FIFTEEN DAYS—CONTENTS. (continued 3)

In the mean time, he turns his attention to what seems to concern himself more nearly. He believes that Henry, whom he perceives to be as resolute as adventurous, will one day carry out his schemes of maritime enterprise, and that he will thus exercise an influence on the destinies of Africa. Will this influence be exerted for good or evil? He sets himself to study the character of the young prince more carefully, makes diligent inquiry concerning his deportment in childhood, and tries to collect information in regard to his lineage,—for this is a point much considered among the Mandingos. He is so fortunate as to make the acquaintance of an ancient nobleman, versed in the history and traditions of the country, as well as in those of the royal court, and fond of telling what he knows, when he has a safe opportunity,—for he is a man of experience, and does not make either the past or the future a topic of conversation with his brother-courtiers. To him the African addresses his questions, and not in vain. The old man knew the present king when he was only Grand Master of the Order of Avis, and the Infant Henry has grown up under his very eyes. All that the traveller learns in regard to Henry himself is satisfactory; and he finds that King John, his father, is regarded as a just and wise sovereign. But, on nearer inquiry, he discovers that this great king is, in fact, a usurper; for, in Portugal, the successor to the crown must be the son of his father's principal wife, and King John had not this advantage. He learns, with yet more regret, that this sovereign is of a family in which filial impiety is hereditary. The first of the dynasty, King Alphonso, made war against his own mother, and imprisoned her in a fortress, where she died, having first, as the Mandingo heard with horror, bestowed her malediction on her son and his line. She foretold that he should be great, but not happy; that his posterity should live in domestic strife and unnatural hatred; that success should only bring them sorrow, and even their just enterprises should turn to evil.

The African asks anxiously whether the religion of the Christians had already been revealed in the time of Alphonso. His venerable friend replies that it had, and that Alphonso, by his great piety displayed in the building of monasteries and in the slaughter of Moors,—for he did not spare even the tender infants,—averted from himself some of the effects of the curse. But though he obtained the crown of Portugal and was permitted to triumph over the infidels, yet it was remarked that his life was disturbed and unhappy, and that he met with strange disasters in the midst of his successes. The curse seemed to deepen with time. His grandson, the second Alphonso, set aside his father's will, and seized on the inheritance of his sisters; a third Alphonso, son to this second one, deprived his elder brother of his throne; the fourth Alphonso rebelled against his father, and was rebelled against, in his turn, by his son Peter, whose wife he had murdered, and who, in revenge, ravaged the country that was to be his own inheritance. When he came to the throne, Peter caused the men who had been the instruments of his father's crime to be put to death by horrible and lingering tortures, which he himself superintended. This Peter, surnamed the Severe, was father to the reigning king, entitled John the Great.

The Mandingo, hearing this history of the royal house of Portugal, is made to feel that he is indeed in a country of barbarians: a fact which the pomp of their court, and the account he has heard of their religion, had almost made him forget. The old courtier becomes more and more communicative, as he sees the surprise and interest his narrative excites, and ventures at last, in strict confidence, to reveal that King John himself, before attaining to the crown, gave evidence of the qualities that marked his house. He assassinated with his own hand a man whom he considered his enemy, after inviting him to an amicable conference; he spread devastation and horror through the kingdom on his way to the throne, which, when he seized it, had several other claimants. One of these was, like himself, a son of Peter the Severe, and had the superiority of a legal birth; but he, having murdered his wife, went on foreign travel, and happening, when the throne of Portugal was left vacant, to be in the dominions of the husband of his niece,—another of the claimants,—was seized and thrown into prison. In this state of the family-affairs, John, the Grand Master of Avis, saw a chance for himself. He consented to act, until the true heir should be decided on, as Protector of the kingdom, and in this capacity opened the prisons, offering pardon to all who would enter his service. He thus formed a devoted little army, which he provided for by giving it license to plunder the enemies of order, among whom, it seemed, were dignitaries of Church and State, and holy recluse women: at least, their estates were ravaged, themselves murdered, and their dead bodies dragged through the streets in terror to others. There was no lack of recruits; the reformed convicts found the path of duty as congenial as that of crime, and all the ruined spendthrifts and vagabonds of the country were content to link their fortunes to those of the Protector. No corner of the kingdom was left unschooled by summary executions. In fine, the adherents of the Grand Master played their part so well, that the people, tired of the interregnum, begged him to make an end of it and set the crown on his own head. He complied, and the country had the relief of being ravaged by the armies of his Castilian competitor and of supporting his own forces in a more regular manner.

But all this is now over; the kingdom has enjoyed an interval of peace, and begins to look with pride on the prince who won it so adroitly and governs it so firmly. The curse which hung over the royal line seems to have been baffled, or, at least, suspended, by his irregular accession. He has held his usurped sceptre with a fortunate as well as a vigorous hand. His five sons are dutiful, united, and of princely endowments.

The Mandingo then inquires about the descent of Henry on the maternal side, and learns that his mother is a sister of the late king of England, a great and wise sovereign, whose son Henry, the fifth of the name, now reigns in his stead. He must see the island-kingdom governed by Prince Henry's cousin and namesake. But he postpones this visit,—for he hears that in a certain city of the mainland the most illustrious persons of Europe are assembled to hold a solemn council, whose decrees are to have force in all Christian states. Even the Supreme Pontiff himself is to be there, the head of the Christian world, superior to all potentates. The African will not lose such an opportunity of studying the manners and institutions of Europe. He hastens to Constance, where the concourse and the magnificence surpass his expectations. He inquires earnestly if he may be permitted to see the Great Pontiff, and learns, to his surprise, that three sacred personages claim this title, to the great confusion and misery of Christendom, which has already shed torrents of blood in these holy quarrels and sees new wars in preparation. Nor is this the worst that is to be dreaded. The power of the rightful Pontiff extends into the future life; and as each of the claimants threatens the followers of his rivals with terrible and unending punishment in the next world, the uncertainty is truly fearful. One of the pretenders is compelled by the council to renounce his claims, and is instantly thrown into prison, that he may have no opportunity of resuming them. A second withdraws his pretensions by deputy; and it is understood that the council intends to require a similar resignation of the third, that the anxiety of the world may be put to rest by the election of a fourth, whose rights and powers shall be unquestionable. There seems, however, no prospect of a speedy solution of these difficulties; and our traveller, having seen all the great personages of the assembly, with their equipages and attendants, begins to weary of the noise and bustle. But he hears that a ceremony of a very particular kind is about to take place, and stays to witness it; for he will neglect no opportunity of improvement. He is present, therefore, at the burning of John Huss, which he understands to be a great propitiatory sacrifice. When he hears, the following year, that a holocaust of the same kind has again been offered in the same place, he, of course, feels justified in recording it as an annual celebration. He notes as a remarkable circumstance, that the victim, on both occasions, is taken from the same nation; but he cannot learn that any law prescribes this selection, or that the efficacy of the sacrifice would be affected by a different choice. Another circumstance which seems to him noteworthy is, that, whereas, under their old religions, the people of these countries offered up, in preference, malefactors reserved for the purpose, or captives taken in war, the Europeans of this newer faith, on the contrary, select men without spot or blemish, and possessed of all the gifts and acquirements held in highest honor among them. He hears vaunted, on all sides, the virtue and learning of Huss, and, above all, his extraordinary eloquence,—for this gift is held in as much esteem in Europe as in Africa. He hears the same encomiums pronounced on the second victim, Jerome of Prague, and learns, at the same time, that the possession of these powers renders his doom the more necessary. He can but infer that the great, though mistaken, piety of the Christians makes them conceive that only what they have of best is worthy to be devoted to so sacred a purpose. But these reflections were made a year later. We must go back to the summer of 1415.

Saturday, April 13, 1844.

It is in the month of August that our African traveller arrives in England. The king is just setting off on a hostile expedition against a country whose inhabitants, though Christian, like the English, are held by them in detestation and contempt. Just before going, the king is obliged to cut off the head of one of his cousins. The cause of this severity is thus explained:—The late king, cousin to his own predecessor, dethroned and killed him; and it being a rule in England that what has been done once is to be done again, the present king lives in great fear of cousins. He finds the people considerate of these royal exigencies. He hears praises bestowed on the clemency of the young Henry, who remits,—so it is reported,—in the case of his kinsman, a grievous part of the punishment which the law awards to treason, only suffering the sentence to be executed in full on a man of inferior rank condemned with him as his accomplice.

