(‡ decoration)GEORGE W. CABLE.“THE DEPICTOR OF CREOLE LIFE IN THE SOUTH.”IT is said “Circumstances make the man;” and, again, “Seeming misfortunes are often blessings in disguise.” Whether this is generally true or not, at least in the case of George W. Cable, it has so turned out; for it was poverty and necessity that drove him through a vicissitude of circumstances which stored his mind with observations and facts that enabled him to open a new field of fiction, introducing to the outside world a phase of American life hitherto unsuspected save by those who have seen it. His rendering of the Creole dialect with its French and Spanish variations and mixtures is full of originality. He has depicted the social life of the Louisiana lowlands, with its Creole and negro population, so vividly that many whose portraits he has drawn have taken serious offence at his books. But it is no doubtthe truth that hurts, and if so, it should be borne for the sake of history, and it is to the credit ofMr.Cable’s integrity as an author that he has not sacrificed the truth to please his friends. His books have also been the means of effecting wholesome changes in the contract system of convict labor in several Southern States.George W. Cable was born October 12, 1844, in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father was a Virginian and his mother a New Englander. They removed to New Orleans in 1837. In 1859Mr.Cable failed in business and died soon after, leaving the family in a straightened condition, and the son—then fifteen years of age—was compelled to leave school and take a clerkship in a store. This he retained until, at the age of nineteen, he volunteered in the service of the Confederate Army, joining the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry, and followed the fortunes of the Southern cause until it was lost. He was said to have been a gallant soldier, was once wounded and narrowly escaped with his life. All his spare moments in camp were given to study.After the surrender of General Lee, Cable—a young man of twenty-one—returned to New Orleans, penniless, and took employment as an errand boy in a store. From there he drifted to Kosciusko, Mississippi, where he studied civil engineering, and joined a surveying party on bayous Têche and Atchafalaya—the native heath of the Creole—and it was here that his keen observation gathered the material which has since done him so much service.Cable first began writing to the “New Orleans Picayune” under thenom-de-plumeof “Drop Shot,” and his articles evinced a power which soon opened the way to a regular place on the editorial staff of the paper. This position he retaineduntil he was asked to write a theatrical criticism. Cable had rigid religious scruples—piety being one of his marked characteristics—always avoided attendance of the theatre, and he now refused to go, and resigned his position rather than violate his conscience.Leaving the editorial rooms of the “Picayune,” Cable secured a position as accountant in a cotton-dealer’s office, which he retained until 1879, when the death of his employer threw him out of position. Meantime his sketches of Creole life had been appearing in “Scribner’s Monthly,” and were received with so much favor that he determined to leave business and devote his life to literature. Accordingly, in 1885, he removed North, living at Simsbury, Connecticut, Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York, which he has since made his headquarters, with a continual growing popularity, his books bringing him an ample competency.Among the published works of this author we mention as the most prominent: “Old Creole Days” (1879–1883); “The Grandissimes” (1880); “Madame Delphine” (1881); “Dr.Sevier” (1883); “The Creoles of Louisiana” (1884); “The Silent South” (1885); “Bonaventure” (1888); “Strange True Stories of Louisiana” (1889); “The Negro Question” and “Life of William Gilmore Sims” (1890); “John March Southerner,” and some later works which the author continues to add at the rate of one book a year.Mr.Cable has also successfully entered the lecture field, in common with other modern authors, and never fails to interest Northern audiences with his readings or recitations, from his writings or the strange wild melodies and peculiar habits of life current among the French speaking negroes of the lower Mississippi.THEDOCTOR.¹(FROM “DR.SEVIER.”)¹Copyright, George W. Cable.THE main road to wealth in New Orleans has long been Carondelet Street. There you see the most alert faces; noses—it seems to one—with more and sharper edge, and eyes smaller and brighter and with less distance between them than one notices in other streets. It is there that the stock and bond brokers hurry to and fro and run together promiscuously—the cunning and the simple, the headlong and the wary—at the four clanging strokes of the Stock Exchange gong. There rises the tall façade of the Cotton Exchange. Looking in from the sidewalk as you pass, you see its main hall, thronged but decorous, the quiet engine-room of the surrounding city’s most far-reaching occupation, and at the hall’s farther end you descry the “Future Room,” and hear the unearthly ramping and bellowing of the bulls and bears. Up and down the street, on either hand, are the ship-brokers and insurers, and in the upper stories foreign consuls among a multitude of lawyers and notaries.In 1856 this street was just assuming its present character. The cotton merchants were making it their favorite place of commercial domicile. The open thoroughfare served in lieu of the present exchanges; men made fortunes standing on the curbstone, and during bank hours the sidewalks were perpetually crowded with cotton factors, buyers, brokers, weighers, reweighers, classers, pickers, pressers, and samplers, and the air was laden with cotton quotations and prognostications.Number 3½, second floor, front, was the office ofDr.Sevier. This office was convenient to everything. Immediately under its windows lay the sidewalks where congregated the men who, of all in New Orleans, could best afford to pay for being sick, and least desired to die. Canal Street, the city’s leadingartery, was just below, at the near left-hand corner. Beyond it lay the older town, not yet impoverished in those days,—the French quarter. A single square and a half off at the right, and in plain view from the front windows, shone the dazzling white walls of theSt.Charles Hotel, where the nabobs of the river plantations came and dwelt with their fair-handed wives in seasons of peculiar anticipation, when it is well to be near the highest medical skill. In the opposite direction a three minutes’ quick drive around the upper corner and down Common Street carried the Doctor to his ward in the great Charity Hospital, and to the school of medicine, where he filled the chair set apart to the holy ailments of maternity. Thus, as it were, he laid his left hand on the rich and his right on the poor; and he was not left-handed.Not that his usual attitude was one of benediction. He stood straight up in his austere pure-mindedness, tall, slender, pale, sharp of voice, keen of glance, stern in judgment, aggressive in debate, and fixedly untender everywhere, except—but always except—in the sick chamber. His inner heart was all of flesh; but his demands for the rectitude of mankind pointed out like the muzzles of cannon through the embrasures of his virtues. To demolish evil!