# The Overland Monthly/Volume 1/In the Sierras

Anon the print of some designing fox
Or dog’s more honest paw ; the solid bowls
That held the heavy oxen’s spreading hoof;
And suddenly, in awe, the bear’s broad palm,
With almost human impress. Riding so,
Against the sky’s blue vacancy, I saw
How nature prints abroad and publishes
Her generous gospels. Here the wind-burnt bark
Like satin, glossed and quilted; scattered twigs
In mystic hieroglyphics ; the dry shrubs
That seem to point to something wise and grave,
The leafless stalks that rise so desolate
Out of their slender shafts within the drift,
And over all the brown straws of the pine.
Strong winter heats of the meridian sun
Smote the dumb earth, and she regained her voice.
The season and the summit passed at once
We entered to the valley, and forgot
How but an hour back we halted where
Under the dripping gables of the fir,
The slow drops softly sink their silent wells
Into the passive snow. More sweet I found
The sunny dream of autumn’s plentiful
And everlingering, everlasting peace.
And here at last I cast me at my length
In the mid valley, where the stream expands
Lakewise, and lilies lift their broad green palms
Against the sunshine, and the skaters skate
Upon the water, and the beetles dive
Into their shady gardens ; while ashore
A glossy water-thrush trips close upon
And curtsies at the margin as he wets
All of his slender body in the pool.
And here a myriad creatures built and toiled
At their incessant masonry. I heard
The meadows drinking in the wet. The earth
Meeting the sun did both together blend
Their powerful magnetisms. Now forgot
The wood, the torrent, and the gale ; no more
I looked upon the diamond-powdered snow,
But went afield, and in the meadow heard
The happy robin’s tender tremolo,
THE DIAMOND MAKER OF SACRAMENTO.
IF in the following story, practical men should be disappointed at finding a vague hinting at a scientific process and only an imperfect sketch of a scientific experiment, I have no explanation or apology to offer. The story is told for the purpose of interesting the reader in the career of a man who was never well understood, and not to illustrate any principle of science. I have a very dim idea of the value of the experiments in chemistry in which the interest of my little sketch chiefly centres, and must disclaim in advance all attempt to give the reader any scientific information whatever.
With the earlier rush of emigration to the State of California, there arrived at Sacramento, then a straggling town of huts and tents, John Barnard, a young physician, full of enthusiasm and hungry for excitement. The young man with his wife, who had but just left her father's home for her husband's, had sailed for California, satisfied that if his excellent qualifications as a medical man brought him no employment, he could turn his ready hand to any of the various callings which the unsettled condition of things in the new El Dorado would be sure to develop and require.
Barnard was a frank, genial young fellow, and I very well remember our first meeting, at which he directly impressed me with his peculiarly winning and attractive manner. He was compactly built, with a broad, roomy forehead, clear-cut but rounded features, a pleasant, mobile mouth, and was gifted, withal, with a magnetic manner of address that was generally considered irresistible, even by matter-of-fact people. As the reader may not be able, otherwise, to understand some things which I want to tell him about my friend Barnard, I desire to give a tolerably minute description of the young physician, whose career afterwards attracted much attention in the State.
I have said that he was frank and direct in his manner, and so he was; yet there was with all his frankness an undefined and dreamy abstraction at times that seemed very much like the air of a mystic. You felt that there was a vein of the supernatural running through all his beliefs. And while no man could be more healthy and vigorous in his mental and moral organization, there was a certain flavor of mystery pervading all his warm and _ hearty nature that perplexed and bothered those who knew him. The man was a study, and those who still recollect his sunny, hopeful face, his pleasant voice and the sincere grasp of his strong hand, will always remember that they never felt that they quite understood why it was that the hearty and genial doctor appeared as though there was at least one chamber in his soul over which, even to his own self-consciousness, there was hung the warning, "No Admittance."
In addition to his studies in medicine, Barnard had early made extensive excursions into the tempting fields of chemistry. He was never weary of experimenting and collating; his fertile genius constantly discovered new combinations and effects from the elements that Nature furnished him, and some of his inventions and intentions were brilliant, if not useful. He laughingly said that his necessities alone prevented him from being an alchemist. If he had not been obliged to provide for his daily bread, he would have spent his life in ransacking Nature's laboratory and ​laying bare her ancient secrets. Nothing seemed to give him so much pleasure as to spend hours over his chemical apparatus, pursuing with tireless enthusiasm the delusive phantoms that were continually rising before him. Days and nights were spent in an eager search for some possible result, which though often escaping, and beckoning him on with aggravating coyness, was generally captured at last. Into this fascinating pursuit Barnard entered with all the ardor of his nature, and led by his fervid imagination, though still guided by accurate scientific knowledge, he managed to amass a sum of results which would have given him considerable fame had they been published to the world. But he declared that he was a mere dabbler in science, and would wait until he had accomplished some great thing before he troubled the scientific world with his childish experiments, which were leading to something better.
It must not be supposed, however, that Barnard spent all his time in the more congenial pursuit of chemical science to the neglect of his chosen profession. To this day there are not a few who were then citizens of Sacramento, who will attest to the untiring patience, close attention and skill which characterized Dr. Barnard during those early years of his life in California, when such rare tact and loving warmth as his were sure to bring hope, if not healing, to the sick-beds of those who were so fortunate as to know him. His range of practice grew to be very wide, and from far and near he was called to minister to the sick and suffering. The times were golden, and Barnard made a great deal of money by his ardent devotion to his practice. In a few years, although he was indifferent to wealth and was generous to the needy and suffering poor, he grew rich and prosperous in his fortunes.
I see him now, at this stage of his career—full-figured, rotund yet shapely,
bubbling over with animal spirits, vigor+ ous with health, in high good humor with himself and the world, winning to his side all the genuine men of the time, and drawing after him loving and admiring looks as he walked abroad with his elastic, springy step. Then I remember the dreamy veil that seemed to shut down at times over his clear blue eye, and the queer abstraction that interrupted the ripple of his bright talk, and I ask myself if this was a premonition of his fate, like that vague, far-off look that old philosophers say belongs to those who are destined to die by violence.
Of his wife I have not said much, because there is not much to say about her. She was one of those shadowy persons, hard to understand, with abundant positiveness as to being, but in character altogether negative. She loved her husband well and truly, and considered him the sum of all human wisdom and goodness. Thoroughly practical, she gloried in his pecuniary success, and only seemed to regret that his own skill had secured for them competence and substantial comfort before the dowry which she brought him had been exhausted. She shared in all the enthusiasm with which Barnard pursued his experiments in science, though she honestly declared that she did not understand them any more than she did the Sanscrit.
As his medical practice increased, and calls on his time grew more frequent, Barnard complained good-humoredly that he had too much professional business to allow himself as much leisure for scientific diversion as his craving passion required. His pecuniary circumstances, however, being easy, I think he grew a little careless about his business, and employed a good deal of time with his visionary schemes and mysterious chemical processes. His wife looked on with simple wonder, but asked no questions and made no inju ​dicious remarks, though she did sometimes open her eyes with wonder when she saw her husband rush out to answer a sudden call, carrying a boiling retort or half-finished experiment in his hand. Believing her husband to be one of the wisest and best of men, she declared that the God of Nature would bring him out of all his maze of conjectures in triumph; but what those conjectures were, and why he should have them, she did not know. I do not believe that she cared to know.
Carbon was always a favorite subject of Dr. Barnard's studies, and he pursued the subtle element through all its tortuous changes and _ multifarious forms. Nobody but a scientific man could understand the variety of his experiments and the wonderful results at which he arrived, in his thirsty chase for all that could be known concerning his favorite subject. "Carbon," he would say, "pervades all nature in one form or another. It gives strength and solidity to the humble plant beneath our feet; it is in the air we breathe and in the food we eat; it gives life and vigor to the blood of man and beast; warms us in the dull coal of the grate, and sparkles in the liquid lustre of the rarest gem in the world." The idea that carbon is capable of being solidified into its purest form, the diamond, was always uppermost in his mind; and pondering on the fact that here was crystalized carbon—only simple carbon in its purest form—he continually asked himself, "Why cannot this familiar element be caught, prisoned, and solidified into the precious gem?" "Nature," he argued, "has but few secrets in her laboratory which are not penetrable to man; her processes are hidden, but may be discovered or imitated; and if we know that Nature makes a diamond by crystalizing carbon, why not follow in her footsteps?" This was easier said than done, but the indefatigable experimenter was on the'keen search for the
hidden secret. Diamonds were not plenty or cheap in those days, and I shudder even now to think of the valuable stones that were bought by Barnard, pulverized, sublimated, triturated and treated to all sorts of tests with acids, fire, and other agencies. Before the long quest was ended, poor Mrs. Barnard's few gems went into the alembic, or melted away, none knew how. Dr. Barnard despised as absurd and chimerical the old notion of the alchemists, that gold could be made by transmutation, and cheerily he laughed at the vain dream that had tempted so many to poverty, desperation, and death. His was not a vulgar and ignorant fancy that gold, a primitive element, could be made by man; but humbly following in Nature's footsteps, he would imitate her own formula, and combine in the flawless gem the simple elements which she had revealed were the constituent parts thereof. This thought having once obtained lodgment in his mind, never left him. He had always known the theory of the chemists in relation to the formation of the diamond, but not until he had been emboldened by brilliant successes in experimental chemistry, did it occur to him that he might possibly accomplish that which had before been only dimly hinted at as a possibility. It had been said that whoever discovered the process of crystalizing carbon would have found the art of making diamonds. This was to be his work, and thenceforward he turned his attention to a pursuit of the phantom with all the ardor of one who is master of the obedient materials at hand. He was familiar enough with the disguises and peculiarities of the element which he pursued to be able to know just where to begin and where to lay his hand upon its secret habitations. His trials and manipulations were, of course, conducted on a small scale, and they were just successful enough to lure him forward to greater ventures and closer ap ​plication. He was never discouraged, for there was always abundant explanation for his repeated failures. Some element was missing, or some other was in excess; it would be easy to remedy these little defects, and with each trial came new light and knowledge. The goal of his hopes and ambition was not far off; it would be reached shortly; and meantime, his only regret was that he had not now the time to publish the wonderful revelations which his absorbing experiments had given him. He had reached the conclusion that his own results would enable somebody else te make the grand success, diamond making, if ke should die before he achieved it for himself.
Diamond making, we used to say, was Barnard's hobby, and the experiments which he made with his odd-shaped retorts and other implements were amusing to his friends, though we refrained from our good natured jests at his expense when we found him in severe earnest. One day he begged from a neighbor a large bombshell that had never been charged and had been kept as a curious relic of the Spanish occupation of California. This he loaded with some curious compound and fused the ingredients by means of a powerful galvanic battery; the shell, though enclosed in a welded crust of iron, exploded in fragments, broke the windows of his neighbors and brought the doctor into disrepute. He was threatened with an indictment as a nuisance if he contined his "dratted experiments," and for a time the ardent disciple of science lost some of his popularity. The mixture with which he charged his bombsheil, by the way, was known only to himself; in a moment of inspiration he seemed to have conceived the idea that certain materials fused under great pressure would secure the desired result; but what those ingredients were he never told. When questioned as to where he found the formula for their
composition he would evade the matter, but finally admitted that it had been "revealed" to him, though whether the revelation was made by spirits from the unseen world or by his own research, or by Nature herself, in a moment of unusual confidence, he would never say; it was sufficient for us to know that he had the infallible and only reliable recipe for compounding the diamond, or rather, for resolving from carbon its purest form—the diamond.
His chief anxiety now was where to find an implement or machine to hold the explosion while he fired his mixture under pressure. In reply to the suggestion that the same spirits who were kind enough to give him the information which enabled him to mix the ingredients, ought to furnish him with the requisite machinery for a successful test of their value, he only laughed good humoredly and said that man must work out some part of his problem himself. He was sensitive to any jocular remarks about the supernatural agency which was employed in his experiments, and though he began to have some traces of respect for the "spiritual manifestations" which were then beginning to attract attention in the country, he steadily declined to say what his chemical formula was or where he got it, except that "it was revealed." His wife asked no questions, but put her trust implicitly in her husband, as she had always done.
Barnard lost a little of his rotundity, and his features grew a trifle sharper, as he prosecuted his fascinating search for the proper machinery for his great experiment. As years rolled by and his bursted &nvils, broken retorts and shattered cannon-balls only brought fresh disappointments, he grew a shade paler and more anxious, but his fine flow of spirits never forsook him. He had a revelation that he would succeed, and his enthusiasm was still quenchless. He never had any more doubt of his ​
ultimate success than he had of his own existence. "Ifthe Lord spares my life, and I know He will," the hopeful little doctor would say, "I shall yet show the world that this dream of mine is not altogether a dream. And when I have made diamonds I shall be satisfied, unless," he added, as new possibilities seemed to shine before him, "unless I shall enter through my diamond gates into other mysteries of nature."
His patients complained of neglect and his practice dwindled somewhat; but this never disconcerted him; wealth and fame were just within his grasp, and he would soon be beyond the harassments of his profession. Wealth was not so much an object to him as the fame which he would secure by a scientific success that should electrify the world. He was willing that his friends, who had given him latterly the pecuniary assistance which he needed, should have the larger share of the profits that would arise from the success of his search after the great mystery; nay, more, he would by locking up the secret, when found, prevent the process from being common, or his own work from being so often repeated that the precious gem should be cheapened. The agents of the California Diamond Company should quietly put upon the market, in different quarters of the world, large and flawless stones of rare brilliancy and pure water; but none would know the parentage of these wonderful gems, and only his fame as a scientist should mark his whereabouts or his occupation.
Near Barnard's house was a huge mass of granite which had been left there by a bankrupt stone worker; on this the restless eyes of the experimenter were fixed. He bought it, and after clamping it about with rough masses of wrought iron, drilled a hole into its heart, placed his chemicals in a hollowed chamber in the bottom of the drilled channel, and then, having closed up the opening with some metallic com position, introduced through another minute channel the poles of a large galvanic battery and let on a terrific charge. The mass of stone and iron flew into a thousand fragments, and in the general disturbance which followed, the broadside of a neighboring house was blown in, to the consternation of a large family of Missourians, the paternal protector of whom, not appreciating the labors and necessities of science, had the doctor arrested for a misdemeanor forthwith. The appearance of the philosopher in the Sacramento police court was a signal fora rally of his friends, who had their good-natured laugh at his expense, as he pleaded his case and explained his novel schemes, and yet helped him out of his troubles with genuine Californian generosity. The Missourian was wroth, and swore vengance on the disturber of his peace, and the doctor agreed that he would try no more experiments inside the city limits.
On the restoration of peace, Barnard, who had supposed his experiment was an unquestionable failure, looked curiously at the cavity in the rent granite, now exposed to the light of day, as one looks at the inside of a work which has cost many weary days of labor under difficulty to perfect, when his eye was attracted by a grayish powder in a little scooping fissure; he scraped it up and rubbed it in his palm, and saw, gleaming in the sunlight, a few sparkling grains of diamond dust! there was no mistaking it. His eyes filled with strange moisture, as he thought of the brilliant future before him, now to begin at last; he thought of his beloved wife and friends, of the wealth which should be theirs and the comfort that should now repay their long endured suspense and anxiety. As he stood gazing in his palm, in which lay the precious dust, a great lump swelled in his throat, anda thousand wonderful visions thronged up the long vista which his imagination opened to him. ​
An hour later his wife found Barnard lying insensible near the shattered fragments of his granite receiver, with his nerveless hands open and empty. The reaction had been too much for his overworked and wearied frame, and he had fainted from excitement. We could not find any traces of the diamond dust in the plebian clay of Sacramento, where it had fallen, and no human eye but Barnard's ever saw it. That was enough, however, and he was from that day strung with a vigor and determination which had never before been his, even when he had been first inspired with the mysterious revelations which had since urged him onward in his search for the diamond. Some of his plain-speaking acquaintances thought that they ought to undeceive him by telling him that what he took to be diamond dust was only pulverized feldspar from the shattered granite. He laughed at the suggestion, and remained fixed in the belief that he had seen and handled minute diamonds which he had made. From that day certain compassionate people shook their heads sadly and said: " Dr. Barnard is as crazy as a loon."
There were others, however, who would not forsake the good doctor, and now that his own and his wife's property had been greatly diminished by his expensive experiments, and his income was far below what it had been, were ready to encourage the hopeful enthusiast in science with substantial aid. He was always particular to insist that all such loans were only temporary, and that the lenders should share in the first benefits of his grand success. So, with their own subscriptions his friends eked out Barnard's dwindling funds, and he went on with preparations for a trial on a larger scale than any heretofore attempted, in which he was confident of success. It is not worth while to go into details, but enough to say that a considerable sum was spent in building and equipping a large iron globe which was bored and charged, after the manner of the block
of granite, and a galvanic shock communicated to the contents of the interior from an immense battery which Barnard himself had constructed. The machine was carted off mysteriously one night to a lonely plain several miles from the city, and was fired by the doctor next day. I met him as he alighted from his buggy on his return; he threw his arms around me and trembled as he said, "I have it! I have it!" He showed a rough pebble, about the size of a large pea, brown in its coating, but emitting on one side, where he had rudely chipped off the crust, a duJl, yellow gleam. The diamond, if such it was, 'passed from hand to hand, and set the town by the ears; not a few said that it was a base invention, and others stoutly maintained that Dr. Barnard was too honest to im-. pose upon others, and too deeply versed in science to be imposed upon. The globe had been hopelessly fissured by the shock, and it required the united labors of Barnard and his friends for several hours to clear out the bore of the machine so as to reacl. the crusted stone that slept within. After dividing the town into two distinct factions, the: stone was sent to Antwerp to be cut and tested. Ten months passed away and it came back, a straw-colored diamond, with a whitish flaw in it, dull and smoky enough, but a diamond, nevertheless. There were stories of letters having been written from California to. buy an opinion from the Antwerp lapidary, and some went so far as to say that Barnard had never sent the stone which had been taken from the iron globe, and even that no such stone had ever been found there, but had been: dexterousiy produced at the right moment by Dr. Barnard. So the question remained unsettled, and the story cf the Antwerp Diamond was the subject for a standing joke for many months thereafter.
The events which I have hastily recounted were stretched over eight or ​
nine years. Notina single year did my old friend give way to the fascination of the diamond dream; not in a few years did his lucrative practice melt away, to be replaced by an eager search for the discovery of a hidden scientific process; not until eight years had passed did he find himself almost a bankrupt in purse, reduced to living in a mean habitation, pinched for the necessaries of life, and kept alive and cheery only by his tireless enthusiasm in his pursuit and by a quenchless belief in his ultimate success. Fortune was still near, and he would soon be so rich that he could bear the little privations of to-day. Itwas something wonderful to see how manfully and philosophically he bore himself under his pecuniary troubles and often disap-pointments. He lived simply and even meanly, but made a pleasantry of his vegetarian fare, and declared that when he came into his fortune he would not be willing to forego the simple luxuries of bread and water for the enervating
and corrupting habits which monied ease would be sure to tempt him with. His wife never repined, but clung to this poorly understood delusion of her husband with as much tenacious confidence
ashe did. If she suspected that all was not well; if her faith in his ultimate success ever wavered, she made no 'sign, but with an almost sullen belief in her husband's scientific infallibility, said simply: "We shall succeed, we shall succeed."
Nor were his friends all gone. Some had left him to struggle on, but many remained to help him with their countenance or with their money. He made new friends, too, with surprising readiness. Of these I shall always remember gratefully a young machinist who had just established himself in Sacramento, and who could not very well afford the sacrifice of time and materials which he made for Barnard. He had no faith whatever in the diamond business, but, as he expressed it, "he could not bear
to see the good doctor wearing himself out and fretting because he had not the means to put his machinery together." There seems to be some subtle charm in the personal influence of dreamy visionaries by which they capture some practical men, and the oddly matched couple—enthusiast and unbeliever—jog on together, bearing and dividing a queer burden. So our young machinist, compassionating Barnard, or half-ashamed of a hidden belief, permitted the unwearied experimenter to use his shop, tools and materials with a liberal hand. The good fellow, half laughing, half crying at the doctor's wild delusion, worked on the new machine whenever he had a moment to spare, and surrendered all his little resources to his call.