Notwithstanding the disturbed state of the times, the stranger is well received, and is questioned with avidity. He is gratified to find that his country is a subject of interest to the English as well as to the Portuguese. They seem, indeed, to be fully aware that Africa is the most favored portion of the globe. They are never tired of asking about its perpetual summer, its marvellous fertility, its inexhaustible mines. Even the common soldiers in Henry's army "speak of Africa and golden joys." He finds that some of the learned maintain that continent to have been the first home of man, and believe that the terrestrial Paradise lies somewhere hidden among its mountains. When he becomes a little more familiar with his hosts, however, he finds that they entertain some notions not altogether so flattering. They are curious about a certain people of Africa who live in the caves of the earth, whose meat is the flesh of serpents, and who have no proper human speech, but only a grinning and chattering; they ask him whether his travels in his own country have extended as far as the land of the Blemmyes, a people without heads, who have their eyes and mouth set in their breasts. He answers, a little stiffly, that he has no knowledge of any such people. When they go on to inquire whether he ever ventured into the region inhabited by the Anthropophagi, explaining at the same time what peculiarities are intimated by that name, his indignation almost gets the better of him, and he denies, with some vehemence, that such wretches hold any portion of his native soil. His English friends assure him that it is nevertheless very certain that such a people live in the neighborhood of the Mountains of the Moon. When he finds that he cannot otherwise persuade them out of this injurious opinion, he ventures, though with as much delicacy as possible, to tell them, that, while on the mainland of Europe, he heard stories equally wonderful and equally absurd of their own island. In especial, he heard a Frenchman assert that the eating of human flesh was practised in some part of the dominions of the English king. He assures his English friends that he refused to credit this story, as well as some other particulars in regard to their island, which seemed to him too monstrous for belief, though they were given to him on the authority of a Greek traveller of high reputation, who had not long before visited England in company with the Emperor of the East, and who had enjoyed extraordinary opportunities for studying the manners of the most polite society of the kingdom. The Mandingo is here interrupted by his English hosts, who make haste to assure him that the Greeks are everywhere known to be great liars; that the same may be said of Frenchmen; and that, indeed, there is no nation of Europe, except their own, whose word is at all to be relied upon. The Mandingo refrains from passing so severe a judgment on the travellers who brought back such rash reports of his own country, but he permits himself to suppose that they did not themselves visit the regions whose manners they described, but received with too little examination stories prevalent in other, perhaps hostile, countries; for he is obliged to confess, with regret, that Africa is not, any more than Europe, always at peace within itself. For himself, he protests, that, even if his natural caution did not prevent him from accepting too readily the statements of the enemies of England, he should have been guarded from this error by the favorable accounts he had heard from Henry of Portugal, by whom he had been warned against believing the stories current among the common Portuguese, who held their English allies in ungrateful abhorrence, and regarded their visits in the same light as those of the plague or of famine. His English friends approve the African's candor; but he can perceive, that, so far as his own country is concerned, they remain of their first opinion. They politely turn the conversation, however, from the men of Africa to its animals,—asking, in particular, about that strange creature, shaped like a pig, but having a horse's mane, whose shadow, falling on a dog, takes from him the power of barking, and which, lurking near a sheepfold until it learns the shepherd's name, calls him by it, and, when he comes, devours him. The African does not deny that an animal possessed of these endowments may somewhere exist, but he is not acquainted with it; neither has he met with the wonderful stone, said to be found in the same creature's eye, which, being placed under a man's tongue, causes him to foretell future events. This ignorance of the natural history of his country does not raise his reputation with the English.

They give him, on their part, every opportunity of forming a correct judgment of their own country,—not concealing or extenuating things liable to be found fault with by a stranger. Indeed, he cannot enough admire the contented and cheerful character of this people, who find advantages where others would have seen deficiencies or evils, and account by latent virtues for disagreeable appearances on the surface. They congratulate themselves that their sun never oppresses them with its rays,—that their soil has not that superabundant fertility which is only a temptation to laziness. They tell him, with pride, that it is necessary, in travelling in their country, to go in strong parties and well armed: for such is the high spirit and great heart of their people, that they cannot bear to see another have more than themselves; and such is their courage, that what they desire they seize, unless the odds are plainly too great against them. One special subject of gratulation among the English he finds to be the possession of a king whose passion is military glory; inasmuch as the foreign wars in which he engages the country have the double advantage of keeping up a warlike spirit in the nation, and of clearing off the idle hands, which might become too formidable, if their natural increase were permitted. The Mandingo, seeing so much land in the island left to itself, cannot help thinking that the hands might find employment at home. But he suppresses this reflection, and, turning the conversation upon agriculture, inquires how so energetic a people as the English can be contented with so scanty a return from their land; for he has remarked that the meagreness of their crops is not wholly due to the poverty of the soil, but likewise, and in great measure, to very imperfect tillage. Many reasons are given for this neglect of their land, all more or less creditable to the English people, but not very satisfactory to the mind of the stranger. At last, however, one is brought forward which he at once accepts as sufficient: namely, the insecurity of possession. It seems that property in England often changes owners in the most unexpected manner; so that a common man, who has hired land for cultivation of its noble proprietor, is liable to be suddenly ejected, and to lose all the fruits of his industry, to say nothing of the risk he runs of laying down his life with his lease. For it appears that the nobles of the country are equally remarkable for courage with the other idle persons, and display it in the same manner. If they think themselves strong enough to add their neighbor's estate to their own, they will—so one of the Mandingo's English friends tells him—"make forcible entry and put out the possessor of the same, and also take his goods and chattels, so that he is utterly disinherited and undone."

The African dismisses his surprise on the subject of agriculture, and gives his attention to the cities, expecting to see the national industry turned to arts which might offer a more certain reward. He finds that the most skilful artisans are foreigners. It occurs to him, seeing the great demand for weapons of all sorts among the English, and their love of golden ornaments, that some of the skilful cutlers and ingenious goldsmiths of his own country might find encouragement. But he gives up this hope, when he sees the hatred borne to the foreign artisans by the natives, who need their skill, but grudge them the profit they draw from it. It is not an unheard-of thing for a foreign artisan or merchant, who has begun to be a little prosperous, to have his house pulled down about his ears. And well for him, if he escape with this! Besides, the jealousy of the people obliges the kings to be always making regulations for the injury of these foreigners; thus the laws are perpetually changing, so that by the time the unlucky men have adapted themselves to one set they find they are living under another. The restrictions and heavy exactions of the law are not enough: foreign artisans and traders are further subjected to the capricious extortions of the collectors. The Mandingo congratulates himself on the more liberal policy of his own country, and on the great respect paid there to the professors of useful arts, whose persons are inviolable even in time of war; above all, he reflects with satisfaction on the sacredness of the common law there, which, having been handed down through centuries, is known to all and admits of no dispute,—whereas, under this system of written enactments, continually varied, a man may spend his life in learning the rules he is to live by, and after all, perhaps, become a law-breaker before he knows it.

Notwithstanding some drawbacks, the African enjoys his visit to the English highly, and finds much to praise and admire among them. He does not neglect to note that they have the choicest wool in the world. This possession, he finds, has endowed them with a branch of manufacture which may be regarded as national. Their woollen cloths are not very fine, it is true, but they are much prized, both in England and in foreign countries, for their strength and durability.

He is much impressed by the religious architecture of the Christians. Before their sacred edifices, he feels his soul lifted into a sublime tranquillity, as in the presence of the grandest objects in Nature. He is much moved at recognizing in the rich stone carving a resemblance to the ornamental cane-work of African houses. This reminds him of what he once heard said by a learned Arab,—that Africa was the first home of the arts, as of man himself, and that they had gone forth from their too indulgent mother to be perfected in sterner regions, where invention is quickened by necessity. He cannot but bow before the wisdom of the superintending Providence which has caused the rigors of climate and the poverty of soil so to act on the mind of man, that, where Nature is less great and exuberant, his own works are the more transcendent, so that his spiritual part may never lack the food it draws from the view of sublime and genial objects.

He admires less the arrangements of private dwellings. He finds that in England, as in Africa, the habitations of families in easy circumstances consist of several houses; but, instead of being all placed on the ground at a little distance from each other, the square in which they stand surrounded by a pretty palisade, as is the case in Africa, they are here piled one upon another, sometimes to a considerable height, so that it is necessary to mount by long flights of uneasy steps; and then, in the cities, houses occupied by different families often adjoin each other, having a partition-wall in common, and their doors opening on a common way, so that it would seem the people living in them can have no proper notion of home or of domestic retirement. He finds that the houses of the common people in the country are not of more durable material than African houses. Those of the great are very commonly of stone, and, unless ruined by violence, are capable of serving for centuries. The African does not think this an advantage, as in the case of the temples; for these damp stone houses, so long used as human abodes, become unwholesome; and what is even worse, when evil deeds have been committed in them,—and this is too often the case with the houses of the powerful,—the contagion of guilt hangs round the walls, and the same crime is repeated in after-generations.