—that seemed the finest of aims; and even as a physician, that was, most likely, his motive until later years and a better self-knowledge had taught him that to do good was still finer and better. He waged war—against malady. To fight; to stifle; to cut down; to uproot; to overwhelm,—these were his springs of action. That their results were good proved that his sentiment of benevolence was strong and high; but it was well-nigh shut out of sight by that impatience of evil which is very fine and knightly in youngest manhood, but which we like to see give way to kindlier moods as the earlier heat of the blood begins to pass.He changed in later years; this was in 1856. To “resist not evil” seemed to him then only a rather feeble sort of knavery. To face it in its nakedness, and to inveigh against it in high places and low, seemed the consummation of all manliness; and manliness was the key-note of his creed. There was no other necessity in this life.“But a man must live,” said one of his kindred, to whom, truth to tell, he had refused assistance.“No, sir; that is just what he can’t do. A man must die! So, while he lives, let him be a man!”How inharmonious a setting, then, forDr.Sevier, was 3½ Carondelet Street! As he drove each morning, down to that point, he had to pass through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either sidewalk—a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that “Time is money.”“It’s a great deal more, sir, it’s life!” the Doctor always retorted.Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling of cotton yielded big harvests in perquisites. At every jog of the Doctor’s horse, men came to view whose riches were the outcome of semi-respectable larceny. It was a day of reckless operation; much of the commerce that came to New Orleans was simply, as one might say, beached in Carondelet Street. The sight used to keep the long, thin, keen-eyed doctor in perpetual indignation.“Look at the wreckers!” he would say.It was breakfast at eight, indignation at nine, dyspepsia at ten.So his setting was not merely inharmonious; it was damaging. He grew sore on the whole matter of money-getting.“Yes, I have money. But I don’t go after it. It comes to me, because I seek and render service for the service’s sake. It will come to anybody else the same way; and why should it come any other way?”He not only had a low regard for the motives of most seekers of wealth, he went further, and fell into much disbelief of poor men’s needs. For instance, he looked upon a man’s inability to find employment, or upon a poor fellow’s run of bad luck, as upon the placarded woes of a hurdy-gurdy beggar.“If he wants work he will find it. As for begging, it ought to be easier for any true man to starve than to beg.”The sentiment was ungentle, but it came from the bottom of his belief concerning himself, and a longing for moral greatness in all men.“However,” he would add, thrusting his hand intohis pocket and bringing out his purse, “I’ll help any man to make himself useful. And the sick—well, the sick, as a matter of course. Only I must know what I’m doing.”Have some of us known want? To have known her—though to love her was impossible—is “a liberal education.” The Doctor was learned; but this acquaintanceship, this education, he had never got. Hence his untenderness. Shall we condemn the fault? Yes. And the man? We have not the face. To bejust, which he never knowingly failed to be, and at the same time to feel tenderly for the unworthy, to deal kindly with the erring—it is a double grace that hangs not always in easy reach even of the tallest. The Doctor attained to it—but in later years; meantime, this story—which, I believe, had he ever been poor would never have been written.He had barely disposed of the three or four waiting messengers that arose from their chairs against the corridor wall, and was still reading the anxious lines left in various handwritings on his slate, when the young man entered. He was of fair height, slenderly built, with soft auburn hair, a little untrimmed, neat dress, and a diffident, yet expectant and courageous, face.“Dr.Sevier?”“Yes, sir.”“Doctor, my wife is very ill; can I get you to come at once and see her?”“Who is her physician?”“I have not called any; but we must have one now.”“I don’t know about going at once. This is my hour for being in the office. How far is it, and what’s the trouble?”“We are only three squares away, just here in Custom-house Street.” The speaker began to add a faltering enumeration of some very grave symptoms. The Doctor noticed that he was slightly deaf; he uttered his words as though he did not hear them.“Yes,” interruptedDr.Sevier, speaking half to himself as he turned around to a standing case of cruel-looking silver-plated things on shelves; “that’s a small part of the penalty women pay for the doubtful honor of being our mothers. I’ll go. What is your number? But you had better drive back with me if you can.” He drew back from the glass case, shut the door, and took his hat.“Narcisse!”On the side of the office nearest the corridor a door let into a hall-room that afforded merely good space for the furniture needed by a single accountant. The Doctor had other interests besides those of his profession, and, taking them altogether, found it necessary, or at least convenient, to employ continuously the services of a person to keep his accounts and collect his bills. Through the open door the bookkeeper could be seen sitting on a high stool at a still higher desk—a young man of handsome profile and well-knit form. At the call of his name he unwound his legs from the rounds of the stool and leaped into the Doctor’s presence with a superlatively highbred bow.“I shall be back in fifteen minutes,” said the Doctor. “Come,Mr.——,” and went out with the stranger.Narcisse had intended to speak. He stood a moment, then lifted the last half inch of a cigarette to his lips, took a long, meditative inhalation, turned half round on his heel, dashed the remnant with fierce emphasis into a spittoon, ejected two long streams of smoke from his nostrils, and, extending his fist toward the door by which the Doctor had gone out, said:—“All right, ole hoss!” No, not that way. It is hard to give his pronunciation by letter. In the word “right” he substituted an a for the r, sounding it almost in the same instant with the i, yet distinct from it: “All a-ight, ole hoss!”Then he walked slowly back to his desk, with that feeling of relief which some men find in the renewal of a promissory note, twined his legs again among those of the stool, and, adding not a word, resumed his pen.