Barnard was too proud to be an object of charity, but took freely whatever was offered him, with the unabashed confidence of one whose millions were not yet subject to sight drafts. Finding that ready money must be had to furnish materials and machinery for a great and crucial experiment, he conceived the plan of getting up a joint stock company, and the little knot of faithful friends who stood by him still consented to become stockholders in the California Diamond Crystallization Company. The organization was completed, and the shares were disposed of. The shareholders represented a great variety of opinions and varying shades of faith in the enterprise in which the company was embarked. There were those who did not believe in the scheme but did believe in Barnard; there were others who were willing to take stock "just to help him out;" there were some who had faith in the scheme from the first; most of these were spiritualists; and there were not a few who, with genuine Californian recklessness, invested a few hundred dollars "just for luck," with the proviso that if they ever got anything back it would be an awful disappointment. These all ​
made up a goodly company, with president, secretary, treasurer and directors, some of whose valuable autographs lie before me now, on a neatly engraved certificate, for five shares in the California Diamond Crystallization Company.
Months were consumed in the laborious manufacture of a solid iron sphere, thirty-eight inches in diameter, a mass of laminated and wrought castiron, so hooped, banded, braced and strengthened in every part as to seem a miracle of strength and solidity. Into this, at great cost and painful labor, a circular channel, three inches in diameter, was bored, reaching to the center, where a circular chamber, six inches in diameter, was hollowed by a peculiar machine, invented by Barnard for the purpose. The materials for the crystallization being introduced, it was intended to close the channel from end to end with a closely-fitting steel screw, adjusted to threads made to fit those of this stopper. Two small openings ran through the center of this screw-stopper, through which were to be passed the poles of a galvanic battery, encased in an insulating substance. The battery used on the occasion was a wonder in its way. It was said to have been the largest ever made in the United States. I do not know enough about such things to be able to take the responsibility of that statement, but it was made of two cups—tubs, rather—each holding ten plates, forty-two inches in diameter. It was said to be of sufficient power to kill a hundred men at one shock. The experiment was never fairly tried.
I have not the heart to describe the repeated failures and reversals, the disappointments and rising and falling hopes with which the work went on during the summer months of 1860. There were numerous disasters of breaking tools, spoiled castings, and unexpected obstacles. The young machinist tore his hair in despair, but picked up his
tools again and worked on with a comical sort of wilfulness. More assessments were levied, and more stock created. Some shareholders fell out by the way, discouraged and dismayed at the "Irish dividends," and one by one withdrew in great disgust. Meantime, tidings of what was going on in the Sacramento machine shop had spread all over the State, and relief came in the shape of new subscriptions from sympathising or sanguine people in the mountains and valleys, and -by the sea side. One man in Shasta county wrote that he had been warned in a dream that he must buy five shares in the Diamond Company if he would be rich. He would be rich, so he enclosed a draft for $625, and bequeathed his five shares of stock to his next of kin five years thereafter.
In September, 1860, the machine which I have described was carried into the heart of an adjoining county, secretly and at night, for fear of such scoffers as might follow it to deride the proceedings or share in the knowledge of the great success. Only a few of the most select of the select, eight in all, were permitted to know the place of rendezvous, and they, to keep all outsiders from the secret, turned teamsters and laborers, and when the machine was fairly prepared for transportation, were the only guard and attendants of its transit to a lonely place, far away from the inspection of any curious eye. A day or two elapsed after the apparatus was taken to the place of experiment, during which Barnard slept on the field, under a slight shed put up for the purpose of sheltering the battery and the materials. His eye shone with a strange light, a bright-red spot appeared on either cheek, and his once elastic step was heavy and trembling with strange eagerness. But his courage was still unshaken, and he spoke calmly and confidently of the Dright certainty before us all. For his™beloved friends ​
there was wealth, but for him fame, more glorious and coveted than mere money, was within reach.
The eventful day was sunny, calm, and lovely. The iron globe had been charged with the mysterious compound. The battery was ready to be attached by a single turn of a lever to the wires which led out into the level space where the great, rude sphere lay sleeping in the sun, holding in its iron heart its tremendous secret. Without any superflous words or dramatic gestures, such as the occasion might have called forth, Barnard mounted the little shed, through the roof of which appeared the lever that was to direct the enormous power of the battery beneath him, along the quivering wires to the silent monster lying in the dry grass, scarcely two hundred feet away. Ata safer distance from the machine, eight stockholders in the California Diamond Crystallization Company, with various feelings, but with dry jokes still uttered with their bated breath, sat upon a rail fence. The moment was sublime. Phineas Goodson said, "She biles!" Then the lever was turned in the Doctor's hand; there was a fierce rending of the air, as if heaven and earth had come together; the solid earth trembled for miles around; birds fell dead from the astonished sky, with fragments of iron and steel; Dr. Barnard ascended, it is averred, fifty feet perpendicularly in the air; then flying horizontally fifty feet, he alighted on the quaking earth with a broken thigh and sundry contusions. All this the eight stockholders on the rail fence saw before the rush of air swept them off in a heap, as a boy would brush off a row of torpid flies. The experiment was concluded, and when ranchmen came spurring in from the alarmed country roundabout, they found —not a new-born volcano or wandering earthquake, as they had expected, but a broken-limbed, broken-hearted philosopher, a field dotted with minute
fragments of an iron globe, a group of half-stunned stockholders, a torn and rent space of ground, a scattered wreck of a wooden shed and battery—but no diamonds.
I draw a curtain over the closing scenes. Inamoment of time, in a flash of electric light, the hope of a lifetime, the fruits of long and weary years of waiting, passed away as lightly as a bursted bubble. Barnard's resources and all that he could expect from his friends had gone in the general wreck of his hopes. His frame was shattered by his terrible fall; and limp and nerveless from the reaction of his overstrained organization, he relapsed into a state of apathy and stupor; the light of his eye was extinguished; his heart was quite broken. He took to his bed and for days spoke no word to any man. Rallying after a while, he persisted in his belief that he only needed an apparatus strong enough to hold the discharge of his battery, and he could yet make the diamond. It was pitiful to see the eager flush with which he would start up when arguing the certainty of success, hoping that his listeners would encourage him by word or assistance to hope for future ventures. No such word or offer ever came, and he slowly gave way under the crushing load of disappointment that weighed him down. With the rainy season of autumn, gloom shut in around him, and though the old hope flashed up occasionally from the embers of his expiring fires, the ashes slowly covered his heart, and he passed into a condition in which he seemed wavering between life and death. Once ina while of a bright occasional day in winter his shrunken form was seen sunning itself at the doorway of his little house in the ragged outskirts of the city. But consumption, which had long been seated in his system, rapidly brought him down to death. His devoted wife, thinner and paler than of yore, but quiet and gentle, ministered to every want, and bore un ​complainingly the querulous repinings which now came from the broken-spirited defeated man.
One winter afternoon, as the rain was falling drearily in the cheerless streets of Sacramento, Barnard lay a-dying. He had quite loosed his hold on life and was drifting out into the dim sea beyond. He rallied and returned; fix ing his fading eyes upon his tearful wife, he difficultly said: "They will make diamonds yet; I may come back and tell them how to prepare the materials; but you shall have the secret now. Take of carbonic acid." The jaw fell, and his cherished secret died with the baffled Diamond Maker of Sacramento.
FAMILY RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES.
IN this world there are no quarrels I so bitter as the quarrels between brothers, no feuds so uncompromising as family feuds. Kinsfolk are proverbiably the worst neighbors, and it is often said that particular individuals are too much alike to agree. This has been the case in all ages of the world.
Three thousand years ago, in the land near to the cradle of the human race, there was strife "between the herdmen of Abram's cattle and the herdmen of Lot's cattle," which increased in bitterness until one of the brothers said to the other: "Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me. If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left." And so the families divided the one from the other.
The world is as full of this malignant spirit now as it was in the days of the Patriarchs, and nations seem to be even more under its influence than families. Those nations which, by similarity of institutions or consanguinity, ought to be the best of friends, prove against every rule of reason to be the worst of enemies; while on the other hand, those who are most remote in geographical position, or which are governed by the most antagonistic systems, appear, on the surface at least, to be the closest kin,
We Americans are proud of our Anglo-Saxon blood and origin. We claim as our own the laws, the traditions, the poetry, and the romance of Britian. These are our inheritance as much as they are the inheritance of the veriest Cockney, born within the sound of Bow bells. Yet we dread and fear the power of our kindred of that nation, and with a strange anomaly, look with trusting confidence to the Muscovite despotism, of all the powers of Europe, for sympathy and neighborly love. And this confidence appears, at least on the surface, to be justified by the whole experience of the nation's life. Among all the disappointments which showered upon the loyal people of America during the four years between the fall of Fort Sumter and the capture of Richmond, scarcely one was more unexpected than the circumstance that the public opinion of all of the world, sufficiently enlightened to be of consequence, was enlisted in behalf of the enemies of our country. And this, aggravated by the obvious fact that the nearer to ourselves in civilization and in consanguinity, the more pronounced was the judgment, the more decided the repugnance to our cause. That which in Austria and in Spain was simply passive deprecation, in France and Belgium grew to be outspoken opposition, and in England and Scotland ​
stayed not at words, but sprang into deeds of the most hostile character. And by a singular transition, from that people to whom we looked for the greatest amount of sympathy and encouragement we obtained the least. More than half a century before the war was commenced by the South for the defence of slavery, and joined in and prosecuted by the North in part, at least, for its destruction, a great law lord had announced from the bench that the air of England was so pure that slavery could not exist for a moment in that favored land, and that upon touching English soil the shackles would fall from the limbs of the slave, and he must stand forth a free man. And less than five and twenty years before, the legislature had determined that this unpolluted element should not be confined to Britain alone, but should spread over the world, to all the colonies and dependencies of that realm, and that slavery should exist no more under the British flag. And no achievement of that power during its thousand years of rule had been more gratifying to the national pride than the peaceful one of emancipation.
With this record, it was not strange that Northern Americans should expect English sentiment to take their side in the great struggle. Why were they disappointed? Why was it that a vast majority of the intelligence, the decency and respectability of England was willing to see the bad cause succeed? The answer is, that it was the same influence which had made the Americans of the South for a century hold Africans in servitude, and the Americans of the North encourage and support them in doing so—pride and arrogance of race, engendered mainly by selfishness and greed. That the English people on the east side of the Atlantic were not different from those other English people whose ancestors had migrated to the west side of the ocean, and taken to themselves a new name; that these
Englishmen who had crossed the sea had not brought away with them ali of the brutality, all of the selfishness, or all of the insolence of power, but only their fair proportion of those qualities; that their brethren whom they had left behind them were neither better nor worse than themselves; and that the offspring of the separated families, with an obedience to the original plans of nature singularly faithful, were found when they again met to have a resemblance as strange as the resemblance of Antipholus of Syracuse to his brother of Ephesus. Different climates and different habits of life had marked certain peculiarities upon the form and features, while different social influences had stamped their effects upon the minds of the people; but as these influences were slightly different, so was the change but trifling.
The great leading peculiarities of the English nation, as it existed on both sides of the water, were found to be identical. Whether it showed itself in the whipping of negroes in South Carolina or coolies in Mauritius, the braining of pappoose at Humboldt Bay or blowing Sepoys from the mouths of loaded cannon at Lucknow, it was the same spirit of Anglo-Saxon selfishness, and disregard for the rights and feelings of others.
Both nations were willing enough to run up and down the world trading with those who would, and robbing those who would not, and asserting and perhaps believing they were spreading Christianity and the elegant arts of peace; both attacking barbarism with bullets instead of books, and standing ready to spread civilization with Henry rifles or Snyder breech-loaders.
The high-spirited youth who pelts defenceless Chinamen with stones in the streets of San Francisco, or tears their flesh with dogs, feels that he is performing a commendable duty in resisting the encroachments of an inferior race, in presuming to breathe of the air ​
or enjoy the light so evidently prepared by the Anglo Saxon's God for the special benefit of his most favored race. The English collier who beats to death his Belgian fellow craftsman, does not condescend to invoke in his defence this well-known superiority, but finds a sufficient excuse in the established right of a noble Briton not to be interfered with in the winning of bread. Wherever we turn the family resemblance is perfect. The American branch is legitimately begotten, and if John Bull is not proud of his offspring, he at least must confess the paternal relationship, for it is obviously true that the Anglo-Saxon family, upon which, unfortunately for the weak, the sun never sets, is a slavewhipping race wherever found all over the world.
But if our own conduct has been so true to the traditions of our race, why did we expect so much from, and why were we so disappointed at the action of our cousins in the old world? Why should we not rather admire that conservatism of tryranny which still maintained the prescriptive right of Englishmen to be arrogant selfish and brutal? The answer is, that it is a weakness of our nature to condemn with special severity a vice which we feel that we have finally abandoned. The reformed drunkard soon ripens into the most zealous and perhaps the most intolerant of apostles of abstinence. The first step of the penitent gamester is to destroy all cards and dice within his reach. The youthful habit of long . hours of sleep, so necessary to the complete development of the human constitution, is naturally abandoned by most men at about five and forty. Nature no longer permits it. At five and fifty the individual has forgotten the time when he did otherwise than rise early, and before three score years and ten are reached, many old men honestly think that the rising generation is wasting its best energies in self-indulgence and unnecessary slumber, and sinking into
habits of hopeless indolence and sloth. They have left off the vice so long that they have forgotten that they ever had it. And so it is with nations. For nearly seyen years past the great majority of educated Americans in the North have taken a lively interest in the extirpation of slavery. And that trifling period has sufficed to wipe out all recollection of that other darker time, when they were as willing to uphold and sustain it. Seven years ago the Republican party was the only organization in the land with influence sufficient to be materially fe!t in public affairs, and which at the same time acknowledged the holding of principles hostile to the peculiar institution of the South. And that Republican party disclaimed vehemently any intent to interfere with slavery, except to prevent its spread into territories then free from it. Its members felt insulted when the infamous epithet of abolitionist was applied to them. Now thousands who at that time acted with the pro-slavery party, have forgotten their old sympathy, and are unequal to the mental task of conceiving how any except their own opinions can be honestly held. The truth is, that we thought the English better than ourselves; that they were more moral, less selfish, and generally farther advanced in civilization than we were. And when we learned by putting the matter to practical proof, that they were not, and that thanks to the war we were drifting into just views more rapidly than they, we turned to the other extreme and easily convinced ourselves that they were so bad as scarcely to be entitled to a place in the ranks of civilized nations.
For the first two years of the struggle we were not abolitionists. But we had never pretended to be such. Nor were the English so except in name. This we learned greatly to our disgust, for we argued: What right have those people beyond the sea to countenance siaveholding against the protestations ofa halt ​
century? It was not enough that the English people should hold to views as liberal or work for ends as lofty as ours. They had taken higher ground and had claimed for themselves a nabler position. For twenty years they had sneered at the flaming lie stereotyped in every edition of the fundamental laws of the land, and declaimed from every village green upon the anniversary of the nation's birthday, that all men were born free and equal. At last by necessity or from principle, (and which it was was no concern of theirs) we had learned to look upon slavery from an English point of view. We expected a hearty welcome into the ranks of the abolitionists of Europe. We were now all of one mind, and slavery should no longer disgrace the land. And we claimed and expected the reward due to the laborer who had begun at the eleventh hour. We did not receive the expected welcome. So much in fact did we look for from England and from Englishmen, that we were not prepared to make any allowance for the influence of greed and avarice when operating upon the minds of our cousins across the waters. New York merchants might clear millions of tons of goods nominally for Matamoras, but in reality for Brownsville in Texas, with scarcely an aspersion upon their loyalty, but the Liverpool and Glasgow trader who attempted the same adventure by way of Nassau was deemed guilty of an offence of the most heinous character. And while a majority of Americans declared that Juarez and his companions were fighting as we were fighting, the cause of republicanism for the whole world, the sympathies of a wealthy steamship company of San Francisco were scarcely thought to be misplaced by sending from our own port cargo after cargo of goods contraband of war to aid Maximillian in his effort to found an Empire on the ruins of our nearest sister Republic. We have never heard that beyond the seizure of one steamer by
the Liberal party, the managers or stock-holders of that corporation have been visited with any punishment or damage for this violation of the law of the land or the cause of Constitutional liberty. And when Spain was carrying on her late war with the South American. Republics, waged as it undoubtedly was for the re-establishment of Spanish dominion in that quarter of the globe, and a steamer of two thousand tons burthen was fitted out with arms and equipments in this port by merchants of San Francisco, so flagrantly as to be within the common knowledge of all, and sent to sea to be delivered to the Spanish authorities off the beleagured port of Valparaiso, almost, if not absolutely beneath the guns of an American cruiser, who thought that the crime of Mr. Laird of Birkenhead was being committed at our own doors and by our most respected citizens? Indeed, it is even probable that those merchants who fitted out the "Uncle Sam" to sell to Her Catholic Majesty to be used in the Chilian war, have old grievances against England for Alabama depredations. But we did not look for Englishmen to be avaricious. They were expected to rise above all selfishness, to be careless of gain. Nay more, they were expected now that we had left off slave-driving, or were about to do so if we could no longer avoid it, to join with us in the glorious work with heart and hand, nor rest till the whole world had become free, and made to acknowledge the universal brotherhood of man.
But the disappointment came, and in our opinion was from the first inevitable. We do not believe that it was ever possible for the people of England, as represented by the governing classes— we had almost said the thinking classes —to look upon the American war in such a manner as to satisfy the susceptibilities of the North.
And this not because of any difference in the spirit or character of the two peo ​
ples, but because of the resemblance between them; a resemblance so true to nature that it reproduces not only the virtues, the high spirit and enterprise of the common ancestors of both, but because it brings out all the weakness, the defects and meaner vices which were incident and almost peculiar to the Anglo Saxon stock. The nations are too much alike to agree. Each works for what it conceives to be its own interest with an earnestness characteristic of both. The ruling interest of England is aristocratic, while that in America is in direct conflict. While these rival interests direct the policy of the two nations, there will be between the people a conflict as irrepressible as that which will always continue between two systems so opposite.
England is beyond all countries upon the globe the paradise of the rich man. Millions toil by day and by night upon the earth, and beneath the earth, and upon the waters under the earth, that he may command every conceivable luxury. And all of this with an alacrity which appears to add to the enjoyment the testimony of the toiler that Providence has foreordained and irrevocably decreed the delightful relationship which exists between master and servant.
In England privileges of the most valuable nature accompany the possession of wealth. The rich man may make laws tending to increase his riches and to fortify his posterity in their enjoyment. This is a condition too pleasant to be readily parted with by any class. The example of America is a constant warning, a continuous threat to all of this. There is seen a nation where there are no privileged classes, and where there is a complete defiance of the notion that some are born to rule, and others to submit; there the rich are content with the permission to enjoy that which they have, without arrogantly demanding further advantages because of the possession of wealth. The aristocracy of England find with alarm that the country is being
Americanized, and that unless a great struggle is made, its rule will pass away. And the aristocracy is the respectability, the refinement and the intelligence of the country. For, like that other aristocracy of the South, this one has considered the education of the masses as a dangerous step, and has as systematically avoided it. And at this moment the lower classes in England are quite as unfitted to assume political power as are the freedmen of the South.
To stay this tide of democracy which is sweeping from America over England and the world, is the lifelong business of almost all of the statesmen of the Liberal party, and of quite all of the statesmen of the Tory party of England. Whetherin Parliament or out of it, by means of the press, through the church and the schools; using all social influences;; practising upon the pride of some and the fears of others, the work is carried on by nearly all the rich and gifted of that land. This is no Dame Partington affair with pattens and mop, but a life and death struggle between forces. so doubtfully matched that the most trifling circumstances may determine it, at least for the time, in favor of one principle or the other. The triumph of the National cause in America has not given democracy the final victory, though the success of the rebellion would have turned the scale against it.