The African learns, while in England, what was the real aim of the warlike preparations he saw going on in Portugal. He hears of the taking of Ceuta,—an event which excites almost as much interest in England as in Portugal; for the English are supposed to have had a great part in this success. He hears, however, the chief merit ascribed to a beneficent being who bears the title of "The Lady of Mercy." It seems, the besiegers landed on a day especially consecrated to her; and to her kind interposition is referred the taking of the city and the terrible slaughter of the Moors who defended it. The African asks how favors of this kind can be made consistent with the character ascribed to this divinity, and is answered, that her mercies are for those who reverence her,—that the unbelieving Moors have no claim on her grace. He is pained; for the lovely qualities he has heard attributed to this gracious being had drawn his heart to her as to one well fitted to be a dispenser of the bounties of Heaven. But it does not appear that she is consistent even in the protection of Christians; for he hears it mentioned as an auspicious augury, that the English king effected his landing in the Christian kingdom of France on the eve of her chosen day; and later, when the Battle of Agincourt fills England with rejoicing, he hears the circumstance again referred to, and the Merciful Lady invoked as a benefactress.

He is daily more and more perplexed in regard to the religion of the Christians. He obtains instruction of an English priest, and finds he has made no mistake as to its tenets: it is understood to teach universal love and ready forgiveness in England as in Portugal. Yet he observes that nothing is considered more shameful among Christians than to pardon an injury; even the smallest affront is to be atoned by blood; and so far from the estimation in which a man is held depending on the good he has done, he is the greatest man who has slain the greatest number of his fellow-creatures.

As he stands one day before a cathedral, marvelling how people so selfish and narrow in their religious views could imagine this grand temple, which seems, indeed, raised to the Universal Father, his attention is drawn to a man of noble aspect, who is observing him with a look so kind and pitiful that he is emboldened to give the confidence which it seems to invite.

"I cannot understand the religion of the Christians!"

"The time will come when they will understand it better themselves. They are now like little children, who do, indeed, reverence the words of their father, but have not yet understanding to comprehend and follow them."

The Mandingo has no time to thank his new instructor. A party of ruffians, who have been for some moments watching the venerable man, now seize upon him, put irons on his hands and feet, and drag him away, amid the shouts and cries of the people, who crowd round, some insulting the prisoner, others bemoaning his fate, others asking his blessing as he passes. The wondering traveller can get no other reply to his questions than, "A Lollard! a Lollard!" uttered in different tones of disgust or compassion.

He learns, upon inquiry, that the Lollards are people who hold opinions disagreeable to the king and to the great generally. For they pretend to understand the doctrines of the Christian religion after a manner of their own; and it is thought this interpretation, if disseminated among the common people, would cause serious inconvenience to their superiors. In order to prevent the spread of these dangerous doctrines, open and notorious professors of them are shut up in prison. Yet, notwithstanding the severities which await the adherents of this sect, such is the hard-heartedness of its leaders, that, when they can manage to elude justice for a time, they use unceasing efforts to persuade others to their ruin. There are among them some men of eloquence, and their success in making converts has been so great that the prisons are filled with men of the better condition, who look for no other release than death; while, in the dungeons below them, people of the common sort are heaped upon each other, perishing miserably of fevers engendered by damp and hunger.

In spite of this unfavorable account of the Lollards, the African is glad when he hears that the only one of them he knows anything about has escaped from prison,—for the second or third time, it seems.

The words of the fugitive have sunk deep into the heart of the Mandingo. But the distant hope, that the Christians may in time grow up to their religion, cannot revive the delight which, when he first became acquainted with its doctrines, he felt in the thought that this divine revelation was to be carried to Africa. What teachers are those who themselves know not what they teach! His heart is heavy, when he sees how the Christians triumph over the fall of Ceuta. Their foot once set on African soil, their imagination embraces the whole continent. He sees the eyes of the narrators and the listeners alternately gleam and darken with cupidity and envy over the story of the successful assault, and of the immense booty won by the victors, who "seem to have gathered in a single city the spoil of the universe." He is not reassured by the admiration bestowed on the craft of the Portuguese, who contrived to keep their intended prey lulled in a false security until they were ready to fall upon it. They sent out two galleys, splendidly equipped and decorated, to convey a pretended embassy to another place. The envoys, according to private instructions, stopped on the way at Ceuta, as if for rest and refreshment, and, while receiving its hospitality, found opportunity to examine its defences and spy out its weak points. The King of Portugal himself, arriving near the devoted place with the fleet that brought its ruin, deigned to accept civilities and kind offices from the Infidels, in order the better to conceal his designs until the moment came for disclosing them with effect. The Mandingo recalls with less pleasure than heretofore the kind words of the Infant Henry and his brother. When he hears that the terrible first Alphonso of Portugal has made himself visible in a church at Coimbra, urging his descendants to follow up their successes, he shudders with foreboding.

We will not follow our explorer through all his voyages and experiences. They are numerous and wide. He carries his investigations even to the far North, where Eric of Pomerania wears the triple crown, placed on his head by the great Margaret. His wife is Philippa of England, niece and namesake of the mother of Henry of Portugal. It is, in part, interest in the family of that prince, his first intimate acquaintance in Europe, which leads the African on this distant journey. But he soon finds that neither pleasure nor profit is to be had in the dominions of Eric, an untamed savage, who beats his wife and ruins his subjects. The great men who rule under him are as bad as himself. Some of them have been noted sea-robbers; even the prelates are not ashamed to increase their revenues by the proceeds of piracy. The traveller gives but a glance to the miseries of Sweden, where the people are perishing under Eric's officials, who extort tribute from them by the most frightful tortures, and where women, yoked together, are drawing loaded carts, like oxen.

He returns to England, where he finds preparations making for a solemn sacrifice. He hears, not without emotion, that the victim selected for this occasion is the stately man who once stood with him in front of the great cathedral. He visits the place chosen for the celebration, and sees the pile of wood prepared to feed the fire, over which the victim is to be suspended by an iron chain. He cannot bring himself to witness the sacrifice, but he afterwards hears that it was performed with great pomp in the presence of many illustrious persons. The king himself, it seems, once superintended a similar ceremony in the lifetime of his father, by whom this species of sacrifice had been reinstituted after a very long disuse. It is customary to choose the victim from among the Lollards, as it is thought that the chance of serving on these occasions will contribute to deter people from adopting, or at least from proclaiming, the unsafe opinions of that sect.

The African traveller's last visit is to France. He made an earlier attempt to see that country, but, finding it ravaged by invasion and by civil war, deferred his design to a quieter time. Such a time does not arrive; but he cannot leave one of the most important countries of Europe unseen. On landing in France, he finds the condition of things even worse than he had anticipated. But he resolves to penetrate to Paris, in spite of the dangers of the road. He passes through desolated regions, where only the smoke rising from black heaps gives sign of former villages, and where the remaining trees, serving as gibbets, still bear the trophies of the reciprocal justice which the nobles and gentlemen of the country have been executing on each other.

It is on this journey through France that the Mandingo learns to be truly grateful for having been born in a civilized country. The unfortunate land in which he now finds himself has at its head a young prince who has robbed his own mother and sent her to prison. Such impious guilt cannot, the African feels, fail to draw down the vengeance of Heaven. Accordingly, when he reaches the capital, he finds the inhabitants engaged in an indiscriminate slaughter of their friends and neighbors. It almost seems to a stranger that the city is built on red clay, so soaked are the principal streets with blood. The traveller meets no one sane enough to give an explanation of this state of things. Nor does he require one. It is plain that this people is afflicted with a judicial madness, sent upon it for the crimes of its chiefs. He finds his way to a street where the work seems completed. All is quiet here, except where some wretch still struggles with his last agony, or where one not yet wounded to death is dragging himself stealthily along the ground towards some covert where he may perhaps live through to a safer time. The stranger stoops compassionately to a child that lies on its dead father; but, as he raises it, he feels that the heaviness is not that of sleep, and lays it back on the breast where it belongs. In a neighboring quarter the work is still at its highest. Where he stands, he hears the yell of fury, the sharp cry of terror, the burst of discordant laughter, rise above the clang of weapons and the clamor of threatening and remonstrance; while, under all, the roar of a great city in movement deepens with curse and prayer and groan. And now a woman rushes from a side-street, looks wildly round for refuge, then runs, shrieking, on, until, stumbling over the dead bodies in her way, she is overtaken and silenced forever.

He has made his way out of France, and is planning new journeys, when he receives, through some travelling merchants, a peremptory summons from his father, who has heard such accounts of the barbarous state of Europe that he regrets having given him leave to go out on this dangerous exploring expedition.