(‡ decoration)
“THE DEPICTOR OF CREOLE LIFE IN THE SOUTH.”
IT is said “Circumstances make the man;” and, again, “Seeming misfortunes are often blessings in disguise.” Whether this is generally true or not, at least in the case of George W. Cable, it has so turned out; for it was poverty and necessity that drove him through a vicissitude of circumstances which stored his mind with observations and facts that enabled him to open a new field of fiction, introducing to the outside world a phase of American life hitherto unsuspected save by those who have seen it. His rendering of the Creole dialect with its French and Spanish variations and mixtures is full of originality. He has depicted the social life of the Louisiana lowlands, with its Creole and negro population, so vividly that many whose portraits he has drawn have taken serious offence at his books. But it is no doubtthe truth that hurts, and if so, it should be borne for the sake of history, and it is to the credit ofMr.Cable’s integrity as an author that he has not sacrificed the truth to please his friends. His books have also been the means of effecting wholesome changes in the contract system of convict labor in several Southern States.
George W. Cable was born October 12, 1844, in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father was a Virginian and his mother a New Englander. They removed to New Orleans in 1837. In 1859Mr.Cable failed in business and died soon after, leaving the family in a straightened condition, and the son—then fifteen years of age—was compelled to leave school and take a clerkship in a store. This he retained until, at the age of nineteen, he volunteered in the service of the Confederate Army, joining the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry, and followed the fortunes of the Southern cause until it was lost. He was said to have been a gallant soldier, was once wounded and narrowly escaped with his life. All his spare moments in camp were given to study.
After the surrender of General Lee, Cable—a young man of twenty-one—returned to New Orleans, penniless, and took employment as an errand boy in a store. From there he drifted to Kosciusko, Mississippi, where he studied civil engineering, and joined a surveying party on bayous Têche and Atchafalaya—the native heath of the Creole—and it was here that his keen observation gathered the material which has since done him so much service.
Cable first began writing to the “New Orleans Picayune” under thenom-de-plumeof “Drop Shot,” and his articles evinced a power which soon opened the way to a regular place on the editorial staff of the paper. This position he retaineduntil he was asked to write a theatrical criticism. Cable had rigid religious scruples—piety being one of his marked characteristics—always avoided attendance of the theatre, and he now refused to go, and resigned his position rather than violate his conscience.
Leaving the editorial rooms of the “Picayune,” Cable secured a position as accountant in a cotton-dealer’s office, which he retained until 1879, when the death of his employer threw him out of position. Meantime his sketches of Creole life had been appearing in “Scribner’s Monthly,” and were received with so much favor that he determined to leave business and devote his life to literature. Accordingly, in 1885, he removed North, living at Simsbury, Connecticut, Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York, which he has since made his headquarters, with a continual growing popularity, his books bringing him an ample competency.
Among the published works of this author we mention as the most prominent: “Old Creole Days” (1879–1883); “The Grandissimes” (1880); “Madame Delphine” (1881); “Dr.Sevier” (1883); “The Creoles of Louisiana” (1884); “The Silent South” (1885); “Bonaventure” (1888); “Strange True Stories of Louisiana” (1889); “The Negro Question” and “Life of William Gilmore Sims” (1890); “John March Southerner,” and some later works which the author continues to add at the rate of one book a year.
Mr.Cable has also successfully entered the lecture field, in common with other modern authors, and never fails to interest Northern audiences with his readings or recitations, from his writings or the strange wild melodies and peculiar habits of life current among the French speaking negroes of the lower Mississippi.
THEDOCTOR.¹
(FROM “DR.SEVIER.”)
¹Copyright, George W. Cable.