If ever an aristocracy deserved success in such a struggle, it is this one of England. The old system of France, before the Revolution swept it away, was steeped in sensuality and vice of every class nameable and unnameable. The aristocracy of Russia is charged with cruelty and corruption sufficient to exclude it from a place in modern civilization. A considerable pd¥tion of the whites of the South were as ignorant as the slaves they ruled, and prone to deeds of violence and bloodshed. The maintenance of caste in England is a matter of conscience, and the duty is discharged ​
with a zeal so untiring as almost to appear to be unselfish. An English nobleman is reared for a lifetime of duty. His education is as thorough as the first institutions of learning in the world can make it. He is taught that the public good is inseparably connected with his order; and that while the law gives him special privileges, he must to make the law respected show himself worthy of the gift. He cannot be a liar nor a cheat. He must respect religion and the rights of his fellow-creatures as he understands them. And when he fails in this, as some do, he is branded by his peers as an unworthy lord; and unworthy he is, for his conduct tends directly to the ruin of the system which supports him.
The integrity and fair dealing of the English people, whether it descends from the higher orders to the lower or works upwards from the small trader till it reaches the lord, is at least obvious to the most casual observer. It appears as if even honesty and truth were summoned in and made to do service on the side of ancient customs and against democratic innovations. The English merchant, whether he is dealing in spices at Singapore, in teas at Hongkong, in wines at Xerez, or carpets at Smyrna, or in all of these and more besides, in his office in Leadenhall street, can be depended upon to deal fairly, to tell the truth, to serve the Queen, and support and sustain "our glorious aristocracy."
But honesty, which appears to be so important a feature in English character, cannot be persisted in to the injury of aristocratic rule. And when one or the other must give way, by common consent it is the least important of the two. The buying of votes—an evil that would not be tolerated an instant in America, and which w8uld be stopped in England in one week if the ruling classes desired to have it stopped—is there openly practised, wherever necessary. As the progress of democratic ideas makes votes necessary, there is nothing left but to
buy them. If they were left free, as would be the case with the ballot, men of the lower classes would find their way into Parliament. But once secure of his seat, and the danger to aristocratic rule 'past, the member of Parliament must forget that he has committed the crime of bribery. Public opinion has been relaxed in his favor, because of the great and trying necessity for his election. His course, when he is in office, must be above reproach. And we believe that no legislative body in the world is more free from the suspicion of corrupt practices than is the English Parliament.
The admiration of middle-class Englishmen for the aristocracy is only equalled by their dislike for that little band of educated men who lead the masses in the struggle against class rule. Mr. Goldwin Smith is a disturber of the public peace, a disorganizer, an enemy to the constitution. The name of Mr. Bright is bandied upon the tongues of respectable young Engiishmen, in better language, but with no less flippancy and contempt, than is that of Horace Greeley by the tobaccospitting, whisky-drinking young blackguards of Broadway and the Bowery.
The Church of England, founded in the interest of the aristocracy, has done good service. By it, infants are taught with their first lisp to be content with the station where they have been placed, and not to aspire to the pussession of the privileges of their divinely appointed betters. But schismatic panthers and the "bristled baptist boars" of dissent have so torn and harried "the milk-white hind" that she can scarce defend herself. She is forced to tolerate that which she cannot suppress, while enemies in all sorts of uniforms are marching under banners as diverse as the banners of the motley army of Peter the Hermit, putting her upon the defense of her very life.
But if the influence of the Church has declined, a new power has grown ​
up which more than compensates the ruling classes for the loss of ecclesiastic aid. The influence of the public press of England is something almost marvellous. And it is but just to admit that journalism there has fairly earned the triumphant place which it occupies. The first talent and the highest education of the country are engaged in the profession of writing for newspapers. And the result is fully adequate to the means employed. It has been said that articles are published every day in the English journals equal in merit to the letters of Junius. And this is certainly true—nay more, it is doubtful if in the eighteenth century above six writers appeared in all England capable of writing a Times leader, or an article worthy of being printed in the Saturday Review. Never in the history of the world has the literature of any country exercised such influence. Its power is felt throughout civilization. But if it were possible to measure intellect and
learning as corn or wine is measured, it would be found that nine-tenths of the literary ability engaged in English journalism are employed in supporting the
cause of aristocratic rule. And this with an earnestness that stops at nothing. For the march of democratic ideas has brought the world to such a pass that monarchy cannot be upheld in one quarter of the globe and revolution encouraged in another. The day has gone by when the same writer can safely give comfort to Greeks or Poles struggling for liberty or nationality, and deprecate the success of Irishmen or Hindoos battling for a kindred cause. The fight has reached such close quarters that the cause of monarchical institutions throughout the world must stand or fall together. False reasoning can no longer impose upon mankind. The logic of aristocracy must be as perfect as its projectiles. An illegitimate inference or a bad premise is as dangerous now as was a lost battle a hundred years ago.
The case of the Christians of Crete bears too many points of resemblance to the wants of the Christians of another island of the ocean, a trifle less remote, to permit them to be safely sympathized with. It is not quite clear that Garibaldi and Mazzini are much more patriotic than Mr. O'Brien or Mr. Burke, who were hanged for "treason felony," within a twelvemonth, or Mr. Emmet, who has been hanging more than a half a century. England forty years ago assisted Greece to do that which Ireland now claims the right to do. She has learned since that time to be consistent. She had learned the lesson before our war began. Russia has not quite learned it, but will soon be able to see that which all other monarchies have seen. This country may make the most of such sympathy as we have had of that power, for we shall have it no more. The autocrat of that land will not be long in learning that it is not safe to take the side of democracy, though it may appear to be in a remote quarter of the globe. Time will convince him, or his successors in power, that Maximilian and Mr. Jefferson Davis were alike fighting the battles of monarchy and of class rule, as well in America as in Europe, and all over the world. No noble lord of England failed for a moment to understand the issue, or will ever misunderstand it in the future, in whatever part of the world it may appear, or whatever form it may assume.
The Poles and the Eastern Christians, the followers of Garibaldi and Kossuth, the oppressed subjects of the Queen of Spain and the conquered tribes of Algeria, must alike be dealt with by those who hold them in subjection. But with the abolition of slavery in America ended the only distinction
between the North and the South, so far as European sympathy is concerned, for with slavery aristocracy in this country was finally destroyed, and any future civil war must be a struggle ​
betwen two hostile sections of an unmixed democracy.
Towards such a contest the ruling classes of the old world can only stand indifferent. It is true that blockade runners will be fitted out, and munitions of war will be sold to the belligerents, for avarice and greed are not the special privileges of ruling classes; but no Government official will take pains to be sick in order that privateers may escape, and no ship-builder will bid for applause in Parliament by declaring himself proud of having built them. The Captain Semmes of the future will not find pleasure yachts stationed conveniently at hand to convey them on shore after being beaten, nor will they be feted in London while their successful adversaries are being snubbed. The bonds of both parties will be sold for what they may be considered worth, and sympathy will not be dragged into the Stock Exchange to assist in the taking up of new cotton loans at a premium.
Aristocracy, as a principle, has ceased to exist in America, for it may hardly be presumed that the franchise will belong exclusively to the blacks of the South for a term of sufficient length to again build upa privileged class of color in that section, and there appears to be no other foundation for one. With the total destruction of aristocracy in America will have disappeared one great cause by which the sympathy of England towards our country could be invoked. If democracy should succeed in obtaining power in that land, and the governments be assimilated, there will be a still nearer approach to identity of interests between the two Anglo Saxon families. But this may not be in
the lifetime of any who read this article. The aristocracy of England is not the "ancient regime" of France— selfish, oppressive and corrupt—nor a turbulent and barbarous oligarchy like that of Poland in the seventeenth, or the South in the nineteenth century; nor effete and sunk in indolence and luxury like the princes of the East; but strong and vigorous and full of life and stamina, like itself and none other. It has outlived a thousand systems that are better in theory, and may survive as many more.
SAN FRANCISCO.
FROM THE SEA.
FAVORING FEMALE CONVENTUALISM.
"WOMAN'S Mission" is today the conservative bugbear. Her inability to break into the circles of exclusiveness built up by men, and weakly assented to by herself during past generations, the precarious condition of her employments, and her nothingness in political spheres, have been the texts from which much common-place preaching has been done, and much argument, logical and illogical, taken rise. The battle, so far, has not, in every particular, been as glorious for womanhood as it might have been; her champions, male and female, have not been the ablest she might have commanded; and the gaunt finger of ridicule has often been pointed with effect at the gracelessness of her appearance as she struggled in the fight.
But certain facts have come to be already admitted by the pleadings, that begin to point in what direction the essential truth of feminine duty may be found.
First: It is the general tendency of modern society to view the position of woman, without some relation to marriage, present or in prospect, as abnormal.
Second: A certain ratio, more or less constant, as the nature of the community varies, exists between the percentages of married and unmarried women. A certain number never can marry; another class have suffered some sad accident in their relations with the opposite sex, and they do not wish to marry; and another class are widows, or those deserted by their legal protectors, through no fault of their own, who still require efficient guardianship.
Third: All unmarried women, whether rich or poor, in consequence of their abnormal relations and of the prejudices of society, have not that proper place and consideration granted them to which they are entitled by the laws of existence and civilization, and with which they can be content.
Fourth: The sphere of employment for women is contracted, either by reason of irrational prejudice, or of usurpations by certain classes of men, or by force of the chains of habit.
Fifth: To broaden the field of feminine labor, anything tending to render woman less feminine, less modest, or less pleasing in her companionship with man, raises a violent distrust in the minds of conservative thinkers of both sexes, and arouses the vigilance of prejudices, that impede the work for any effectual purpose whatever.
Sixth: To obviate the difficulty, something must be done that, leaving women free in every respect, will yet place and maintain them in a well-de- ​fined honorable position, which they can abdicate, should they ever think it necessary, or into which they can step temporarily, waiting for marriage or any other settlement in life.
The so-thought normal condition of woman—that of waiting from the age of puberty in listless idleness, or at best, taking a feeble part in the round of househoid duties, until some one chooses to admire and ask her to share his fortunes—has about it something almost as degrading as is the condition of a Georgian girl, standing in the slavemarket and waiting for the lordly Turk, her purchaser. The young man of the same lustrum is occupying no such false and undignified position. He is under no such uncertainty of fortune, but is busy at his trade, his business, or profession.
That the doubt thus hanging over her future should give, at times, an unfortunate turn to the mind of an American girl, and cause her to pay more regard to the attentions of the young men whom she meets than to her own subjective fitness for her future duties, and that she should learn to look upon matrimony with something of the excitement of a gambler, is but the moral result of her unstable position.
But once employ her time; mark out a path in which she can advance to some goal of feminine honor; give her a career, in which healthy excitement can be induced; and if "he comes not," she will no longer be "aweary," but can wait in happy independence until her master chooses to be lonely, leaves his bachelor pleasures, and saunters in to win her; and she can be far more critical in her choice, besides.
There is also a class of young women—orphans, and the like—who need protection, as well because of their poverty, as that there is no special guardian to bestow upon them that care which all girls absolutely require. The position of many becomes more and more painful as years slip by, and no admirer carries them off. The helplessness of needlewomen, of female teachers, and of all those classes whom misfortune has thrown upon their own resources, has become so great an evil that already philanthropy is beginning to think in that behalf; and "Ladies' Relief," "Female Co-operative," and other associations are being established in order to lessen the 'harshness that colors the prospect to those who are cast out by poverty to struggle for themselves.
The fact that the evil is so widespread, and that every class of society is interested in remedying it, encourages the belief that some united effort might be organized, against which unreasonable opposition from prejudice would be powerless.
There is one method that classes suffering from an evil always adopt, and one, in which lay part of the success of the early Christian church. Community life has always been a favorite dogma of the Greek and Latin Christians. It was no doctrine of self-abnegation that first made the Church a family, but the helpless and despised condition of the New Faith. The organization grew as much out of the necessity for combined effort on the part of the proscribed religionists to have a means of subsistence, as from the sympathy and fellowship taught by the apostles. The early missions of the church too, were in many instances centres of an increasing civilization of a secular character, as well as outposts of a new faith.
A convent in the middle ages did not mean altogether a fortress, in which Christianity, as a dogma, entrenched itself; but it was commonly a school of practical art. Monks were not only and not always preachers of the Word: they were masons, carpenters, weavers, scribes, farmers, physicians, and even lawyers; in short, they were of every ​
trade and profession imaginable. The romantic idea of a conscientious friar— one whose physical system was worn down by fasts, whose knees were like Daniel's—callous from prayer—is hardly the monk in fact, who had callous hands, a good appetite, and a practical eye for worldly business. We have a shallow impression that the vast estates given the church in those ages were but illconceived liberality based on superstition; but when we consider the social purpose they served, and the interests they aggregated, and what protection they offered to those who would otherwise have been at the mercy of every wind of misfortune, we begin to imagine the early pious donors and testators by no means so irrational.
The monastery began at last to be a refuge for all classes of persons, whose wants and aspirations in life were not satisfied by the few callings left the masses by the troubles of the times. If a man wished a life of letters, he became a monk; if he desired a home by reason of some accident of constitution or feelings, he sought 2 monastery; the hood and gown became profession and position to all human waifs, and covered charitably all lackings in the matters of birth and position; nor was his usefulness by any means limited to the barren callings of prayer and praise. Palimpsest vandalism was not a general failing: there might be found many cloistered scholars, whose Latinity was Ciceronian enough, and monkish labors were of no insignificant character. There was scope for the most laudable ambitions; and the Abbot Samsons of those days acted their parts quite as heroically as any secular enthusiasts do to-day.
Before the Revolution in France, convent-life for women was a solace and resort to which they applied themselves in quite a matter-of-fact sort of way. There grew up to supply the wants of the times, sisterhoods of all degrees of laxity and restraint. It is true
there were the most frightful abuses in every corner of ecclesiastical life; but it is much to be questioned whether the vices attendant upon convents were any more monstrous than might be noted in every department of French society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or were particularly attributable to the nature of the establishments. A social generation, that accepted Pompadours, du Barris, and Parcs aux Cerfs, might well suffer a little licentious extravagance in its devotes. It can hardly be charged upon monastic doctrines, that in an administrative light they proved failures. They were but too successful; and it needed the severest exercise of arbitary power to break them up. Corporations, however soulless, have exhibited an extraordinary vitality. England swarms with eleemosynary establishments that have retained in petrifaction the most minute eccentricities of their foundation, to the disgust of all who have agrarian desires. Such abstract too much from the tide of public prosperity to be gratifying to the greed and selfishness of the public. There is an uncontrollable desire always to cut canals from these banked-up reservoirs to the common stream. In this land, the simple followers of Father Junipero were by no means offensive on account of their vices; they had done a good work in the civilization of California, as any one who has observed the docile character for usefulness of our civilized Indian in contrast with the almost idiotic stupidity of his wild brother, can testify: they were by no means lazy or luxurious; but they could not help making their work show itself in the acquirement and enhancement of the value of their lands, and they were stripped of their possessions with a grasping violence that would have done credit to the needy creatures of bluff Harry.
But there are directions that monastic organization might take to-day without ​
arousing the least feeling of covetousness on the part of other classes. Civil death is now an absurdity for a sane mind. No one chooses to put up barriers forever shutting out humanity; but the uses of combined effort are still as important, and protection against modern ills can be acquired in that way now as well as when the convent doors opened kindly to the distressed and persecuted.
There is even an affection for the ancient forms and designations still lingering in the most Protestant in faith. Young women band themselves into dainty associations under pleasant corporative names, such as the "Sisterhood of St. James" or "St. Luke;" and though the aims are limited in the main to the decorating of churches and the superintending of religious bazaars, they give promise of more substantial results hereafter.
That single women, capital being furnished them for the inception of the work, may successfully combine into a power for the foundation of establishments in which to learn and practice every art and duty of which they are capable, sheltering and supporting themselves materially and intellectually, furnishing a scope for any "mission," which they may choose to adopt, with a loss of no tittle of feminine grace and dignity, is a proposition that no misogynist, however contemptuous, after a careful consideration of the ecclesiastical and feminine experience chronicled in European history, will seek to combat. They might, as they do now, take charge of educational interests, manage hospitals, manufacture a thousand articles capable of a constant market, and enjoy varied accomplishments limited only by their tastes.
It is not necessary to become Amazonian for all this. The heroine of such a movement would not be a coarse Hippolyte, but an Eloise secured from persecutions, with energies turned from
sentimental brooding into practical channels. There would be no fossilizing for the outward world; but however temporary each individual worker might consider her life, there would be nothing precarious about it.
Such an organization, or system of organizations, with its element of rivalry, its claims for distinction, and its incentives to ambition, would give to each a position entitling her to a well-defined respect both in and out of her college; and about the conduct of those so associated, wherever they went, the reputation of their establishment would hang as a mantle of protection and honor.
As to the details of the enterprise, they would suggest themselves to the practical workers-out of the system, as circumstances might require. The humorous absurdities of the "Princess " need by no means be classed as essential vices rendering feminine organizations impracticable. It is very fine for chivalrous Tories to smile half playfully, half doubtfully, at the prospect of "sweet girl graduates with their golden hair;" to depict the ridiculous airs of female masters and proctors; but there is nothing in the whole range of powers sarcastically laid upon feminine shoulders by the poet, that has not been exercised by woman with effectual success. Margaret Roper, Queen Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, and a host of others, down to Mrs. Browning, have exhibited acquirements of a depth and extent that would astonish the lazy mass of passmen and bachelors of English and American colleges. These they wore with no unfeminine awkwardness; but flirted quite as artistically and broke hearts as deftly as their shallower sisters. In the feudal days, when.men were reputed so very manly, and women so very womanly, if the warrior was brought in, wounded and bleeding, his lady did not stand sobbing and wringing her hands, while the servant rushed off for the gouty ​
family doctor, but like an experienced leech, as she was, with no nonsense about her, took hold of the matter, bound up the hurts, and returned her lord as expeditiously as possible to his jolly head-breaking professional engagements.
When Faust, the modern typical man, clasps in his arms the ancient Helen, she melts away, leaving nothing but her limp mantle in his grasp. Many a man to-day has secured a supposed heroine; but the touch has shown him that he has nothing from his struggle but a beautiful rag hanging on his arm and encumbering his motions. This helplessness arises mainly from the false position taken by woman because of her faith in the proffer of civilized man to take upon himself all the labors of life external to the home existence, and to leave to her the guardianship of the individual interests of the family nest. She has taken him at his word, and has been misled thereby to her own discom
fort and poverty. She finds that she must lay aside her household isolation and go out into the world, or sit at the
hearthstone and starve. It ill becomes us, then, to take the tools from her hands and push her aside as a child, when we are unable to manage the work ourselves.
We may laugh at the first attempts of women to fight the moral battle unaided by men; but we smile also at the toddling infant who will one day outstrip us in the race; the goose-step performances of the young cadet are ridiculous; but the day may come when his genius will control the battle-field; and though female organizations may break and scatter wildly on their first parades, yet victory must eventually perch on their banners.
Nor are there any essential habits to be unlearned. The government of female schools and of Roman Catholic convents, stricter far than may be necessary for mature women, is a thing of
established success resting solely with woman; for, as a general thing, the male authorities of such establishments are the least capable of enforcing discipline.
Take a school of girls, where no fixed period is in prospect for the pupil to quit it; extend its sphere so that it may be a home for any spinsters choosing it; unite with it any and all means and machinery for employment, of which women are capable; make it in fact a university, with its resident fellows, its circles of doctorates; its laws and regulations neither so lax as to create confusion and impair its success, nor so severe as to hamper the material advantages of freedom; and the intellectual sphere of woman will be widened to an extent commensurable to the capital and labor expended.
Such a seminary can act as a cooperative union for feminine labor; for it will have a plenty of talent and energy to detail for the service of finding and uniting the two complemental interests of supply and demand. It can carry on hospitals, giving an almost angelic support to homeless humanity in the hour of sickness and death. It can take charge of many public charities, and distribute the eleemosynary surplus of the public in uniform and equitable ways, without calling upon the time and attention of business men or matrons, whose family duties are now broken in upon for charitable visits. It will have all the emulation of an enthusiastic army, where each member will seek daily to add to the glory of her record. It will be an aristocracy, where every one will take precedence according to her deservings, and where every form of practical ability, judgment, talent, or genius will meet with its due appreciation.
The society of men need be avoided only in so far as it would be hurtful, impede duty or the purposes of the organization; and when admitted, their ​
coming would not be, as now, the great daily event, but merely one of a variety of pleasures attached to woman's life.
Outside of the walls of such a convent and wearing its zzsignia, the law would cheerfully grant an extra degree of sacredness in its protection, analogous to that given the custodians of the public peace.