Our Mandingo did not meet the tragic fate of Bemoy, to whom the friendship of the whites proved fatal. He returned in safety to his country.

The house of the renowned traveller became a centre of attraction. The first question asked by his guests was, invariably, whether, in his long residence among the Christians, he had learned to prefer their manners to those of his own people. He was happy to be able to assure them that this was not the case. He had met in Europe, he said, some admirable men, and he thought the people there, in general, quite as intelligent as those of his own country, but far less amiable; they were, perhaps, even more energetic, especially the Portuguese and English; but he was obliged to add, that their energies were not as constantly employed in the service of mankind as their professions gave reason to expect. What he had found very displeasing in the manners of the Europeans was their disregard of cleanliness. Their negligence in this respect was a thing inconceivable to an African who had not lived among them.

He was much embarrassed, when called upon to speak of the religion of the Europeans and their mode of professing it. His audience was indignant at the hypocrisy of the Christians. But he was of opinion that their enthusiasm for their creed and their zeal for its propagation were undoubtedly genuine. Why, then, did they allow it no influence on their conduct? He could only conclude that they knew it to be too good for them, and that, though they found it, for this reason, of no use at all to themselves, they were perfectly sincere in thinking it an excellent religion for other people.

The result of his observations on the Christian nations was, that their genius especially displayed itself in the art of war, in which they had already attained to great eminence, and yet were intent on new inventions. Indeed, he gave it as his unqualified opinion, that the European had a great natural superiority over the African in everything which concerns the science of destruction.

The Mandingo had news, from time to time, through the travelling merchants, of what was going on in the North. He heard, in this way, of the captivity and miserable end of the Infant Ferdinand, of the accession of a fifth Alphonso, and of the revival of the bloody dissensions of the royal house of Portugal. He waited long for tidings of Henry's expeditions, although the year of his own return from Europe was the same in which John Gonçalvez Zarco and Tristam Vaz set off on the search for Guinea. But the looked-for news came at last, to bring with it a revival of his old foreboding.

You must allow that I have been tender of Europe. I might have introduced our traveller to it at a worse moment. Instead of going to England in the time of a chivalrous, popular prince, like Henry the Fifth, he might have seen it under Richard the Third; or I might have taken him there to assist at the decapitation of some of the eighth Henry's wives, or at a goodly number of the meaner executions, which went on, they say, at the rate of one to every five hours through that king's extended reign. Instead of making him report that human burnt-offerings, though not unknown in England, were infrequent, and that only a single victim was immolated on each occasion, I might have let him collect his statistics on this subject in the time of the bloody Mary. I am not sure that he could have seen France to much less advantage than in the days of the Bourgignon and Armagnac factions; but perhaps he would not have formed a very different judgment, if, going there a century and a half later, he had happened on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

The African traveller sometimes a little misapprehended what he saw, no doubt; but he noted nothing in malice. If he did not see our English ancestors precisely with their own eyes or with ours, at least he did not fall into the monstrous mistakes of the Greek historian Chalcondyles, of whose statements in regard to English manners Gibbon says,—"His credulity and injustice may teach an important lesson: to distrust accounts of foreign and remote nations, and to suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of Nature and the character of man."

Sunday Morning, April 14, 1844.

Yesterday was the day my journal should have gone; and my delay has not the usual excuse, for here was already a heavy budget. It is my love of completeness which has detained it. Next Saturday I can send you, together with the account of Harry's arrival and visit here, that of our leave-taking at Omocqua. You will thus have this little episode in my life entire.

The solicitude we had felt beforehand about Dr. Borrow's entertainment was thrown away. He has his particularities certainly, but we soon learned to accommodate ourselves to them. Harry, with perfect simplicity and directness, all along as on the first day, kept us informed of the Doctor's tastes and warned us of his antipathies, so that we had no difficulty in providing for his general comfort. As to his little humors and asperities, we accepted them, in the same way that Harry does, as belonging to the man, and never thought of asking ourselves whether we should like him better without them. One thing I will say for the Doctor: if, when he feels annoyance, he makes no secret of it, on the other hand, you can be sure that he is pleased when he appears to be,—and this is a great satisfaction. He is not inconsiderate of the weaknesses of others, either. I do not know how he divined that I disliked his blue glasses, but after the second day they disappeared. He said our pure air enabled him to do without them. Then the umbrella,—it attended us on the Saturday's walk. I supposed it was to be our inevitable companion. But on Sunday it came only as far as the door; here the Doctor stopped, held it up before him, considered, doubted, and set it down inside. Harry carried it up-stairs in the evening. I expected to see it come down again the next morning,—but it had no part in our pleasant Monday rambles. I had not said a word against the umbrella.

The engagement I made with Harry that Monday afternoon had Dr. Borrow's concurrence. He even expressed a willingness to assist at our readings. The order of our day was this:—In the early morning we had our walk,—Harry and I. Coming back, we always went round by Keith's Pine. We were sure to find the Doctor seated on the bench, which had been left there since the last Sunday, microscope in hand and flower-press beside him. Then all to the house, where we arrived with an exactitude which caused the Doctor, whose first glance on entering was at the clock, to seat himself at the table in a glow of self-approval sufficient to warm all present into a little innocent elation. After breakfast we separated,—Harry walking off to take my place with Karl and Fritz, the Doctor going to his flowers, and I to my writing. We all met again at an appointed time and place for an excursion together. We carried our dinner with us; or, if we were not going very far, had it left at some pleasant spot, where we found it on our way home. After dinner I read, and then we had an hour or so of discussion and criticism.

I have given you the readings of two days. I shall try to copy the rest for you in the course of the week. Copying is work; I cannot do any this morning; and then I have still other things remaining to me from those days which I have not yet shared with you.

On Tuesday, the ninth, the first day of the new arrangement, Harry went away as soon as breakfast was over. The Doctor rose, as if going to his room, hesitated, and sat down again. I saw that he had something to say to me, and waited. My thoughts went back to the conversation of the afternoon before. Had I really displeased him? He spoke seriously, but very kindly.

"Harry has no need of incitement in the direction of"——

He stopped, as if for a word which should be true at once to his pride and his disapprobation. He did not find it, and began over again:—

"It is the office of friendship to restrain even from generous error. It is possible to err on the side of too great disinterestedness. A man such as Harry will be, while living for himself,—living nobly and wisely as he must live,—is living for others; he has no need to become a crusader."

"Harry will be what he was meant to be; you would not have him force himself to become anything else?"

"No, I would not," the Doctor answered confidently, yet with a little sadness in his voice. "It almost seems," he added, a moment after, "that the qualities which fit a man for a higher sphere are incompatible with his success in this."

"Not, perhaps, with what Harry would call success."

"I am ambitious for him; I own it. And so are you, though you do not own it. You want to see him recognized for what he is."

Certainly it is natural to wish that others should love what we love, should admire what we admire. Our desire of sympathy, our regard for justice, both ask it. But we must have trust.

I could not answer the Doctor immediately. "Whatever course Harry may take," I said at last, "his power will make itself felt. He will disappoint neither of us."

"He has never given me a disappointment yet; though I prepare myself for one, whenever he begins anything new. We have no right to expect everything of one; but, whatever he is doing, it seems as if that was what he was most meant to do."

"It is in part his simple-mindedness, his freedom from the disturbing influence of self-love, which gives him this security of success in what he undertakes. You have said that Harry was one to take his own path. I will trust him to find it and hold to it."

"I must come to that," answered the Doctor, whose anxiety had gradually dissipated itself. "I don't know why I should hope to guide him now, if I could not when he was seven years old. On the infantile scale his characteristics were then just what they are now, and one of them certainly always was to have a way of his own.

"And yet he was always so tender of others' feelings, so ready to give up his pleasure for theirs, you might almost have thought him of too yielding a nature, unless you had seen him tried on some point where he found it worth while to be resolved."

The Doctor sat silent a little while, held by pleasant thoughts, and then began again:—

"There comes back to me now an earlier recollection of him than any I have given you. I witnessed once a contest of will between him and a person who was put over the nursery for a time in the absence of its regular head, and who was not thoroughly versed in the laws and customs of the realm she was to administer. Harry could not have been much more than two, I think, for he had hardly yet English enough for his little needs. He was inflexible on his side; the poor woman at first positive and then plaintive. She had recourse to the usually unfailing appeal,—'But, Harry, do you not want me to love you?' He held back the tears that were pressing to his eyes,—'I want all the peoples to love me.' But he did not give way, for he was in the right.