THE main road to wealth in New Orleans has long been Carondelet Street. There you see the most alert faces; noses—it seems to one—with more and sharper edge, and eyes smaller and brighter and with less distance between them than one notices in other streets. It is there that the stock and bond brokers hurry to and fro and run together promiscuously—the cunning and the simple, the headlong and the wary—at the four clanging strokes of the Stock Exchange gong. There rises the tall façade of the Cotton Exchange. Looking in from the sidewalk as you pass, you see its main hall, thronged but decorous, the quiet engine-room of the surrounding city’s most far-reaching occupation, and at the hall’s farther end you descry the “Future Room,” and hear the unearthly ramping and bellowing of the bulls and bears. Up and down the street, on either hand, are the ship-brokers and insurers, and in the upper stories foreign consuls among a multitude of lawyers and notaries.In 1856 this street was just assuming its present character. The cotton merchants were making it their favorite place of commercial domicile. The open thoroughfare served in lieu of the present exchanges; men made fortunes standing on the curbstone, and during bank hours the sidewalks were perpetually crowded with cotton factors, buyers, brokers, weighers, reweighers, classers, pickers, pressers, and samplers, and the air was laden with cotton quotations and prognostications.Number 3½, second floor, front, was the office ofDr.Sevier. This office was convenient to everything. Immediately under its windows lay the sidewalks where congregated the men who, of all in New Orleans, could best afford to pay for being sick, and least desired to die. Canal Street, the city’s leadingartery, was just below, at the near left-hand corner. Beyond it lay the older town, not yet impoverished in those days,—the French quarter. A single square and a half off at the right, and in plain view from the front windows, shone the dazzling white walls of theSt.Charles Hotel, where the nabobs of the river plantations came and dwelt with their fair-handed wives in seasons of peculiar anticipation, when it is well to be near the highest medical skill. In the opposite direction a three minutes’ quick drive around the upper corner and down Common Street carried the Doctor to his ward in the great Charity Hospital, and to the school of medicine, where he filled the chair set apart to the holy ailments of maternity. Thus, as it were, he laid his left hand on the rich and his right on the poor; and he was not left-handed.Not that his usual attitude was one of benediction. He stood straight up in his austere pure-mindedness, tall, slender, pale, sharp of voice, keen of glance, stern in judgment, aggressive in debate, and fixedly untender everywhere, except—but always except—in the sick chamber. His inner heart was all of flesh; but his demands for the rectitude of mankind pointed out like the muzzles of cannon through the embrasures of his virtues. To demolish evil!—that seemed the finest of aims; and even as a physician, that was, most likely, his motive until later years and a better self-knowledge had taught him that to do good was still finer and better. He waged war—against malady. To fight; to stifle; to cut down; to uproot; to overwhelm,—these were his springs of action. That their results were good proved that his sentiment of benevolence was strong and high; but it was well-nigh shut out of sight by that impatience of evil which is very fine and knightly in youngest manhood, but which we like to see give way to kindlier moods as the earlier heat of the blood begins to pass.He changed in later years; this was in 1856. To “resist not evil” seemed to him then only a rather feeble sort of knavery. To face it in its nakedness, and to inveigh against it in high places and low, seemed the consummation of all manliness; and manliness was the key-note of his creed. There was no other necessity in this life.“But a man must live,” said one of his kindred, to whom, truth to tell, he had refused assistance.“No, sir; that is just what he can’t do. A man must die! So, while he lives, let him be a man!”How inharmonious a setting, then, forDr.Sevier, was 3½ Carondelet Street! As he drove each morning, down to that point, he had to pass through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either sidewalk—a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that “Time is money.”“It’s a great deal more, sir, it’s life!” the Doctor always retorted.Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling of cotton yielded big harvests in perquisites. At every jog of the Doctor’s horse, men came to view whose riches were the outcome of semi-respectable larceny. It was a day of reckless operation; much of the commerce that came to New Orleans was simply, as one might say, beached in Carondelet Street. The sight used to keep the long, thin, keen-eyed doctor in perpetual indignation.“Look at the wreckers!” he would say.It was breakfast at eight, indignation at nine, dyspepsia at ten.So his setting was not merely inharmonious; it was damaging. He grew sore on the whole matter of money-getting.“Yes, I have money. But I don’t go after it. It comes to me, because I seek and render service for the service’s sake. It will come to anybody else the same way; and why should it come any other way?”He not only had a low regard for the motives of most seekers of wealth, he went further, and fell into much disbelief of poor men’s needs. For instance, he looked upon a man’s inability to find employment, or upon a poor fellow’s run of bad luck, as upon the placarded woes of a hurdy-gurdy beggar.“If he wants work he will find it. As for begging, it ought to be easier for any true man to starve than to beg.”The sentiment was ungentle, but it came from the bottom of his belief concerning himself, and a longing for moral greatness in all men.“However,” he would add, thrusting his hand intohis pocket and bringing out his purse, “I’ll help any man to make himself useful. And the sick—well, the sick, as a matter of course. Only I must know what I’m doing.”Have some of us known want? To have known her—though to love her was impossible—is “a liberal education.” The Doctor was learned; but this acquaintanceship, this education, he had never got. Hence his untenderness. Shall we condemn the fault? Yes. And the man? We have not the face. To bejust, which he never knowingly failed to be, and at the same time to feel tenderly for the unworthy, to deal kindly with the erring—it is a double grace that hangs not always in easy reach even of the tallest. The Doctor attained to it—but in later years; meantime, this story—which, I believe, had he ever been poor would never have been written.He had barely disposed of the three or four waiting messengers that arose from their chairs against the corridor wall, and was still reading the anxious lines left in various handwritings on his slate, when the young man entered. He was of fair height, slenderly built, with soft auburn hair, a little untrimmed, neat dress, and a diffident, yet expectant and courageous, face.