captain knocked the ashes from his long clay pipe, and stuck it in the rafter overhead, and cleared his throat, prepared to talk.

“Now you must know,” began the Captain, “that I cannot finish the story I’m going to tell you all in one day,—indeed, I can only just begin it. It’s a very long one, so you must come down to-morrow, and next day, and every bright day after that until we’ve done. Does that please you?”

“Yes, yes,” was the ready answer, and little Alice fairly cried with joy.

“Will you be sure to remember the name of the place you come to? Will you remember that its name is ‘Mariner’s Rest’? Will you remember that?”

“Yes indeed we will.”

“And now for the boat we’re to have a sail in by and by; what do you think I’ve called that?”

“Sea-Gull?” guessed William.

“Water-Witch?” guessed Fred.

“White Dove?” guessed Alice.

“All wrong,” said the Captain, smiling a smile of satisfaction. “I’ve painted the name on her in bright golden letters, and when you go down again to look at her, you’ll see ‘Alice’ there, and the letters are just the color of some little girl’s hair I know of.”

“Is that really her name?” shouted both the boys at once, glad as they could be; “how jolly!” But little Alice said never a word, but crept close to the old man’s side, and the old man put his great, big arm around the child’s small body, and as the soft sunlight came stealing in through the openings in the foliage of the trees, flinging patches of brightness over the green grass around, the Captain began his story. And thus it was:—

“Now, my little listeners,” spoke the Captain, “you must know that what I am going to tell you occurred to me at a very early period of my life, when I was a mere boy; in fact, the adventures which I shall relate to you were the first I ever had.

“To begin, then, at the very beginning, I must tell you that I was born very near this place. So you see I have good reason for always liking to come back to the neighborhood. It is like coming home, you know. The place of my birth is only eleven miles from Rockdale by the public road, which runs off there in a west-nor’westerly direction.

“My mother died when I was six years old, but I remember her as a good and gentle woman. She was taken away, however, too early to have left any distinct impression upon my mind or character. I was thus left to grow up with three brothers and two sisters, all but one of whom were older than myself, without a mother’s kindly care and instruction; and I must here own, that I grew to be a self-willed and obstinate boy; and this disposition led me into a course of disobedience which, but for the protecting care of a merciful Providence, would have brought my life to a speedy end.

“My father being poor, neither myself nor my brothers and sisters received any other education than what was afforded by the common country school. It was, indeed, as much as my father could do at any time to support so large a family and at the end of the year make both ends meet.

“As for myself, I was altogether a very ungrateful fellow, and appreciated neither the goodness of my father nor any of the other blessings which I had. Of the advantages of a moderate education which were offered to me I did not avail myself,—preferring mischief and idleness to my studies; and I manifested so little desire to learn, and was so troublesome to the master, that I was at length sent home, and forbidden to come back any more. Whereupon my father, very naturally, grew angry with me, and, no doubt thinking it hopeless to try further to make anything of me, he regularly bound me over, or hired me out, for a period of years, to a neighboring farmer, who compelled me to work very hard; so I thought myself ill used, whereas, in truth, I did not receive half my deserts.

“With this farmer I lived three years and a half before he made the discovery that I was wholly useless to him, and that I did not do work enough to pay for the food I ate; so the farmer complained to my father, and threatened to send me home. This made me very indignant, as I foolishly thought myself a greatly abused and injured person, and, in an evil hour, I resolved to stand it no longer. I would spite the old farmer, and punish my father for listening to him, by running away.

“I was now in my eighteenth year,—old enough, as one would have thought, to have more manliness and self-respect; but about this I had not reflected much.

“I set out on my ridiculous journey without one pang of regret,—so hardened was I in heart and conscience,—carrying with me only a change of clothing, and having in my pocket only one small piece of bread, and two small pieces of silver. It was rather a bold adventure, but I thought I should have no difficulty in reaching New Bedford, where I was fully resolved to take ship and go to sea.

“The journey to New Bedford was a much more difficult undertaking than I had counted upon, and I believe, but for the wound which it would have caused to my pride, I should have gone back at the end of the first five miles. I held on, however, and reached my destination on the second day, having stopped overnight at a public house or inn, where my two pieces of silver disappeared in paying for my supper and lodging and breakfast.

“I arrived at New Bedford near the middle of the afternoon of the second day, very hot and dusty, for I had walked all the way through the broiling sun along the high-road; and I was very tired and hungry, too, for I had tasted no food since morning, having no more money to buy any with, and not liking to beg. So I wandered on through the town towards the place where the masts of ships were to be seen as I looked down the street,—feeling miserable enough, I can assure you.

“Up to this period of my life, I had never been ten miles from home, and had never seen a city, so of course everything was new to me. By this time, however, I had come to reflect seriously on my folly, and this, coupled with hunger and fatigue, so far banished curiosity from my mind that I was not in the least impressed by what I saw. In truth, I very heartily wished myself back on the farm; for if the labor there was not to my liking, it was at least not so hard as that which I had performed these past two days, in walking along the dusty road,—and then I was, when on the farm, never without the means to satisfy my hunger.

“What I should have done at this critical stage, had not some one come to my assistance, I cannot imagine. I was afraid to ask any questions of the passers-by, for I did not really know what to ask them, or how to explain my situation; and, seeing that everybody was gaping at me with wonder and curiosity, (and, indeed, many of them were clearly laughing at my absurd appearance,) I hurried on, not having the least idea of where I should go or what I should do.

“At length I saw a man with a very red face approaching on the opposite side of the street, and from his general appearance I guessed him to be a sailor; so, driven almost to desperation, I crossed the street, looking, I am sure, the very picture of despair, and I thus accosted him: ‘If you please, sir, can you tell me where I can go and ship for a voyage?’

“ ‘A voyage!’ shouted he, in reply, ‘a voyage! A pretty-looking fellow you for a voyage!’—which observation very much confused me. Then he asked me a great many questions, using a great many hard names, the meaning of which I did not at all understand, and the necessity for which I could not exactly see. I noticed that he called me ‘land-lubber’ very frequently, but I had no idea whether he meant it as a compliment or an abusive epithet, though it seemed more likely to me that it was the latter. After a while, however, he seemed to have grown tired of talking, or had exhausted his collection of strange words, for he turned short round and bade me follow him, which I did, with very much the feelings a culprit must have when he is going to prison.

“We soon arrived at a low, dingy place, the only noticeable feature of which was that it smelled of tar and had a great many people lounging about in it. It was, as I soon found out, a ‘shipping office,’—that is, a place where sailors engage themselves for a voyage. No sooner had we entered than my conductor led me up to a tall desk, and then, addressing himself to a hatchet-faced man on the other side of it, he said something which I did not clearly comprehend. Then I was told to sign a paper, which I did without even reading a word of it, and then the red-faced man cried out in a very loud and startling tone of voice, ‘Bill!’ when somebody at once rolled off a bench, and scrambled to his feet. This was evidently the ‘Bill’ alluded to.

“When Bill had got upon his feet, he surveyed me for an instant, as I thought, with a very needlessly firm expression of countenance, and then started towards the door, saying to me as he set off, ‘This way, you lubber.’ I followed after him with much the same feelings which I had had before when I followed the man with the red face, until we came down to where the ships were, and then we descended a sort of ladder, or stairs, at the foot of which I stumbled into a boat, and had like to have gone bodily into the water. At this, the people in the boat set up a great laugh at my clumsiness,—just as if I had ever been in a boat before, and could help being clumsy. To make the matter worse, I sat down in the wrong place, where one of the men was to pull an oar; and when, after being told to ‘get out of that,’ with no end of hard names, I asked what bench I should sit on, they all laughed louder than before, which still further overwhelmed me with confusion. I did not then know that what I called a ‘bench,’ they called a ‘thwart,’ or more commonly ‘thawt.’

“At length, after much abuse and more laughter, I managed to get into the forward part of the boat, which was called, as I found out, ‘the bows,’ where there was barely room to coil myself up, and, the boat being soon pushed off from the wharf, the oars were put out, and then I heard an order to ‘give way,’ and then the oars splashed in the water, and I felt the boat moving; and now, as I realized that I was in truth leaving my home and native land, perhaps to see them no more forever, my heart sank heavy in my breast.

“It was as much as I could do to keep the tears from pouring out of my eyes, as we glided on over the harbor. Indeed, my eyes were so bedimmed that I scarcely saw anything at all until we came around under the stern of a ship, when I heard the men ordered to ‘lay in their oars.’ Then one of them caught hold of the end of a rope, which was thrown from the ship; and, the boat being made fast, we all scrambled up the ship’s side; and then I was hustled along to a hole in the forward part of the deck, (having what looked like a box turned upside down over it,) through which, now utterly bewildered, I descended, by means of a ladder, to a dark, damp, mouldy place, which was filled with the foul smells of tar and bilge-water, and thick with tobacco-smoke. This, they told me, was the ‘fo’castle,’ where lived the ‘crew,’ of which, I became now painfully conscious, I was one. If there had been the slightest chance, I should have run away; but running away from a ship is a very different thing from running away from a farm.

“If I had wished myself back on the farm before, how much more did I wish it now! But too late, too late, for we were all ordered up out of the forecastle even before I had tasted a mouthful of food. In truth, however, it is very likely that I was too sick with the foul odors, tobacco-smoke, and heart-burnings to have eaten anything, even had it been set before me.

“Upon reaching the deck, I was immediately ordered to lay hold of a wooden shaft, about eight feet long, which ran through the end of an iron lever; and being joined by some more of the crew, we pushed down and lifted up this lever, just like firemen working an old fashioned fire-engine. Opposite to us was another party pushing down when we were lifting up, and lifting up when we were pushing down. I soon found out that by this operation we were turning over and over what seemed to be a great log of wood, with iron bands at the end of it, and having a great chain winding up around it. The chain came in through a round hole in the ship’s side, with a loud ‘click, click,’ and I learned that they called it a ‘cable,’ while the machine we were working was called a windlass. The cable was of course fast to the anchor, and it was very evident to me that we were going to put to sea immediately. The idea of it was now as dreadful to me as it had before been agreeable, when I had contemplated it from the stand-point of a quiet farm, a good many miles away from the sea. But I could not help myself: no matter what might happen, my fate was sealed, so far as concerned this ship.

“We had not been long engaged at this work of turning the windlass, before my companions set up a song, keeping time with the lever which we were pushing up and down, one of them leading off by reciting a single line, in which something was said about ‘Sallie coming,’ or ‘having come,’ or going to come to ‘New York town’; after which they all united in a dismal chorus, that had not a particle of sense in it, so far as I could see, from beginning to end. When they had finished off with the chorus, the leader set to screaming again about ‘Sallie’ and ‘New York town,’ and then as before came the chorus. Having completely exhausted himself on the subject of ‘Sallie,’ he began to invent, and his inventive genius was rewarded with a laugh which interfered with the chorus through two turns of the windlass. What he invented was this:—

And now they drawled out the chorus as before, which I will recite that you may see how senseless it was. Here it is, following, as you will understand, directly after ‘New Bedford town’:—

You see I drawl it out very slow to imitate them. As soon as they were through with this chorus, the leader put in his tongue again, inventing a sentiment to rhyme with the first, howling it out as if he would split his throat in the endeavor. This is what it was:—

which made them all laugh even more than the other sentiment, and caused an interruption of the chorus to the extent of four revolutions of the windlass; but when the laugh was over, they went at the dismal chorus again with double the energy they had previously shown, repeating all they had said before about ‘John’s getting along,’ and ‘storming along,’ after the same manner as before. And thus they went on without much variety, until I was sick and tired enough of it. The ‘lubber’ part of it was too clearly aimed at me to be mistaken; but I could not discover in it anything but nonsense all the way through to the end.

“After a while I heard some one cry out, ‘The anchor’s away,’ which, as I afterwards learned, meant the anchor had been lifted from the bottom; and then the sailors all scattered to obey an order to do something, which I had not the least idea of, with a sail, and with some ropes which appeared to me to be so mixed up that nobody could tell one from the other, nor make head nor tail of them. In the twinkling of an eye, however, in spite of the mixed-up ropes, there was a great flapping of white canvas, and a creaking and rattling of pulleys. Then the huge white sail was fully spread, the wind was bulging it out in the middle like a balloon, the ship’s head was turned away from the town, and we were moving off. Next came an order to ‘lay aloft and shake out the topsail’; but happily in this order I was not included, but was, instead, directed to ‘lend a hand to get the anchor aboard,’ which operation was quickly accomplished, and the heavy mass of crooked iron which had held the ship firmly in the harbor was soon fastened in its proper place on the bow, to what is called the ‘cat-head.’ By the time this was done, every sail was set, and we were flying before the wind out into the great ocean.

“And now you see my wish was gratified. I was in a ship and off on the ‘world of waters,’ with the career of a sailor before me,—a career to my imagination when on the farm full of romance, and presenting everything that was desirable in life. But was it so in reality, when I was brought face to face with it,—when I had exchanged the farm for the forecastle? By no means. Indeed, I was filled with nothing but disgust first, and terror afterwards. The first sight which I had of the ocean was much less impressive to me than would have been my father’s duck-pond. I soon got miserably sick; night came on, dark and fearful; the winds rose; the waves dashed with great force against the ship’s sides, often breaking over the deck, and wetting me to the skin. I was shivering with cold; I was afraid that I should be washed overboard; I was afraid that I should be killed by something tumbling on me from aloft, for there was such a great rattling up there in the darkness that I thought everything was broken loose. I could not stand on the deck without support, and was knocked about when I attempted to move; every time the ship went down into the trough of a sea I thought all my insides were coming up. So, altogether, you see I was in a very bad way. How, indeed, should it be otherwise? for can you imagine any ills so great as these?—1st, To have all your clothes wet; 2d, To have a sick stomach; and, 3d, To be in a dreadful fright. Now that was precisely my condition; and I was already reaping the fruits of my folly in running away from home and exchanging a farm for a forecastle.”