"Candor, however, obliges me to add that he did not always give way when he was in the wrong. Oh, I was in the right sometimes."—The Doctor laughed good-humoredly in answer to my involuntary smile.—"You may believe it, for Harry has admitted it himself later. Our debates were not always fruitless. I have known him come to me, three months, six months, after a discussion in which we had taken opposite sides, and say,—'I see now that you knew better about that than I did. I was mistaken.' On the other hand, some of his little sayings have worked on me with time, if not to the modification of my opinions, at least to that of my conduct, and sometimes in a way surprising to myself. For the rest, I liked to have him hold his ground well, and was just as content, when he did make a concession, that it was made out of deference, not to me, but to truth.

"I don't know whose opinion was authority with him. He did not respect even the wisdom of the world's ages as condensed in its proverbs, but coolly subjected them to the test of his uncompromising reason. I remember somebody's citing to him one day, 'A penny saved is a penny earned.' He considered it, and then rejected it decisively, proposing as a substitute,—'A penny spent is a penny saved.' I suppose that little word of his has spent me many a penny I might have saved,—but I don't know that I am the poorer.

"Another of his childish sayings passed into a by-word in the household. He was filling with apples for her grandchildren the tin kettle of an old family pensioner, whose eyes counted the rich, red spoil, as it rolled in. 'Enough!' says the conscientious gardener, who is looking on. 'Enough!' echoes the modest beneficiary. 'Enough is not enough!' gives sentence the little autocrat, and heaps the measure. I thought of this as he was walking beside me, grave and silent, over Harvey's well-ordered plantation. 'The child is father of the man.'"

The time was past when the Doctor had scruples in talking of Harry or I in asking. He forgot his flowers, and I my writing. Nothing more interesting to me than real stories of childhood. As a means of instruction, it seems to me the study of the early years of the human being has been strangely neglected by the wise. I listened well, then, whenever, after one of his contemplative pauses, the Doctor began again with a new "I remember."

"I remember being in the garden with him once when a barefooted boy came in and asked for shoes. Harry ran off, and presently reappeared with a fine, shining pair, evidently taken on his own judgment. A woman, who had been looking from the window, came hurrying out, and arrived in time to see the shoes walking out of the gate on strange feet. 'Why, Harry, those were perfectly good shoes!' 'I should not have given them to him, if they had not been good,' the child answered, tranquilly. The poor woman was posed. As for me, I ignored the whole affair, that I might not be obliged to commit myself. But I thought internally that we should not have had the saying, 'Cold as charity,' current in our Christian world, if all its neighborly love had been of the type of Harry's.

"You are not to suppose that Harry and I were always at variance. Our skirmishing was our amusement. He was teachable, very teachable,—and more and more as he grew older. Some of the happiest hours I have to look back upon were passed with him by my side, his reverent and earnest look showing how devoutly, with what serious joy, his young soul welcomed its first conscious perceptions of the laws of Nature, the sacred truths of Science."

By the Riverside.

The morning called me out imperatively. It is almost like that Sunday morning on which I took my first early walk with Harry. I fell into the same path we followed then. This path led us to the Dohuta. We walked slowly along its fringed bank, as I have been walking along it now, and stopped here where the river makes a little bend round a just perceptible rising graced by three ilex-trees. We found ourselves here more than once afterwards. We never thought beforehand what way we should take; we could not go amiss, where we went together.

The river holds its calm flow as when Harry was beside it with me. Here are the trees whose vigorous growth he praised, their thorny foliage glittering in the new sunlight as it glittered then. These associates of that pleasant time, renewing their impressions, awaken more and more vividly those of the dearer companionship.

It is strange the faithfulness with which the seemingly indifferent objects about us keep for us the record of hours that they have witnessed, rendering up our own past to us in a completeness in which our memory would not have reproduced it but for the suggestions of these unchosen confidants. Without displacing the familiar scene, distant and far other landscapes rise before me, visions that Harry Dudley called up for me here; to all the clear, fresh sounds of the early morning join themselves again our asking and replying voices.

I knew at once when a place had a particular interest for Harry, by the tone in which he pronounced the name. Fiesole was always a beautiful word for me, but how beautiful now that I must hear in it his affectionate accent! Volterra has a charm which it does not owe to its dim antiquity, or owes to it as revivified by him. His strong sympathy, embracing the remoter and the near, makes the past as actual to him as the present, and both alike poetic.

Harry's researches have not been carried on as a pastime, or even as a pursuit, but as a true study, a part of his preparation for a serviceable life. It is the history of humanity that he explores, and he reads it more willingly in its achievements than in its failures. The remains of the early art of Etruria, its grand works of utility, give evidence of the immemorial existence of a true civilization upon that favored soil, the Italy of Italy.

Among the retributions of time—as just in its compensations as in its revenges—there is hardly one more remarkable than this which is rendering justice to the old Etruscans, awakening the world to a long unacknowledged debt. Their annals have been destroyed, their literature has perished, their very language has passed away; but their life wrote itself on the country for whose health, fertility, and beauty they invented and labored,—wrote itself in characters so strong that the wear of the long ages has not effaced them. This original civilization has never been expelled from the scene of its ancient reign. Through all changes, under all oppressions, amid all violences, it has held itself in life,—has found means to assert and reassert its beneficent rights. Its very enemies have owed to it that they have been able to blend with their false glory some share of a more honorable fame. In its early seats it has never left itself long without a witness; but still some new gift to the world, in letters, in art, or in science, has given proof of its yet unexhausted resources.

As freedom is older than despotism, so civilization is older than barbarism. Man, made in the image of God, was made loving, loyal, beneficently creative.

No country except his own is nearer to Harry's heart than Italy,—not even France, though it is almost a second home to him; but perhaps there cannot be that passion in our love for the prosperous. For me, too, Italy has always stood alone;—sacred in her triple royalty of beauty, genius, and sorrow.

Harry has ties of his own to Italy, and of those which endear most closely. It was the scene of his first great grief,—as yet his only one. The firm, devout expression which his face took, whenever he spoke of his brother, showed that the early departure of the friend with whom he had hoped to walk hand in hand through life had not saddened or discouraged him,—had only left with him a sense of double obligation.

Harry does not speak of himself uninvited; but he was ready to do so, as simply and frankly as of anything else, when I drew him to it. He has his day-dreams like other young men, and found a true youthful delight in sharing them. I could not but observe that into his plans for the future—apart from the little home, vaguely, yet tenderly sketched, for which a place was supposed in them—his own advantage entered only inasmuch as they provided him a sphere of beneficent activity.

The one great duty of our time may oblige him to postpone all designs which have not its fulfilment for their immediate object. But only to postpone, I will hope. For why should we suppose that the struggle with slavery is to last through the life of the present generation? May we not believe that the time may come, even in our day, when we shall only have to build and to plant, no longer to overthrow and uproot?

Karl and Fritz have found me out here. They came to propose to me that we should have our service this morning in the open air, at the same place where we had it Sunday before last. They had already been at the house, and had obtained my mother's assent. Karl was the spokesman, as usual; but he stopped at the end of every sentence and looked for his brother's concurrence.

I have remarked a change in Karl lately. He has the advantage of Fritz, not only in years, but in capacity and energy. He has always been a good brother; but his superiority has been fully taken for granted between them, and all its rights asserted and admitted without a struggle. Within a short time, however, his character has matured rapidly. He has shown greater consideration for Fritz, and in general more sympathy with what is weaker or softer or humbler than himself. I had observed a greater thoughtfulness in him before Harry Dudley's visit here. But that short intercourse has extended his view in many directions. The entire absence of assumption, where there was so incontestable a superiority, could not but affect him profoundly. And then Harry, although Karl's strength and cleverness made him a very satisfactory work-fellow, took a great interest in Fritz, in whom he discovered fine perceptions. He tried to draw him out of his reserve, and to give him pleasure by making him feel he could contribute to that of others. Some latent talents, which the shy boy had cultivated unnoticed, brought him into a new importance. He knows the habits of all our birds, and has a marvellous familiarity with insects. His observations on their modes of life had been so exact, that Doctor Borrow, in questioning him, had almost a tone of deference. He was able to render signal service to the Doctor, too, by discovering for him, from description, tiny plants hard to find when out of bloom. Hans, who is fondest of the son that never rivalled him, exulted greatly in this sudden distinction. Karl took a generous pleasure in it; and, under the double influence of increased respect from without and enhanced self-esteem, Fritz's diffident powers are warming out wonderfully.

The boys thanked me very gratefully, as if I had done them a real favor, when I gave my consent to their plan; though I do not know why they should not suppose it as agreeable to me as to themselves.

Evening.