“Dr.Sevier?”“Yes, sir.”“Doctor, my wife is very ill; can I get you to come at once and see her?”“Who is her physician?”“I have not called any; but we must have one now.”“I don’t know about going at once. This is my hour for being in the office. How far is it, and what’s the trouble?”“We are only three squares away, just here in Custom-house Street.” The speaker began to add a faltering enumeration of some very grave symptoms. The Doctor noticed that he was slightly deaf; he uttered his words as though he did not hear them.“Yes,” interruptedDr.Sevier, speaking half to himself as he turned around to a standing case of cruel-looking silver-plated things on shelves; “that’s a small part of the penalty women pay for the doubtful honor of being our mothers. I’ll go. What is your number? But you had better drive back with me if you can.” He drew back from the glass case, shut the door, and took his hat.“Narcisse!”On the side of the office nearest the corridor a door let into a hall-room that afforded merely good space for the furniture needed by a single accountant. The Doctor had other interests besides those of his profession, and, taking them altogether, found it necessary, or at least convenient, to employ continuously the services of a person to keep his accounts and collect his bills. Through the open door the bookkeeper could be seen sitting on a high stool at a still higher desk—a young man of handsome profile and well-knit form. At the call of his name he unwound his legs from the rounds of the stool and leaped into the Doctor’s presence with a superlatively highbred bow.“I shall be back in fifteen minutes,” said the Doctor. “Come,Mr.——,” and went out with the stranger.Narcisse had intended to speak. He stood a moment, then lifted the last half inch of a cigarette to his lips, took a long, meditative inhalation, turned half round on his heel, dashed the remnant with fierce emphasis into a spittoon, ejected two long streams of smoke from his nostrils, and, extending his fist toward the door by which the Doctor had gone out, said:—“All right, ole hoss!” No, not that way. It is hard to give his pronunciation by letter. In the word “right” he substituted an a for the r, sounding it almost in the same instant with the i, yet distinct from it: “All a-ight, ole hoss!”Then he walked slowly back to his desk, with that feeling of relief which some men find in the renewal of a promissory note, twined his legs again among those of the stool, and, adding not a word, resumed his pen.
THE main road to wealth in New Orleans has long been Carondelet Street. There you see the most alert faces; noses—it seems to one—with more and sharper edge, and eyes smaller and brighter and with less distance between them than one notices in other streets. It is there that the stock and bond brokers hurry to and fro and run together promiscuously—the cunning and the simple, the headlong and the wary—at the four clanging strokes of the Stock Exchange gong. There rises the tall façade of the Cotton Exchange. Looking in from the sidewalk as you pass, you see its main hall, thronged but decorous, the quiet engine-room of the surrounding city’s most far-reaching occupation, and at the hall’s farther end you descry the “Future Room,” and hear the unearthly ramping and bellowing of the bulls and bears. Up and down the street, on either hand, are the ship-brokers and insurers, and in the upper stories foreign consuls among a multitude of lawyers and notaries.
In 1856 this street was just assuming its present character. The cotton merchants were making it their favorite place of commercial domicile. The open thoroughfare served in lieu of the present exchanges; men made fortunes standing on the curbstone, and during bank hours the sidewalks were perpetually crowded with cotton factors, buyers, brokers, weighers, reweighers, classers, pickers, pressers, and samplers, and the air was laden with cotton quotations and prognostications.
Number 3½, second floor, front, was the office ofDr.Sevier. This office was convenient to everything. Immediately under its windows lay the sidewalks where congregated the men who, of all in New Orleans, could best afford to pay for being sick, and least desired to die. Canal Street, the city’s leadingartery, was just below, at the near left-hand corner. Beyond it lay the older town, not yet impoverished in those days,—the French quarter. A single square and a half off at the right, and in plain view from the front windows, shone the dazzling white walls of theSt.Charles Hotel, where the nabobs of the river plantations came and dwelt with their fair-handed wives in seasons of peculiar anticipation, when it is well to be near the highest medical skill. In the opposite direction a three minutes’ quick drive around the upper corner and down Common Street carried the Doctor to his ward in the great Charity Hospital, and to the school of medicine, where he filled the chair set apart to the holy ailments of maternity. Thus, as it were, he laid his left hand on the rich and his right on the poor; and he was not left-handed.
Not that his usual attitude was one of benediction. He stood straight up in his austere pure-mindedness, tall, slender, pale, sharp of voice, keen of glance, stern in judgment, aggressive in debate, and fixedly untender everywhere, except—but always except—in the sick chamber. His inner heart was all of flesh; but his demands for the rectitude of mankind pointed out like the muzzles of cannon through the embrasures of his virtues. To demolish evil!—that seemed the finest of aims; and even as a physician, that was, most likely, his motive until later years and a better self-knowledge had taught him that to do good was still finer and better. He waged war—against malady. To fight; to stifle; to cut down; to uproot; to overwhelm,—these were his springs of action. That their results were good proved that his sentiment of benevolence was strong and high; but it was well-nigh shut out of sight by that impatience of evil which is very fine and knightly in youngest manhood, but which we like to see give way to kindlier moods as the earlier heat of the blood begins to pass.
He changed in later years; this was in 1856. To “resist not evil” seemed to him then only a rather feeble sort of knavery. To face it in its nakedness, and to inveigh against it in high places and low, seemed the consummation of all manliness; and manliness was the key-note of his creed. There was no other necessity in this life.
“But a man must live,” said one of his kindred, to whom, truth to tell, he had refused assistance.
“No, sir; that is just what he can’t do. A man must die! So, while he lives, let him be a man!”