Perhaps its pecuniary success at the outset would not astonish us; but as for that, feminine employment by no means abounds in swift or large fortunes; and if women only live at all by their own exertions, it is saying a great deal for their capacity under untoward circumstances.
The great aim to be attained would be—not to take the woman from her affections of the home circle, if she is so fortunate as to possess them, nor to dole out to her merely a means of living; but to so open up refuges for her that she need never become aimless and hopeless in life—not to take from those who have a degree of contented happiness already insured them, and call upon them for the performance of unreasonable duties and unattractive labors, but to devote that surplus of energy, now chafing them into listless
discontent, to the work of sympathy with their sisters of less fortunate surroundings. That sympathy given by the socially strong to the socially weak would not, as now it unfortunately too often does, take the odious form of arbitrary charity, returning to the giver nothing beyond the sense of a humane duty performed. But the weakest member of such an association, however dependent upon her sisterhood upon her entry therein, would feel that the future gave promise to her endeavors of something of feminine glory and independence.
If by such means, organizing women into small communities, and these chapters into broader sisterhoods, and finally into one great order, little by little, the aimless, hopeless state of isolated female exertions were broken up, and a healthy energy instilled into the daily life of all, rich and poor, cultivated and ignorant, the great cloud now resting upon woman's advancement would be lifted, and her aimless murmurings, her misunderstood discontents, her aspirations, either noble or ill-advised, would find aid or antidote in her own world of action and enterprise, and a long stride would be taken in the progress of woman.
HAWAIIAN CIVILIZATION.
THE people of the Hawaiian Islands used to eat each other. Starting from such a fact, the imagination might take its wildest flight in the regions of conjecture, and not go much amiss from the truth of tradition and history in portraying the life and character of the Hawaiian people. They had little knowledge of right or wrong. They had no idea of what was bad, and what was worse, had no idea of what was good. They lived in abject fear and servitude, under the rule of an iron
tyranny, and subject to the will of a savage despotism. They were a nation of thieves, and murderers, and fighters. They revelled in the vilest intoxication, and rioted in all the excesses of human degradation, till nature sank exhausted under the burden and they had perforce to cease. The men were slaves to the chiefs, and the women were slaves to the men, and were degraded by the burden of every labor which their strength could endure. To kill a man (fepehi hanaka) was an art to be cultivated, and ​
there were those who taught how "to strangle and break men's bones, and how to despatch a man with one blow of the fist without bruising him." Any weakness or infirmity was a reason for abuse. Their old men, whose tenacity of life was a source of displeasure to them, they hurried into their graves, reversing the ancient sequence of death and burial; and little children, who had not begun to make any figure in life, they sent too hastily to their last accounts. They recognized nothing like the marriage relation, every man attaching to himself as many women as he chose, and every woman as many men as her desires prompted. What was a brother or a sister no one knew; who was one's father he could not tell, and after a few years of age mothers could hardly designate their offspring. They were a nation having none but brutal ideas, and it is not strange that in their language is no expansion or elasticity, and no synonyms by which it is possible to express any delicate shade of thought. Their life was the life of alternate crimes and repose, and their language is full of words to designate the former state; but in the current of their monotonous degradation, there was no ripple of virtue, and in their language is no word for chastity, for modesty, for virtue, or for any noble or refined sentiment. There is nothing like gratitude in the race, and their is no word in their language for rendering thanks. Yet, in view of the moral darkness that impended over them, it is perhaps doubtful whether they were absolutely a bad race. After nearly half a century of lifting up, it is much more doubtful if we can say they are a good people.
In the hands of the chiefs were held the lives and fortunes of every one of the people. They were the most eminent, physical representatives of the race. In the time of peace they indulged to its fullest extent their indolence, one of the characteristics of the people, gorging
themselves with food, reclining upon couches of mats made from the split leaf of an indigenous tree. By them stood servants to brush away the flies, feed them and dress them, and who were employed in luxurious kneading, shampooing, cracking the chieftainsjoints to renovate their system and excuse them from other exercise. Sometimes they were borne about upon the shoulders of their servants, but this custom became afterwards unfashionable, it being narrated of one chief, that being crabbed and petulant when carried to the brink of the precipice, the bearers retorted and relieved themselves of their burden by pitching him headlong over the steep place, "which," adds the historian, "put an end to him and the custom."
The chiefs had generally permanent establishments of their own, and held in menial service as officers of the household, "purloiners," "assassins," "cooks," "kahili (bunches of feathers) bearers," "spittoon carriers," and "pipe lighters;" the whole retinue eating, drinking, cooking and sleeping in common. Having complete control over the property, lives and liberty of the people, the record of their lives was often dark and bloody beyond description. The prisoners in war, especially if ancient enemies, 'were sacrificed to some god, or were roasted and eaten, for then the victors were certain of their destiny. Most of them died violent deaths, and it is noted as a marked and wonderful event in their history, that one, Luamuo, actually died a natural death amid his court, which was accounted as a reward for his extraordinary merits. But there were degrees of brutality even among these savage despots. It is remembered that Huakau, an ancient king of Maui, seeing a face more handsomely tattooed than his own, would have the head removed and in his presence horribly mangled; and a hand or a leg comelier than his own would be cut down as ​
the reward of its impertinent existence. When a chief died it was an occasion of universal notice. From the dwelling of the dead commenced the mournful auwe, which taken up from dwelling after dwelling, was carried on by all the people, at first in subdued tones, then prolonged and increasing in sound, till the monotonous cry was borne upon the air from hillside unto hillside over the land. The ceremonies of his burial were characteristic of the most dissolute and degraded people, none of either sex venturing into the presence of the dead except in a state of complete nudity, and there pursuing a round of beastly dissipation, tearing the hair with mournful howls, drinking awa till in a state of insensate drunkenness, knocking out the front teeth, carrying to their greatest height licentiousness, rioting, revelling, murder and every form of dissoluteness known to the savage mind. And this was continued for days together, and did not finally cease from any sense
of completeness of the ceremony, but only when nature, over-taxed and exhausted, could execute no further devil
ish intent. It was a time when no man's life or property was in the slightest degree regarded, when all pretense to decency was thrown aside—an era of unrestrained riot and wanton debauchery.
It may be to some minds almost a palliation of the somewhat unpleasant and continuous barbarity to know that they were a religious people. Throughout the land were seen the Aetaus (temples) which they had erected to the gods, consecrated with many ceremonies and frequented for religious offerings, and whose ruins are to-day visible in various localities. The priestly office was hereditary and they who filled it numerous, and of very powerful influence. The gods they worshipped were as numerous as the sources of danger to the barbaric mind. Every high chief had his family priest, who went always with him into
battle carrying the image of the chieftian's god. The essence of their religion was only the fear they entertained lest some calamity should come upon them. Their gods were in all things that could bring them misfortune; in nothing that brought to them any favor or benefit. To them was a special god in every volcano, in» every earthquake, in every singular and unusual appearance of nature. There were gods of war, of the sea, of the winds; in every dangerous cavern lurked a divinity and over every precipitous cliff, and for their protection they placed in those localities images of the presiding deities.
But to call any belief which could prevail among such a people religion, is to give dignity and character to the common expression of a gigantic selfishness and slavish fear, with which was never allied anything noble or elevating, nor with whose existence was ever any sentiment or feeling of duty or obligation, of love or gratitude. They appealed to the gods that their enemies might be destroyed; they prayed that the tempest and the earthquake might be averted; they offered sacrifices of animals in the building of a temple, and whenever a house had been built, before entering it to dwell in, they performed mysterious ceremonies to exorcise the evil spirits that might lurk about. They prayed in sickness to the little gods of the mountains, the hills, the streams, to turn away misfortune and disease. Sacrifices of some living thing accompanied every religious rite of importance. Held ina state of degraded serfdom, and bearing the burdens imposed by cruel and exacting chiefs whom they knew to be their superiors, what else could a god be but a great chief of temper and character like theirs, only vastly superior in size and strength, and a disposition more savage and more exacting? Their religious idea could be nothing more than a scheme of appeasing this over-wrathful spirit, that was ever waiting for an ​
opportunity of inflicting misery—a system of bribery, in which it was not always certain what nor how great offerings to bring. But the priests were the teachers, and in them was put implicit faith. By them, under the direction of the gods, were the sacrifices designated, and by them often for months and sometimes years beforehand were the human beings marked out for immolation—and the chroniclers intimate, that they were chosen among those most hateful and offensive to the priests. The sacrifice which seemed to best propitiate the gods was the human. It came before battle accompanying the prayer for victory, and came after it, not in grateful rememberance, but because the gods demanded it. It came at the consecration of heathen temples, when a chief had died, and in celebration of any great public event. If it were not so appalling, it would be ludicrous to remember, how Umi, a celebrated king of Hawaii, after a victory, offered human victims to his god, who, after several were slain, being insatiate called for more, "which were granted," says the chronicler, "until none were left except Umi and the priest."
Even among them there was some pretense to science. The art of the sorcerer was prevalent and feared, and as among the ancient Greeks there were those who could read the entrails of dead animals, who could divine the future from the flight of birds, and could read auguries in the heavens, the clouds, the rainbow and the storm. There were physicians among them who were as mysterious in their manner and as mystifying in their prescriptions as any modern Aésculapius, and, if the chronicles tell truly their remedies, new terrors were added to disease by their presence. They had some knowledge of herbs, which had been first received from the gods by Koleamoku, and by him taught to two disciples. The profession was hereditary, and being exceedingly lucra tive it was kept always in the same families. They feigned great knowledge of diseases, and it was believed that by prayer and ceremonies of a wonderful nature they could even inflict such diseases upon one as could not be cured. Various herbs were cooked or mashed with a stone, mixtures of which were given in liberal allopathic doses. "Their knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs," writes one historian, "was considerable," but there is a touch of scepticism as he concludes, "though fatal results often followed their application." Nature taught them that friction would mitigate many minor pains, but it is hard to believe that the same kind mother ever hinted to them those more singular prescriptions according to which "stones of twelve pounds weight and upwards were rolled over the afflicted parts," and "patients were steamed over ovens of hot stones, or held over the smoke of fires prepared from green succulent herbs." It is less difficult to believe, that, if moved by anger or hatred in the treatment of sick persons, they could even cause death. They knew there was a future state for some, for the priests brought messages to the living from the dead, which at times seemed to redound mysteriously to the priestly benefit, and they were accepted as divine revelations. The souls of some of the people "went to Po (the place of night) where they were annihilated or eaten up by the gods;" others went to the dwelling places of Akea and Milu, former kings of Hawaii, where darkness prevailed, and where "lizards and butterflies were the orly articles of diet." The chiefs, the priests had kindly provided, were conducted, by " Kaonohioka/a, the eye-ball of the sun," to some unnamed place in the heavens, whence they occasionally returned to watch over their people. What happy abode was prepared for themselves, the cunning priests never revealed; but for the common people who lived here in ​
servitude, "no hope enlightened their souls for the future."
The story of the Hawaiian people down to the early part of the present century is told from tradition, from conjecture, invention of priests, and from the historical sze/és, (songs) which are said to narrate the genealogy of seventyfour kings, from the last of whom descended Kamehameha I, the first and greatest ruler of whom we have any true account, and from whose time history began to gather up and preserve the facts of interest to that nation. In their traditions we recognize the story of a great deluge; of how the island of Hawaii was produced from the bursting of a large egg as it was deposited on the water by a bird of immense size; of the god Mauz, who held the sun in his course one day, so that his wife might finish her work before dark; and of Wazola-loa, "the water of enduring life," by bathing in which the aged, ugly and diseased were restored to youth, strength and beauty.
The islands were first found by Spanish voyagers in 1542, but the knowledge gained thus was not availed of, and the civilized world knew nothing of them till their re-discovery by Capt. Cook in 1778. The natives received Cook with feelings of interest, and accepted in him the fulfillment. of an ancient belief, that the god Zozo, who had once been one of their kings, would return again. From an intimation of their religious belief, we can easily understand the respect and courtesy with which this white god was received and entertained; but the real principles and depravity of this man we can as easily understand, when we know that he accepted their worship as the god whom they believed him to be, and took their many gifts without offering remuneration. The first appearance of the ships afar off was to them the movement of an island grove, and they spoke of them as moku, (surrounded land) and as the
ships came nearer and people were seen walking upon their decks, their first impressions were confirmed, and to-day the word in their language meaning "ship" is the same as that first uttered. To the childish mind the death of Capt. Cook was represented by a woodcut in the geography with accompanying text, by which we were impressed with the idea of the Captain's singular goodness, as we were with the christian virtue of the young "Pocahontas, the King's daughter." But what a common distrust has come upon us in the truth of chroniclers, as we come in later life to know that the story of the fair Pocahentas is now, on historical evidence, assumed to be false, and that Capt. Cook, gratifying his cupidity by exhausting demands upon the barbariansfaith, and by desecrating their temples: merely to supply himself with fuel, met his death not blamelessly at the hands of an awakened intelligence in that savage people, in whom patient endurance would not have been longer a virtue.
The advent of foreigners, following the visit of the first ships, opened the eyes of the natives, who were: naturally interested in the aspect and manners of a new and evidently superior people, and unceasingly curious in the methods and accomplishments of the strangers. Personal contact with repeated collections of civilized people could not but have its effect in mollifying and moderating the habitual barbaric life. Trade and the acquisition of new things excited and developed in them new desires and capacities. The occasional addition to the population of the islands by runaways from ships, and the gradual increase of traders, who settled for a time, gave the natives some insight into another mode of life, which, if not inspired by the best cultivation or highest principles of morality, was yet much more elevated and civilized than had ever come within cheir ​
experience. Among the natives the " tabu," a method of exercising power by the priests, was held in absolute awe, and influenced the whole nation as nothing else did. What was declared tabu must be respected and inviolable, or death would follow. There was ¢adu at certain seasons upon different articles of food, when they could not be touched. Under its restrictions no persons of different sexes could eat together, neither of the same food, nor at the same table, nor under the same roof. A native home consisted of various houses—made of straw, thatched upon light wooden frames—and the builder must build one for himself to eat in, and one for his wife, one to sleep in, and another for his god. Days were tabu, and then silence prevailed; no man could be with woman, and if a woman ate pork, cocoa-nuts, or bananas on that day, she must die. The teaching was, that for violation of the ¢abu the gods would kill them, and their experience was, that the priests and chiefs were the divine instruments that obeyed the high behest.
It took but a short time for the foreigners, who must have been in continual intercourse with this people, to learn their religious rites, and their slavish idolatry; and the natives, if not equally swift in learning the absence of any religious ceremonies among the former, could not fail soon to perceive that the strangers not only lived free from harm, without heeding the ¢adu of their priests, or the admonitions of their gods, but that they looked only with derision upon their rites, and their slavish subjection to the priests. And as it resulted after many years of such intercourse, that the people and the chiefs perceived the useless cruelty of the ¢abu, and the insignificance of the wooden gods they had set up, and so broke up the former and destroyed the latter, it seems hardly necessary to have recourse to a special Providence
to explain the slow and gradual awakening in the heathen mind of a practical common sense.
When the American missionaries reached the islands in 1820, they found them just rising from the depths of a wild debauch, which had accompanied the funeral ceremonies of Kamehameha I. He is represented as a man of unusual activity and strength of intellect, who had taken counsel! of the possible superiority of the white race, and who had learned and taught his people much that his keen observation had acquired. Writers speak of him as above the ordinary vices of his people, and he was remembered with such fondness and tenderness as could exist in the savage breast. He was so great as a warrior, that Jarves speaks of him as_ the " Napoleon of the Pacific," and denominates him as the "good and noble savage "—a conjunction of words which seems hardly congruous. The issue of his last sickness seems to have been awaited with considerable anxiety by his whole people. When he had died, "the chiefs held a consultation. One of them spoke thus: 'This is my thought: we will eat him raw.' Kaahumanu (a daughter of the King) replied, ' Perhaps his body is not at our disposal; that is more properly with his successor. Our part in him—the breath—has departed; his remains will be disposed of by Liholiho (his son and successor)'"—a speech perhaps correctly reported, but which is quite unlike any other in the records. The great respect and reverence with which he was held can be partly estimated, when we read, that "a sacrifice of three hundred dogs attended his obsequies," an animal of considerable scarcity in the islands, and held in ancient and present estimation as the choicest article of diet. "When the sacred hog was baked, the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a god."
In the volumes which have been writ ​ten, giving the history of this people since the advent of the first missionary delegation, we have no detail of the slow and almost fruitless work which it must certainly have been to them—the gradual rise and the certain relapse, the brilliant hope and promise, and the despairing outbreak anew of savage habits. The prophecy of success came in the dawning of their intelligence, and was followed by the all but hopeless return to their barbaric fears. It must have been nothing other than the alternation of hope and despair.
The time of the missionaries' coming was fortunate in this, that having just broken up the faéu and thrown down their idols, they had not found, nor sought, nor felt the need of anything to take their place. The missionary idea is one of self-sacrifice and toil; the missionary experience has proved equal to their completest expectation. We have no right to be late in our recognition of the services which they have rendered,
nor chary of our praise to those whose spirit of disinterestedness and lofty principle led them to attempt and pursue the
task of civilizing this people. Codperating with this active purpose has always been that other civilizing influence, unconscious and unintentional, the commercial contact with the representatives of our own race. These two active influences have made the Hawaiian people, from the nothing they were as a nation, the little which they are to-day. The movement has been slow, and it has been difficult to tell, from books alone, how the work has been thus far consummated. The enthusiasm of the missionaries has credited all the civilizing influences to themselves, and it has seemed as though the language of courtesy was hardly strong or elastic enough, to properly characterize the depth of depravity, want of moral principle, and actual wicked intent, which found their consummation in the lives and habits of the foreigners, who for
many years were the only other white residents in those lands. On the other side, the bounds of politeness have had no restraint upon the denunciations which have been poured forth on what has been called the officious meddling and selfish aggrandizement of those, who, by virtue of their professed purpose and expressed intent, were in closer relations with the reigning powers. It is the story over again of the contact of hard practical sense, with honest and impracticable theory. Barbarism cannot credit equal results to each influence, but that will be an untrue account which fails to concede much to the example of common life, even if it concedes much more to religious precept and noble intent, and can point to invaluable gains which were their logical result.
The Hawaiian people of to-day, by those who like to congratulate themselves and their clerical brethren upon an extraordinary result of noble toil and devotion, are called a civilized people. One writer, who believes in the converted natives, with whom he has lived more than twenty years, and, possibly, too much distrusts the earlier civilized people, from whom he has been absent most of the years of his discretion, comes to "the honest conclusion that, in proportion to the population of the islands, there are, upon an average, as many true Christians among them as there are among the people of America or Europe," and excepts neither New or Old England, nor Scotland, nor the most favored portion of either.
The natives have professedly given up their idol-worship and their false religion; in the settled communities they clothe themselves; churches have been built for them, and they attend in vast numbers and with apparent zeal; an educational system, fostering schools of the higher studies, has been established, which is of such completeness, that scarcely a native can be found who cannot read and write his native lan ​guage. They read such books as have been printed in the native dialect, chief of which is the Bible, which they quote with a volubility and correctness that may astonish the stranger. Under the persuasions and injunctions of the missionaries, upon whom they look with somewhat of the old superstition with which they contemplated the savage priests, they have given up the heathen ceremonies attending all occasions of public interest. They have learned the relation of man and wife, and observe the marriage ceremony, which was not conceded till several years after the arrival of the missionaries. They have become farmers and mechanics, and engage in trade to a considerable extent; some of them are teachers in the elementary schools; some have become constables, some school inspectors; some even are entitled lawyers, and others occupy seats upon the bench. The government is monarchical, having a legislature of nobles and representatives, a large portion of whom are whites, besides a cabinet of ministers, all but one of whom are resident foreigners, and some of whom are men of education and character.