When I went home to breakfast this morning, I found the chairs already gone, except the great arm-chair. Nobody was expected to-day of sufficient dignity to occupy it. I was unwilling to draw it up to the table for myself. I believe I should have taken my breakfast standing, if it had not been that this would have called for explanation. How little I thought, when the Doctor first took his place among us, that a time would come when I should not wish to have his seat filled by any one else! I did not know how much I cared for him, until after he was gone; I do not think I knew it fully until this morning, when I came in and saw that solitary, empty chair. Then it came over me with a pang that he would never lay down the law to me from it again,—never would lean towards me sideways over its arm, to tell me, with moderated tone and softened look, little childish stories of his foster-son.

Karl stayed behind to-day, instead of Tabitha, to warn those who arrived of the place of meeting. He came in with the Lintons, who were late,—the fault of their poor old mule, or rather his misfortune. He fell down, and so broke and otherwise deranged his ingenious harness that the family were obliged to re-manufacture it on the road.

My mother did a courageous thing this morning. When the Hanthams came, she addressed them by name, and, calling the daughter up to her, took her hand and said some kind words to her. I thought they would be thrown away on her, but they were not. Her look to-day had in it less of purpose and more of sympathy. The Blantys were not here. I cannot understand why, in such fine weather. We missed them very much. But all the rest of those who are most to be desired came. We had a happy and united little assemblage.

I read Jeremy Taylor's second sermon on the "Return of Prayers." I am sure that we all heard and felt together, and were left with softened and more trustful hearts; yet doubtless each took away his own peculiar lesson or solace, according to his separate need. What has remained with me is a quickened sense of the Divine munificence, which so often grants us more and better than we pray for. "We beg for a removal of a present sadness, and God gives us that which makes us able to bear twenty sadnesses."

After the services were over, Franket came up and handed me a letter,—a most unexpected and a most welcome one. If I had not seen Harry's writing before, I think I should have known his strong, frank hand. I held the letter up before my mother, and her face brightened with recognition. Harry writes in fine spirits. The Doctor has been very successful. And they met Shaler again. "Perhaps he will be one of us on the nineteenth." That is good news indeed. Altogether this has been a very happy Sunday.

Davis Barton stayed with us until four o'clock, and then I rode part of the way home with him. This boy is becoming of importance to me; he is bringing a new interest into my life. This morning, after I had read Harry's letter aloud, and after my mother had read it over again to herself, I gave it to him to read. His eyes sparkled, and he cast up to me a quick glance of gratitude; for he felt, as I meant he should, that this was a mode of admitting him to full fellowship. I saw, as he walked off before us to the house, that he was a little taller already with the sense of it. Just before we arrived, however, he was overtaken by a sudden humiliation. Looking round at me, who, with Fritz, was carrying my mother's couch, the poor child espied Karl and Tabitha following, both loaded with chairs. He stood for an instant thoroughly shame-stricken, and then darted by us without lifting his eyes. He made so many and such rapid journeys, that he brought back more chairs than anybody, after all. When dinner was over, I gave Davis some engravings to look at, meaning to spend an hour in writing to you. I had taken out my portfolio, but had not yet begun to write, when I found him standing beside me, looking up at me with a pretty, blushing smile, which asked me to ask him what he wanted. He wanted me to teach him.—"What do you want to learn?"—"Whatever I ought to know."—Whatever I am able to teach, then, I will teach him, and perhaps more; for, in thinking out what he ought to know, I shall discover what I ought to know myself. It was soon settled. He is to come over three times a week, very early in the morning. I shall give him an hour before breakfast, and another in the course of the day. I shall have an opportunity of testing some of the theories I have talked over with Harry. Davis has a good mother, and has been pretty well taught, and, what is more important, very well trained, up to this time. I am looking forward to a busier and more useful summer than I have known for a long while.

Monday, April 15, 1844.

"When are we going to see the Shaler plantation?" the Doctor asked me abruptly one morning at breakfast. "We passed it by on our way here, knowing that we should have more pleasure in going over it with you."

I had been over it only once since Shaler left it, and that once was with himself on one of his rare visits. Franket's house is near the great gates. It was a porter's lodge in the old time, and is now a sort of post-office,—Franket having added to his other avocations the charge of going once a week to Tenpinville with letters intrusted to him, and bringing back those he is empowered to receive. When I go there to ask for letters or to leave them, no old associations are roused, for I did not use the main entrance formerly. I had a key to a little gate which opens on a bridle-path through the oak-wood. I entered the grounds through this gate when I was last there with Shaler, and I had pleased myself with the thought, that, when I entered them by it again, it would be again with him, on that happy return to which he is always looking forward.

But it seemed no violation of my compact with myself to unlock this gate for Harry, to walk with him through these grounds sacred to him as to me; for I knew that in his thought, as in mine, these untenanted lands were not so much deserted as dedicated. It was right that these places should know him. And what pleasure hereafter to talk of him as having been there,—to point out to Shaler the trees he had distinguished, the views that had delighted him! But I wished this visit to be the last we should make together. My delay in proposing it had, perhaps, made Harry attribute to me a secret reluctance. After the first eager expression of his desire to see the early home of his friend and mine, when we talked of Shaler together that pleasant afternoon on Prospect Hill, he did not mention the subject again. The Doctor did not second him then; but I knew he felt as much curiosity as Harry did interest, before his impatience broke bounds as I have told you.

"Let us go on Thursday, if you will," I answered.

Harry understood me.—"The right day!"

"Any day is the right one for me," said the Doctor, who would have named an earlier one, perhaps, if I had asked him to choose.

On Thursday, then, the last day but one of their visit here, I was their guide over "The Farms."

Two brothers settled at Metapora side by side. Their two plantations were carried on as one, under the direction of the younger brother, Colonel Shaler, the father of my friend. The brothers talked together of "The Farms"; their people took up the name; it gradually became the accepted one in the neighborhood, and has maintained itself, although the two places, having both been inherited by Charles Shaler, are now really one estate.

I opened the little gate for the Doctor and Harry to pass in, and followed them along the wood-path. All was the same as formerly; unkindly the same, it seemed.

"You have not been missed," said the Doctor, entering into my feeling, though not quite sympathizing with it. "You have not been missed, and you are not recognized. The birds are not jubilant because you have come back. The wood was as resonant before your key turned in the lock." He stopped and looked about him at the grand old oaks. "The man who grew up under these trees, and calls them his, may well long for them, but they will wait very patiently for his return. We could not spare trees and birds, but they can do without us well enough. Strange the place of man on his earth! Everything is necessary to him, and he is necessary to nothing."

Shaler had left the key of his house with me. There could be no indiscretion in introducing such guests into it. We went first into the dining-room. Everything was as it used to be, except that the family portraits had been taken away. The cords to which they had been attached still hung from the hooks, ready to receive them again. The large oval table kept its place in the middle of the room. What pleasant hours I had had in that room, at that table!

Colonel Shaler was our first friend in this part of the world. My father and he were distantly related, and had had a week's acquaintance at the house of a common friend when my father was a very young man and the Colonel a middle-aged one. On the third day after our arrival here, my father somewhat nervously put into my hand a note which had taken some time to write, and asked me to find the way with it to Colonel Shaler's plantation, which lay somewhere within ten miles of us in a southeasterly direction. As I was to go on horseback, I liked the adventure very much, and undertook it heartily. I was first made conscious that it had a shady side, when I found myself in the hall of the great, strange house, waiting to be ushered into the presence of its master.

"Hallo!" exclaimed a voice beside and far above me, as I stood with eyes fixed on the ground, expecting that serious moment of entrance. "You are Ned Colvil's son!" And my hand was lost in a capacious clasp, well proportioned to the heart it spoke for. I looked up to see a massive head, shaggy with crisp curls of grizzled hair, and to meet quick, bright blue eyes, that told of an active spirit animating the heavy frame. The Colonel did not expect me to speak. "We are to be neighbors! Good news! Your horse cannot go back at once, and I cannot wait. You must take another for to-day, and we will send yours home to you to-morrow."

Colonel Shaler's stout gray was soon led round, and presently followed, for me, a light-made, graceful black, the prettiest horse I had ever yet mounted. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it must be his son's, and visions of friendship already floated before me.

"One of Charles's," said the Colonel; "he is out on the other. I wish he was here to go with us, but we cannot wait."