How inharmonious a setting, then, forDr.Sevier, was 3½ Carondelet Street! As he drove each morning, down to that point, he had to pass through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either sidewalk—a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that “Time is money.”
“It’s a great deal more, sir, it’s life!” the Doctor always retorted.
Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling of cotton yielded big harvests in perquisites. At every jog of the Doctor’s horse, men came to view whose riches were the outcome of semi-respectable larceny. It was a day of reckless operation; much of the commerce that came to New Orleans was simply, as one might say, beached in Carondelet Street. The sight used to keep the long, thin, keen-eyed doctor in perpetual indignation.
“Look at the wreckers!” he would say.
It was breakfast at eight, indignation at nine, dyspepsia at ten.
So his setting was not merely inharmonious; it was damaging. He grew sore on the whole matter of money-getting.
“Yes, I have money. But I don’t go after it. It comes to me, because I seek and render service for the service’s sake. It will come to anybody else the same way; and why should it come any other way?”
He not only had a low regard for the motives of most seekers of wealth, he went further, and fell into much disbelief of poor men’s needs. For instance, he looked upon a man’s inability to find employment, or upon a poor fellow’s run of bad luck, as upon the placarded woes of a hurdy-gurdy beggar.
“If he wants work he will find it. As for begging, it ought to be easier for any true man to starve than to beg.”
The sentiment was ungentle, but it came from the bottom of his belief concerning himself, and a longing for moral greatness in all men.
“However,” he would add, thrusting his hand intohis pocket and bringing out his purse, “I’ll help any man to make himself useful. And the sick—well, the sick, as a matter of course. Only I must know what I’m doing.”
Have some of us known want? To have known her—though to love her was impossible—is “a liberal education.” The Doctor was learned; but this acquaintanceship, this education, he had never got. Hence his untenderness. Shall we condemn the fault? Yes. And the man? We have not the face. To bejust, which he never knowingly failed to be, and at the same time to feel tenderly for the unworthy, to deal kindly with the erring—it is a double grace that hangs not always in easy reach even of the tallest. The Doctor attained to it—but in later years; meantime, this story—which, I believe, had he ever been poor would never have been written.
He had barely disposed of the three or four waiting messengers that arose from their chairs against the corridor wall, and was still reading the anxious lines left in various handwritings on his slate, when the young man entered. He was of fair height, slenderly built, with soft auburn hair, a little untrimmed, neat dress, and a diffident, yet expectant and courageous, face.
“Dr.Sevier?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Doctor, my wife is very ill; can I get you to come at once and see her?”
“Who is her physician?”
“I have not called any; but we must have one now.”
“I don’t know about going at once. This is my hour for being in the office. How far is it, and what’s the trouble?”
“We are only three squares away, just here in Custom-house Street.” The speaker began to add a faltering enumeration of some very grave symptoms. The Doctor noticed that he was slightly deaf; he uttered his words as though he did not hear them.
“Yes,” interruptedDr.Sevier, speaking half to himself as he turned around to a standing case of cruel-looking silver-plated things on shelves; “that’s a small part of the penalty women pay for the doubtful honor of being our mothers. I’ll go. What is your number? But you had better drive back with me if you can.” He drew back from the glass case, shut the door, and took his hat.
“Narcisse!”
On the side of the office nearest the corridor a door let into a hall-room that afforded merely good space for the furniture needed by a single accountant. The Doctor had other interests besides those of his profession, and, taking them altogether, found it necessary, or at least convenient, to employ continuously the services of a person to keep his accounts and collect his bills. Through the open door the bookkeeper could be seen sitting on a high stool at a still higher desk—a young man of handsome profile and well-knit form. At the call of his name he unwound his legs from the rounds of the stool and leaped into the Doctor’s presence with a superlatively highbred bow.
“I shall be back in fifteen minutes,” said the Doctor. “Come,Mr.——,” and went out with the stranger.
Narcisse had intended to speak. He stood a moment, then lifted the last half inch of a cigarette to his lips, took a long, meditative inhalation, turned half round on his heel, dashed the remnant with fierce emphasis into a spittoon, ejected two long streams of smoke from his nostrils, and, extending his fist toward the door by which the Doctor had gone out, said:—
“All right, ole hoss!” No, not that way. It is hard to give his pronunciation by letter. In the word “right” he substituted an a for the r, sounding it almost in the same instant with the i, yet distinct from it: “All a-ight, ole hoss!”
Then he walked slowly back to his desk, with that feeling of relief which some men find in the renewal of a promissory note, twined his legs again among those of the stool, and, adding not a word, resumed his pen.