The Captain here paused and laughed heartily at the picture he had drawn of himself in his ridiculous rôle of “the young sailor-boy,” and, after clearing his throat, was about to proceed with the story, when he perceived that the shades of evening had already begun to fall upon the arbor. Looking out among the trees, he saw the leaves and branches standing sharply out against the golden sky, which showed him that the day was ended and the sun was set. So he told his little friends to hasten home before the dews began to fall upon the grass, and come again next day. This they promised thankfully, and told the Captain that they “never, never, never would forget it.”

But the head of William was filled with a bright idea, and he was bound to discharge it before he left the place. “O Captain Hardy,” cried the little fellow, “do you know what I was thinking of?”

“How should I, before you tell me?” was the Captain’s very natural answer.

“Why, I was thinking how nice it would be to write all this down on paper. It would read just like a printed book.”

The Captain said he “liked the idea,” but he doubted if William could remember it. But William thought he could remember every word of it, and declared that it was splendid; and Fred and Alice, following after, said that it was splendid too. But whether the story that the Captain told was splendid, or the idea of writing it down was splendid, or exactly what was splendid, was not then and there settled; yet it was fully settled that William was to write the story down the best he could, and ask his father to correct the worst mistakes. And now, when this was done, the happy children said “Good evening” to the Captain, and set out merrily for home, little Alice holding to her brother’s hand, as she tripped lightly over the green field, turning every dozen steps to throw back through the tender evening air, from her dainty little finger-tips, a laughing kiss to the ancient mariner, whose face beamed kindly on her from the arbor door.

I. I. H.

I am Jack,—Jimmy-Jack,—My-Jimmy-Jack. Perhaps I shall never find a better time to tell my own story. I am beginning to be left a good deal by myself, so I can think it all over at my leisure. The only trouble is, that I am as likely to be left standing on my head in the waste-basket, or tied round the door-knob, or lying face downward in the bath-tub, as in any easier position, and this, of course, has a tendency to mix my wits sadly, and may make my story somewhat mixed; but I have a story of my own, and it is just as good to me as anybody’s story.

I was made something as Haydie Woodward said he was. How was that? Why, when he was about three years old, there came a visitor to the house who was very fond of him. She was sitting at the window with him one evening, when the great moon came creeping up over the mountains, with her wise old face turned full upon us to see if things were going any better than they were the last time she came round; and as the little boy turned as round and bright and almost as wise a face upward, the lady said, “It’s grand, isn’t it, Haydie? Do you know who made the moon?”

“No,” Haydie said, he was quite sure he didn’t know anything about it, and listened to the lady’s explanations as if he had never been told before.

When his mamma was putting him in bed that night, she said, “O Haydie! How could you tell the lady you didn’t know who made the moon? You mortified me; you knew that as well as you know who made you. Who did make you, Haydie?”

“Why, mamma! It was Dod—on the sewin’-machine!”

Now I was made by Miss Alice, on knitting-needles. Whether she began at the bottom of the blue tassel of my cap, or at the tip of one of my black stockings, I can’t say: there are several stitches dropped in my bump of memory. But one thing I do know: when I was once made, I was done, and didn’t have to be knit out longer in the legs and arms, every little while, as seems to be the uncomfortable way with boys and girls in general.

To be sure, a few stitches more would have made my left leg as long as my right, which it isn’t; and my right eyebrow as high as my left, which it also isn’t; and my two thumbs of the same size, which they are not by a good deal. But that is neither here nor there, when you think how nice it was to be born (as I was) as much of a man as I could ever be by living a hundred years, with a splendid (blue) black beard all ready grown and curled, and with all my clothes for a lifetime on my back. No sooner was I born and admired, than I was named Jack, and sent off, by rail, to my present home.

I may as well tell you first as last, that I was not “born free and equal,” (I don’t now refer to my legs, thumbs, and eyebrows,) like you “Young Folks,” but a slave! All my journey, I hardly drew a breath, I was so anxious about the hands I was to fall into at its end. When at last I arrived, and was unwrapped, (it was on Christmas day,) I nearly burst out laughing in spite of my good manners (Miss Alice took care to put that in, whatever other stitches she skipped), and my solemn old face (“old,” I say, for I looked fifty at least the day I was born), when I saw who the master I had been so dreading really was; for whom should it be but Queenie!

Don’t you know Queenie? Dear me! That’s a pity. I don’t know how I ever can describe her. She was a ten-months-old baby, as white, as pink, as sweet as any Mayflower, but given to much buzzing, like a honey-bee, and with very loose ideas as to the uses of things.

Accordingly, when I was presented to her, she buzzed and babbled and danced in her nurse’s arms, and finally pounced upon me as if she had been a humming-bird, and I so much trumpet-honeysuckle; and, first I knew, my red, white, blue, spick-span new cap (with my head inside it!) was in a fair way to be made into honey, on the inner side of her pretty little bill! Thanks to somebody, I was pulled out then; but many a time since I have been there,—some part of my body, I mean,—and the wonder is that I am alive to tell the tale.

Queenie was now staying at her grandpapa’s, because her own papa and mamma had been forced to leave her behind while they went over the seas in search of a blessing which they were not to find. The baby was too young to miss them, and indeed she was surrounded with such an atmosphere of love that I think she could hardly have wished for more had she been older. But how they missed her!

That very Christmas morning when I came to their darling, they were sitting on the great steps of St. Peter’s, in Rome, singing lullabies for her softly together, as they did every single day of their absence.

Since I began to write, I have happened to find two letters which were written to Queenie’s papa and mamma in honor of my arrival, which I think you ought to see. Here is

Next comes Nurse Susan’s letter,—“Hoosie,” as Queenie called her. She was a bright English girl, who had taken care of the little one ever since she was three weeks old. The moment she came into the nursery, Queenie had liked her. She took the wee baby right into her arms, and, seating herself in a chair without rockers, jounced backward and forward, singing at the top of her voice,—

till everybody in the house was distracted but the wee baby, who thought it was splendid, and to this day thinks the same!

Hoosie had been two years in this country, and had smoothed off her old English a good deal; still, if she were very much excited, she was apt to fall back on Staffordshire. “O, isn’t hurr too cunning!” she would say, when her little charge developed some new accomplishment.

The handwriting of this letter is so particularly nice that I wish I could show it to you, and all the more because the spelling isn’t quite what we are used to in New England. Still it may be all right in Staffordshire; and here is the letter precisely as she wrote it.

Now if you think there was ever a letter written which gave much more pleasure to those who received it than this, I have the very best authority for telling you that you are mistaken.

From that Christmas day till now, I believe Queenie and I have never spent a day apart from each other.

Even when I first knew her she was a great talker; that is to say, she repeated the two or three words she knew over and over again a great many times, which makes the liveliest conversation in the world! When she was only five months old, she had said “Papa” and “Mamma,” and when her other grandpapa (for this little girl was so rich as to have two grandpapas, and really “grand” they were), who then lived with her, asked her, in his deep bass voice, to say “Grandpa,” what should the little mimic do, but drop her voice away down into the bottom of her throat and growl out “Papa,” as gruff as you please, which made everybody laugh; and so she did it over and over again, and thought, as sure as could be, that she was saying “Grandpa!” After that, she never failed to growl for “Grandpa,” while for “Papa” she used her natural tone: at least she did this until she learned to say “Gannapa,” two or three months later. But this happened before I knew her, as did her summer at the sea-shore at the same age, when she was the belle of the season, and promenaded the veranda on everybody’s arm; and every morning “received” a select company, who saw her come out of her bath, and take her “constitutional,” pacing up and down Nurse Susan from head to foot with as regular steps as if she had known how to walk; and where one day in the bowling-alley a gentleman kissed her, and said he should want to do it again sixteen years from that time, at which she buzzed and whirred very disdainfully, as she ought!

But to return to the things which I saw and part of which I was. Every day when the sun was bright, Queenie and Susan and I would go out on the green, where the gray squirrels keep house in grand style in the old elms, but come down very graciously (when they are hungry) to receive offerings of nuts, &c. from their admirers, little and big, or else we walked through the city streets, staring at all the pretty things in the shop windows, with nobody to say “Don’t!” to us.

But if I tell you all that was done and said, nobody would put me into print, which would be too dreadful for the world and me.

There came a sweet morning in May, when Queenie once more saw her papa and mamma. She was very shy at first. There she sat on Hoosie’s arm, holding me very tight, looking very stately in her short white frock and blue ribbons,—(“Deary me! what has become of our precious long baby whom we left behind us? Does this dainty little maiden really belong to us?”—this was one of the things they thought as they saw her,)—and looking at them solemnly from under her long lashes. But it wasn’t long before her papa had her seated on a big newspaper, spread upon the carpet, and was drawing her all about the parlors, bowing down his dear head, which was usually so high above us all, and almost breaking his back, for the sake of giving his baby one of his famous boat-rides, as he used to do before he went away. But although she sat up as straight as she did long before, when papa first invented the pretty paper boat, and wasn’t at all sea-sick, and was very much at home (she had me in her arms, you may be sure!) and delighted, yet we came to grief, for we “sat and sat and sat till we sat the bottom out” of our newspaper, and it was concluded that Queenie had grown quite too substantial for such a fairy craft.

But this return home brought me my first trial. We went back at once to Queenie’s birthplace to live again, and there, sitting in the biggest chair in the study, was a magnificent poupée as she called herself, nearly as tall as our Queenie! Her hair was crépé in the height of the fashion, and was also of the most modish shade,—a cream-white. Between you and me, it was nothing in the world but lamb’s wool! I think I ought to know, for I’ve worn that same wig (much against my will) a great many times since. But nobody would have imagined, when Mademoiselle Eugénie first arrived in this country, that graceful head to have been nothing but sheep-skin and Spalding’s glue! Her color was beautiful, and I think it must have been her own, for it was as bright as ever the last time I saw her, when she had been through everything and been scrubbed with everything imaginable.

When we first saw her—Queenie and I—she wasn’t in what we should call full dress. Queenie’s papa had done the best he could for her, for, as she had no clothes to speak of when she arrived, he had ransacked the house while mamma was gone, and found a baby nightgown, which fitted the pretty creature very nicely.

She was a beauty, I must confess, although later in our lives she cost me many a heart-burn. Her eyes were deep, and bright, and blue like Queenie’s, and her round limbs tapered into the plumpest little hands and feet, with real fingers and toes, as full of dimples as Queenie’s own.

Eugénie she was to have been named, because she was born under the very shadow of the Tuileries; but Queenie cried out “Minnie” when she first clasped the new playmate in her arms, and so “Minnie” she had to be forever, of course.

Minnie could sit down, and kneel down, and stand up, like any other lady, and she always gave you the impression that, if she didn’t walk, it was only because she didn’t think it worth her while. Her coquettish head could turn from side to side in the most fascinating manner, and indeed she tried this graceful art so often that the terrible consequence was that by and by she twisted it around so that the back was where her face should have been,—so look out, little folks, and not turn and twist too much!

But I am anticipating my story by a good many months.

At first, Minnie’s head was all right; but, alas for poor me! I was all wrong. At least, Queenie no sooner saw the new pet than she threw me behind the big Japan books on a lower shelf in the library, and there I lay for several hours, till little black Willy drew me out by one leg, and made much ado over me, comforting me.

Poor little soul! He knew how to sympathize with the neglected and lonely. He was the only child of black Nancy, who had been cook years and years ago at Queenie’s mamma’s mamma’s. She had heard great stories of what was to be seen in far countries from the sailor-boy of the family, and was wild to see for herself. So one day (when she was quite an old woman, as the young people thought) she set sail for the East Indies, where she saw many things which are not set down in the books. “I saw the Cave of the Elephants,” said she, in my hearing once. “White folks said it growed so, but I knowed, as quick as I see it, it was huged out of a rock.”

But after a time back she came from her wanderings, bringing with her a little black dot which she called a baby. By and by it grew till other people could see that it really was a baby, and after Queenie’s mamma had a house of her own in a strange city, who should come into its kitchen one day but black Nancy, looking no older than ever, (for she was like me in always being, and never growing, old,) and with her the black dot grown into a four-years-old morsel of a boy named Willy.

He was just as black as black could be; at least you thought so, until he snapped his eyes at you, which were so much blacker than his skin, that that began to seem “yaller” as Nancy called it, and which she thought was almost worse than being wicked; so it couldn’t have really been “yaller,” only a different shade of black. And as for his hair, that curled tighter to his head than French Minnie’s, although Nancy was so opposed to crooked hair that she once had her own head shaved as smooth as your hand, and Queenie’s mamma and uncle remember rushing out into the kitchen to see the operation, and how very queer her old pate looked when the barber had piled up the pure white “lather” all over it, and how brown and shiny it looked when the razor had done its work, and how odd she looked in a wig of straight brown hair, and how very cross she was when the new crop began to sprout, and was woollier and crookeder than ever, and how spitefully she would twitch it and say, “The black scorpion!”

But perhaps the new fashion had reconciled Nancy to frizzed hair; at any rate, Willy’s frizzed with a will; but his eyes shone with real fire, and he was as bright as if he had been snow-white and violet-eyed like our Queenie. But how he admired Queenie! He would sit on the floor at her feet, and show all his shining teeth as he laughed up at her, and once in a great while touch her little white hand with the tip of his black finger, or even his red lips.