I did not keep the Doctor and Harry long in the house. It was the plantation they wanted to see. We spent several hours in walking over it. I tried to do justice, not only to the plans and works of my friend, but to his father's schemes of agricultural improvement, and also to the very different labors of his uncle, Dr. George Shaler, who, utterly abstracted from matters of immediate utility, took the beautiful and the future under his affectionate protection. Through his vigilance and pertinacity, trees were felled, spared, and planted, with a judgment rare anywhere, singular here. If he gave into some follies, such as grottos, mimic ruins, and surprises, after the Italian fashion, even these are becoming respectable through time. They are very innocent monuments; for their construction gave as much delight to those who labored as to him who planned, and the completed work was not less their pride than his. His artificial mounds, which, while they were piling, were the jest of the wider neighborhood,—as the good old man himself has often told me,—now, covered with thrifty trees, skilfully set, are a legacy which it was, perhaps, worth the devotion of his modest, earnest life to bequeath.

Charles Shaler has piously spared all his uncle's works,—respecting the whimsical, as well as cherishing the excellent.

We went last to the quarters of the work-people. A few of the cabins were left standing. Most of them had been carried off piecemeal, probably to build or repair the cabins of other plantations. Those that remained seemed to have been protected by the strength and beauty of the vines in which they were embowered. I was glad to find still unmolested one which had an interest for me. It had been the home of an old man who used to be very kind to me. I lifted the latch and was opening the door, when I became aware of a movement inside, as of some one hastily and stealthily putting himself out of sight. If this was so, the purpose was instantly changed; for a firm step came forward, and the door was pulled open by a strong hand. I stepped back out of the little porch, and addressed some words to the Doctor, to make known that I was not alone; but the man followed me out, and saluted me and my companions respectfully and frankly. I offered him my hand, for he was an old acquaintance.

"Senator, why are you here?"

"Because I ought to be here."

"There is danger."

He did not reply, but the kindling of his look showed that he saw in danger only a challenge to his powers. He saluted us again, and walking away, with a slow, even step, disappeared in a thicket which shrouded one of Dr. George's favorite grottos.

"The true Othello, after all!" exclaimed the Doctor, when we turned to each other again, after watching until we were sure that we had seen the last of this apparition. "Of royal siege, assuredly!"

"He claims to be, or rather it is claimed for him," I answered. "His mother was a native African, a king's daughter, those who came with her said; and she bore, by all accounts, the stamp of primitive royalty as clearly impressed as her son does. Her title was never questioned either in the cabin or at the great house. She was a slave on the Westlake plantation,—but only for a few weeks, as I have heard."

"Did you ever see her?" the Doctor asked.

"No, she died long ago; but her story is still told on the plantation and in the neighborhood. Old Westlake bought her with four others, all native Africans, at Perara. The rest throve and made themselves at home. She, stately and still, endured until she had received her son into the world, and then, having consigned him to a foster-mother of her choice, passed tranquilly out of it. During her short abode on the plantation, she was an object of general homage, and when she died, the purple descended to her son."

"And the son has his story?" said the Doctor.

"A short one."

The Doctor and Harry both turned to me with expectation. They knew the Westlake plantation and its master; but you do not. If Senator's story has not the interest for you that it had for them, that must be the reason.

The prestige of rank was the only inheritance of the little foreign orphan. The very name his mother gave him, and which she impressed, by frequent, though faint repetition, upon those about her, was lost in the surprise of her sudden departure. The good souls to whom it had been committed strove faithfully to recover it. They were sure it was no proper Christian name, but a title of dignity; and, comparing their recollections of the sound, and their intuitions of the meaning, agreed among themselves that its nearest equivalent must be "Senator."

Senator was born on Christmas day; and this was regarded as all the greater distinction that it had been enjoyed before him by the young master,—the then heir and now owner, our present Westlake.

As he grew up, he took, as of course, and held, the place assigned to him in advance. At the age of sixteen he was already in authority over men, and exercised it with an ease and acceptance which proved that he was obeyed as instinctively as he commanded.

I do not know a prouder man than Westlake, or one more saturated with the prejudice of race. But he is not exempt from the laws which govern human intercourse. He came under the spell of Senator's cool self-reliance and unhesitating will. The petted slave did not directly or palpably misuse his power; yet his demeanor occasioned a secret dissatisfaction. He gave to his master's interests the whole force of his remarkable abilities, but it was not clear that he duly appreciated the indulgence which permitted him to exercise them untrammelled. He had never undergone punishment,—had hardly even met rebuke; but it was more than suspected that he attributed his immunities to his own merits. Westlake valued him for his high spirit as much as for his capacity; but should not Senator be very sensible to such magnanimity? This spirit had never been broken by fear; ought it not all the more to bend itself in love and gratitude?

Poor Westlake is very fond of gratitude. He enjoys it even from the most worthless and neglected of his slaves,—enjoys it even when it is prospective and conditional, and when he has the best reasons for knowing that the implied stipulations are not to be fulfilled. To Senator's gratitude he felt he had so entire a claim that he could not but believe in its existence. He tried to see in its very silence only a proof of its depth. But, if not necessary to his own feelings, some outward expression was important to his dignity in the eyes of others. He exerted himself, therefore, by gracious observations made in the presence of guests or before the assembled people on holidays, to afford Senator an opportunity at once of testifying to his master's liberality and of displaying the eloquence which was one of the chief glories of the plantation. These condescending efforts, constantly baffled by the self-possessed barbarian, were perpetually renewed.

One Christmas morning the common flood of adulation had been poured out more profusely than usual, and Westlake had quaffed it with more than usual satisfaction. His outlay for the festival had been truly liberal, and he felt that the quality of the entertainment guarantied that of the thanks. Besides the general benevolence of the dinner,—already arranged on long, low tables set about the lawn, to be enjoyed in anticipation by their devouring eyes,—special gifts were bestowed on the most deserving or the most favored. Senator was greatly distinguished, but took his assigned portion in silence; and Westlake felt, through every tingling nerve, that the attentive crowd had seen, as he had, that it was received as a tribute rather than as a favor. He had hitherto covered his defeats with the jolly laugh that seemed meant at once to apologize for his servant's eccentricity and to forgive it. But now he had made too sure of triumph; surprise and pain hurried him out of himself.

"What is it now?" he cried, fiercely, raising his clenched fist against the impassive offender.

"I have not spoken, Master."

"Speak, then! It is time. I have done more for you than for all the rest, and not a word!"

"We have done more for you than you for us all. What you give us we first give you."

It was as if a thunderbolt had fallen. The assembly scattered like a flock of frightened sheep.

I had this from Westlake himself. He came straight over to me. Not that Westlake and I are friends. There had never been any intimacy between us. There never has been any, unless for those few hours that day.

Senator had been secured. His sentence had been announced. It was banishment. Those who were nearest the master's confidence had leave to add the terrible name—New Orleans.

Senator had neither mother nor wife. He was nineteen, the age of enterprise and confidence. Perhaps, after all, it was the master on whom the doom would fall most heavily, I thought, while Westlake was making his recital. He was almost pale; his heavy features were sharpened; his firm, round cheeks were flaccid and sunken; his voice was hoarse and tremulous. Surely, that birthday might count for ten.

"I cannot overlook it," he groaned out. "You know that yourself, Colvil. I cannot forgive it. It would be against my duty, and—— Any way, I cannot. But—you may think it strange—but I am not angry. I was, but I am not now. I cannot bear to know him locked up there in the corn-barn, shackled and chained, and thinking all the time that it is I who have done it to him!"

Westlake had not seen the man since his imprisonment, and had come over to ask me to be present at the first interview. I declined positively.

"I do not believe," I said, "that he is to be reasoned out of his opinions. Certainly he will not be reasoned out of them by me. If anything could persuade a nature like his to submission, it would be the indulgent course you have till now pursued with him. If that has failed, no means within your reach will succeed."

"You do not understand me. I do not want you to reason with him, or to persuade him to anything. I only ask you to be witness to what I am going to say to him, that he may believe me,—that he may not himself thwart me in my plans."

"In what plans?"

"Plans that you will agree to, and that you will help me in, I hope,—but which I cannot trust to any one but you, nor to you except to have your help. If you will come with me, you shall know them; if not, I must take my chance, and he must take his."

I did not put much faith in Westlake's plans; but the thought of Senator chained and caged drew me to his prison. There might be nothing for me to do there; but, since I was called, I would go.

By the time my horse was saddled, Westlake had recovered his voice, and, in part, his color. This birthday would not count for more than five. He plucked up still more on the road; but when we came within a mile of his place, his trouble began to work on him again. He would have lengthened that last mile, but could not much. His horse snuffed home, and mine a near hospitality. Our entrance sustained the master's dignity handsomely. There was no misgiving or relenting to be construed out of that spirited trot.