But this is not the perfect picture. The teaching of the nation has been in the native language, which, in itself, is of narrow and limited scope, which has never been the vehicle of any lofty ideas, into which no perfect translation can be made, and which has not and can never have the elasticity which must be characteristic of all languages used by peoples not altogether savage. The Bible and but a few religious and elementary works, translated from the English, compose the Hawaiian library. There is no literature, no books of science, of art, of travel, of philosophy, and can never be in that language. When one has learned to read and write the Kanaka \anguage, his course of study in that channel is nearly complete. If he would receive a liberal education, he
must throw off the old philological shell, and acquire the vocabulary of a language which, once attained, opens to intelligence exhaustless and invaluable stores of learning. But the native mind seems as listless and inactive as his body. At school he may have acquired something of education, but in his life it is useless, and he adds nothing to that which has been taught him. As a people they are good-natured, amiable and docile to a remarkable degree, but are lazy and indolent, taking no interest in any matter of real public importance, and caring nothing for what is not absolutely personal. They have no pride in themselves as a nation, caring and thinking nothing of a possible future for the kingdom, with no ambition and no self-reliance. They exhibit no marked original strength in any direction. Although they are mechanics of every kind, they are foremen and leaders in none. They know nothing of foreign governments, take no interest in the life of political principles, and have and seek no further enlightened connection with their own government, than to fill such offices as can give them power, position and pecuniary gain, in which they resemble some in a civilized nation, but which, after all, is but responding to a barbaric instinct, which was theirs when they were confessedly savages. Their lawyers only pettifog, and their most noted judge used to sleep on the bench. They attend church because of their superstitious regard of missionaries, and because they like the excitement and sociability of a crowd. They are proud in being church members, render the most accomplished lip-service, are fluent in prayer, and continue the outer religious life from love of approval. In old age they are pious, because they have outlived the years of sinful vigor; but not till then. Piety and youth or manhood, in the Hawaiian life, do not know each other. Religion is the day's garb, but ​
not the night's. In sickness they almost invariably pay tribute to their uplifted sense by calling educated physicians, and tribute to their ancient credulity by employing also the native doctor. The duplicity they conceal from one— from both, if they can. In paying the tributes and taking both prescriptions, the mixtures too often create equal derangement in intellectual and physical life. Many still keep concealed their old idols, and when they die, the heathen dread not unfrequently overcomes what they have of Christian trust, and they flee for safety to the gods of their pagan days, for they believe they are acquainted with them.
Until the very fibre of the native mind is changed, there will be still left thereon the pictures which the superstitions of ages have impressed. When the native body has become spiritualized and the mind infused, through long intercourse, with lofty thoughts and holy emotions, the licentiousness, which is inborn and so extensive as to be national, may be exiled; and drunkenness, whether in response to the heathen taste for awa, which they have always known, or the modern taste for the most wretched alcoholic compounds, may be banished and forgotten. The old language had in it no word that signified the quality of chastity, and it is doubtful, if to-day the language were any richer, whether there could be found anything among the whole native population of the full blood to which the word could be applied. Decent living is so monotonous to their instincts, that it is not strange that every occasion of excitement has a tendency to drag them, temporarily, back into the stupendous revelry that was the glory and the consummation of the barbaric life. Thus, while it may have been a matter of profound regret, it need not have been of surprise to a sensible mind, that at the recent (1864) death of the Princess Victoria, whose life and character could be amply described without seeking for
words outside the native dialect, the king and his native court within the palace indulged in the old time Awlahuda. Assuring the absence of anything civilized or humane by a native patrol, in the nude presence of both sexes they kept up the revelry of drunkenness and dissoluteness about the corpse of the poor royal sinner, till human nature could not bear the burden longer.
The government is nominally under the rule of the King, Kamehameha V, who succeeded, by appointment, his brother. But the native blood is evident in his royal veins, acknowledging the superiority of the white, and putting no confidence in the wisdom of his own race, and placing foreigners in the places of his cabinet and upon the bench of the Supreme Court. The natives occupy seats as nobles and representatives, the king. being always able to hold a majority, but the guiding force of legislation is the intelligence of the foreigners, who are virtually in all matters of consequence the rulers of the kingdom. A peculiarity of the higher classes is that ofrank. They still talk of chiefs and chiefesses, taking their rank from the mother, in memory, perhaps in respect, of an ancient wisdom of that people, that while his paternal derivative was to every child a matter of profoundest doubt, and might even fade from the maternal memory, it was a matter of comparative certainty who was his mother. The Hawaiian people are not yet a civilized people, although they are not indeed savages. As individuals they excite no personal interest or sympathy, and as a nation they are uninteresting to the last degree.
It is the drivel of selfishness that charges the deficiency in their civilization to what is called, in the impertinent phrase of interested traders, "the meddling of the missionaries "with the government. That an inferior people, looking up for light, should ask every aid from those who came professedly to teach them any good thing, and but little from ​
those who did not, is in the course of nature. Perhaps the practical observer, however, could have told just where to refuse, and would have refused, to give any counsel in matters somewhat out of the sphere of his experience; but what if not? To have resolved comeliness and completeness of sovereignty out of the chaos of heathendom, would have demanded that the missionaries should also have been statesmen, which they were not—else they would never have been missionaries. Their idea was rather to build a church than a state. They were inexperienced, fresh from the schools, clergymen, teachers, physicians, civilizers, in so far as each might be, of a savage people, but not learned in creating civil governments. With theories of how to live nobly and a burden of high resolve, they knew nothing of the cunning alchemy by which experience tempers the harshness of impracticable rules of right. Before them was a field rich in labor, but not fertile in the highest results. Grafting something of sweetness into the barbaric life, they had themselves to learn something of action in their contact with a common human nature.
The Hawaiian, as every other man, needs something more than religious culture, although combined with such moral and intellectual development as comes from schools, to make him anew, thoroughly out of heathendom and thoroughly into christendom. Although Paul plants, if Apollos does not water, we shall be over-hopeful if we look illogically for the increase. And so for a higher position, this nation must rely much upon its own energy and capacity, not in isolation, but in fullness of intercourse with civilization in its best phases, if possible; if not always its best, then the best that can be. Its contrasts are not without their teaching.
It is not half a century since the representatives of civilization first sought to plant its seeds in the heathen
fields. We know "the mills of God grind slowly," and that the story of mental unfolding and growth is the story of eternal patience. The history of civilization has been, after barbarism, first the poetic impulse, then the philosophic reason, then the christian man. We find our virtue resting upon a mental texture inherited from the early nations of Europe; but how much better than barbarian were our Saxon ancestors? Better, perhaps, than these cannibals and image-worshippers fifty years ago; but centuries have passed in the blooming and maturing of our civilization, which is not yet perfect; and the analogies of history afford us no hope of anything substantial or worthy coming from this people, till after centuries of contact with a superior race. If they were left to weave the fine fabric of civilization from the native product alone, we should soon see how much easier "the descent to Avernus," than the ascent to any higher place, of which they have now no real conception. If they are sustained by their present religious support, they will doubtless hold their own place, such as it is, among the nations, for the limited period which, judging from the past, they are likely to remain a distinct people. It would almost seem, however, as if the determination of that period were an easy problem in mathematics.
It is believed that at the time of Capt. Cook's visit, the population was 300,ooo. In 1823 it was estimated at 140,000. This decrease may be attributed to the diseases brought on by the terrible excesses of the nation, to infanticide, to wars, to comparative cessation of any natural increase during such a period, to the prevalence of epidemics—the small-pox, measles and whooping-cough. The promiscuous intercourse of the natives among themselves has tended to engender the worst form of sensual diseases, and the ​
advent of ship-loads of sailors from the time of Cook till now, has completed the work. In 1832 the population was, by census, 130,315; in 1836 it had fallen to 108,579; in 1850, to 84,165. The year 1848 is remembered as "the year of death," when 10,000 died from the specific diseases named above. In 1860 the number of natives had decreased to 61,800; at present it is estimated at about 50,000. It is believed that in the progress of civilization the great mortality of the nation will be stayed. The experience in our own country does not encourage that hope. The degraded native seems to adopt the vices of the civilized race quite as soon as its virtues. In the old Kanaka language there was no oath, but these natives early acquired an education in profanity, and now mingle the English oath and the Hawaiian speech with considerable ease.
To speak of the civilization of the
Hawaiian people, is but following a priestly fashion and acknowledging the
existence of what is not. For civilization, in modern phrase, is the structure of the people, representing the highest results of average modern culture. It answers any question concerning the capacity and reasonable hope and expectation of a people. The nation that has reached it asks no stranger's arm, for it is sustained by its own strength. We recognize the best results of the missionaries' work, but in the heartiest expression of their self-congratulations we can hear no syllable of trust in this people's self-sustenance. If one should hint of the native ministers and teachers as a sufficient stay and support of their civilization, and earnest of their future progress, not one but would answer doubtingly of reeds—bent, and too easily broken.
To say boldly that by natural inheritance, as the yet unreclaimed estate coming to us, "the heir of all the ages and the youngest born of Time," these
lands and their people should be ours, might meet some opposition. It would come from those who never favor the extension of our sovereignty over territory which has not always been ours, and from those who recognize no national safeguards in those stations, that stand like trusty sentinels on our distant right and left. But we take what to such may appear a worthier position, affirming that to make them ours, so that they be a part with us and of us, will be the consummation of the missionary labor—the final and complete conquest of the latest and thus far best civilization, over the reluctant and unyielding stronghold of heathenism. He would indeed be a poor political economist, who would ask a demonstration of benefits to them and to us from bringing a people of unmatured capacities and a land of indefinite possibilities, with all its uncultivated fertility, into the fold of our nationality, and with them an unrestrained competition with our Saxon sinews, our straightest furrows and our proudest sheaves. Perhaps the commercial argument is the strongest with which to attack any prejudice against their annexation to our republic. It touches the Hawaiians as well as ourselves. The earnest hope with which the people there look for our ratification of the treaty of reciprocity, already ratified by their government, and which proposes such a change in the present revenue system, indicates how much they estimate the necessity that they and we should be brought into nearer mercantile contact. Whether or not it originated with them, it meets the swift and earnest advocacy of all the brain and active sinew of that kingdom. We cannot here examine critically and specifically the whole instrument, but only say in general that it preposes free importation hence of those articles most necessary in the islands, and free importation hither of every except the most desirable article produced there. Of sug ​ars, whose production and importation greatly exceed the aggregate of all other articles, the treaty proposes to import free only those purchased by the refiners, and by none other; te duty to remain upon the rest, which is much the greater part, and which, as imported, is used in all our homes. The duty at present is said to be oppressive upon producers.
The islands are believed to contain 500,000 acres of arable and pasture land. Of this 100,000 acres are adapted to the sugar cane, but not above 20,000 are so cultivated, producing an average of 4,000 pounds per acre. Those islands sent to California, during the last fiscal year, 14,219,414 pounds, and other countries the balance of 40,000,000 pounds. Merchants in the Eastern States imported 810,000,000 pounds from other countries.
The advent hence to the Hawaiian Islands of capital, commercial enterprise and additional labor, sufficient to develope their resources, it is believed would be justified by the operation of the treaty. If this were practicable, the Islands might supply to us nearly one-half of the entire consumption of sugar in. the United States. And much might be said of the other productions of that country—molasses, paddy, rice, coflee, fungus, pulu, wool, cotton, hides, and tallow, and the various tropical fruits.
The mercantile activity at the islands has always been among the foreigners, and has been dependent almost wholly upon the activity and prosperity of the whalers who resort there for supplies and refreshment. That interest has declined much of late years, and a feeling is now prevalent there that some effort must be made or their commerce will entirely fail. i The treaty, therefore, has the support of
that class of the community. The king and government hope for its ratification also as of benefit to their country. The king himself is not personally friendly to the United States, from his chagrin at the treatment he received when travelling in
this country ten years ago, and where the all but "black prince" learned by experience, that "negroes were not allowed to sit at the fable d'hote;" while in England and on the continent he was received as one included within that divinity which "doth hedge a king." Most of his ministers and advisers also, being Englishmen, Frenchmen, and apostate Americans, apart from their certain loss of places of emolument in case of annexation, favor the treaty in opposition to real American interests, knowing that no idea of annexation to the republic could outlive the ordeal of prosperity which they think would obtain under the treaty. With all the commercial advantages of intercourse which exists between the states, why should any one there think of annexation?
The treaty would undoubtedly sustain the apparent falling fortunes of that kingdom, and would stimulate its planters and merchants to new activity. But that is no argument to us for its ratification. Moreover, a treaty is only ephemeral at best, and capital is too sensitive to emigrate with no security longer than seven years, the term fixed in this instrument. Halfof that time would pass before there could be any returns. And we look in vain, through the treaty, for any reciprocity. We can find as resulting to our country only the certain loss of all that duty upon imported articles which, in the event of the great predicted increase of commerce, under the treaty, would then come from those islands, which duty would otherwise amount annually to several millions of dollars. We see most of the energy of the islands devoted to the production of the inferior grades of sugars, and other articles in the schedule. We see no public gain compensate to our loss, and only the private emolument of a few manufacturers to whose manipulations we should all have to render compensation. We see all hope of acquisition of those lands slip through our hands, and the firmer estab ​lishment of a monarchical government as a neighbor, whose acts will not tend to the benefit of the republic.
If there should still be no treaty, the efforts to maintain the commercial life of the kingdom may take up the suggestion of annexation to our government. They have need of all the benefits which the
treaty could confer to sustain themselves. A union with these states will not only confer all those benefits, but will insure a tendency to a complete civilization of the native people. That is the only treaty concerning which, as merchants, diplomatists and civilizers, we should hold any argument.
DOS REALES.
HE had to have a name, of course. So one day when he met us on the Mole and I had given him a quarter of a dollar by mistake for a copper "dump" or two-cent piece, and he had hurried off, throwing glances of trepidation behind him every now and then as he ran up the wharf lest I should overhaul him and demand return of change, I called him "Dos Reales." And always after that he seemed to know the name.
But that was a long while ago. Years before the Spanish fleet knocked the
lower town to pieces. Dos Reales must be getting on in years by this time, even if he still lives.
He was a large dog, of no particular breed, and of the color of a ripe horsechestnut. A dog of no vices. He scorned to run in debt, always paying cash down for what h® ate, and lodging no one knew where. I have'nt the slightest doubt, however, that he paid for bed as well as board. A very Beau Hickmann of a dog. Courteous, affable, self-possessed, never seeking an acquaintance but always glad to meet any friend of a friend of his, always opening his mouth for money when any one whom he knew came near him. Bones and garbage he left to the plebeians of his race. I have often seen him turn up his nose with quiet contempt at ordinary pups squabbling for refuse edibles, as he, having
dined well, lay at full length in the sun with an air of lazily smoking his afterdinner cigar.
No one knew where he came from. Dr. Reid, the wholesale druggist, whose shop is in Cochrane or Commercial street, I forget which—at any rate it isn't far from the Custom House which stands or did stand, before Admiral Nunez shelled it, right across the way from the gate of the Mole—and you turned to the right from the Custom House to go there—Dr. Reid, who knew more about the town than any other American in it, told me that he believed Dos Reales was left on shore by some merchantship's boat when quite a little puppy, and that when he found himself thrown upon his own resources, as you may Say, he organized and adopted his own method of support in life.
It seemed to me that the dog deserved a good deal of credit for this. In fact, every one gave it to him.
He would stand on the upper step of the long flight of landing stairs, watching our boat as it came from the ship. He knew the flag perfectly well, and would bark a hoarse and gruff "good morning!" as the officer in charge called out "way enough! trail oars!" and the coxswain steered her in towards the stairs, and the men let their oars swim loose in the beckets that hung alongside, and threw over the little fenders of ​stuffed leather that looked like biscuits over-done, and the bow and stroke-oar, each armed with a boat hook, made desperate dives at piles and stairs to check her headway.
The gruffness was all put on, however. He would come up to us as we landed, laying his big, honest head in the hand of one and giving his paw to another, while he winked at a third and wagged his tail vociferously as the last one out of the boat came over the cap-sill. Then he would draw back from the group, sit down, open his mouth and look a request for money. Usually each of us gave him a "dump." He would close his teeth on the coin, wave a goodbye with his tail, and walk away to the town.
He patronised two butchers, a baker, and two cafés. At the butcher's he bought beef or mutton. He never ate pork. He always selected some choice cut, with plenty of juice and not too much bone in it. He liked a little bone for medico-chemical reasons probably. From the butcher's he would go to the baker's or one of the cafés, and purchase either plain bread or sweet cake, either or both as his taste or his means dictated, and then he would lie down in some quiet corner and eat his breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, like a christian.
I wanted to tell you about his habits and peculiarities first, you know, so that you might feel acquainted with him.
We were all going to dine at Henry Caldwell's one night just after we arrived. Henry was a good-hearted, whole-souled fellow, who liked nothing better than to have his friends come to see him. He was a lumber merchant. His partner, Don Somebody-or-other, I forget his name, lived away down in the Patagonian woods, near the German city of Port Montt, where he cut lumber and sent it up to Valparaiso, and Henry attended there to its sale.
Caldwell's home was a snug little house on Concepcion Hill, right up in
the air three hundred feet above the lower town, and not half that distance back from where Cochrane street would have been had its location marked the summit instead of the base-line of the precipitous front of the hill. A zig-zag path, for mules and foot-travelers only, ran up the face of the bluff.
David Page and I were the only officers going from the ship that evening. Harry Finn, once on the stage in Boston, (you remember his father, the great comedian, dead long ago, a man of immense dramatic genius in his day and generation) was at that time in commercial business in Valparaiso, and three Chilean gentlemen were to complete the party. Henry Caldwell's cosy little dinners were perfection, and Page and I were anticipating a delightful evening.
"Don Ricardo isn't well enough to come to-night," said Henry.
He and David and I were walking slowly up the zig-zag path. "He's quite sick, in fact. Almost dangerously so, his clerk told me this afternoon."
I was very sorry. Don Ricardo was a civil engineer, at that time engaged in some way on the Valparaiso and Santiago railroad. He was most agreeable company, speaking English perfectly, and appreciating fully, which is one of the hardest things that a foreigner can do, all the points of a joke in our language. I was sorry we should'nt see him, and very sorry to hear of his illness.
Dinner went off very well. Mrs. Caldwell always handled her table and her guests in the most pleasantly efficient manner possible. Every one was naturally a little subdued at first by the Don's absence and its cause, but as the wine went round we grew more like ourselves; and when our coffee had been poured and our cigars lighted, and Peta, the pretty table-girl, had made everything about the table snug and comfortable for a long sitting, we talked of ​
people and things and felt certain Don Ricardo would be better by morning.
Perhaps he was.
There came a knock at the door, and one entered whose face was a face of sorrow and mourning.
Don Ricardo was dead.
Burials are such sad _ necessities! Why isn't the old classical incremation better? A retort to hold the body; a furnace to reduce it to ashes; an urn to hold the dust. I doubt if the daily, sickening thought that the hands which were ever devotedly ours for every need and tender care, the eyes that read love in return in our own, the lips that kissed us into life and light, are going back to their dust in slow and loathsome and crawling decay and corruption, is as pleasant as it might be. Still, tastes differ. Burials may be more christianlike. It doesn't seem so to me—that's all.
Sincere mourners carried Don Ricardo's body to its grave.
And when we came back to Caldwell's and sat there at the open windows in his little parlor, and talked about the dead man, wondering what friends or relatives he had in his old home somewhere up near Santiago, wondering what they would say when they heard of his death, we grew very melancholy. We were all away from home, too. Very far away. All with stout hearts. All with good courage. But what befell Don Ricardo might come to us, would in all certainty reach us somewhere. Perhaps while we were still strangers in a strange land.
Page and I said "Good-night" to Mrs. Caldwell, and started to go down town.
"T'll go with you," said Henry. "I can't sleep just yet. And Lizzie, why don't you go to bed, child? You're tired out, youknow. Ill be back soon."
The night was perfect. Stilland cool. The moon was nearly full.
At our feet, so far below us that the
houses and ships were tuys in size, lay the crescent of the lower town traced in triple lines of gas-light from the three business streets: lay the bay of silver undulating in slow magnificence as the ground-swell came in with the first of the flood.
At our left was the hill of the "MainTop," looking by day like a gigantic leprous abscess ready for the knife; reeking both by night and day in its dens of misery and disease with more than the leper's foulness; a thing of beauty in the moonlight now.
Behind us, peak above peak, rising in snowy splendor till their king, Aconcagua, 23,000 feet above the sea, carried earth in unearthly grandeur to heaven, reigned the Andes of Chile.
And the Southern Cross shone out. Dimmed in glory by the moon, yet still radiant with the everlasting light that its stars gave forth ages before the world was, it hung in the midnight sky just over the churchyard where Don Ricardo slept, and pointed upward to God.