As for Queenie, she just thought he was the funniest joke! She laughed as soon as she looked toward him; but when he ducked his queer little fleecy head at her, and said, “Moder’s little lamb! moder’s little lamb!” she laughed all over, and it seemed as if she could never stop.

But, as I said, Willy dragged me out from my Japan dungeon, and as soon as Queenie saw me again,—the darling!—she dropped Minnie, with all her roses, and dimples, and curls, and hugged me as if I had been gone a year. Then her papa picked her up with me in her arms, and gave Willy a whistle and a big bell, and marched all over the house, singing,

while Willy squeaked the whistle and rang the bell before us, as solemnly as if he had been a Fourth-of-July celebration. And as for Minnie, she stayed in the drawer a good deal of the time after that, until Queenie grew bigger; for Mamma said Old Jack was best after all, for it made no difference whether he was wet or dry, or which side up or out he was, or how many ways he was doubled up.

Willy told Queenie and me a great many big stories. One of these was about a great gold woman who stood up night and day on the top of the court-house opposite us, holding a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. Willy said his mother told him that this was the first woman who ever killed her husband in Massachusetts. But why she should be changed into pure gold for that reason, and set up on high, he didn’t tell us. Willy also tried to teach us to say, “Wiggle, waggle, little star,” (which Nancy used to repeat to Queenie’s mamma, instead of “Twinkle, twinkle,”) but we were dull learners and only laughed. Nancy had had a great deal of pains taken with her to teach her to read, but could never learn; and, indeed, said, “Colored folks haven’t any souls, and course dey can’t learn,”—because you must know she had been a slave once, and very badly treated, so that she had lost hope, and was sometimes very sour. But when she came to have a child of her own, though he was very “colored,” she was quite sure he had a soul, and wanted him to learn how to read and do everything like “white folks.”

So Queenie’s mamma, who had tried when a little girl to educate black Nancy, must needs try her hand now on Willy. But Willy liked to teach better than to learn. He never got beyond “round O,” which was where he began. But one day, when he was set to look for round O’s, he fixed upon a big C, and said “Dere’s a broken O”; which wasn’t so bad a mistake as might have been made.

But I must tell you something which happened one night after Queenie was fast asleep. Our cook had been sent away, and black Nancy came to fill her place for the time, and of course little Willy had to come with her. When bedtime came, Nancy found she had left his clothes in the little room, at the other side of the city, which these poor strays called home. So an old nightgown which had once belonged to a gentleman six feet high was brought out for her, as the best substitute that could be easily found, and Willy was tucked into it bodily, and put in bed in the fourth story, and left to his fate.

But when Nancy had been down in the kitchen some time, Willy waked up to the idea that he was in a strange place, and that a familiar face would be a pleasant sight. So, after shouting “Moder!” and “Nancy!” (he called his mother either name, as it happened) till he was tired, he decided to make a raid on the lower regions.

The young minister was sitting in his study on the second floor, writing away at his sermon, when he saw, through the open door, the oddest of ghosts sliding down the attic stairs. There was a little black knob on top, from which descended a dozen yards (more or less) of white drapery, which dragged and whisked and flopped from stair to stair as the little black knob came nearer. The sermon might have had some queer quavers in it by good rights, for it was a very funny sight. I was lying on the study-table under the concordance, and it almost killed me,—the ghost, and not the concordance.

It didn’t take the minister long to guess what was inside the bale of cotton, and he pitied the forlorn little fellow so much that, as soon as he could stop laughing, he told Willy he might come in and sit on the floor by him, and even gave him the chessmen to play with, which was a very rare treat to Queenie herself. And the little spectre never knew how it made the kind gentleman ache to keep the laugh in, as he talked so pleasantly with him.

One question Queenie’s papa asked Willy was, if Nancy had told him anything about Jesus Christ. “Yes sirr,” said Willy, sturdily. “What did she say about him?” “O, she said he was such a pooty man!” Now this made the minister feel as much like crying as he had felt before like laughing, for it touched him tenderly to see how the poor, ignorant woman had tried to teach her child, and had given to the Saviour of men the very choicest epithet she knew, “Pretty.”

But by and by Willy began to ask for “Moder” again, and the minister’s laugh came back as the little black knob with its trailing folds and floating streamers began to move off toward the door. So he bade Willy go down the staircase and knock at the door of the parlor below, and ask there for his “moder”! And so he did, and Queenie’s mamma (who, as the minister knew, was entertaining visitors there) opened the door, and there in the bright gas-light stood the long ghost with the little black knob to it! Then there was such a shout from the ladies and gentlemen below, echoed by the minister, leaning over the banisters above, that the little black knob spread all its wings—mighty pens and downy pin-feathers—and fluttered toward the basement, the most astonishing comet that ever appeared on anybody’s horizon. Another time, perhaps, I may tell you how I came to be surnamed “Jimmy”; and something of my thousands of miles of travel, and more about French Minnie.

Mrs. Edward A. Walker.

Little Pussy had now grown up to be quite a young woman. She was sixteen years old, tall of her age, and everybody said that, though she wasn’t handsome, she was a pretty girl. She looked so open-hearted and kind and obliging,—she was always so gay and chatty and full of good spirits,—so bright and active and busy,—that she was the very life and soul of all that was going on for miles around.

Little Emily Proudie was also sixteen, and everybody said she was one of the most perfectly elegant-looking girls that walked the streets of New York. Everybody spoke of the fine style of her dress; and all that she wore, and all she said and did, were considered to be the height of fashion and elegance. Nevertheless, this poor Emily was wretchedly unhappy,—was getting every day pale and thin, and her heart beat so fast every time she went up stairs that all the household were frightened about her, and she was frightened herself. She spent hours in crying, she suffered from a depression of spirits that no money could buy any relief from, and her mother and aunts and grandmothers were all alarmed, and called in the doctors far and near, and had solemn consultations, and in fact, according to the family view, the whole course of society seemed to turn on Emily’s health. They were willing to found a water-cure,—to hire a doctor on purpose,—to try homœopathy, or hydropathy, or allopathy, or any other pathy that ever was heard of,—if their dear, elegant Emily could only be restored.

“It is her sensitive nature that wears upon her,” said her mamma. “She was never made for this world; she has an exquisiteness of perception which makes her feel even the creases in a rose-leaf.”

“Stuff and folderol, my dear madam,” said old Doctor Hardhack, when the mamma had told him this with tears in her eyes.

Now Doctor Hardhack was the nineteenth physician that had been called in to dear Emily,—and just about this time it was quite the rage in the fashionable world to run after Doctor Hardhack,—principally because he was a plain, hard-spoken old man, with manners so very different from the smooth politeness of ordinary doctors that people thought he must have an uncommon deal of power about him to dare to be so very free and easy in his language to grand people.

So this Doctor Hardhack surveyed the elegant Emily through his large glasses, and said, “Hum!—a fashionable potato-sprout!—grown in a cellar!—not a drop of red blood in her veins!”

“What odd ways he has, to be sure!” said the grandmamma to the mamma; “but then it’s the way he talks to everybody.”

“My dear madam,” said the Doctor to her mother, “you have tried to make a girl out of loaf-sugar and almond paste, and now you are distressed that she has not red blood in her veins, that her lungs gasp and flutter when she goes up stairs. Turn her out to grass, my dear madam; send her to old Mother Nature to nurse; stop her parties and her dancing and her music, and take off the corsets and strings round her lungs, and send her somewhere to a good honest farm-house in the hills, and let her run barefoot in the morning dew, drink new milk from the cow, romp in a good wide barn, learn to hunt hens’ eggs,—I’ll warrant me you’ll see another pair of cheeks in a year. Medicine won’t do her any good; you may make an apothecary’s shop of her stomach, and matters will be only the worse. Why, there isn’t iron enough in her blood to make a cambric needle!”

“Iron in her blood!” said mamma; “I never heard the like.”

“Yes, iron,—red particles, globules, or whatever you please to call them. Her blood is all water and lymph, and that is why her cheeks and lips look so like a cambric handkerchief,—why she pants and puffs if she goes up stairs. Her heart is well enough, if there were only blood to work in it; but it sucks and wheezes like a dry pump for want of vital fluid. She must have more blood, madam, and nature must make it for her.”

“We were thinking of going to Newport, Doctor.”

“Yes, to Newport, to a ball every night, and a flurry of dressing and flirtation every morning. No such thing! Send her to a lonesome, unfashionable old farm-house, where there was never a more exciting party than a quilting-frolic heard of. Let her learn the difference between huckleberries and blackberries,—learn where checkerberries grow thickest, and dig up sweet-flag-root with her own hands, as country children do. It would do her good to plant a few hills of potatoes, and hoe them herself, as I once heard of a royal princess doing, because queens can afford to be sensible in bringing up their daughters.”

Now Emily’s mamma and grandmamma and aunts, and all the rest of them, concluded that Doctor Hardhack was a very funny, odd old fellow, and, as he was very despotic and arbitrary, they set about immediately inquiring for a nice, neat farm-house where the Doctor’s orders could be obeyed; and, curiously enough, they fixed on the very place where our Pussy lived; and so the two girls came together, and were introduced to each other, after having lived each sixteen years in this world of ours in such very different circumstances.

It was quite a circumstance, I assure you, at the simple little farm-house, when one day a handsome travelling-carriage drove up to the door, and a lady and gentleman alighted and inquired if they were willing to take summer boarders.

“Indeed,” said Pussy’s mother, “we have never done such a thing, or thought of it. I don’t know what to say till I ask my husband.”

“My daughter is a great invalid,” said the lady, “and the Doctor has recommended country air for her.”

“I’m afraid it would be too dull here to suit her,” said Pussy’s mother.

“That is the very thing the Doctor requires,” said Emily’s mother. “My daughter’s nerves are too excitable,—she requires perfect quiet and repose.”

“What is the matter with your daughter?” said Mary Primrose.

“Well, she is extremely delicate; she suffers from palpitations of the heart; she can’t go up stairs, even, or make the smallest exertion, without bringing on dreadful turns of fluttering and faintness.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Primrose, “we should not be able to wait on her as she would need. We keep no servants.”

“We would be willing to pay well for it,” said Emily’s mother. “Money is no object with us.”

“Mother, do let her come,” said Pussy, who had stolen in and stood at the back of her mother’s chair. “I want her to get well, and I’ll wait on her. I’m never tired, and could do twice as much as I do any day.”

“What a healthy-looking daughter you have!” said Emily’s mother, surveying her with a look of admiration.

“Well,” said Pussy’s mother, “if she thinks best, I think we will try to do it; for about everything on our place goes as she says, and she has the care of everything.”

And so it was arranged that the next week the new boarder was to come.

Harriet Beecher Stowe.

VIII.

At the day of which we write, the intercourse between parents and children was much more formal than at present. The people were then living under a monarchy, and the spirit of the government was felt in the family. Deference to superiors in age or station was rigidly enacted. In many families children did not eat with their parents, but at a side-table in the same room. School-children were required to “make their manners” to their teachers, and to aged people or strangers whom they met in the road, going to or returning from school; the boys took off their hats and made a bow, the girls made a courtesy,—that is, they bent the knees, and depressed the body, very much as ladies do now when a person treads on their dress in the street. And this was a good custom: it taught children politeness, and made them easy in their manners, and so civility became habitual, because it had grown in them. They did not stand in the middle of the road, thumb in mouth, staring at a stranger, but made their manners and passed on.

Parents were not accustomed to take their children in their laps and kiss and caress them,—not after they were babes. I should have been frightened, if my father had kissed me when I was a child. But they loved just as well as parents love their children at this day, for all that, and were willing to endure the greatest hardships, death itself, in order that their children might have greater advantages than they themselves had enjoyed. Thus it was with Elizabeth and Hugh: they were not accustomed to caress their children, and their parental word or look was law, and neither to be questioned nor disobeyed. “Mother says so,” was reason enough.

His mother assisted William to put up the fence, after which they took their way in silence to the house. As they reached the door, Bose, having yarded the cows, was stealing around the corner of the pig-sty, and making for the woods. He could not get the Indian’s track out of his head, and, as William would not go with him, was determined to go “on his own hook.”

“Bose, you villain, you!” cried William, “come here, sir!” He had never spoken so to Bose before. The dog came slowly towards him, his ears drooping, his tail between his legs, his belly dragging on the ground, and with an astonished, supplicating look. William took him by the nape of the neck, and, dragging him into the house, tied him to the bedstead, exclaiming, “You shall stay there at any rate till the scent is washed out!”

He now shut the door, and fastened it to keep the other children out, and, sitting down before his mother, told her the whole story word by word. He told her what Beaver said, and how he answered him. “As long, mother, as he talked about his striking the war-post, and being a brave and killing folks, and swelled up so, and seemed so big, and to think he was so much better than I was, I didn’t care,—I should just as lief have fought with him as not. But you can’t tell how it made me feel when he came to talk so to me as he did at the last of it. I had half a mind to go off with him; but something held me back. I suspect it was because I thought how he looked when he said he liked to see blood run, and that he could drink it.”

“O William!” cried his mother, now thoroughly alarmed and distressed, “could you leave me and your father and your brothers and sisters and go to be an Indian and live with savages?” And, breaking through all the restraints and the customs of that day, she put her arms around his neck, and took his head upon her knees.

“No, mother,” he replied at length, “I could never leave you. But I did love Beaver so! You know I had nobody else to play with, as Uncle James’s boys have at Saco, and we agreed so well; and I’ve heard you yourself say, that, if he was an Indian, a better boy never stepped. When I saw how bad he felt, (though he kept it down,) and his voice sounded so, it did cut me deep. O mother, I don’t know what to do with myself!” Then the great boy, fairly getting into his mother’s lap, put his arms around her neck and sobbed like a little child.