We went together to the corn-barn. Senator was extended on the floor at the farther end of the room. He lifted his head when we entered, and then, as if compelled by an instinctive courtesy, rose to his fettered feet. I saw at once that there had been no more harshness than was needful for security; it even seemed that this had not been very anxiously provided for. The slender shackles would be no more than withes of the Philistines to such a Samson. A chain, indeed, fastened to a strong staple in the floor, passed to a ring in an iron belt about his waist; but it was long enough to allow him considerable liberty of movement. His hands were free. Perhaps Westlake had half expected to find the room empty. He stopped, a little startled, when he heard the first clank of the chain, and watched his prisoner as he slowly lifted himself from the ground and rose to his full height. Then, recollecting himself, he went forward. One ignorant of what had gone before might have mistaken between the culprit and the judge.

"Senator," Westlake began, in a voice whose faltering he could not control, "I have been a kind master to you."

No answer.

"You allow that?"

Senator was inflexible.

"I would never have sent you away of my own free will. This is your doing, not mine. You cannot want to go!" This in indignant surprise,—for something like a smile had relaxed the features of the imperious slave.

Senator spoke.

"This is my home, as it is yours. I was born here, as you were. This land is dear to me as it is to you; dearer,—for I have given my labor to it, and you never have. In return, I have had a support, and the exercise of my strength and my skill. This has been enough for me until now. But I am a man. I look round and see how other men live. I want somebody else to do for: not you, but somebody that could not do without me."

"Things might have gone differently," Westlake began, recovering his self-complacency, as visions, doubtless, of the fine wedding he would have given Senator, of the fine names he would have bestowed upon his children, rose before his fancy. "Things might have gone differently, if you had been"——

"If I had been what I am not," answered Senator, becoming impatient as Westlake relapsed into pomposity. "It is enough, Master. We have done with each other, and we both know it. Let me go."

"I will let you go,"—Westlake spoke now with real dignity,—"but not as you think. If I would have you remember what I have been to you, it is for your own sake, not for mine. I am used to ingratitude; I do not complain of yours. I have never sold a servant left me by my father, and I do not mean to begin with you. You shall not drive me to it. You are to go, and forever, but by your own road. I will set you on it myself. Is there any one in the neighborhood you can trust? We shall need help."

A doubtful smile passed over Senator's face.

"There is no one, then? Think! no one?"

"I am not so unhappy. There are those whom I trust."

"Then I will trust them. Tell me who they are and where they are. And quick! This news will be everywhere soon. To-morrow morning the neighbors will be coming in. What is done must be done to-night. Senator, do not ruin yourself! I mean right by you. Here is Mr. Colvil to witness to what I say. Is this mad obstinacy only? or do you dare not to trust yourself to me?"

"I do not trust to you those who trust me."

"Do you suppose I would give up those whose aid I have asked?"

"You would know where to find them when they give aid you have not asked."

"Colvil, speak to him! If he goes off by himself, I cannot hide it long. The country will be roused. I shall have to hunt him down myself. My honor will be at stake. I shall have to do it!"

The obdurate slave studied his master's features with curiosity mingled with triumph.

"Help me, Colvil! Help him! Tell him to listen to my plan and join in it! The useful time is passing!"

"Senator," I said at last, being so adjured, "your master means you well. He is not free to set you free,—you know it. You have done work for him,—good and faithful work; but never yet have you done him a pleasure, and he has intended you a good many. This is your last chance. Gratify him for once!"

Senator looked again, and saw, through the intent and wistful eyes, the poor, imploring soul within, which, hurried unconsenting towards crime, clung desperately to his rescue as its own. He comprehended that here was no tyrant, but a wretched victim of tyranny. A laugh, deep, reluctant, uncontrollable, no mirth in it, yet a certain bitter irony, and Senator had recovered his natural bearing, self-possessed and authoritative; he spoke in his own voice of composed decision.

"What is the plan, Master?"

Westlake told it eagerly. He was to save his authority with his people and his reputation with his neighbors by selling the rebellious servant,—that is to say, by pretending to sell him. Senator was to entitle himself to a commutation of his sentence into simple banishment by lending himself to the pious fraud and acting his part in it becomingly. Westlake had been so long accustomed to smooth his path of life by open subterfuges and falsehoods whose only guilt was in intention, that he had formed a very high opinion of his own address, and a very low one of the penetration of the rest of the world. As he proceeded with the details of his plot, childishly ingenious and childishly transparent, Senator listened, at first with attention, then with impatience, and at last not at all. When Westlake stopped to take breath, he interposed.

"Now hear me. Order the long wagon out, with the roans. Have me handcuffed and fastened down in it. Tell those whom you trust that you are taking me to Goosefield."

"To Goosefield?"

"To Dick Norman."

"Dick Norman! He help you! He is not an ——?"

Westlake could not bring himself to associate the word abolitionist with a man who had dined with him three days before.

"He is a slave-trader."

The blood, which had rushed furiously to the proud planter's cheeks, left them with a sudden revulsion. To be taken in by a disguised fanatic might happen to any man too honorable to be suspicious. He could have forgiven himself. But to have held a slave-trader by the hand! to have asked him to his table! Westlake knew that Senator never said anything that had to be taken back.

Richard Norman was a man of name and birth from old Virginia. Of easy fortune, so it was reported, still unmarried, he spent a great part of the year in travelling; and especially found pleasure in renewing old family ties with Virginian emigrants or their children in newer States. When he favored our neighborhood, he had his quarters at Goosefield, where he always took the same apartments in the house of a man, also Virginian by birth, who was said to be an old retainer of his family. Norman's father had been the fathers' friend of most of our principal planters. He was welcome in almost every household for the sake of these old memories, and apparently for his own. He was well-looking, well-mannered, possessed of various information, ready with amusing anecdote. And yet all the time it was perfectly known to every slave on every plantation where he visited what Mr. Richard Norman was. It was perfectly known to every planter except Westlake, and possibly Harvey. I do not remember to have heard of him at Harvey's. Those who never sold their servants, those who never separated families, those who never parted very young children from their mothers, found Norman a resource in those cases of necessity which exempt from law.

The slaves talked of him among themselves familiarly, though fearfully. He was the central figure of many a dark history; the house at Goosefield was known to them as Dick Norman's Den. The masters held their knowledge separately, each bound to consider himself its sole depository. If, arriving at the house of a friend, soon after a visitation of Richard Norman, one missed a familiar hand at his bridle, a kind old face at the door, curiosity was discreet; it would have been very ill manners to ask whether it was Death or Goosefield.

"Dick Norman starts at midnight. He has been ready these three days. He only waited to eat his Christmas dinner at old Rasey's."

Westlake had pondered and understood. "Where shall I really take you?" he asked, despondingly.

"Leave me anywhere six or eight miles from here, and I will do for myself."

"Colvil, you will ride along beside?"

"No."

I find in myself such an inaptitude for simulation or artifice of any kind, that I do not believe it was intended I should serve my fellow-men by those means.

"No," repeated Senator,—"not if we are going to Goosefield."

"It is true," assented Westlake, sadly; "nobody would believe you were going with me there!"

I rode off without taking leave of Senator. I felt sure of seeing him again. I thought I knew where the aid he would seek was to be found. Mine was just the half-way house to it. He would not be afraid of compromising me, for his master himself had called me to be witness to their compact. Senator would have the deciding voice, as usual; and Westlake would be guided by him now the more readily that he himself would tend in the direction of his only confidant. When I had put up my horse, I went into the house only for a few moments to tell my mother what I had seen and what I was expecting.

I walked up and down between the gate and the brook that evening,—I could not tell how long. I had time to become anxious,—time to invent disasters,—time to imagine encounters Westlake might have had on the way, with officious advisers, with self-proposed companions. I was disappointed more than once by distant wheels, which came nearer and nearer only to pass on, and farther and farther away, on the road which, crossing ours, winds round behind our place to Winker's Hollow. At last I caught sound of an approach which did not leave me an instant in uncertainty. This time, beyond mistake, it was the swift, steady tramp of Westlake's roans. As they entered our sandy lane, their pace slackened to a slow trot, and then to a walk. Westlake was on the lookout for me. I went into the middle of the road. He saw me; I heard him utter an exclamation of relief.

Senator, who had been stretched out on the bottom of the wagon, sat up when the horses stopped, took the manacles from his wrists and threw them down on the straw. With his master's help, he soon disencumbered himself of his fetters, and sprang lightly to the ground. Westlake followed, and the two stood there in the starlight confronting each other for the last time.

The face of the banished man was inscrutable. His master's worked painfully. This boy, born on his own twenty-first birthday, had been assigned to him, not only by his father's gift, but also, so it seemed, by destiny itself. He had had property in him; he had had pride in him; he had looked for a life-long devotion from him. And now, in one moment, all was to be over between them forever. The scene could not be prolonged. There was danger in every instant of delay.