FAMOUS WOMEN NOVELISTS.NOTED WOMEN NOVELISTS.OCTAVE THANET • AMELIA E. BARR • ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS (WARD)JANE GOODWIN AUSTIN • HARRIET BEECHER STOWE • CHAS. EGBERT CRADDOCKMARION HARLAND • FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT • HELEN HUNT JACKSON(‡ decoration)HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.AUTHOR OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”FEW names are more indelibly written upon our country’s history than that of Harriet Beecher Stowe. “No book,” says George William Curtis, “was ever more a historical event than ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ... It was the great happiness ofMrs.Stowe not only to have written many delightful books, but to have written one book which will always be famous not only as the most vivid picture of an extinct evil system, but as one of the most powerful influences in overthrowing it.... If all whom she has charmed and quickened should unite to sing her praises, the birds of summer would be outdone.”Harriet Beecher Stowe was the sixth child of Reverend Lyman Beecher,—the great head of that great family which has left so deep an impress upon the heart and mind of the American people. She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in June, 1811,—just two years before her next younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher. Her father was pastor of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, and her girlhood was passed there and at Hartford, where she attended the excellent seminary kept by her elder sister, Catharine E. Beecher. In 1832 her father accepted a call to the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary, at Cincinnati, and moved thither with his family. Catharine Beecher went also, and established there a new school, under the name of the Western Female Institute, in which Harriet assisted.In 1833Mrs.Stowe first had the subject of slavery brought to her personal notice by taking a trip across the river from Cincinnati into Kentucky in company with Miss Dutton, one of the associate teachers in the Western Institute. They visited the estate that afterward figured as that ofMr.Shelby, in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and here the young authoress first came into personal contact with the slaves of the South.Among the professors in Lane Seminary was Calvin E. Stowe, whose wife, a dear friend of Miss Beecher, died soon afterDr.Beecher’s removal to Cincinnati. In 1836 Professor Stowe and Harriet Beecher were married. They were admirably suited to each other. Professor Stowe was a typical man of letters,—a learned, amiable, unpractical philosopher, whose philosophy was like that described by Shakespeare as “an excellent horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.” Her practical ability and cheerful, inspiring courage were the unfailing support of her husband.The years from 1845 to 1850 were a time of severe trial toMrs.Stowe. She and her husband both suffered from ill health, and the family was separated. Professor Stowe was struggling with poverty, and endeavoring at the same time to lift the Theological Seminary out of financial difficulties. In 1849, while Professor Stowe was ill at a water-cure establishment in Vermont, their youngest child died of cholera, which was then raging in Cincinnati. In 1850 it was decided to remove to Brunswick, Maine, the seat of Bowdoin College, where Professor Stowe was offered a position.UNCLE TOM AND HIS BABY.“’Ain’t she a peart young ’un?’”The year 1850 is memorable in the history of the conflict with slavery. It was the year of Clay’s compromise measures, as they were called, which sought to satisfy the North by the admission of California as a free State, and to propitiate the South by the notorious “Fugitive Slave Law.” The slave power was at its height, andseemed to hold all things under its feet; yet in truth it had entered upon the last stage of its existence, and the forces were fast gathering for its final overthrow. Professor Cairnes and others said truly, “The Fugitive Slave Law has been to the slave power a questionable gain. Among its first fruits was ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”The story was begun as a serial in theNational Era, June 5, 1851, and was announced to run for about three months, but it was not completed in that paper until April 1, 1852. It had been contemplated as a mere magazine tale of perhaps a dozen chapters, but once begun it could no more be controlled than the waters of the swollen Mississippi, bursting through a crevasse in its levees. The intense interest excited by the story, the demands made upon the author for more facts, the unmeasured words of encouragement to keep on in her good work that poured in from all sides, and, above all, the ever-growing conviction that she had been intrusted with a great and holy mission, compelled her to keep on until the humble tale had assumed the proportions of a large volume.Mrs.Stowe repeatedly said, “I could not control the story, it wrote itself;” and, “I the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’? No, indeed. The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest of instruments in his hand. To him alone should be given all the praise.”For the story as a serial the author received $300. In the meantime, however, it had attracted the attention ofMr.John P. Jewett, a Boston publisher, who promptly made overtures for its publication in book form. He offeredMr.andMrs.Stowe a half share in the profits, provided they would share with him the expense of publication. This was refused by the Professor, who said he was altogether too poor to assume any such risk; and the agreement finally made was that the author should receive a ten per cent. royalty upon all sales.In the meantime the fears of the author as to whether or not her book would be read were quickly dispelled. Three thousand copies were sold the very first day, a second edition was issued the following week, a third a few days later; and within a year one hundred and twenty editions, or over three hundred thousand copies, of the book had been issued and sold in this country. Almost in a day the poor professor’s wife had become the most talked-of woman in the world; her influence for good was spreading to its remotest corners, and henceforth she was to be a public character, whose every movement would be watched with interest, and whose every word would be quoted. The long, weary struggle with poverty was to be hers no longer; for, in seeking to aid the oppressed, she had also so aided herself that within four months from the time her book was published it had yielded her $10,000 in royalties.In 1852 Professor Stowe received a call to the professorship of Sacred Literature in Andover Theological Seminary, and the family soon removed to their Massachusetts home. They were now relieved from financial pressure; butMrs.Stowe’s health was still delicate; and in 1853 she went with her husband and brother to England, where