"Let's go round to his quarters a moment," said Henry. "The outer door was left unlocked this afternoon, and somebody may take a notion to steal something. You'll have plenty of time to reach the Mole."
Our boat had orders that night to wait till we came, and as the house where the Don had lived wasn't much out of our way, we went.
There's a sort of irregular, threecornered plaza in the lower town. I don't remember its name. Perhaps it has none. Four or five streets make it in uniting and crossing each other. It's the only open space in the city of that especial shape, however, and is near Cochrane street. There is a long twostory building on one side of it, that has a balcony or open veranda running the entire length of its front, on a level with the floor of the second story. Its projecting width is some seven feet, about that of the sidewalk belowit. At ​
each end a stairway, set against the wall, goes from the sidewalk to the balcony. These stairways are about four feet wide, and are set sloping towards each other. Nearer each other at the top, I mean, than they are at the bottom. Convergent. One word would have told what two sentences didn't. The ground floor is cut up into eight or ten retail shops, each one the width of an ordinary house-lot here in San Francisco, and forty or forty-five feet deep. The second story has as many suites of rooms as there are shops below. There are three rooms in each suite; the front one lighted from the balcony, the second and third by windows in the roof. These rooms communicate with the balcony only, each suite being isolated from its neighbor, and the only way to reach them from the street is by the outside Stairways and the veranda. Just remember how this is, so that you can understand what I tell you.
We walked slowly along and stopped on our way at the English club house to get some brandy and cigars. We hadn't felt like either drinking or smoking before during the evening, but the mental and physical fatigue of the day began to tell. We talked with the manager, Whip, (I wonder whether he's still in existence, what he did in the bombardment, and whether he'll remember me when he sees this) lighted our cigars at one of the tiny braseros of burning charcoal that stood on the bar, came out into the moonlight and walked on towards the plaza.
We came into the plaza in such a direction that the house where Don Ricardo had lived was directly before us. To reach either of the stairways leading to the balcony it was necessary to make a detour either to the right or left. The moonlight fell squarely on the face of the building, but just as we entered the open space a cloud dimmed and almost quenched it. The stairs on the left were a little nearer to us than the others,
(we had come down on the left-hand side of the street from Cochrane) so turning that way, Caldwell leading, we traversed one side of the triangle and began to go up the stairway. Caldwell first, I next, and Page last.
Henry's head was just above the level of the floor of the balcony, when he stopped and looked intently forward. I was two or three stairs below him and stopped when he did. He looked ahead, put his left hand back with a gesture of warning, and then said, without turning round, speaking in a hoarse whisper, "or heaven's sake, doctor, look!"
I passed up by his side. Page followed. We three stood together on the same step of the stairway.
The moon shone out with renewed brilliancy, and there, leaning against a stanchion of the veranda rail not a dozen yards from us, and looking down into the plaza, dressed in his old-time wear, standing in his old familiar attitude, was Don Ricardo! Dead—buried fathom deep in red clay—and here!
As we stood the figure turned. The moonlight fell across its face, showing it white and ghastly and still. Then with slow and noiseless steps it entered the open door of Don Ricardo's quarters.
The little plaza was silent. From a distance came the sound of the foot-fall of some vigilante walking his beat, the bark of vagrant dogs, the deadened roar of the surf on the beach of the bay.
We looked at each other, turned, went down the stairs, then took counsel.
Regarding the right of a man, alive or dead, to enter his lodgings, there can be no doubt. The question is one of ability merely. To the best of our knowledge in the case of the Don, this ability had no existence.
Caldwell went along the sidewalk to the right hand stairway. Page took up a position in the road that enabled him to command a view of the veranda from end to end, and I began to re-ascend the stairs on the left. Henry and I reached ​
the veranda at the same time and walked towards each other and the door where the figure had disappeared.
The front room was vacant of everything but its ordinary furniture. The chairs stood in their usual places. Books, instruments and papers lay undisturbed on the large table in the centre of the floor. Caldwell lighted a match and with it the standing gas-light on the table. Every portion of the room was visible then, and no living beings were in it but ourselves. Walking out on the balcony I called to Page and he came up.
The door of the middle room was closed but not locked. We opened it and went in.
Don Ricardo had used this second room fora work-place. Drawing-boards, surveying implements, and two or three chairs were its only contents.
The back room door was shut. Lighting the gas in the working room we opened it cautiously.
A draft of air blew towards us and
the gas-jet in the second room fluttered
and flapped and nearly went out. Closing the door quickly, Caldwell scraped a match on the heel of his boot and ignited the gas at the bracket on the wall at the head of the bed.
The sky-light was open. Left so by the undertaker's attendants to ventilate the room, about which the odor of chlorine still lingered from the disinfecting agents used after the Don's death. The blank wall checked our further progress.
The bed was stripped. We looked below it. We looked in the movable closet or wardrobe standing on the right. We opened the drawers of the bureau on the other side of the room. We made a variety of absurd investigations into every nook and corner—and found nothing.
Page sat down and lighted a fresh cigar, offering one to Caldwell at the same time and another to me. The smell of chlorine was unpleasant and we joined him in smoking, Thus far our
search to understand the mystery ended in nothing more tangible. Ended in smoke.
Sailors are almost always superstitious. I have been one myself and I know of what I speak. Things come to men who go down to the sea in ships and do business in the great waters that landsmen never dream of. Old shellbacks believe in marvellous happenings because they must. Wouldn't the testimony of a dozen witnesses, men of truth and honor, combining to tell how each and every one of them had seen me kill you or you kill me, send me or you to the gallows? Very good. I can bring you the attested oaths of a thousand men who have seen that embodiment of the terrible, the Shrouded Demon of the Sea; who have found themselves working away up and out on a yard-arm in some night of storm and darkness, sideby-side with something that wore the form and features of a shipmate dead, sewed in his hammock and launched overboard days before, with a thirty-two pound shot at his heels; who have seen a ship with everything set, manned by no mortal men, drive straight into the teeth of a gale and vanish, shadowy masts and spars going over the side of a ghostly hull, which rose and plunged and sunk, while groans and shrieks of men and women came over the surging sea to the ears of the horrified witnesses, and have had this drama of death three times repeated in their sight in an hour. Superstition is hardly the term to apply to this sort of thing. It's simply a belief in facts as patent to the eyes of those who see them as are the ordinary scenes of a city to a lounger in its streets. What's the use of saying they can't be, when they ere?
So two of us being of the sea, we sat, and smoked, and talked, of this apparition. If one of us only had seen it, the others might have doubted its reality, and attributed the whole thing to the fumes of Mr. Whip's strong water acting ​
on a system wearied with the toil of the day. But it had been seen by all three. And, as if to confirm its reality, the portrait of the Don, hanging on the wall directly beneath the skylight, parted its fastenings suddenly, as if unseen hands had cut the cord, and fell on the floor with a crash that shivered its heavy frame and tore the canvas from its stretcher. Fell at our feet—and the painted face, rent from forehead to chin, looked up mournfully at us from the ruin.
"Let's get out of this," said Page. "I'm going aboard ship."
He threw his half-smoked cigar away, and went through the other rooms to the balcony. I saw no reason for remaining, and went out after him. Caldwell turned off the gas in each room as he left it, and followed us.
We stopped at Whip's again on our way to the Mole. I have great doubt of either the need or benefit of brandy under ordinary circumstances. But
there's probably no fact more firmly established than the one of there always being some especial reason why a drink
should be taken. We had taken our first one that night to revive us. Page suggested the second to quiet our nerves; and Page being then and now aman using but little stimulant, a suggestion of this sort from him carrying weight, in consequence, and meaning something, we agreed to it.
Two or three men had come into the club-house since our first call, and when we went up stairs the second time we heard them talking and laughing out in the moonlight, through the open door at the end of the central hall. There was a balcony there that overhung the water.
Caldwell recognized their voices, and asked Whip to send our brandy out there after us.
Page knew one of the party, an old Scotchman, named McLerie, and Henry was evidently well known to all of them. They made room for us at the table
where they were sitting. Presently the servant in attendance at the bar brought out our decanter and glasses, and we all drank together.
" What's the matter with you three?" said McLerie. "Caldwell there looks as if he had seen a ghost. What has happened?"
Then Page told him about what we had seen on the balcony, and how we looked through the rooms and found nothing, and wanted to know what he thought of it.
"Well," said McLerie, after a pause of a few minutes, during which he emptied his glass and lighted a fresh cigar, "I think that whoever or whatever it was you saw, went out of the third room, through the open skylight. I don't believe there was anything unreal about the affair. You were all thinking of the Don; there was somebody standing at his door. The moonlight is uncertain at best. I haven't the slightest doubt about there being a man there, but I am perfectly sure that it was a man, and no ghost. That's my idea. Page and the doctor know very well how easily an active man might mount on the bureau, cling to projections here and there in the wall of the room, and be out on the roof in less time than it took you to get there from the front door. I don't believe in supernatural agency when I can account for a thing by ordinary rules."
We sat there and talked the matter over for a long time. As usual, each one of the party had his own theory to advance and his own illustrations to tell. Whip was a remarkably patient man with good customers, the summer night was short, and the bay below us began to reflect the first faint approach of sunrise before our conversation ended. We had forgotten all about our boat. Caldwell had unwittingly far overstayed his promised time for returning home. But we knew our men didn't care, and we trusted that the captain would find but little fault when he heard our rea ​sons for delay, and Henry's wife had undoubtedly gone to bed to sleep quietly till he came. She was a very sensible woman.
So we all got under way for the Mole. Caldwell and our new friends insisted on going down to see us safely off for the ship. Our boat lay bumping gently every now and then against the lower stair of the landing. There was one man in her, fast asleep. Page woke him up, and started him off after the rest of the crew. We all sat down on the long bench that runs along inside the railing on the cap-sill of the pier, and waited for the crew to come.
Dos Reales had preferred camping out that night to retiring to his usual lodging-house, wherever that might be. So we judged, at least, for after the sound of several prolonged yawns, and a variety of scratchings and slippings of claws on the wooden floor of the wharf, had come to us from a little distance, he made his appearance, walking sleepily towards us, through the morning twilight. He rubbed a "good morning" against each one of us, and then sat down and opened his mouth for money for his breakfast.
" You're too early, old fellow," said I; "there are no shops open yet. Lie down, sir!"
After waiting a while, and looking wonderingly at the absence of his usual remittances, he appeared to think so too, and curled himself up at my feet to resume his interrupted slumbers.
The coming daylight came nearer. The lanterns on the Mole began to grow dim, and the chilly land breeze from the mountains to lessen in strength.
There was a steady footstep coming down the pier from the entrance gate.
"There comes the coxswain," said Page. "The crew are close behind him. Let's get into the boat."
We were shaking hands with our shore friends, and saying "good bye," when Caldwell exclaimed: "McLerie!
87 Look there!" We turned and looked up the Mole.
The steady footsteps had ceased, but a figure stood about a dozen yards from us, shadowy and vague in the dim light, wearing the features and dress of the dead Don Ricardo—stood in his old familiar attitude, looking far out seaward, unconscious, apparently, of us or of anything else of earth.
McLerie shrank back.
"What do you think xow?" whispered Page.
McLerie braced himself as if against some physica! shock, waited a moment, and then exclaiming, "Man or ghost, I'll make it speak!" he started with a firm step towards the figure.
But Dos Reales was too quick for him. With a bark of joyful greeting he sprang up and ran towards the apparition, satisfied that he had at last found some one who would give him what he wanted. After his usual manner, he sat down close to the figure, and opened his mouth for the expected coins.
The apparition burst into a loud laugh.
It was a twin-brother of Don Ricardo's. The affair of the night before had been impromptu on his part. He had seen our heads above the upper step of the balcony stairs, suspected what we thought, and resolved to carry out the delusion by doing exactly what McLerie surmised he had done—climbing rapidly out on the roof through the open skylight, and dislodging, or rather loosening, the nail that sustained the picture, as it gave him a momentary stand-point in his ascent.. This morning he had merely walked out for fresh air. At the gate of the Mole he had heard our voices, and supposed them to be those of boatmen. Coming nearer, he had recognized us, and resolved to maintain the illusion of the balcony of the night before; but Dos Reales interfered.
The affair didn't lessen either Page's belief or mine in ghosts, however. ​
EIGHT DAYS AT THEBES.
TO the student of archeology Egypt is perhaps the most interesting country in the world. Its recorded history dates back almost to the genesis of therace. Its hieroglyphics rehearse the annals of a mighty empire that flourished two thousand years before the Star of Bethlehem had arisen. When Syria was a waste, and Greece slept the sleep of barbarism, the Nile reflected the splendors of a civilization hardly inferior to our own. Long before Plato dreamed, or Homer sang, the Priests of Isis unveiled the mysteries of science, and told the story of the immortality of the soul. Before the Parthenon was conceived, before the temple of Solomon was reared, the sculptors and painters of Thebes and Beni Hassan had taught the rudiments of plastic art.
No other country has such a wealth
of ruins. The traveler is overwhelmed by their number and magnitude. The Pyramids of Gezeh are only types of a vast system of colossal remains stretching from Alexandria to Wady Halfa. The banks of the river are literally strewn for hundreds of miles with the debris of the civilization of the Pharaohs. The sides of the mountains are honeycombed with tombs; forests of obelisks glitter in the mellow sunlight; calm-eyed sphynxes greet the wanderer from a hundred storied sites; broken arches and crumbling columns crown innumerable eminences on the river's shores. Ruins everywhere: at every curve and bend of the Nile; on every plain and rocky height; on the Delta and the desert; from the shores of the sounding sea to the cataracts. The spirit of the dead past haunts the mysterious river. It carries us back to the infancy of man. We are brought face to face with the people who built the Pyramids—who
founded Thebes and Memphis. We walk the sacred corridors of the temples of the Pharaohs; we visit the burial places of extinct races; we behold the products of their genius, the very implements with which they wrought.
Philz is beautiful; Memphis is sadly picturesque; Dendra is a memory to cling to the soul forever; the grottoes of Beni Hassan well repay the toils of travel; the Pyramids are at once sublime and awe-inspiring; but the crowning glory of Egypt is Thebes. Shall I ever forget the eight days spent among its ruins? The approach to it coming up the Nile is one of the most striking in the East. The valley widens, the desert recedes, the mountains form themselves into a mighty amphitheatre opening toward the north. As we near the site of the "hundred-gated" city, the majestic propylon of the Temple of Karnak is darkly outlined against the sky. Nearer still, and groups of sphynxes appear through a grove of palms. A slight bend of the river, and Luxor with its obelisks, and columns, and statues of gods, and ruined temples, bursts upon the view. To the right are seen the Vocal Memnon, the palace and temples of the Pharaohs; while on every side, for miles and miles, stretches the broad plain that enshrines the dust of Thebes. We leave our Nile boat, and under the escort of an army of donkey-boys, pay a hurried visit to the Temple of Luxor. Time has cruelly played the vandal with it. Of all the grandeur of the once glorious edifice only a few pillars and scarred walls remain. Near by stands a solitary obelisk, its brother having been sacrilegiously carried off to adorn a European capital. At the entrance of the temple are a couple of colossal statues of Kamases the Second—broad-breasted fellows, meas ​
1868.]
uring some ten feet from shoulder to shoulder. They are buried up to the bosom in sand, and the scars of over thirty centuries are written on their stony brows. Passing through the propylon, with its massive walls completely covered with hieroglyphics, we enter the portico with its fourteen lofty pillars looking down on heaps of ruins and Arab huts. Scattered about are several statues of cat-headed deities, fragments of walls and columns, and the remains of the body of the temple. Luxor was the fourth in size of the temples of Thebes, and was probably connected by an avenue of sphynxes with the temple of Karnac, two miles distant.
From Luxor to the Tombs of the Kings. A sailacross the river, we land on the western shore, under the shadow of the Memnonium in the gray of the early dawn. We are in our saddles before sunrise, and canter briskly, donkey-back, under the inspiration of the cool morning air. For some two miles we pass over a level and fertile plain, the supposed site of the western section of the great city. Then we come upon a barren waste thickly strewn with mummy-pits, which continue to the base of the mountain, running parallel with the river. Here we enter a deep and narrow defile, surrounded by high and overhanging cliffs of calcareous rock. The road is narrow, and frequently interrupted by immense boulders. Nothing can exceed the barrenness of the scenery. Not a speck of green—not a blade of grass, or shrub, or wild flower relieves the dreary waste. After traversing this road for five or six miles—the same road over which a long line of Pharaohs were borne to their last abode—we enter a secluded valley in the mountains—a veritable "Valley of Death." Our guide suddenly pauses, and gives the signal to dismount. At first we can discern nothing, but a closer scrutiny reveals a small excavation in the side of the hill. This we enter, and in ten seconds find ourselves
in the tomb of one of the earliest and greatest of the Pharaohs—that discovered by Belzoni. Our guide lights his torches, and we grope our way down a flight of steps, with a perpendicular descent of twenty-four feet to the first landing. The great tomb is three hundred and twenty feet long, with a perpendicular depth of one hundred and eighty feet. It contains fourteen chambers, all inscribed with hieroglyphics and sculptures. The entrance hall is twentyseven feet long and twenty feet broad, richly decorated with images of gods and goddesses, and sacred fish, and birds, and reptiles. It opens into another chamber twenty-eight by twenty-five feet, with figures in outline looking as fresh and vivid as if executed but yesterday. The touch of the painter's brush, the mark of the sculptor's chisel, are still there. Another long descent—a magnificent corridor—another long staircase, and we are ushered into an apartment twenty-four by thirteen feet. Here, as in the preceding one, the walls and ceilings are covered with paintings and sculpture—the colors growing brighter and fresher as we advance. The artist inducts us to the mysteries of the nether world. Now the deceased king is ushered into the presence of Osiris, the "judge of the dead;"" now immense serpents, with human legs and celestial crowns on their heads, are receiving the homage of devoted worshippers; now troops of genii are flitting about the Elysian abodes; now owl and cat, and hawk and crocodile, and ape-headed gods are sitting in all the dignity of fullfledged divinities. Farther onstill, and we come to a hall twenty-seven by twenty-six feet, supported by two rows of pillars terminated by a large saloon with vaulted roof. This latter is thirty-two feet in length by twenty-seven feet in breadth, from which open several other chambers. In the centre of the great saloon Belzoni found the beautiful Sarcophagus of King Osiris. And ​this im mense tomb, which it takes hours to explore, was wrought out of the solid rock.
I cannot pause to give the details of the wonderful sculptures and still more wonderful paintings of this tomb. In one of the rooms is a representation of four different peoples contrasting widely in dress and color and cast of countenance. These are supposed to represent the great divisions of mankind, among them the negro. So little has the latter changed during a period of over 3,000 years, that an "American citizen of African descent" might recognize his portrait among the figures of this group. What, then, becomes of the pretty theory of those ethnologists who insist that the difference in color and feature between the white and blackis referable to the influence of time and climate? If the lapse of over 3,200 years (for the occupant of this tomb ascended the throne 1,385 years before Christ) has sufficed to effect no perceptible physical difference in the Ethiop, surely the remaining less than 3,000 years of man's biblically-recorded history cannot have produced so great disparity between white and black. One of the chambers of the great tomb is unfinished. The positions of the figures are given by the artist, but the coloring is not put on. What great event—what sudden calamity—prevented the completion of the task? You have entered the studio of an artist during his temporary absence from his work. Half-finished sketches are lying about; rough designs are scattered hither and thither; the paint is hardly dry upon the canvas at which he wrought; a multitude of outlines and shadows—of faintly dawning perspective and sombre background are visible. So here: the artist seems to have just left his work. Profiles of gods and goddesses—sketches of kings, and apes, and owls, and hawks, and genii, are seen on walls and ceilings. You cannot realize that these profiles
were drawn—that these _half-filled sketches were executed —that these brilliantly tinted figures were wrought, over thirty centuries ago.