It was the first sorrow and the first parting, and the “bitterness thereof drank up his spirit.” Elizabeth, who had endured so many bitter trials herself, was deeply touched; all the mother was aroused by the agony of her son. She pressed him to her bosom, ran her fingers through his hair, and kissed him as she had done when he was an infant. At length she persuaded him to lie down, and, sitting by him, soothed him till, worn out by his feelings, he was sleeping for sorrow.

The piety of Hugh and Elizabeth was not something put upon them, narrow and bounded by the Sabbath and the family altar, but the offspring of their affections. They prayed not only at stated times, but whenever they were moved to do so. They “walked with God,” and when they wished to say anything to Him, as to their father, they said it. If Hugh was building fence beside the woods on a pleasant spring morning, when the ground was steaming, and the fences smoking in the warm sun, the robins singing, and the wild geese honking overhead,—if the beauty of the scene, the promise of the year, or some blessing he had received, drew out his heart in gratitude to God,—the strong man who, if he feared God, feared nothing else, would drop his axe, and, retiring to the woods, pour out his soul in grateful prayer and praise.

Thus, when Elizabeth (after having spread the table for William when he should awake) sat down beside the bed, and thought over the circumstances he had related to her, considering the ripeness of judgment and sterling qualities both of mind and heart which he had manifested, and how fearlessly and nobly he had borne himself, she straightway knelt down and thanked her Maker for the boy, for his preservation from the bullet of the Indian, and that he had not been mastered by his feelings of attachment to his companion and his love for life in the woods, and gone off with the savage.

The history of those days proves abundantly that it is much easier to pass from civilized to savage life, than it is to emerge from the state of the savage to that of civilized man. And taking into consideration the boy’s attachment to his friend, and his passionate love for the free life of the woods, his mother had the best of reasons for anxiety. During that same year, a lad by the name of Samuel Allen was taken by the Indians at Deerfield. Though he had been with them but eighteen months, “yet, when his uncle went to redeem him, he refused to talk English, would not speak to his uncle, and pretended not to know him, and finally refused to go home, and had to be brought off by force. In his old age he always declared that the Indian’s life was the happiest.”

William, after an hour’s sleep, rose calm and refreshed. No slight cause could long disturb his well-balanced and healthy nature, and his emotions soon became subject again to his control. His mother placed food before him of which she knew he was fond, and, sitting down to the table with him, exerted herself to turn the conversation into a cheerful channel. While they were eating, Hugh came in and joined them at their meal.

When the children were put to bed, the three drew their stools around the fire, and entered into an anxious consultation in respect to their duty under the circumstances. It was probable that Beaver was only one of a body of savages on the war-path, who had committed the violence at Saco and Topsham and Purpooduck, and were watching for an opportunity to strike another blow. Ought they not instantly to give the alarm, in order that the settlers might be on their guard, and that they might, with the help of Bose, follow on the track of Beaver, and thus prevent the meditated blow, or capture him? Ought any feelings of good-will to him to influence them so far as to put in peril the lives of their neighbors? Perhaps before another morning they might hear the sound of the war-whoop.

It was their duty, perhaps, at that very moment, to alarm the nearest neighbors; under cover of night to get as silently as possible to the garrison, and fire the alarm gun, thus putting Mosier and the more distant inhabitants on their guard.

Thus reasoned Hugh and Elizabeth. On the other hand, William earnestly, though respectfully, opposed. He said that it was as clear as day to him that Beaver was neither a spy nor one of a party lying in ambush; for the Indians would never send so young a person on so dangerous and important an errand; that Beaver wouldn’t have dared to spare him if he had been a spy, when he could have taken his life without noise, because they would have asked him where he had been, and what he had done; and that Beaver had told him that his own people would never know where he had been.

“Why, father,” said William, “I had my back to him, putting up the fence; I turned round to look for a pole, and there he was, standing right behind me, and must have been standing there as much as fifteen minutes. He could have driven his tomahawk through my skull, or knocked me on the head with the breech of his gun, or shot me right through the back with an arrow, and I never should have known what hurt me. I believe that he came back on purpose to bid me good by, as he didn’t have time when they went away. I know Beaver wouldn’t lie,—he would think it mean for a warrior to lie,—and he said that was what he came for. I know that he had come a great way, and come fast too, for his moccasons and leggins were scratched and torn, he was spattered with clay, and the sweat had made the stripes of paint on his breast all mix together and run down on to his belt, and streak it all over, and he seemed beat out. There was but a little corn in his pouch; it wasn’t half full. He had a new French carbine, and his tomahawk and knife were new, and he had a breech-clout of broadcloth. I believe that they all went right from here to Canada to get their outfit, and that the rest of them are there to-night.”

Although Hugh was well aware that William’s judgment was far beyond his years, that a kind of instinct in respect to all matters of forest life, and a thorough knowledge of Indian habits, gave to his opinions a weight to which neither his age nor experience entitled them, yet he was astonished at the keen observation with which the lad had noted every part of the Indian’s equipment, and the maturity of mind evinced by the conclusions drawn from it.

“How mean it would be, mother, when he has just spared my life,” said William, in conclusion, “and we have agreed not to pick each other out, to go and set Bose and the Rangers on his trail! I’d rather be shot, any day.”

“Well, William,” replied his mother; “it is just as your father says. He knows what is best to be done.”

After long deliberation, the father said: “Wife, I think the boy is right. This Indian was so much attached to him, that the thoughts of his old playmate haunted him night and day, and he could not rest till he had seen him again. And I shouldn’t wonder if he had travelled all the way from Canada to do it. A hundred or even five hundred miles is not much to an Indian. When they have an object ahead, they will tire out any animal but a wolf.—William, look to the priming of the guns, and let us go to bed. It does not become Christian people to be outdone in generosity by a savage.”

The next day the defences of the garrison were completed, and everything made ready for the inhabitants to move in. The guns were mounted in the flankers, a common stock of ammunition provided, and a flag-staff erected, upon which was hoisted his Britannic Majesty’s flag. The Indians, discouraged, perhaps, by the evident preparations to give them a warm reception, notwithstanding their recent outbreak, left the Gorham settlers unmolested. It was evident that the Indians had no desire for a conflict,—that they were well aware that it was more for their interest to trade with the English than to fight with them, since, though they might obtain successes at first, they were sure to get many hard knocks, and to be defeated in the end,—that it was only by reason of French influence they engaged in the war at all; but those best acquainted with them believed that, after the first outbreak, they had gone back to Canada, to return in the spring with greater numbers, and thoroughly armed and prepared for conflict.

In view of this probable event, nine of the eighteen families of which the clearing then consisted left their farms and removed, some to Portland, others to Massachusetts. Nine—those of Captain Phinney, Hamblen, Mosier, McLellan, Harvey, Reed, Cloutman, Hodgdon, and Eliphalet Watson—remained to face the storm, and perish, if need be, defending their firesides. The amount of peril which, according to the common opinion of that day, they incurred, may be estimated from a remark made in a letter written from Falmouth, in 1747, to the Hon. William Pepperell:^*—“I am now to inform you that y^e barbarous and cruel sons of violence, on y^e 14th inst., killed and scalped Na’ Dresser, a young man, within thirty yards of David Libby’s house. A scout of what few soldiers were here, with some of our inhabitants, immediately followed, came athwart of three camps, about half a mile above Gorham Town Garrison, where they found some beef and the skins of two cows. We are in poor circumstances, having but about 15 or 20 soldiers to scout from Capt. Bean’s to N. Yarmouth, so that the people cannot pretend, without the utmost hazard, to plant, or sow, or carry on any other business, especially on y^e most out and exposed parts. And unless immediate succor or assistance, I cannott perceive how Gorham Town, Marblehead (Windham), and Sacarappy can subsist,—for they do not care to visit them, or carry them necessaries of life, unless they have more men.”

Hugh, having an abundant harvest and a strong team, spent the winter in lumbering, with greater profit than ever before; but as the spring of 1746 approached, it was evident that the blow would not be longer delayed. Captain Phinney, uneasy and anxious by reason of the great forwardness of the spring,—as the spring was the customary period for the Indians to make their attacks,—begged and prayed the settlers to come to the garrison. All except four families complied,—McLellan’s, Reed’s, Bryant’s, and Cloutman’s. They determined to stay out till they could get their ploughing and sowing done.

We now crave the indulgence of our young readers while (for the sake of the Gorham boys and girls) we give a passing glance at the condition of the four families referred to, in order that they may know more clearly how much their ancestors underwent that their children might be better off than they themselves.

Imagine yourselves in the flat ground to the east of the Female Seminary. The road (such as it is), full of stumps and cradle-knolls and bushes, among which a horse can pick his way in the summer, and over which the ox-teams can go in the winter when they are all covered with snow, runs from Saccarappa up over Fort Hill to the river. You are on Hugh McLellan’s land, all surrounded by woods. On your right hand, as you face north, is an opening in the woods where, Grannie said, her father cut a mast so large that they turned a yoke of oxen on the stump of it without their stepping off. As you descend the Academy hill, covered with a heavy growth of rock-maple and yellow birch, you come in sight of Hugh’s log-house, which is on the western side of the road, close to where the brick house now stands, but nearer to the road and the brook. Some pomegranates and an old cellar mark the spot. As you cross the brook upon a fallen pine that serves for a bridge, and ascend the hill on the other side, you come to Reed’s house, on the west side of the road, just north of the house now owned by George Pendleton, Esq. A little above Reed’s, on the opposite side of the road, on what was the Colonel Nathaniel Frost farm, lived Cloutman. About fifty rods farther, on the west side of the road, you come to Bryant’s. This house stood on the north side of the road that now crosses the Fort Hill road and runs over towards Cressey’s and Clement’s Corner, in the corner of the fence. Still going north, you cross a little thread of water, that was quite a stream once, at the foot of Nathaniel Hamblen’s hill; on the bank of this brook Bryant was killed, while fleeing to the garrison. The road which you are in, full of stumps and knolls, is now Fort Hill road, but was then called King Street. As you pass on, you find it crossed by another at right angles, which was then called Queen Street, and, after going a few rods, lost itself in the woods. Upon the east side, in the corner made by these two roads, on the north side of Queen Street, stood the house of Captain Phinney, near where Moses Fogg’s house now stands. A short distance north of this house, on the west side of the road, is the meeting-house, built of logs, and erected when there were not more than twelve or fourteen families in town. At the door of it is the horse-block,—a great stick of timber, one end on the ground, the other raised a few feet, thus , for children and short-legged people, who could take the horse to the highest part of it, which was nearly level with the beast’s back. During the war, worship was held in the southeast flanker of the fort, which stood just above the meeting-house. The road runs due north to the river, and south to where the Portland road now crosses it, whence it ran into the woods, and was lost. Gorham Corner was then up at Fort Hill, what is now so called being all forest.

You must also know, that your ancestors were very loving and sociable in their dispositions, had all things common, (you know what Grannie said in the first chapter when she was provoked,) and stood by each other till the death. Of course they had no public amusements, and when they could they used to assemble at each others’ houses to have a social meal and a good time, and to hear the news, for they had no papers. As they were very industrious, and the labor of clearing their land and providing for their families was very great, the custom on such occasions was for the women to go with their knitting or sewing, and sometimes (if work was very pressing) with wool and cards, soon after dinner, while the men came at four o’clock, and they all had supper at five,—while, in consequence of the expected rest, they exerted themselves so much that they did a good day’s work before they went.

Upon the 16th of April, Wednesday, the families out of the garrison were invited to Bryant’s to supper. Shortly after dinner the women were all on the spot with their children. Elizabeth had her children,—Abigail, now eight years old, Mary, six, Alexander, four, and Carey, in arms; Cloutman’s wife had her little boy Timothy, of eight years, while Mrs. Bryant had a family of five, the eldest a boy of twelve, and the youngest a babe but a fortnight old.

Mrs. Bryant was a large-boned, strong, fearless woman, with a freckled face, masculine voice, and a blustering way; she was an inveterate scold, but she was also generous, hospitable, kind in sickness, and always ready to do a good turn for anybody. She was a capital cook and housewife, and the neighbors, who were used to her ways, all liked her. Many of her people had been killed by the Indians, and she hated them with all her soul. In this respect she was the very opposite of Elizabeth, who always gave to them when it was in her power, and often in her own necessity, and so was always on the best of terms with them. But Mrs. Bryant would not allow that there was a single good quality in them. When they asked for anything, she would call them Indian dogs. And once she threw hot water on one who came to grind his tomahawk on their grindstone.

Reed’s wife was a young woman, with two small children.

In the course of the afternoon they had a very animated discussion in respect to the Indians. Mrs. Bryant gave it as her opinion (in which she was supported by Mrs. Reed and Mrs. Cloutman) that they were no better than wolves, if indeed as good, and ought to be knocked on the head at every opportunity. She then related with great glee a most shameful butchery of Indian women and children by her husband’s father and other white men in the Narragansett war; to the propriety of which her supporters gave their assent by saying, “It served them right.”

“Now, Mrs. Bryant,” said Elizabeth, “I can’t think that a Christian woman, and one so kind-hearted as I know you to be, could bear to see a little innocent babe that never injured anybody flung into a blazing fire, and another into a bog and trodden to death in the mud and snow before the eyes of its mother, even if that mother was an Indian squaw.”

“Yes, I could, and glory in it. Nobody spares a rattlesnake, because it’s little; it’s a rattlesnake if it’s only half an inch long, and will sting when it gets big enough.”

“I am astonished, Mrs. McLellan,” said Cloutman’s wife, “that you, who profess to be a religious person, and are the wife of an elder in the church, should take up for those who have dealings with Satan! Why, don’t you know that their conjurers can make a green leaf out of a dry one, can take an old cast skin of a snake out of a bush and turn it into a live reptile, and make water freeze right in the middle of the summer?”