The next tomb we visit—that of Rameses the Third (called the "Harper's Tomb ")—is equally interesting, though not so rich in painting and sculpture. Its total length is four hundred and five feet, with a perpendicular descent of thirty-one feet. Here the wondering traveler obtains a glimpse of the manners and customs of the ancient Thebans, We enter a small room on whose walls the mysteries of the Egyptian kitchen are revealed. An ox is being slain; aman is filling a cauldron with the joints of the slaughtered beast; another is blowing the fire with the bellows; another is pounding something with a mortar; another is chopping meat into mince; another is making pastry; anotheris kneading dough. Farther on is a room whose walls are covered with paintings of furniture. There are chairs and sofas of elegant forms and richly ornamented; couches of seductive pattern, porcelain pottery, copper utensils, baskets of graceful shapes, mirrors and toilet articles, basins and ewers, and all the paraphernalia of stylish household furniture. Nothing I have seen in this strange land amazed me more than these latter. They prove the old Egyptians to have been versed in the elegant arts—to have known a degree of refinement in their private life indicating a high type of civilization. No dealer in "fancy wares" on Broadway or Montgomery street could present a more brilliant "assortment" than are displayed upon these time-honored walls.
Is there any thing "new under the sun?" How much have we advanced in the practical or elegant arts beyond the busy-bodies of ancient Thebes? Glass-blowing was practiced in the reign of Osirtasen over 3,800 years ago, and the form of the blow-pipe and the bottle differed little from that of our ​
own day. The same kind of plow was used in Egypt thirty centuries ago as is used to-day. The bastinado was the mode of punishment for minor offences in the time of Joseph as it is in this year of grace 1868; while then as now, hanging was the penalty for capital crimes. There is good reason to believe that the use of gunpowder was known in the days of the earlier Pharaohs. Anvils and blacksmiths' bellows, almost precisely like those seen in an American country smithy, are depicted on the walls of the grottoes of Beni Hassan. The germ of the Doric Column may be traced among the oldest relics of Egyptian art, and the Arch is older than Sesostris. The Thebans amused themselves with the game of draughts, and their athletes and jugglers performed some of the same feats with which the Buisleys and Hellers of our day astonish metropolitan audiences. The harp, guitar, lyre, drum and bugle are as old as the Pyramids; Theban artisans knew how to anneal and solder metals; and Theban poulterers understood the art of hatching eggs by artificial means. Looking-glasses adorned ladies' boudoirs long before Moses was found among the bulrushes, and pins and needles, and combs and fancy jewelry were as indispensable to the dear sex in the days of Rameses as in the days of Victoria.
I visited in succession twelve of these wonderful tombs. The same sculptures —the same rich paintings—the same splendid halls—the same vaulted roof— the same interminable processions of gods and goddesses, sacred animals and brute-headed, divinities characterize each. The eye wearies and the brain reels with the succession of strange scenes. You feel as-if you were in a new world—a _ wierd, subterranean world. Were these tombs intended only for the receptacles of the dead Pharaohs? Was all this lavishment of means—all this struggling for brilliant
effects—for xo other purpose than that of enshrining a mummy? Was this rich product of Art, which it took the life-time of a monarch to rear, to be ignobly sealed the moment he closed his puny eyes in death? I cannot believe it. I must believe, rather, that the tombs had other purposes—purposes connected in some manner with religious rites—perhaps with the horrid "mysteries "which form so essential a part of the Egyptian religion. I recall the description of them given by Ezekiel: "Then said he unto me: 'Son of man dig in the wail;' and when I had digged in the wall, behold a door. And he said unto me: 'Go in and see the abominable things that they do there. And so I went in, and saw and beheld every form of creeping thing and abominable beasts and all the idols of the house of Israel portrayed upon the walls around about."
Our next visit is to the tombs of the Priests and People, on the western side of the desert mountain. Like those of the kings, they are cut out of the solid rock. The largest, that of Asseseef, covers an area of over one acre. The sculptures and paintings of many of them are of absorbing interest. In one we find cabinetmakers and carpenters at work. One person is hewing a piece of timber; another is working on a sofa; another is chiseling out a sphynx; another is putting a piece of furniture together; another is engaged in manufacturing glassware; while a group of swarthy workmen are making bricks. Here is the interior of the house of a wealthy Egyptian. A lady is making a call. A servant offers her some wine; a black slave stands near with a plate in her hand; while several musicians are entertaining her with what were, doubtless, airs from the last opera. Let me give you an idea of how a Theban woman of fashion dressed. She wore a petticoat or gown, secured at the waist by a colored sash, or by straps over the ​
shoulders. Above this was a large loose robe, made of the finest linen, with full sleeves, tied in front, below the breast. The gown was of richly colored stuff, presenting a variety of patterns. Her dainty feet were encased in sandals, prettily worked, and turning up at the toes. Occcasionally she indulged in the extravagance of shoes or béots. Her hair was worn long and plaited; the back part consisted of a number of strings of hair, reaching to the bottom of the shoulder blades, while on each side other strings descended over the breast. An ornamented fillet encircled the head, and the strings of hair at the sides were separated and secured with a comb. From her ears hung large round single hoops of gold; sometimes an asp, whose body was of gold, set with precious stones, was worn. She had all the passion for finger jewelry of her modern sister. Sometimes two or three
rings were worn on the same finger,
while occasionally she indulged in the superfluous feminine extravagance of a ring on the thumb! So you see the sex is much the same, past and present, the world over.
The tombs. upon which the "first families" of Thebes so much prided themselves are now occupied as cow and donkey stables, and huts, by the miserable Arabs with which the neighborhood is infested. As the traveler wanders about from sepulchre to sepulchre, he is dogged by a squad of vagabonds, with arms and hands and feet and heads of mummies, whom they have sacrilegiously "unearthed," imploring him to buy these grim relics. I purchased a head of a "prominent citizen " for three piastres, while the delicate hands of a Theban belle were offered me for an equal sum. Our cook bought a whole mummy, coffin and all, for six piastres, to be taken to Alexandria as a present to his children. The reader must do his own moralizing.
After spending three days among the
tombs of the great, I was desirous of looking in upon the "pits" of the more ignoble dead. My guide led me bya narrow path, thickly strewn with fragments of mummies—hands, feet, legs, arms, trunks, scattered about in charming confusion—to a small opening in the side of the mountain. Through this I was compelled to crawl, some fifteen or twenty feet, to a larger opening. Lighting a torch, we continued our way until we came toa chamber filled with human mummies, piled one upon the other, to a depth of, I know not how many feet. Walking remorselessly over this horrid pavement, we came to another chamber, similarly filled; then another and another, tenanted by the same ghastly denizens. Sometimes I would sink to my knees into this mass of withered human carrion; sometimes my cruel heel would unwittingly crush in a grining face, or "go through" a mass of blackened bowels. There they lay, pellmell, a dozen deep, some headless, some sitting half upright, leering at vacancy, some lying helplessly with face downward, some with feet uppermost. There was one huge fellow, looking as if he might have been an extinct prize-fighter, minus a head, who measured over six feet from neck to heel. We turned him over, laid open his poor chest, and left him to his fate. I did not take the census of this motley congregation, but there must have been several hundred in a single "pit." Sir Gardener Wilkinson estimates that there are nine millions of mummies in the mountains about Thebes.
"To this complexion hath it come at last."" This reeking mass was once warm with life. Each had its little world in which it hoped and wrestled. Each strutted its brief-hour upon the great stage, and thought that hour /he pivotpoint upon which the world's destiny would turn evermore. There were strifes and bickerings and heartaches; there were rivalries and cliques and cabals ​
and petty warfares then. - Demagogues and knaves flourished then as now. Noisy patriots harangued from the stump, fanatics howled from the rostrum, and office seekers wandered up and down the earth.
From the mummy-pits to the Memnonium, the temple-palace of Sesostris. It is imposing even in its wreck. I ts lofty columns, crowned with capital and cornice, stand erect as in the days of its prime. It is approached by an avenue of sphynxes, terminating in a splendid propylon, richly covered with sculptures, commemorative of the triumph of the monarch whose name it bears. Near its entrance are the remains of a colossal statue of Sesostris, hewn out of a single block of granite, measuring twentythree feet across the breast, and weighing eight hundred and eighty-seven tons! This enormous colossus was
'hurled from his pedestal by the fury of Cambyses, and broken into fragments.
But splendid as is this temple, it is puny in comparison with that of Medeenet Habou, half a mile to the south. I cannot describe it at length. Passing the pylon, you enter a court, one hundred and ten by one hundred and thirteen feet, having on the one side a row of Osiride pillars, and on the other, eight similar columns, with bell-formed capitals, representing the full-blown lotus. Then follows the principal pylon, or gateway, surmounted by a row of sitting apes, the emblems of the god Thoth, which leads into the grand court. It measures one hundred and twenty-three by one hundred and thirty-three feet, and is surrounded by a peristyle, whose east and west sides are supported by five massive columns, the south by a row of eight pillars, and the north by a similar number. Behind is a superb corridor of circular columns, each with a circumference of twenty-three feet, and a height of twenty-four feet. These pillars are richly colored, and present
an appearance the most magnificent of which the imagination can conceive. The walls of this court are covered with sculpture, illustrating the Pharoah to whom the temple was dedicated. In one place he is represented as sitting in his car, while a heap of hands (those of his vanquished enemies) are placed before him, which an officer counts, while a scribe notes down in numbers. In another place he is returning from the wars. A long procession of captives, with pinioned arms, are marching beside and before him, while three of the number are bound to the axle of his chariot.
There are three other smaller temples on the western side of the river, two of which I visited, but which I cannot stop to describe. Indeed, the whole vast plain is one field of ruin. Columns and colossii, sphynxes and towers, rear their giant forms above the waste of sand as far as the eye can see. Wherever the traveler wanders, the same wrecks of the past arrest his progress. Some are barely visible above the sand, while others stand out clear and dauntless, as if defying the might of Time.
A short ride across the plain brings us vis-a-vis with the Vocal Memnon. There he sits, calm and stoical, as he sat when the sages of Greece and Rome came to do him homage, and listen to his greetings of the morning sun. He has long since, however, given up singing as a profession, and sends forth no welcome to the blushing Aurora as she kisses his weather-beaten brow. This modest veteran is hewn out of a single block of granite, and measures in his sitting posture some forty-seven feet in height. His face is sadly battered; he has lost his nose and left ear; his chest is quite gone, and the poor fellow looks shabby and woe-begone generally. An Arab boy climbed up his back and tried to imitate his "tricks upon travelers" by striking a "musical stone." But it was a poor imitation, and I left ​him with a strong conviciion that his talents as an artist had been slightly exaggerated by Herodotus and his wonder-loving fellow historians. Near by sits his "big brother" equally herculean, equally storm-beaten, but not distinguished in the musical line.
But the greatest marvel of ancient Thebes is yet to be seen. Of all the ruined temples of Egypt—of all the ruined , wonders of the earth—Karnak on the east side of the river is the most impressive. No description, no plan, no diagram, can give expression to its vastness. It is approached from Luxor by an avenue of two hundred sphynxes, terminating at the outer gate-way of the temple. They are all headless now, but the pedestals remain to tell the glory of the past. There are three other approaches, all by similar lines of sphynxes, all with immense propylii, all terminated by vast courts and colonnades. The walls of the principal gate-way are twenty-seven feet thick, while the towers have almost the proportions of pyramids. A forest of towers and pillars and crumbling walls darken the heavens on every side. Entering the great hall the traveler is lost in wonder. This edifice measures one hundred and seventy-six by three hundred and twenty-nine feet, and is supported by a central avenue of twelve massive columns sixty-six feet high without the pedestal and abacus, and twelve feet in diameter. To this are added one hundred and twenty-two columns, each forty-one feet high and
twenty-seven and a-half feet in circumference. Beyond this are four lofty obelisks; then the sanctuary of polished granite, the walls richly sculptured and the ceiling studded with stars. Farther on another colonnade—another portico, another avenue of sphynxes—another magnificent propylon.
A LEAF FROM A CHINESE NOVEL.
BOOKMAKING is an old and honorable craft in China. Historians flourished there eight centuries before our era, whose remains still live in the pages of Confucius, who collected them three hundred years after they were written. These chronicles contain all that will ever be known of the sixty-six Emperors that had sat on the "Dragon Throne" before Romulus was born.
Of course, aristocracy is an idea quite consonant with that of an empire, but the Chinese hit upon a singular method of creating one. Passing over military prowess, birth and wealth, they began by declaring Confucius a grandee of the empire, and his descendants enabled by hereditary titles, forbidden to any other members of the nation. Then they decreed the narrow portal to office, fame and dignity alone open to the scholar and man of science.
This system seems perfectly satisfactory to this strange people, who are exceedingly puzzled at mention of our system of party politics and public honors. It must however be admitted, that, while the emoluments of office and the highest consideration of all classes is the just reward of the Chiriese litterateur, there the matter ends. The "classics "are firmly believed to contain absolutely every thing worth knowing; hence, the writer who should presume to wander from that beaten track has nothing to hope for in the way of pecuniary reward.
Copyright is an unheard of notion in China, the supposition being that the author would employ printers and publish his works himself should he deem such an enterprise profitable. In fact, wealthy men of letters sometimes do this, not for gain, but to secure accuracy, and the lowest possible cost to the reader.
It would be considered exceedingly bad taste for an author to put his name on the title page of his book. It would be, say the Chinese, "like the gardener setting up his name in the midst of his flower-beds; people stroll into gardens to be amused, not to busy themselves with the cultivator's name." Besides this, they like books with a flavor of age upon them. "What impertinence," say they, "for a writer to flourish his name about before the public has tested his merits!" It was among such a people that the romance entitled "The Dream of the Red Chamber" appeared, nearly two centuries ago.
As the style of the work is so exceedingly prolix and minute as to be unendurable to the desultory reader, only a few scenes from an introductory chapter will be given, and those, too, the most translatable into an English dress; for it must be confessed that Chinese literature still cuts an awkward figure in the language of Shakspeare and Milton; something like Chinese paintings, admirable in detail, but alas, shocking to the taste formed on science and the rules of perspective.
After whole chapters of what Sterne would call preliminary "digressions on purpose," the author gives a voluminous account of a certain wealthy and titled family resident in Pekin, the capital of China. He says that a subject of this kind is of such an intricate nature, that it brings to his mind the vexation of searching for the clue of a tangled mass of hemp. "Indeed," he continues, "it was fortunate for this story that certain poor relations of the high and mighty Young family were planning an attack upon their purses and good nature." The thing happened in this fashion: A certain Mr. Kaou was the son of a gentleman who had held office under a former sovereign many years before. ​
This official had so attracted the regards of the famous and powerful Mr. Young, that by a solemn act, called by the Chinese "adoption of ancestry," they had formed a relationship, strictly so regarded in China. Time passed, and with it arose the fortunes of the Young family, while the Kaous seemed never deserted by evil fortune. The present head of the latter family, retiring from the capital, took up his abode in a humble hamlet, where he contrived to exist in a wretched and hopeless poverty. He had married a Miss Lew, who had brought him a son and daughter, not to mention a mother-in-law, an old lady of shrewdness and simplicity, both sides of whose character are perfectly delineated in the various adventures which befal her, as related in this veracious history.
Matters of late had been unprosperous, touching the fortunes of Mr. Kaou. Farming had not paid, and winter was approaching before the least provision had been made to meet its inclemency, or support the family at a season when necessities double and resources dwindle. The anxious farmer, discouraged and dejected, took to drink, and family affairs seemed on the brink of some dreadful crisis, when Madame Lew resolved to put up no longer quietly with her son-in-law's unhappy course of conduct, and she addressed him in the following style:
"My honored son! don't fly in a passion if I should address you in an outspoken fashion, after the manner of honest country folk. As our dish is, so is the amount of rice we eat. When a youth, you had the old man's bin to dip out of, and an easy art then was eating and drinking! Matters forsooth have changed since then; now you get into a fury because you know nothing of gaining money, or keeping it, if even you could obtain it. What a fine fellow—what a noble hero. you will turn out at this rate! Listen! Though living outside of Pekin, we are not as far from Court after all; that
CHINESE NOVEL. [Juty, very city has the ground covered with money, if we only knew how to bring some of it away. Folding yourarms will never solve the question, take my word for it!"
"You old harridan! what do you mean? Would you have me betake myself to the road as a cut-throat?"
"Now who told you to take to the highway? Listen! Do you think that money will know of itself to come running into our house? If we could put our heads together, we might light on some plan that would do our business, just as it ought to be done."
" Do you think now if I had a plan on foot, that I should have waited for your sagacity before putting it into execution? I can but think of powerful friends who have long ago forgotten me; and why, too, should they bother their heads about such as we?"
"Man forms the plan,' and Heaven gives the issue; there is a good deal in a happy chance—let me try my hand in sketching out a project for you.
The rich and powerful family of the Youngs, however distant, are indisputably your relations; the aged and venerable Lady Fung presides with great dignity over the ancestral mansion, and people say that as she advances in years she more than ever compassionates the poor, and pities the aged and needy. If she has forgotten you, there is no one to blame but yourself; striving as you are with a foolish false pride, you don't fancy bending, bowing and scraping to these big people, who know so well how to be cool and distant to the proud and egotistic poor. Heaven has blessed this Lady Fung, who may still remember old friends; take a turn in that direction, and you may find that a hair of her head
is thicker than our waist. The farmer's wife overhearing this
scheme of her mother, now interposed her view of the question.
"Dear old mother! What you say is truth itself, but let me ask you how such countryfied folk as we_are should dare to ​so much as knock at the doors of the great? No servant would show us in, and a nice thing it would be to have our faces slapped in the presence of the whole world! My decision is—better not go!"
This high-spirited retort might have finally settled the family council, had not the good husband divined a way to save his pride, and yet make use of both the old lady and her advice. He had been gradually relaxing all the time, and at length smiling, suddenly changed his tactics.
"Good, old mother! you know these people better than I do; why should you not like to ramble in the direction of this great family yourself?"
"Nonsense! a nobleman's door is as wide as the sea, and who am I to venture into it? The footmen would turn me out, and I should have my labor for my pains!"
"Now, old lady, don't give up at this rate; if in the city you can meet with a certain Mr. Chow, a dependent of Lady Fung's, you may open every door of her mansion, though they were fastened with ten bolts!"
"Oh, yes, I knew all about the Chows, but, dear me, how, are people to know what sort of persons they are now after so many years of non-intercourse! This is the real difficulty of coming at the Chows for help. Well! well! I think I'll go myself with the little boy, for my daughter must not be seen selling her head to buy feet for such a stroll."
The next day old Madame Lew departs at dawn, and while the day was still young, reaches the Young mansion. After whole pages of diplomacy and intrigue, enough to have settled the affairs of a kingdom, the "genteel upper servants" of the establishment are induced to admit the visitors into the great drawing-room.
The hand-maiden, Miss Ping, lifts the embroidered red screen, and ushers in the old peasant woman and her charge into a vast hall, magnificently furnished with gilded lanterns and carved seats, a la Chinoise, all very costly, very grand and very uncomfortable.
Madam Lew, however, was quite fascinated by an extraordinary ticking sound, quite resembling the winnowing of flour in a machine; nor could she help gazing around for the cause of this unusual phenomenon. All of a sudden she spied in the centre of the hall a sort of box suspended on a pillar. At the bottom of this was hanging down a something like the balance weight of a steel-yard, which kept constantly wagging to and fro. "What in the name of goodness," thought the old lady, "is this? What can be the use of it?" Just then rung out a sound "dingdong," as if proceeding from a golden bell or brazen cymbal; she started to her feet with alarm, but the same sounds continued to strike ever so many times.
This extraordinary article of furniture was nothing more startling than an European clock, announcing the very hour when the great lady made her appearance in the reception room. She enters and her visitors fall upon their knees; an explanation follows, and the whole company are soon engaged in easy conversation. It soon takes the following turn. Lady Fung desirous of ascertaining the real motive of her humble visitor, says:
"Want of intercourse makes relatives but cold and distant; some will look down upon others, whom they will accuse of considering no one as good as themselves."
"Our circumstances, dear madam, have at home been very straightened, so we have been quite unable to visit you. Surely you would not have us slap your ladyship on the mouth, by our uncouth poverty!"
"Nay, such words wound the heart; even the Emperor has three families to provide for: his sisters, his mother's and his wife's relations."
"That's true, which reminds me of ​
what I wanted to say. I ought not indeed to mention it, considering that today I meet your ladyship for the first time for so long a period, but indeed, I have come a long distance, running to you, as it were, to a kind friend!"
The poor relation is proud, (that last luxury of the hun bled!) and proceeds to hide what the confession is costing her, by addressing the child:
"Here, Pan-rh!" go to this lady, (leads the child before her) and tell her what your father sent as a message! Why did he send us to this noble lady? Wasit for nothing? Ah, you know they are ill at ease at home, while the larder is empty and winter at hand!" The great lady had long ere this divined the meaning of this little scene, and to hide her feelings, exclaimed,
"Don't say another word! all about it!"
A repast is then set out wherewith to treat the visitors, after which Madam Lew and the boy return thanks and the great lady continues.
"Be good enough to be seated and listen to what I am going to say. I thoroughly understand the object of your visit, which I am sure was kindly meant. Indeed, we on our side should not have waitetl for you to first cross our threshold, before looking after you; but the fact is, the care of a large establishment leave us but little leisure to hunt up old friends."
Of course the Chinese novelist is now in the pure region of romance. The lady continues:
"Your kind visit, however, shows a proper spirit; you have come a long distance, and I am glad that a lucky chance enables me to offer to your acceptance a few ounces of silver, just for present use."
Madam Lew's eyes fairly laughed, as another proverb slipped out of her mouth. "To be sure," exclaimed she, "you have very many calls for money; but you know that though the camel die
I know
CHINESE NOVEL. [Juty, of leanness, he is always bigger than a horse."
A servant is then ordered to hand twenty ounces of silver to the poor relation, who is shown out of the mansion, with an invitation to "come again," and here the curtain falls.
ETC.
As I may have occasion in these pages to advance certain opinions perhaps scarcely worthy of being dignified as the expression of plural wisdom, I shall always use the first person, singular. Generally I think the average reader is not deceived by the editorial plural. We do not, I observe, accept objectionable doctrine any the quicker for it. On the contrary, we are very apt to say: "That's Smith—everybody knows he's incited by jealousy," or "Jones got his price for that article." Perhaps Jones did; perhaps we get our price for opposing Jones' views; but that is neither here nor there. I simply meant to say that in this department of the Overland there is nothing oracular—nothing but the expression of an individuality, generally inexact, rarely positive, and certainly never authoritative.
Yet it falls to my lot at the very outset, to answer, on behalf of 'the publishers, a few questions that have arisen in the progress of this venture. Why, for instance, is this magazine called "The Overland Monthly?" It would perhaps be easier to say why it was not called by some of the thousand other titles suggested. I might explain how "Pacific Monthly" is hackneyed, mild in suggestion, and at best but a feeble echo of the Boston "Atlantic;" how the "West," "Wide West" and "Western" are already threadbare and suggest to Eastern readers only Chicago and the Lakes; how "Occidental " and "Chrysopolis" are but cheap pedantry, and "Sunset," "Sundown," "Hesper," etc., cheaper sentiment; how "California,"—honest and direct enough—is yet too local to attract any but a small number of readers. I might prove that there was safety, at least, in the negative goodness of our present homely Anglo-Saxon title. But is there nothing more? Turn your eyes to this map made but a few years ago. Do you see this vast interior basin of the Continent, on which the boundaries of States and Territories are less distinct than the names of wandering Indian tribes; do you see this broad zone reaching from Virginia City to St. Louis, as yet only dotted by telegraph stations, whose names are familiar, but of whose locality we are profoundly ignorant? Here creeps the railroad, each day drawing the West and East closer together. Do you think, O owner of Oakland and San Francisco lots, that the vast current soon to pour along this narrow channel will be always kept within the bounds you have made for it? Will not this mighty Nilus overflow its banks and fertilize the surrounding desert? Can you ticket every passenger through to San Francisco—to Oakland—to Sacramento—even to Virginia City? Shall not the route be represented as well as the termini? And where our people travel, that is the highway of our thought. Will the trains be freighted only with merchandize, and shall we exchange nothing but goods? Will not our civilization gain by the subtle inflowing current of Eastern refinement, and shall we not, by the same channel, throw into Eastern exclusiveness something of our own breadth and liberality? And if so, what could be more appropriate for the title of a literary magazine than to call it after this broad highway?
The bear who adorns the cover may be "an ill-favored" beast whom "women cannot abide," but he is honest withal. Take him if you please as the symbol of local primitive barbarism. He is crossing the track of the Pacific Railroad, and has paused a moment to look at the coming engine of civilization and progress—which moves like a good many other engines of civilization and progress with a prodigious shrieking and puffing—and apparently recognizes his rival and his doom. And yet, leaving the symbol out, there is much about your grizzly that is pleasant. The truth should however be tested at a moment when no desire for self-preservation prejudices the observer. In his placid moments he has a stupid, good-natured, grey tranquility, like that of the hills in midsummer. I am satisfied that his unpleasant habit of scalping ​with his fore paw is the result of contact with the degraded aborigine, and the effect of bad example on the untutored ursine mind. Educated, he takes quite naturally to the pole, but has lost his ferocity, which is perhaps after all the most respectable thing about a barbarian. As a cub he is playful and boisterous, and I have often thought was not a bad symbol of our San Francisco climate. Look at him well, for he is passing away. Fifty years and he will be as extinct as the dodo or dinornis.
Before this Magazine reaches the hands of some of its readers the Fourth of July, 1868, will have passed. Those who have brought their eyes uninjured out of this trying patriotic ordeal will naturally look to these pages for some allusion to the day; those who are preparing to celebrate will expect a sustained rhetorical effort, containing an allusion to the American eagle more or less distinct. Rhetoric and finely turned apostrophes are good in their way, but there is something better than that. What is the finest passage in the Declaration of Independence? It is not the premises so grandly stated; it is not any one of the terrible counts of that awful indictment against his majesty George III; it is not the dogma of equal rights, but it is the concluding sentence, wherein "we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." How windy our declamation; how tawdry and insincere our most elaborate rhetoric seems, beside the simple and majestic sincerity of this statement. It is not to the elegance of the composition, nor the perfection of the pleadings, but to this pledge alone that we owe our blessed privilege of reading it to-day. No: we will not attempt an oration. We will explode the honest cracker, we will elevate the ambitious rocket, we will let off the playful serpent, and burn our fingers in other ways, but we will not, if you please, write an oration.
WE make history too rapidly in this country, and are too accustomed to changes to notice details. In the continual ebb and flow of life in San Francisco we scarce note an absence. Men go round the world before they are missed from Montgomery street. I am afraid Belisarius would hardly find a friend when he came back, and Ulysses' dog would have been impounded. In respect of the following, Mud Flat is a type of San Francisco:
RETURNED.
So you’re back from your travels, old fellow,
And you left but a twelvemonth ago ;
You’ve hobnobbed with Louis Napoleon,
Eugenie, and kissed the Pope’s toe.
By Jove, it is perfectly stunning,
Astounding—and all that, you know ;
Yes, things are about as you left them
In Mud Flat a twelvemonth ago.
The boys!—They’re all right—O, Dick Ashley,
He’s buried somewhere in the snow ;
He was lost on the Summit, last winter,
And Bob has a hard row to hoe.
You knew that he’s got the consumption?
You didn’t! Well, come, that’s a go;
I certainly wrote you at Baden,
Dear me—that was six months ago.
I got all your outlandish letters,
All stamped by some foreign P. O.
I handed, myself, to Miss Mary
That sketch of a famous chateau.
Tom Saunders is living at ’Frisco—
They say that he cuts quite a show.
You didn’t meet Euchre-deck Billy
Any where on your road to Cairo?
So you thought of the rusty old cabin—
The pines, and the valley below;
And heard the North Fork of the Yuba,
As you stood on the banks of the Po?
'Twas just like your romance, old fellow;
But now there is standing a row
Of stores on the site of the cabin
That you lived in a twelvemonth ago.
But it’s jolly to see you, old fellow—
To think it’s a twelvemonth ago!
And you have seen Louis Napoleon,
And look like a Johnny Crapaud.
Come in. You will surely see Mary—
You know we are married. What, no?
O, aye. I forgot there was something
Between you a twelvemonth ago.
Going to Jericho; or Sketches of Travel in Spain and the East. By John Franklin Swift. San Francisco: A Roman & Co.
The days of sentimental journeying are over. The dear, old book of travel, with its conscientious desire to instruct, its guidebook directness, its dreadful distances, and more dreadful dates; its feeble moralizing, its poetical quotations from Moore, Byron and Rogers; its one or two thrilling personal adventures, and its reminiscence of at least one noted foreign public character, is a thing of the past. Sentimental musings on foreign scenes are just now restricted to the private diaries of young and impressible ladies, and clergymen with affections of the bronchial tubes, whose hearts and mucous membranes are equally susceptible. No one dares quote John Murray except ironically; no one draws upon Childe Harold's Pilgrimage except apologetically; no one has any adventure except of a humorous or whimsical quality. They are plundered only by guides; theye "stand and deliver "only bucksheesh; they are devoured only by fleas. Nor is this lack of the heroic quality as remarkable as the want of reverence. A race of good-humored, engaging iconoclasts seem to have precipitated themselves upon the old altars of mankind, and like their predecessors of the eighth century, have paid particular attention to the holy church. Mr. Howells has slashed one or two sacred pictorial canvasses with his polished rapier; Mr. Swift has made one or two neat long shots with a rifled Parrott, and Mr. Mark Twain has used brickbats on stained glass windows with damaging effect. And those gentlemen have certainly brought down a heap of rubbish. It has been said they have given nothing in return. But if they have left the indestructible; if they cleared away the extrinsic and useless, and if they opened to us a clearer view of the real edifice of christianity, we need not to sit in judgment on their motives. Beside these exuberant image-breakers—whose perfect unconsciousness of the terror they have excited in the well regulated mind is
not their least charm—even Kinglake Eothen's rhetoric seems occasionaly tawdry, Curtis' sensuous elegance affected and dressy; the spectacle of good Mr. Prime with a revolver in one hand and a bible in the other is somewhat ludicrous, and too susceptible Lamartine's tears mere brine, and pickle. It is true, we have lost something. We have lost that which made Irving's Taleg of a Traveler possible; which lent a nameless charm to some of Lever's earlier novels—the romance of foreign travel. We can offset Lamartine's persistent lachrymoseness by Ross Browne's persistent jocularity; Prime's bibles and revolvers, by Mark Twain's lawless humor and lyric fire; Curtisdilettanteism by Swift's satirical and half playful materialism; and be the gainer. But we cannot afford to lose even such a book as Mackenzie's "Year in Spain "'—though inferior in literary ability to any we have named.:
Mr. John Franklin Swift's "Going to Jericho "is in legitimate literary succession to Howell's Venetian Life, Ross Browne's multifarious voyages, and Mark Twain's Holy Land letters. It is somewhat notable that three of these writers are Californians, and all from the west. With the exception of the first, who has an intrinsic literary merit which lifts him above comparison with any other writer of travel, Mr. Swift in some respects is superior. He is more self-restrained, and often impresses the reader with a reserved power even better than his performance. He uses his satire sparingly, not from lack of material but apparently from conscientiousness of purpose. He is rarely funny for fun's sake alone; but uses his wit only to illuminate some phase of his story, or to pointa moral. He has but one wholly funny chapter in his book— and it is difficult to tell whether the exaggerations which make that humorous are intentional. They certainly are not strained— a quality which cannot be charged upon anything Mr. Swift does, and which is unfortunately a too common fault of your humorous traveler. His best things are said in a ​
sentence perhaps at the close of a serious paragraph—or introduced not impertinently with other matter, as an after-thought. Clever as is the chapter which describes his unavailing attempts to pass the counterfeit coins he gathered in Spain, it is not equal to the satirical audacity of his comparison of the two orders of church architecture— the Grecian and Gothic—and his suggestion that the Gothic "seemed to be designed by both art and nature to facilitate the passing of brass pistareens upon an over credulous sacerdotal order."
¢ Mr. Swift does not impress us with much instruction, for which we are not sorry; nor much that is novel, for which perhaps the reader's familiar knowledge of the lands he visited is alone responsible. He describes a bull fight graphically—but it is not as interesting as his original suggestion that "Spanish revolutions are worked by telegraph," and that the fighting is done around the telegraph office in the Puerta del Sol, at Madrid. He has given us one pretty picture of a Spanish interior, and a street scene by night. But in going from Spain to Syria at the present day, one can touch upon little that shall be novel except in the manner of narration. Indeed, Mr. Swift seems to have been reticent where he might have expatiated; to have been merciful where we did not expect mercy; he takes us into the sherry cellars of M'Kenzie & Co., and permits us to depart without a dissertation on the vintage; he gives an humorous description of his purchases of Ottar of Rose without an account of its manufacture. He is sparing of Scriptural quotations in Jerusalem; and equally sparing of enthusiasm. People seem to have interested him more than places; incidents than scenery; and the little we gain from him about localities is contained in a few graphic touches of character. We fear that his book would hardly answer to illustrate Holy Land lectures for Sabbath Schools, or that his reminiscences of the Holy Sepulchre would inspire a new crusade. Yet he is never apparently skeptical, and if not demonstratively reverent of the Holy places, is at heart too reverent of the opinions of others, oi too listless, for heresy. He humorously confesses to a desire to adopt Mohammedism as a temporary religion, out of respect to the
citizens. He brings into a region of precedents and arbitrary belief, a good deal of originality and independence, and has a kind word of apology—half in fun half in earnest—for even the poor Arabs that swarm about him at the Pyramids and demand bucksheesh under the shadow of the Sphynx. Where Mark Twain works himself into a grotesque and exaggerated passion, Mr. Swift becomes as satirically sympathetic. He does not know of "over three men in America who if they were in the places of these poor fellows would act differently." He is willing to admit that if he were an Arab "no white man should get back to Cairo with a rag on his back." At Damascus, "had a massacre of the Christians taken place, it is doubtful how he would have thrown his influence." Although statements like these are calculated to erect the hair of dogmatic believers, they are the natural effect of any aggressive religious system upon the American mind, trained to the greatest religious liberty.
There is but one fault that we have to find with this pleasant volume. Mr. Swift, like all Californians, desires to be thought inr2pendent and cosmopolitan; yet like all 'Californians, he carries too much of California with him to be entirely free from the provincial taint. He has never altogether severed his connection with San Francisco, and "drags at each remove a lengthening chain." It may be well to note the resemblance between California and Spain; the similarity of the straits of Gibraltar and the Golden Gate; and the treeless hills that remind him so pleasantly of his own local scenery at classic Lime Point and San Pablo; for have not Californians noted the same resemblances in Syria, and indeed wherever they have carried California reminiscences? The rustic habit of detecting likenesses to " brother Dick "or "cousin Jim" in a new acquaintance, is only a more objectionable form of the same instinct. But when Mr. Swift refers jocularly to the Pacific club of San Francisco, with purely local witticisms, we are forced to believe that he is writing more for a very inconsiderable portion of humanity than becomes a cosmopolitan. It may be urged that his work is made of letters written to a local journal; but even if this were an excuse for the original offence, ​which we cannot admit, he has had ample opportunity for excision. It is to be regretted the more, since the greater part of his volume is catholic enough for the interest and appetite of all readers. The severest criticism we can make is, that his talent is worthy of a larger audience than his taste has selected.
An octavo volume of seven hundred pages devoted to the resources of California, and issued just when thousands at home and abroad are eager to obtain new facts and to read old ones, could not fail of attracting attention. Typographically the book is well done—so well that no injustice would be done if it were placed first on the list of books which have been produced on this coast.
It was impossible to write a book of this kind without drawing largely on the labors of others. Facts were wanted, and they must be taken wherever found. Sometimes they are taken without any acknowledgment, or indication of the sources from which they have been derived. Something would have been gained by citing authorities for statements made, and by a reference to authors, who, as pioneers, have done honorable service in collecting and publishing facts bearing on the material wealth of the State.
In a work which covers so much ground and includes so great a variety of topics, absolute freedom from errors was hardly to be expected. No single writer had at his command, or within reach, all the information sought. Important discoveries are made from week to week, and new facts are daily brought to light. Remote and almost inaccessible parts of the State suddenly become centres of great interest, requiring personal visits and a careful discrimination of what is mere rumor and what is sober fact.
Some of the topics, as the flora and fauna, were evidently committed to scientific writers, and in these departments there is a conciseness and accuracy of statement which meets the test of all just criticism. In other chapters there is a redundancy of statement or a recitation of unimportant facts, which serve to swell the volume without adding to its value. And yet we apprehend that this book is by far the most complete summary of facts ever given to the public concerning the resources of this State. It is the aggregating of all the local knowledge which was within reach. We are not disposed to find fault with here and there a little rubbish, when so many treasures are laid at our feet. We cannot say that in some instances a faultless taste is evinced by unduly "writing up" certain enterprises, with a preponderance of names and small facts; though it is possible that personal vanity may have been gratified thereby. All discriminating authorship must have a limit which does not so much as suggest that the pocket is of more consequence than literary reputation.
On the whole, our local pride is gratified. The book is a monument of patient industry. We are not disappointed at meeting here and there a minor imperfection; but are rather surprised that so much has been done and done so well. What a suggestive record is this of the undeveloped wealth of the State! The germ of the great Commonwealth is outlined, and an inventory is taken of its marvelous resources. We quote a paragraph from the introductory chapter:
"Yet for a community never exceeding from 400,0co to 500,000, all told, scattered over an area large enough to support 30,000,000, and beginning twenty years ago with but a handful of Caucasians, California has accomplished a great deal. If its gold product has fallen from $65,000,000 per annum to $25,000,000, its agricultural products have increased to an amount equal to half the largest gold yield ever known. The wheat crop alone for 1867 was worth nearly as much as the gold, and the surplus of this staple freighted two hundred and twenty-three ships, and reached a value of $13,000,000; while the total exports of home products, including about fifty different articles for which the State was formerly dependent on other lands, was about $17,000,000. The vintage of 1867 exceeded 3,500,000 gallons of wine and 400,000 gallons of brandy; the number of vines now growing in the State being about 25,000,000. The wool clip was 9,500,000 pounds, showing a gain of more than thirty per cent. over 1866. Silk, tobacco, hops, flax and cotton may now be ranked among the minor products that promise to be sources of profit. A silk factory and a sugar beet factory are two of the new industries being established. The manufac​tures of the State are already estimated at $30,000,000 per annum. The best mining machinery in the Union is made here. The assessed value of real and personal property increased in 1867 about $21,000,000, runling up the total taxable values of the State to some $221,000,000, and showing a gain of twenty per cent. in two years, the most prosperous years ever experienced in the State.
Seven hundred pages imperial octavo are devoted to facts like these. But only two pages are devoted to the libraries and literature of the State!—not perhaps an erroneous indication of the relation which one interest has heretofore been deemed to sustain to the other. Let us hope that since so good an account has been given of our natural wealth, something may yet worthily be written of the intellectual wealth and culture of the State. The book will go into public and private libraries as the best authority extant concerning most of the topics of which it professes to treat.
The admirers of this wonderful man—Mr. George Lawrence—need not look beyond the titles of the chapters of this novel, or indeed of the novel itself, to know that it is worthy of his steel. Given, a gentleman of the "thirteenth hundredth year of Grace," with the name of "Brakespeare," and we can imagine what follows, The author is sufficiently far removed into the region of pure romance to indulge now his wildest dream of muscular activity. The feats of Guy Livingstone, which, to say the least, were scarcely probable in the nineteenth century, are perfectly consistent with the thirteenth. We hear the old "dull, ominous crash;" we see "the face set as a flint stone, dark and pitiless;" we hear "the low moan of intense, half-conscious agony," and we never think of calling for the Police. For this is the fourteenth century—or as Mr. Lawrence would say—"God wot, these be parlous times." He revels not only in "gages," "corselets," "vamplates" and "habergeons," but, in the language of the period, intermixed with scraps of monkish Latin and Norman French. That he feels an intense satisfaction in speaking of a man as "a leal knight and stalwart," of saying "pardie," "De par Dieu," "Messire" and "Beau Sire," and "mine" for "my," no one acquainted with that gentleman's chivalric weakness will for a moment doubt. When we state that "Ralph Brakespeare" at the very outset of his thrilling career embraces his favorite bloodhound, feels for her heart and drives his dagger home; and when we add that he does this with his eye glistening with the tear of muscular sensibility, because he fears the dog may be lonely in his absence, we give the reader a touching idea of the moral perfections of Mr. Lawrence's hero.