“I don’t believe any such nonsense,” said Elizabeth, “or that they are any nearer to the Devil than any other wicked men. We are not to make ourselves even with them, and be perhaps worse than they are. There are allowances to be made for creatures that have never had the Gospel nor any kind of instruction. I am sure they are not one whit worse than the wild Irish we have had to deal with, but a great deal better.”

“If,” said Mrs. Reed, “you had had your own blood relations taken and fastened by a long rope to a beech-tree, so that they could walk round it, and then a fire built around them, and when they were all blistered with the heat to have a hole cut in their side, and one of their inwards pulled out, and fastened to a limb of the tree, and they whipped with briers and fire-brands, and made to travel round the tree till they pulled their bowels out, and dropped down dead, I reckon you’d feel as we do, and want to serve them the same sauce when you had a chance.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Reed, I can’t feel as you do, nor do I desire to,” said this apostle of humanity. “I believe, if we had been brought up like them, we should have been much like them. Indeed, I have read in the old books that our ancestors were no better before they had the Gospel. And as to what you say about my being a religious person, if religion is to make me treat my fellow-creatures worse, I don’t want it. I don’t blame the Indians for defending their property; it’s my opinion they have had hard usage. We never make a treaty with them but to break it; we never agree with them upon a line, but we are the first to step over it; we tread on them, and when they turn on us, we call them wolves. No, I don’t feel like you. And were I, on my way home to-night, to find an Indian child forsaken in the woods, if I could not preserve its life in any other way, I would nurse it at my own breast before I would destroy, or suffer to perish, a thing that God made, and that had a soul in it, and for whom I believe Christ died.”

“Well, well, well!” shouted Mrs. Bryant, perfectly astounded at sentiments so unusual in that age. “Heard ever any civilized body the likes of that? Call a savage a fellow-creature! Talk about nursing one of their brats! I wouldn’t put it to a cow,—no, nor to a breeding sow! I wouldn’t disgrace a hog so much. I suppose if an Indian should come to your house, you would say, ‘Take all there is here, it is yours’; then lay your head down on the door-step and ask him to cut it off.”

“I should defend my land and property,” said Elizabeth; “for we bought our land, and paid for it. But I would be willing to buy it over again, if I could have the names of the Indians that owned it at the bottom of the title-deed. I believe the property would wear better. I’ll shoot an Indian, if I am called to, and when it is my life or his; but no child of mine shall mangle an Indian after the breath is out of his body, or take his scalp, or murder an Indian woman or child, if I can hinder it, let them do what they will to me or mine. And I will feed them when they are hungry, and warm them when they are cold, for I know that God made them as well as me.”

“O, you don’t know them as well as we do,” exclaimed all the rest in a breath: “we have summered and wintered them. They will eat your bread and cut your throat as soon as they are done.”

“Don’t I?” she replied; and then related the story of the Indian who brought the corn and meat, while the tears sprang to her eyes as she recalled the agony of that terrible winter.

What reply the auditors who had presumed so much upon her ignorance of Indian character would have made to this we know not, for Mrs. Bryant, looking at the hour-glass, which was almost run down, said that it was four o’clock, and time for her to be getting supper. Upon this they all volunteered to assist her. “O no,” said she, “it is all cooked. There is nothing to do except to make the tea.”

“I hardly thought I could come,” said Elizabeth, “I had so much to do getting ready to move into garrison; but when you sent me word that you had got some tea, I told Hugh I must and would come. Where in the world did you get it?”

“Why, Mr. Bryant’s brother sent it to us from Barnstable,—you know we came from the Cape. He piloted an English ship into Provincetown, and the Captain gave him some,—you know you can get such things there. We haven’t had a drop before since we came here. You could always get it there by paying enough for it.”

“We had some last Thanksgiving,” said Elizabeth, “but I guess it will be a long day before we shall get any more, for I expect this Indian war will make us as poor as ever, if we escape with our lives. We were just beginning to raise crops and live comfortably.”

Elijah Kellogg.

VI.
WHAT BECOMES OF ALL THE “TEA-POTS.”

ll I know about that,” said I, “is, thirty-five thousand of them die every day.”

“Who says so, Georgy?”

“My father’s Cyclopædia.”

“Oh! Then China must be a very easy country to live in, and a very hard one to die in.”

“At the rate of thirty-five thousand a day? I don’t see it, Sharpey.”

“That’s because your statistical education has been neglected. Don’t your father’s Cyclopædia say the population of China must be at least three hundred and fifty millions?”

“Yes; lowest estimate (Mr. G. W. Cooke’s), 360,279,897,—highest (Article ‘China,’ Pierer’s Universal Lexicon), 410,000,000.”

“Very well, then, where’s your arithmetic? Thirty-five thousand into three hundred and fifty millions, how many times does that go?”

“35 into 350, 10 times, and nothing over; naughts into naughts is naught, three naughts,—10,000,” said I.

“Just so,” said Charley. “Good boy! You’ll be Chief of the Census Bureau yet, or even Lightning Calculator at Barnum’s Museum, if you live, and are not too particular.”

“Well, and what does all that prove?”

“Why, don’t you see? It shows that in China there are at least nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine chances to one that you won’t die any day. It must be as good as having a Mutual Life Insurance Company all to yourself, to live there.”

“I don’t know anything about your statistics and things,” said I; “I’m not a Board of Health. But it does seem to me thirty-five thousand a day is pretty fair dying for a country utterly destitute of steamboat explosions, railroad collisions, patent pills, and whiskey.”

“Why, bless your heart!” said Round-the-world Joe, “thirty-five thousand ain’t the quarter of ’em. The chap that did the ciphering for your father’s Cyclopædia must have thought he was writing a composition on Immortality. Where were all his infanticides, and his homicides, and his suicides, I’d like to know?”

“Infanticides?” said I. “Good gracious! You don’t mean to say—”

“Yes, I do,” said Joe; “if it wasn’t for keeping up the stock of boys, they’d drown every kitten of ’em before they could crawl.”

“What! Ba-a-bies?” said I.

“Babies,” said Joe,—“that is, the she ones. Hundreds of thousands of them are drowned, or strangled, or flung to the bears, every year.

“Why, it’s perfectly ridiculous,” said I. “What’s the matter with them?”

“Well, you see, Georgey,” said Charley, “they had no business to be girls. What’s the use of girls, anyhow? They can’t wear galluses, nor raise mustashers, nor smoke without getting sick. It costs a heap of money to keep them in photographs, waterfalls, and peplums, and when you require the services of a man, they are nowhere. Counting first cost and improvements, and advertisements, we find they don’t pay. But boys!—well, boys are what I call good stock; there’s money in boys; when you’ve got boys you’ve got something you can depend upon, and if you happen to get in a tight place, there they are.”

[“Beware, rash youth!” Joe hoarsely whispered, (but his words fell like a box upon my sensitive ear.) “Pretty Kate Eager reads the Young Folks! That daring passage will not escape her eagle eye.”

“O Joseph!” cried Charles, “if I thought she thought I thought that, I should never smile again. O no, Joe! she is such a Supeeeerior Being!—She understands Me!!”

“Gentlemen,” we interposed, with freezing dignity, “we will, if you please, return to the subject of Babicide in China. The name of a certain young person, very nearly related to ourself, must not be trifled with.”

There was an interval of mute, embarrassing emotion. Then a dulcet strain of love-lorn melody was softly wafted upon our ear. ’Twas the tender, though manly voice of young Brace:—

“Joe,” said I, “you wander, Sweet One.”

“Where was I?” he asked, feebly.

“In China,” said I,—“infanticide, you know,—female offspring, &c.”]

“O yes; I remember now. Well, it’s just as Charley says; only the Chinese make no joke of it. Girls, they say, are a burden to the poor and a bother to the rich. They can do nothing to support themselves, or their parents; they must be kept at home, to be pampered and adorned in idleness, till they are old enough to be married, and then they must have costly dowries of furniture and clothing. A married daughter belongs to the family of her husband, and is not expected to help her own parents in poverty, sickness, or old age; and an unmarried daughter, over eighteen years of age, is a nuisance and a disgrace. When a daughter is married, fine presents must be made to the family of her husband; when a son is married, presents are received from the family of the bride.

“A boy, on the contrary, is regarded as a blessing and an honor to his house. He will soon be old enough to work for his father and mother; he will keep up the family stock, and confer distinction upon the family name. He may be made mandarin, or prefect, or head cook, or even a writer for magazines, and become enormously rich and powerful. Above all, he can burn incense before the tablet of his ancestors, and keep their graves swept clean, and offer roast pig and tea to their ghosts,—duties which a girl is not considered worthy to perform. If any Chinaman were to allow his daughter to scrub the tombstone of his father, I tell you she’d raise spirits, and the spirits would raise thunder,—so they say there.”

“But, Joe,” said I, “can’t the monsters contrive any other way of getting rid of the poor little kittens than by drowning them?”

“O yes,” said Joe; “I must do them the justice to say that they prefer selling them, or even giving them away; and are quite thankful when any kind person will buy one, or accept her as a gift,—like those lovely female infants, ‘to be adopted out,’ that we read of in the Herald, whose eyes are always so blue, and whose parents are always so refined. But girl-babies in China are like girl-puppies in New Jersey,—it’s very hard to find anybody who wants one ‘of that kind.’ When they are sold, they usually fetch $2 per annum of their age,—that is, $2 for a one-year old, $4 for a two-year old, and so on.”

“About half the price,” said Charley, “of good black-and-tans,—anywhere except in New Jersey. There the price depends upon ‘the kind,’ the dog-tax, and the spring business of the Camden and Amboy Railroad.”

“And there’s suicide,” said Joe. “If there’s any one thing that a Chinaman admires more, and understands better than any other kind of a man, it is suicide. It is a necessity,—the poorest Chinaman cannot dispense with it; it is a luxury,—the richest Chinaman is proud of it; it is respectable,—every decent Chinaman patronizes it; it is fashionable,—every dandy Chinaman cultivates it; it is commendable,—every pious Chinaman approves of it; it is profitable,—thousands of Chinamen get their living by it; it is heroic,—generals glory in it; it is honorable,—gentlemen settle their difficulties with it; it is wholesome,—doctors recommend it; it is smart,—lawyers practise it; it is improving,—scholars study it; it is ‘perfectly killing,’—the ladies dote on it; it is amusing,—the children play at it; it is universally popular,—everybody bets on it; it draws,—theatres and newspapers run it.”

“Is that all?” said Charley.

“It is also remarkable,—every traveller writes about it.”

“But I don’t seem to see,” said I, “how those thousands of Chinamen get their living by it.”

“Suppose you are very poor, and have a very large family.”

“Well?”

“Suppose you have a very rich enemy with a very small family.”

“Well?”

“All you have to do is to go to your rich enemy’s house, and hang yourself to his lantern.”

“Just so.”

“That’s the talk!” said Charley.

“Your rich enemy is imprisoned and tortured, and you get your revenge, don’t you?”

“Well?”

“And your poor family go to law with him, and get awful damages, don’t they?”

“Well?”

“So you are all right.”

“Don’t see it,” said I.

“That’s not my fault,” said Joe. “Suppose you are in love with a fascinating creature.”

“That’s all right,” said Charley.

“And she rejects your suit with scorn.”

“But she wouldn’t,” said Charley.

“Never mind,—let’s call it so, this once, for the sake of illustration. And her father is a bloated aristocrat, bursting with sapecks.”

“Well?”

“You climb over his garden fence at night, and jump down his well.”

“Well?”

“Well! You take the conceit out of her, break her heart and get her head shaved, reduce the bloated aristocrat to squalid poverty and disgrace, and divide his property among your relations. So you are all right.”

“H’m?”

“Now suppose, instead of pursuing this moderate course, you murdered your rich enemy, or the beautiful aristocrat.”

“Ah! now you are talking like a Christian,” said Charley.

“Why, then it would be your own relations that would all be ruined and disgraced, and when you died you wouldn’t be allowed even so much as a one-horse funeral; while it would be your rich enemy and the bloated aristocrat and his pursed-up flirt that would have all the good time.”

“Hey?” said Charley.

“And suppose you owe a heap of money, and Christmas comes, and you can’t pay anybody. All you have to do is to buy a coffin on credit, lie down in it, and swallow a pint of the deadliest poison. No creditor will annoy you that year; such is the custom.”

“I see,” said I.

“And suppose you have the stomach-ache, or a great lot of biles in all sorts of inconvenient places; and peppermint and mustard plasters, and bread-and-milk poultices, and soap and sugar, and tobacco quids, and shoemaker’s wax, are all in vain,—you have only to tie a piece of white crape to the tail of your eldest son, and then hold your head under water for half an hour; the relief is rapid and permanent.”

“O, isn’t that strange?” said I. “What an interesting country! And how little is known about it!”

“That’s so,” said Joe. “You should go there first, and then read all the books of travel, like me, if you want to be astonished. When two Chinese gentlemen have a difficulty, they don’t call each other out,—pistols, bowie-knives, surgical instruments, cold mornings, strong coffee, and all such nonsense; but they call their friends in, and sit down sociably together to a nice feast, with all the delicacies of the season. And after soup—which is always the last course of a Chinese dinner, you know—the two gentlemen who have had the difficulty rise, drink each other’s health in expensive tea, pay each other some pretty compliments, and bow to the company; and immediately each of them bores a hole in his own stomach without a bit of fuss; then they drink each other’s health again, make another bow to the company, and so lie down and die very pleasantly. Everything is conducted on the most honorable principles, and in the most gentlemanly style, and there is plenty of satisfaction.”

“But don’t it strike you, Joe,” said I, “that such disregard of human life looks—a little queer?”

“Well, it does have that appearance,” said Joe. “But only think—Three Hundred and Fifty Millions of them! What’s a million or so, here or there? especially when you consider where they all came from.”

“Where?” said I.

“When Puang-Ku, the First Person, made the world—”

“But who made Puang-Ku?”

“Don’t ask conundrums. When Puang-Ku had made creation, by clearing out a place in Chaos with his hammer and chisel, the Heavens sent down to Earth two brooms, with their compliments; and from those two brooms the whole Chinese part of the human race has descended.”

“Pshaw!”

“It’s in their Bible, I tell you. And as brooms are about the commonest and cheapest things in all China,—why, there’s an idea for you; now study away.”

“Where do they put each other when they are dead?”

“In coffins, of course,” said Joe.

“Nice shiny, fashionable ones, with all the modern improvements?” inquired Charley; “and with a dear Mr. Gracechurch Brown to make everything genteel and expensive?”

“They hire a Professor of Ceremonies,—same thing, you know,” said Joe,—“to arrange their funerals, when they can afford one; and they have some very chaste styles of coffin, of thick heavy boards, called ‘longevity or old-age boards,’ (but I guess that’s ‘sarkastikal,’) made air-tight with a mixture of varnish and pounded crockery, and all the seams calked with cloth; they oil it inside and out a great many times, stain it black, or red, or violet color, and varnish it till it shines like an auction piano.

“All over China it is considered The Thing to have a grand upright premium coffin in your drawing-room, and no mandarin’s establishment is complete without one. Ladies and gentlemen present each other with complimentary coffins on their birthdays, and other ladies and gentlemen call to offer their congratulations, and turn up their noses at the quality and price. The manufacture of coffins is on a most imposing scale; as the newspapers say, ‘A vast amount of Capital is invested in this important branch of Industry, and millions of Operatives and skilled Artisans find constant employment in the numerous extensive Coffin-works.’ ”

“That’s the style,” said Charley, “to draw the advertisements, and set all the rival establishments to puffing their own concerns, and running each other down. There’s the Steinway coffin, for instance, and the Chickering coffin, and the Knabe coffin, and the Wheeler and Wilson coffin, and the Grover and Baker coffin, and the Singer coffin, and the Florence coffin. Each of them is far superior to all the others, each has taken all the gold medals and diplomas at all the Chinese Institutes and State fairs, and each of them publishes testimonials from all the celebrated dead clergymen, editors, generals, and mandarins, declaring that, for tightness, dryness, snugness, and durability, that particular coffin is the very best coffin he ever performed or operated upon.”

“The custom of giving coffins as premiums to clubs of subscribers,” said I, “originated with the ‘Peking Gazette’ in the Han dynasty, B. C. 150, and not with the Greeley strawberry, as is generally supposed.”

“My youthful friend Tea-Pot,” said Joe, “had his failings,—I’ve acknowledged that before,—but nobody can say he was not a dutiful son. He was always trying to make his father comfortable, and when he saved up all his winnings at mumble-the-peg and push-pin to buy the poor old man a nice warm coffin, it was very touching.”

“Georgy,” said Charley, “we must write the Life of Tea-Pot, for the ‘Good Boy’ series.”

“But here comes the important question,” said I: “Where Do They All Go To When They Die?”

“Now you’ve got me,” said Joe. “I’m a conscientious traveller, and I don’t pretend to describe what I never saw. All I know is, they don’t all go to heaven; for they have a saying of their own,—‘If everybody was good, the bottom of heaven would drop out.’ ”

“How about the other place?” said Charley.

“Never had any bottom to drop out,” said Joe. “And you will never touch bottom, if you don’t pay more attention to your catechism, and stop asking such naughty questions as that.”

Joe says every Chinaman has three souls,—houen, they call them,—and when he dies they separate. One of them passes into another body, one remains in the family, and the other follows the corpse and dwells with it in the tomb. They think the family-houen of a child is spiteful and dangerous, and they take the strangest pains to deceive it and drive it away. When the poor thing is dying, some one carries it a long distance from the house, and throws it into a river, or leaves it in the woods, so that its mischievous houen may pass into a crocodile, or a fish, or a wolf, or a bear, and not return to plague the folks at home. And the person who carries off the child does not proceed in a straight line, but zigzag,—a little to the right, and then a little to the left, and then backward, and then across, and sometimes almost in a circle,—so that the houen may never be able to find its way back to the house.

They think it is all dark in the spirit-land, and that without lights the dead will stumble and lose their way. So when a friend is dying they have two candles ready, and the moment he has breathed his last, they light them, and set them by his bedside.

They present to the lips of the dead cups of wine, and bowls of rice and vermicelli, to strengthen him for his “long meander”; and they make a small sedan-chair, and four little figures of bearers, all of bamboo splints and paper, and burn them before the corpse, that the spirit may ride when it is tired; at the same time they burn mock-money, of white or yellow paper, to pay the wages of the bearers. The paper represents silver or gold; and sometimes they burn another little man with a little umbrella, to protect the ghost from the dark sun.

In the reception-room of the house they keep, for some time, a place for the spirit, with a table, a chair, a stool, a pair of slippers, and a rag-doll to represent the dear departed. On the table there are two candles, a bowl for rice, a pair of chop-sticks, a wine-cup, and a stick of burning incense.

When it is a father of a family who has died, his sons sleep beside his coffin, lest he should feel lonesome in the night; and in the morning they bring him hot water to wash in, and rice for his breakfast; and always at bedtime they bid him good night.

On the forty-second day after he has “saluted the world,” the dead man arrives at a certain point on his journey, turns back to look at his home, and suddenly discovers that he is dead. Then he feels very badly, and loses his appetite, so that his family have much trouble to find anything that he can fancy.

In the ceremony called “Mounting the Platform,” long tables are set, covered with a great variety of dishes, and a numerous company of dead folks are invited to come and enjoy themselves. Among other things prepared for them there are vessels containing gruel, or salted paste, with spoons, and pails of water, covered with sheets of paper. The gruel is for the headless spirits, who cannot chew, and the spoons are to put it down the holes in their necks with. The water is for the dusty spirits, that have walked a long distance, to wash in, and the paper is for towels to wipe on.

The Chinese, who have a method of doing everything always the reverse of ours, actually lay up for themselves treasures in hell. They think they can send on money in advance, to pay their necessary expenses and provide them with comforts when they arrive there; and that they can forward clothes and furniture to their dead relations and friends, and remit funds to pay debts that dead people owe to other dead people. The way they manage this is very simple and expeditious: the money, clothing, furniture, and materials of all kinds are represented by paper, cut in various forms, and by bamboo strips and splints. To send it to ghosts, all that’s necessary is to make a ghost of it, and this they do by burning it.

Sometimes they send a gauze trunk, made of bamboo rods and paper, in the shape of a wardrobe, five or six feet long, and three or four feet high, with shelves in it. It is packed with miniature furniture,—bedsteads, chairs, lanterns, plates, and bowls, clothing of all kinds, and even little images of servants, all made of bamboo and paper, and all burned.

Joe says they usually send a letter to the Ten Kings of Hell, by two paper couriers mounted on paper horses, to inform them of the death of any distinguished person; and when a family are about to send a “gauze trunk” to one of their dead relations, it is not an uncommon thing for a living neighbor to bring a bundle of paper clothing, or other useful articles, and request them to send it in the same trunk, with a note addressed to the “relation,” requesting him to deliver it to the person for whom it is intended, and much oblige his respectfully, Fun-Y-Thing.

The Ten Kings of Hell, who are supposed to be very considerate and polite, provide each dead man, as soon as he arrives, with a little imp to show him the way around. This pilot is called “the Devil who follows,” and whenever a family send presents to their departed father or brother, they take care to enclose at the same time a little pocket-money for “the Devil who follows,” lest he should play tricks on the stranger, and lead him into furnaces.

“Joe,” said Charley, “what do you think of them, anyhow?”

“Boys,” said Joe, “I’m almost afraid to think of them at all. They are a very funny people to watch, and to wonder at; but they are a frightful people to think about seriously; they are so cunning, cruel, and mocking! No wonder the men have tails, and the women have feet like goats; everybody has both where they came from,—or where I should say they came from, if it wasn’t casting a reproach on the goodness and wisdom of God who made them.”

George Eager.

Ever since little Birdie had taken his walk in the woods, and heard about the garden his mother had when a child, he had been wanting to have a garden of his own. His mother promised to give him a piece of ground, and help him plant it with flowers, as soon as the weather became warm and dry enough for him to be out of doors all day. It seemed a long time to our little friend before the rain stopped falling, and the dark clouds blowing over the sky, and he sometimes said, “Summer never will come”; but at last the warm sunshine greeted him day after day, the grass began to turn green, and summer had really come.

Then his mother said to him, early one morning: “Now is the time for your garden, my boy. You have been quite patient, and deserve to be rewarded. Let me tie on your broad straw hat, and then you can take your wheelbarrow out on the path, while I get a trowel, and we will go to work.”

No sooner said than done; for Birdie was ready in a twinkling, and was trundling out his wheelbarrow before his mother could turn round; but he did not mind waiting out of doors, where all was so bright and pleasant. He picked some yellow dandelions and wild violets out of the grass, and trotted to the poultry-yard to take a look at the hens and chickens, and had almost forgotten his garden when he heard his mother calling him. He ran to her, and found her waiting at the back door, with her garden-hat and gloves.

“Forward! March!” said she; and Birdie seized his wheelbarrow, and followed her.

They went down the wide gravel-walk that ran through the garden, bordered on each side by flower-beds. Some of the plants were covered with flowers; the rose-buds were beginning to open, and the lilacs nodded sweet, purple blossoms above, while heart’s-ease and mignonette were blooming nearer the ground. Birdie said he hoped his flowers would be as pretty, and his mother said she thought they would, if he took good care of them. Near the end of the garden, a narrow path crossed the middle one, and here his mother turned and stopped before a border that had been freshly dug and raked, and said to Birdie, “This is to be your garden, my boy; now we must plant it full of flowers or vegetables; which do you want?”

He thought a moment, and then said, “I want half for flowers, mamma, and all the rest for sings to eat; but I don’t b’lieve tables would grow in such a little place.”

His mother smiled, and said: “Things to eat are called vegetables, dear. If you wish to plant half of your ground with them, Thomas must make a little path in the middle of this border, and you can walk on it and look at your garden.”

Birdie was pleased with this plan; and his mother sent him to find the gardener, and ask him to bring his spade and make a path.

Thomas soon came; and Birdie said he would stay and help him, while his mother cut some flowers for the parlor. So he brought his wheelbarrow, and picked up all the sticks and stones that Thomas threw out of the ground; and when he had gathered up a few, he would take them to a pile of rubbish and empty them, calling out, at the end of each trip, “I’m helping Thomas, mamma!”

The path was soon made, and Birdie was much pleased with it; and after trotting up and down several times, he ran to his mother, and said, “Now, mamma, can’t I have a rose-bush in my garden, all full of roses, and some tulips, and violets, and lots of pretty flowers?”

His mother smiled rather sadly, as she pushed back the hair from his warm face, and said: “We should have to get the fairies to help us, dear child, if you want your garden to bloom in one day; but we can move some plants into it, and I will give you some seeds, and in a few weeks you will have ‘lots of pretty flowers’ in your little garden.”

This was a new idea to Birdie, who thought one day’s work would turn his border into a blooming flower-bed, and whose gardening had always been on a plan of his own, and consisted in sticking flowers into the ground by their stems; which answers very well for a day, but would hardly make a handsome garden by the end of summer. He looked down, and was quiet so long that his mamma said, “Never mind, dear; the time will soon pass by, if you are busy and good,”—thinking he was grieving over his long waiting. But the little boy looked up very cheerfully, and said, “I wonder where the fairies live, mamma; for if I knew where to find them, I would go and beg them very hard, and give them my new picture-book, and then I’m ’most sure they would make my flowers grow.”

His mother sat down on a garden-chair, and, taking Birdie on her knee, said: “Mamma knows of some fairies who will help you, even without the new picture-book; one is called Patience, who likes to live in our hearts, if naughty Impatience does not drive it out. If you will let Patience live in your heart, my child, and wait until Our Father in Heaven sends the dew and the sunshine to awaken your flowers, you will soon see them growing and blooming. Then there is a fairy called Love, a heart-fairy like Patience, who is always watching to make good children happy. Perhaps it will find out a way to help you. But now we must go to work and see what we can do ourselves; for we cannot expect help, unless we do our share.”

Birdie listened attentively to his dear mamma’s kind words, and then she put him down with a kiss and a loving smile, which went right to his heart like a sunbeam, and drove away all his disappointment. He watched and tried to help her, as she took up carefully, with the trowel, two or three small rose-bushes, leaving plenty of earth around the tender roots, and placed them in the little wheelbarrow, which Birdie wheeled slowly to his new garden. They planted them near the fence at the back of the border, and then went for another load of plants. In this way they moved some violets and daisies, some yellow cowslips, and some “Johnny-jumpers” as Birdie called heart’s-ease; and when all this was done, the garden was quite full of plants.

Birdie’s kind mother then gave him some flower-seeds, and, showing him how to plant them, she said: “Now, after a day or two, the warm rain will awaken the little plants, and they will send their tiny roots creeping into the soft earth to find food, and then the tender leaves will come peeping up to find the sunshine, and so they will grow and bear flowers.”

“But, mamma,” said Birdie, “I planted some seeds last summer, and I dug ’em up the next day, to see if they were growing, and they never growed at all!”

His mother smiled, and said: “O, you must not dig them up, my child; that was Impatience at work; you must let them alone until they are ready to come up. How would you like me to pull you out of your bed at night to see if you were asleep?”

Birdie seemed to understand, nodding his round head wisely, and saying, “I’ll not dig ’em up this time.”

So his mother left him at work, and went into the house, to put the flowers in water. Before long she heard a pair of little feet come pattering through the hall, and go trotting up stairs, and then soon come trotting down again, and out into the garden. She followed quietly to see what the little boy was doing, and got there just in time to see him putting an old pair of slippers into a hole he had dug.

“Why! what are you doing, Birdie?” said the mother, so suddenly that he started, and looked up in surprise, before he said: “I want some lady’s-slippers in my garden, mamma. You had some last summer, and they were so pretty, all white and red, with little bits of slippers in them; so I’m just going to plant these old shoes,—you don’t want ’em any more,—and then I’ll have lady’s-slippers when they grow.”

“O dear me! what a memory you have!” said his mother, laughing, as she thought of the pretty flowers Birdie admired so much, and how his father had said, in joke, that they grew from old shoes. But seeing the child’s puzzled look, she only said, “Give me the slippers, dear, for they will not grow; but I will give you some seeds that I picked from the flowers we had last summer.”

So Birdie dug up the shoes, with rather a long face at their dusty appearance, and whispered, “I’m sorry, mamma,—I won’t do it again,”—and then went to work to plant the flower-seeds.

His mother left him again, and it was not long before he came in quite warm and tired, and said, “My garden is all done, mamma, and my wheelbarrow is put away in the tool-house, and I’ll try to be patient, and wait till everysing grows; but,” he added with a sigh, “I hope it won’t be very long.”

His mother told him he would have plenty to do, with weeding and watering his garden, and then advised him to look for clean hands and face in the bath-room, as dinner was almost ready.

After dinner papa heard the history of the garden, and at the end of it Birdie said, “Don’t you think they make dear little weeny watering-pots at the tinman’s, papa?”

The “tinman” made everything, according to Birdie,—for as most of his toys were tin, and were often sent to the shop to be mended, he thought there was nothing the tinman could not make or mend, and often proposed taking broken china or torn books “to the tinman’s.” This time he was right, however, and his father promised to look for a nice little watering-pot when he went to the village, and then Birdie ran off to play with his kitten.

That evening he was on the front porch, looking at the cows going back to the meadow, when he heard a step, and found it was Thomas going into the garden with a large watering-pot. “O Thomas,” said the child, “won’t you water my garden?”

“Haven’t time, sir: you must mind your own garden, your mother said,” answered Thomas, hurrying on.

Birdie thought he would see what he could do with Nancy, for his father and mother had gone out for a drive. So he trotted into the kitchen, and then out into the shed, calling Nancy; but no sooner had he reached the shed, than he saw, standing near the pump, the weeniest, nicest little watering-pot that ever was. There it stood, bright and new, as if it had just come from the tinman’s. “O, it’s for me, it’s mine!” shouted Birdie. And, seizing Nancy’s dress, he pulled her towards it, saying, “See, Nancy; isn’t it sweet? Won’t you put some water in it, please, Nancy dear? I want to water my garden.”

Nancy was a fat, rosy, good-natured Irish girl, who had lived there a long time, and was very fond of the little boy; and though she seemed to be busy, she said, “Sure, then, its meself likes to plase ye, when ye ax so pretty”; and, filling the little watering-pot at the pump, she helped Birdie carry it to his garden, where together they managed to give each plant “a drink of water.” Then a place was found in the tool-house for the new possession, and the tired little boy found his place in bed.

His first thought the next morning was of the new watering-pot, and he told his mamma about it, and asked her if she knew where it came from.

“Is it too large for the fairies to carry?” asked she, smiling.

“Yes, indeed, mamma, unless they were big fairies,—most as big as me,” answered he, trying to look tall.

“Well, dear,” said his mamma, “it was a fairy even bigger than you,—a grown-up fairy, called Papa. There he is now, coming in at the gate,” she added. “Run and thank him for it, and tell him breakfast is ready.”

Birdie ran, and, jumping into his father’s arms, said, “Thank you, dear, kind fairy Papa!”

“For what?” said his father, seeming much surprised.

“Why, for that dear little new watering-pot; didn’t you get it for me at Mr. Tinman’s? Now tell the truf!” and the child looked earnestly at his papa.

“Well, if I must ‘tell the truf,’ Birdie,” said the father, “I did get a small watering-pot from the tinman yesterday. And so it pleases my little gardener, does it? I’m glad to hear it”;—and, with a kiss and a toss in the air, Birdie was landed on the porch, and they went to breakfast.

As soon as it was over, Birdie asked his mother and father to go and look at his garden; and as they consented, he hopped along in front of them, until he came to the path that ran by his border; but when he reached it, he stood still, looking with great surprise at his little garden. What do you think he saw, little ones? I don’t suppose you can guess, but, as I happen to know, I will tell you. There was the bed he had left the night before without a flower in it, and now it was filled with the loveliest flowers he had ever seen! In the centre was a rose-bush with beautiful pink roses on it, and around it were small plants, some with white and red blossoms, and others with purple flowers, that were very sweet-scented. That was enough to delight a little boy who had made up his mind to wait two or three weeks to see his plants in bloom. After staring at this wonderful sight for a few minutes, as if he could hardly believe his own eyes, Birdie gave a shout of joy, and, clapping his hands, called out, “O, come quick, papa and mamma! Come see these flowers, they’re so sweet!”

His parents hurried up to him, with smiling looks, and, as they saw the verbenas and roses, they said, “Where did they come from, Birdie? Did you plant them last night?”

“No,” said the child; “I just watered the plants mamma moved, and there wasn’t a singly flower on ’em, and now my garden is full; I guess the fairies must have brang ’em.”

Birdie’s grammar was apt to be forgotten when he was excited. His father smiled at this speech, and, laying his hand on the mother’s shoulder, said, “Yes, a good fairy brought them for you, my boy; here she is.”

For a moment Birdie loooked rather puzzled, but he soon understood it, and, seizing his mother’s hand, he said: “O you dear, darling mamma! You’re the bestest fairy in the whole world”;—ending with showering kisses on her hand.

His mother bent over him fondly, and said: “I told you, my pet, that the fairy Love would help you if you were good and patient, and this is some of that fairy’s work. When I saw you so patiently waiting for your plants to bloom, I determined to give you a pleasant surprise, and so papa and I went to the greenhouse last evening, and brought home these flowers for you.” Then his mother explained to him that garden plants could not be moved when they were in bloom, because it was apt to injure the roots a little, and that made the flowers wither; but greenhouse plants were raised in pots, and could be taken from place to place, and even planted out while in bloom. Then Birdie insisted on giving a flower to his mamma “to put in her hair,” and, as she knew it would please him, she said he might do so. The little boy took one of the prettiest pink blossoms, and felt very happy as his mother thanked him, and placed it in her glossy hair. He said, “I’m going to be good all the days now, and never drive my kind fairies away”; and with this good resolution we must leave him for the present, hoping that all our little friends will follow his example; for when the fairies of Obedience and Patience are in the hearts of children, the fairy Love is never far distant.

Margaret T. Canby.

In modern archery several sorts of shooting are practised. The clubs use targets, fixed from sixty to a hundred yards apart. These are round mats made of straw, covered with canvas, which is painted black and white in rings. The targets are elevated from the ground, and the archers shoot so many arrows from one to the other, and then from that end back again. The arrows of each shooter are marked.

It is not likely, however, that our readers will follow the ceremonious observances of the clubs. Their archery is likely to be more of the roaming, rough-and-ready kind, in which, during their wanderings over the fields and through the woods, they can shoot at any object which may present itself. This particular mode is called “roving.” The name describes the sport well, and the rules are simple.

The distance of the object shot at, say a tree, may be from sixty to a hundred yards, and farther, if it is within the strength of the shooter. The first object is chosen by agreement, and if the shooting is of one party of boys against another, the captains of the sides agree upon object and distance. But the winner of the first shot has the right to choose the next target. Arrows lodged in the object are equal, for there being no “bull’s-eye” (which is the round centre of a target), all that have hit the target itself are of the highest value. Arrows which do not hit the object are also counted, provided they are within five bows’ length of it. The nearest is of the greatest value of those not in the mark itself. Those that are more than five bows’ length from the object shot at are also equal,—that is equally bad.

Now suppose George, John, and William shoot at “roving” against Henry, Alfred, and Louis,—and George and Henry, as captains of the bands, have selected a tree at a hundred yards, as near as they can judge,—there is no need for measurement. George lets fly and hits the tree. Henry misses it, but his arrow pitches within two bows’ length. John follows and comes within four bows’ length. Alfred shoots within a bow’s length. William claps into the tree, and now it is impossible for Henry’s side to win; for though Louis may hit the tree, his side will only have one arrow in it to two of the other side’s, and an arrow in the tree is better than any number out of it. But if William had missed, and Louis had hit the tree, Henry’s side would have won. Each side would have had an arrow in the object, and the arrows of Henry and Alfred would have been best of those not in the tree.

Shooting at the “clout,” is another convenient method for boys. The clout is a round piece of pasteboard, about a foot across. It is put into a split stick, the other end of which is stuck slantwise into the ground, so that the lower edge of the clout just touches it. The distance may be from one hundred to one hundred and fifty yards, for it is to be nearly at the extent of range for the average shooters of the party. The score is the same as at rovers. An arrow in the clout will beat all out of it, but, my young friends, it will require some practice before you will put one into it at a hundred yards.

The next order of shooting is more for the display of strength than skill, as no object is aimed at, and the longest shot is the best. This is called flight shooting. It does nothing to perfect the aim of the shooter, but still it is very useful to beginners, because it makes them apt and ready with the bow, and increases the strength and steadiness of their arms. It demands a great deal of muscular power to draw an arrow well home, and much firmness of muscle and nerve to hold the bow steady with the left hand, and let go the arrow from the string, straight and sharp, with the right.

We must now consider the implements to be used. The bow is, of course, the first in order. Ingenious lads may make bows for themselves, but in the vicinity of the cities they can buy them much better finished at moderate rates. There is a shop in New York which I have often visited to examine implements for archery and other sports, where is kept a great variety of bows, from sizes adapted to children up to those six feet long and upwards, which none but strong men can bend and shoot with. The material of bows is various; yew, lancewood, hickory, and snakewood are all used, and we lately saw some bows from Japan which were made of two flat pieces of bamboo, glued upon a piece of white hard wood. These bows were very long and strong, and required corresponding power in the shooter. The bows made of yew are sometimes all of one piece, sometimes of two pieces glued together; lancewood and hickory together make a fine bow; snake wood makes a good, strong shooting bow, requiring power in the shooter. I shall describe the different sizes hereafter. The bow is tapered from the middle towards the ends, which are fitted with pieces of horn, having notches cut in them to receive the string; hence the term horns of the bow. The back of the bow—the part from the string and the shooter—is flat. The belly, which is inside when the bow is bent, is rounded. Care must be taken, in bending the bow, to observe that the back is outwards, for if an attempt is made to bend it the reverse way, with the belly out, it is likely to break. The handle of the bow is so near the centre that, when it is grasped for shooting, an arrow in the centre of the string just rests upon the upper side of the hand (the thumb and forefinger) which grasps the handle of the bow. The handle itself is covered with velvet in bows manufactured for sale.

It is much better to buy bow-strings than to trust the strings not made for the purpose; the former are round and true, and are covered with a composition which protects them from the weather. The bow strings should be kept dry, if possible. At the battle of Cressy, the archers of the French army had suffered their bow-strings to be wet by a sudden shower; the English had kept their bows in their cases. When, at the orders of the kings and generals, they joined battle, the shooting of the English was vastly superior, partly because their bow-strings were dry. When from use the bow-string becomes soft, and the twist has come out of it to some extent, give it a few turns the right way by rolling it with the palm of one hand on the palm of the other, and rub it with beeswax.

A spare string should always be carried. At one end an eye is worked, and this is slipped into and out of the notch in the upper horn every time the bow is bent. At the other, the lower horn, there is a standing fastening, by means of what sailors call a timber-hitch. The eye is always over the bow, whether the latter be bent or unbent, so the bow-string is never at loose end, like a whip-lash, but only slack in the centre. The timber-hitch can hardly be described. It is the easiest thing in the world to make when once seen. That being fast, you are ready to bend the bow.

Take hold of it by the handle, with the back towards you. Put the lower horn on the ground against the middle of your right foot inside. Take the eye of the string with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand; put the heel of that hand upon the back of the upper arm of the bow. Press firmly down upon that upper arm with the heel of the left hand, while you draw the middle of the bow outwards with your right hand. Your right foot and left hand are now holding the arms of the bow one way, while your right hand is drawing the middle of the bow the other. As it bends, the string slackens, so that you can push it up with the thumb and forefinger until the eye drops into the notch, and the bow is bent. It is unbent by the same process, the eye being lifted out of the notch, and suffered to drop down towards the handle.

The arrows are round and straight, made of pine, with iron or brass points riveted in. Some are of the same size from end to end, while others are made tapering a little from the middle towards the ends. A piece of horn is fitted on to the but of the arrow, and in this there is a groove to receive the string. Near the but the arrows are armed or plumed with three feathers, one on each side and one on the top. This latter is of dark color, and it must be upwards when the arrow is laid to the bow to shoot. The arrows of the old English archers and outlaws were mostly fitted with the wing feathers of the wild goose, and hence came the expression “gray goose shaft.” A quiver for the arrows, and a pouch and belt, together with a leather brace and shooting glove, are also among the equipments of the modern archer of the clubs; but I think our young folks will manage to dispense with, or find suitable equivalents for, everything but the bow and arrows.

Now, in providing the bow, you must not be too ambitious as to size. Good shooting and strong shooting will much sooner be attained by practice with a bow well within the strength of the shooter. I have just seen a lot of bows of various sizes, recently imported; the capacity was indicated by weight in pounds,—not the weight of the bow, but of power to pull the arrow to the head. A little information as to sizes and prices I here give. The best snakewood bow for gentlemen is six feet six inches long, capacity from 40 to 60 pounds; the strings are Flemish; the price is $8.00. These are self bows, made of one piece of wood. A back bow for gentlemen, which means snakewood, yew, lancewood, or hickory in a combination of two pieces, that is snakewood and hickory, or lancewood and hickory, or snakewood and lancewood, has a capacity of from 46 to 70 pounds, and costs from $8.00 to $9.00. We now come to bows suitable for ladies and boys. Best back bows, Flemish strings, four feet, four feet and a half, five feet, and five feet and a quarter, capacity from 24 to 40 pounds, are to be had from $2.00 up to $7.50. In this class the young folks will find what they want, if they can afford it. Passing on to the lancewood self bows, we find them for gentlemen six feet long, capacity from 56 to 65 pounds, price $4.00. For ladies and boys, five feet long, capacity 24 to 36 pounds, price $3.50. A five-foot bow is quite large enough for a very strong boy, and more than most youths can shoot with; the Indians on the plains use bows of less than five feet in length. As a general rule, the length of the bow ought to be about the height of the shooter.

Bows very suitable for young people, and very likely quite as good to shoot with, may be had at lower rates. Remember that ornament adds really nothing to the utility of the instrument. Fine lancewood bows, stained, polished, horn-tipped, and fitted with fine (but not Flemish) strings, cost as follows: six feet long, $2.50; five feet long, $2.00; four feet and a half long, $1.50; four feet long, and this is a very useful article, $1.12. You can even go lower, and get a lancewood bow, four feet long, for 30 cents. The Japanese bows, of great capacity, are $4.00 each.

But in the country it will not be often convenient to reach a store where archery implements are kept, and so I will tell my country readers how a bow is best made. The simplest and rudest way of all is to cut a hickory pole, from three quarters of an inch to an inch in diameter, let it get dry just as hoop-poles do, and cut it the right length, leaving the rind on. Cut a notch at one end to receive the timber-hitch of the standing end of the string, and one at the other end to catch and retain the loop when the bow is bent. Now here is a bow, rough to look at, but not altogether to be despised in regard to shooting. A great improvement is, however, within the reach of anybody who has the use of tools. Take a long split of hickory from the sap part of a young tree, such as ox-bows and axe-helves are made of. When it is seasoned, work it round on three sides, and flat on the other, which is to be the back of the bow. At the same time let it taper gradually from the middle to the ends, which may be rounded out so as to stand flaring outwards and upwards, when the bow is laid upon its belly. In the inside of these curved ends, that is, on the back of the bow, the notches for the string are to be cut.

In a bow five feet long the string will be about five inches from its belly when it is bent. The best Flemish bow-strings cost from 19 to 38 cents each. It must be remembered that all the prices mentioned in this article, being those of a large importing house, are in gold, or its equivalent in currency.

As to arrows, it is to be remarked that the old “cloth-yard shaft” of the Middle Ages is no longer in use. We suppose that modern archers find that arrows of twenty-eight inches in length are quite as long as they can draw to the head with good stiff bows. They range from that length to fifteen inches. When I was a boy, we used to make the shafts of our arrows of dry reeds, cut out of the pools in a neighboring marsh, and they used to shoot well enough. A broken brad-awl bound with a waxed-end into the split end of the reed was a formidable point, but the arrows were not feathered. The consequence was, that we lost many a one which would not have been lost if the feathers had been there to be seen in the grass or foliage. When we failed to find an arrow on a tolerably clear place, our habit was to go back, as nearly as we could judge, to the place we shot from, and let fly another at the same object. The flight of this, closely watched, often led to the discovery of the first.

It is now time to say something about shooting itself. Stand sideways to the mark, the legs well planted, and the feet rather wide apart than otherwise. Other methods are more easy and graceful, it is said; but none is so firm and steady, and without firmness and steadiness the shooting cannot be good. Therefore, plant yourselves flat-footed, feet apart. Get steadiness first, grace may come afterwards. Of all mistakes, one of the greatest is trying to teach the young to do things gracefully that they can’t yet do at all. No boy taught to ride by a riding-master ever gets the ease and power and finished grace of him whose riding education is begun in the field under some old horseman. The reason is, that the master is trying to teach the boy to do certain things gracefully, which are not essential parts of the riding at all; while the experienced rider pays no attention to anything but the seat, the bend and clip of the knees and thighs, and the lightness yet strength of hand. When the rider knows these thoroughly, the rest is sure to come, for he feels power and ease, and is therefore naturally graceful.

But to return. Being well planted with the left shoulder forward, raise the bow with the left hand, grasping it by the handle, and fit the arrow to the string. Extend the bow, held upright, until the left arm is straightened. Draw the arrow back in a line with the lower part of the ear, glance along it at the object, and let fly sharply. Finger-stalls—cots, perhaps you would call them—had best be worn on the right hand. Some draw the arrow back to the head, and then pause while taking aim, but this needs great strength and steadiness in the left arm. The attention is to be fixed upon the object shot at, not upon any other external thing.

Two calculations are necessary to a correct aim; one for the direct line of flight, the other for the proper elevation as to distance. Neither an arrow from a bow, nor a cannon-ball from a rifled gun, will go far in what is called point-blank range,—that is, a straight, flat flight is always a short one. To get the distance, a certain range upwards must be taken, by elevating the point of the arrow, or the muzzle of the gun, at the moment of discharge. This getting the right elevation is experimental, and at first a matter of some difficulty. During the late war you would often read that one party or the other retired, not because they were beaten, but because the gunners of the opposite artillery had “got the range,”—that is, the right elevation for the distance.

As to the line of the shot, in archery, a great deal depends upon the wind. If it is blowing sidewise, it must be allowed for; if endwise, much less elevation will be required by those who shoot with it than by those who shoot against it.

You are not to look at the arrow when aiming, but at the mark, and this is the great secret of good shooting with bow, shot-gun, or rifle,—especially with the first two. It seems to me that I never see anything but the bird when I bring down a quail or wild duck on the wing. If I glance along the barrel to the sight mechanically, and then pull, I am a “goner,”—and so is the bird shot at, for it is sure to be missed.

I think this covers all that need be said about archery, and so I leave this capital sport to be cultivated and enjoyed by my young country-people.

Charles J. Foster.

DOUBLE ACROSTIC CHARADES.

The name of a celebrated English novelist.

ILLUSTRATED REBUS.—No. 11.

CDB

CHARADES

I am composed of 45 letters.

Je suis composé de 41 lettres.

I am composed of 53 letters.

ILLUSTRATED REBUS.—No. 12.

S. Eugene.

ARITHMETICAL PUZZLE.

A man divided his property, amounting to $2,000, among four persons.

The difference of the first and second persons’ shares was equal to one half of the third person’s share.

The sum of the first and third persons’ shares is equal to the sum of the shares of the second and fourth persons, and that sum increased by $200.

The difference of the shares of the first and fourth persons is equal to four times the share of the third person.

What is each person’s share?

Julie M. P.

PUZZLES.

I am not a melancholy being, though I am often cast down. I have no feet, yet Camilla never moved as gracefully as I. I dwell mostly on the earth’s surface, though men sometimes find me in caves; and if you will look carefully at the full moon, I will look down at you therefrom, though my eyes are blurred, and my nose and mouth are distorted. I am like Mrs. Prim’s little girl, always seen, but never heard. You may strike me, stab me, shoot me, but I remain unhurt. I am a good racer, but I never did outrun a reindeer, neither did a reindeer ever outrun me, when on a race. I am a good flier; yet I never outflew a pigeon, nor did a pigeon ever outfly me, at trial. I have competed with kangaroos, kittens, and grasshoppers in jumping, but, strange to relate, none of us could ever succeed in beating. I am fond of staying under trees, umbrellas, and parasols. Sometimes you will see me running fast on the ground as though I was frightened, being chased by a cloud a mile away from me. I am very ductile at sunrise and just before sunset, and am so plastic that you may make out of me a rabbit or a fox’s head as quick as you can say the words. I am without doubt the best caricaturist in the world; but as it is quite dark now, I will bid you good night and go to bed, which place philosophers might hunt for forever, but they never would find it.

Willy Wisp.

Make a correct sentence of these words, and translate it:—

Hard Nut.

ANSWERS.

R. R. P. sends from Philadelphia this letter:—

“I noticed, in reading the May number of ‘Our Young Folks,’ that Mr. Foster has made two great mistakes in his article on ‘Cricket and Base Ball.’ First, in saying, ‘the distance between the wickets is twenty-two feet.’ This ought to be twenty-two yards, and as there is some slight difference (as will no doubt be readily perceived), which might lead a great many young Americans away, who look to the ‘Young Folks’ as the standard, I thought I would call your attention to it.

“Now for the other. ‘When the ball is caught after having been hit by the bat, no run can be made, and the batsman is out. But though no run can be made, the other batsman may be put out if he leaves his ground, and cannot get back to it before the ball touches the wicket so as to remove a bail,’—which is, in fewer words, that two batsmen can be put out on the same ball, which is impossible, and directly against the rules of the game. And I think you, by noticing the mistakes in your ‘Letter Box,’ will confer a favor upon me, and raise Mr. Foster considerable in the eyes of Cricketers in general. Hoping not to appear dictatorial, I remain

“Yours respectfully.”

To this criticism Mr. Foster replies as follows, establishing his position completely:—

“First. Twenty-two feet is an error; the distance between the wickets, for men, is twenty-two yards. For boys it should be less, so as to get pace and distance in the bowling.

“Second. There is no rule to prevent two batsmen from being put out for one ball, but there is a ruling by umpires to that effect, which is, in fact, contrary to the rules. For instance, if the ball is caught off the bat, the striker is out; if the non-striker leaves his ground, and a bail is knocked off by the ball, he is out. Now, if these provisions were interpreted according to their plain sense, both the batsmen might be put out for one ball, unless the ball became dead in the hands of the catcher. Let us see whether it does. Rules 26 and 44 say the ball shall be considered dead when finally settled in the bowler’s or wicket-keeper’s hands. There is not a word about its being dead in the hands of the scouts. Now, suppose the striker is caught out, and, the other batsman having left his ground to run, the catcher throws at his wicket and knocks it down. Two distinct and independent things have been accomplished here, for each of which the rules prescribe that a man shall be out. It has been overridden by rulings, but not by rules. We used to play the game so when I was a boy, and I am convinced that, in order to encourage good fielding, it ought to be played so now. The players instinctively stump the other man, when the striker is caught out, if they can; and if the umpires were to hold that the ball had touched the ground before the catcher held it, the man stumped would be out. Now, why should he not be out when the ball is caught? He is stumped for an independent act of his own. When the bowling is slow, the non-striker very often leaves his ground before the ball is struck. Failing to get back to it before his bails are displaced, he ought to be out, unless there is a specific rule, providing that a ball caught shall be dead in the hands of the catcher, or that two batsmen shall not be put out for one ball. There is no such rule in the code, and it is a mere invention of umpires.”

H. W. Send subscribers for as many different post-offices as you please. The advertisements in the early numbers of the year show exactly what the premiums for subscribers are.

A. F. “Well drove” is not good English; you should say “well driven.” Your rebus was clever,—will you try again?

Nancy J. O. The singer’s name is Par’epa.

Empire State. “Appearance” has no e in the last syllable; the apostrophe in “don’t” does not follow the d; “puzzles” is not to be spelled “puzzels.” Ought you not to be correct before you are critical?—The postage-stamp business is a peculiar one, and can only be well explained by an expert in it.—The person to whom you refer is not “very idle,” but very industrious; he saves all his odd minutes, and so has plenty of leisure for recreation when he wishes it.

Levi L., Fannie, Lilla W., Franklin M., Artie C., Emilie L., Louie F. E. Thank you, one and all.

The answer to Mary R. C. C.’s French puzzle is Drâme.

North Canaan says:—

“In our school there is a boy that is in the habit of putting oranges, candy, &c. in under our desks. At first we took them and thanked him; but then he bought us all tickets for an Old Folks’ concert, and, after we had gone to hear it, we heard that he had stolen the money to buy them with. Now, of course, we do not want to take any more presents from him, but he will keep giving them to us; and we would like to have you tell us how we should refuse them, for he appears to be a very pleasant boy, and we are afraid we will hurt his feelings if we tell him what we have heard.”

The safest course in regard to presents is, to refuse all which you do not know are rightly given,—that is, given by proper persons, who are able to afford such generosity. In any doubtful case, consult your teacher or your mother immediately. So far as this instance is concerned, you need not suspect your school-fellow of theft; you can simply decline to be placed under obligation by encouraging his offers, and if he is really a good boy, he will not force any attention upon you.—Pronounce “Hiawatha” as it is spelled, with the i long.

This Composition, which has come to us by chance from an exhibition of the Cotting School in Arlington, Mass., has something so pleasant about it that we think it entitled to a place here:—

The picture proverb in the July number is, “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” This month we offer you for trial the name of a famous play, although we are afraid that it is almost too easy for you. The design was sent us by Goak.

THE END

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.

[The end of Our Young Folks. An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls. Volume 3, Issue 8 edited by J. T. Trowbridge, Gail Hamilton and Lucy Larcom]