she received, much to her surprise, a universal welcome. She made many friends among the most distinguished people in Great Britain, and on the continent as well. On her return she wrote the “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and began “Dred, a Tale of the Dismal Swamp.” In fact, her literary career was just beginning. With “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” her powers seemed only to be fairlyawakened. One work after another came in quick succession. For nearly thirty years after the publication of “Uncle Tom,” her pen was never idle. In 1854 she published “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands,” and then, in rapid succession, “The Minister’s Wooing,” “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” “Agnes of Sorrento,” “House and Home Papers,” “Little Foxes,” and “Oldtown Folks.” These, however, are but a small part of her works. Besides more than thirty books, she has written magazine articles, short stories, and sketches almost without number. She has entertained, instructed, and inspired a generation born long after the last slave was made free, and to whom the great question which once convulsed our country is only a name. But her first great work has never been surpassed, and it will never be forgotten.A SCENE IN UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.Little Eva.—“‘Oh, Uncle Tom! what funny things youaremaking there.’”After the war which accomplished the abolition of slavery,Mrs.Stowe lived in Hartford, Connecticut, in summer, and spent the winters in Florida, where she bought a luxurious home. Her pen was hardly ever idle; and the popularity of her works seemed to steadily increase. She passed away on the1stof July, 1896, amid the surroundings of her quiet, pretty home at Hartford, Connecticut. The whole reading world was moved at the news of her death, and many a chord vibrated at the remembrance of her powerful, and we may even say successful, advocacy of the cause of the slave. The good which “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” achieved can never be estimated, and the noble efforts of its author have been interwoven in the work of the world.THE LITTLE EVANGELIST.FROM “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”IT was Sunday afternoon.St.Clare was stretched on a bamboo lounge in the verandah, solacing himself with a cigar. Marie lay reclined on a sofa, opposite the window opening on the verandah, closely secluded under an awning of transparent gauze from the outrages of the mosquitoes, and languidly holding in her hand an elegantly-bound prayer-book. She was holding it because it was Sunday, and she imagined she had been reading it—though, in fact, she had been only taking a succession of short naps with it open in her hand.Miss Ophelia, who, after some rumaging, had hunted up a small Methodist meeting within riding distance, had gone out, with Tom as driver, to attend it, and Eva accompanied them.“I say, Augustine,” said Marie, after dozing awhile, “I must send to the city after my old doctor, Posey; I’m sure I’ve got the complaint of the heart.”“Well; why need you send for him? This doctor that attends Eva seems skillful.”“I would not trust him in a critical case,” said Marie; “and I think I may say mine is becoming so! I’ve been thinking of it these two or three nights past; I have such distressing pains and such strange feelings.”“Oh, Marie, you are blue! I don’t believe it’s heart-complaint.”“I daresayyoudon’t,” said Marie; “I was prepared to expectthat. You can be alarmed enough if Eva coughs, or has the least thing the matter with her; but you never think of me.”“If it’s particularly agreeable to you to have heart-disease, why, I’ll try and maintain you have it,” saidSt.Clare; “I didn’t know it was.”“Well, I only hope you won’t be sorry for this when it’s too late!” said Marie. “But, believe it or not, my distress about Eva, and the exertions I have made with that dear child, have developed what I have long suspected.”What theexertionswere which Marie referred to it would have been difficult to state.St.Clare quietly made this commentary to himself, and went on smoking, like a hard-hearted wretch of a man as he was, till a carriage drove up before the verandah, and Eva and Miss Ophelia alighted.Miss Ophelia marched straight to her own chamber, to put away her bonnet and shawl, as was always her manner, before she spoke a word on any subject; while Eva came atSt.Clare’s call, and was sitting on his knee, giving him an account of the services they had heard.They soon heard loud exclamations from Miss Ophelia’s room (which, like the one in which they were sitting, opened to the verandah), and violent reproof addressed to somebody.“What new witchcraft has Tops been brewing?” askedSt.Clare. “That commotion is of her raising, I’ll be bound!”And in a moment after, Miss Ophelia, in high indignation, came dragging the culprit along.“Come out here, now!” she said. “Iwilltell your master!”“What’s the case now?” asked Augustine.“The case is, that I cannot be plagued with this child any longer! It’s past all bearing; flesh and blood cannot endure it! Here, I locked her up, and gave her a hymn to study and what does she do but spy out where I put my key, and has gone to my bureau and got a bonnet-trimming and cut it all to pieces to make dolls’ jackets! I never saw anything like it in my life.”MISS OPHELIA AND TOPSY.“I cannot be plagued with this child any longer!”“I told you, cousin,” said Marie, “that you’d find out that these creatures can’t be brought up without severity. If I hadmyway, now,” she said, looking reproachfully atSt.Clare, “I’d send that child out and have her thoroughly whipped; I’d have her whipped till she couldn’t stand!”“I don’t doubt it,” saidSt.Clare. “Tell me of the lovely rule of woman! I never saw above a dozen women that wouldn’t half kill a horse, or a servant either, if they had their own way with them—let alone a man.”“There is no use in this shilly-shally way of yours,St.Clare!” said Marie. “Cousin is a woman of sense, and she sees it now as plain as I do.”Miss Ophelia had just the capability of indignationthat belongs to the thorough-paced housekeeper, and this had been pretty actively roused by the artifice and wastefulness of the child; in fact, many of my lady readers must own that they would have felt just so in her circumstances; but Marie’s words went beyond her, and she felt less heat.“I wouldn’t have the child treated so for the world,” she said; “but I am sure, Augustine, I don’t know what to do. I’ve taught and taught, I’ve talked till I’m tired, I’ve whipped her, I’ve punished her in every way I can think of; and still she’s just what she was at first.”“Come here, Tops, you monkey!” saidSt.Clare, calling the child up to him.Topsy came up; her round, hard eyes glittering and blinking with a mixture of apprehensiveness and their usual odd drollery.“What makes you behave so?” saidSt.Clarewho could not help being amused with the child’s expression.“’Spects it’s my wicked heart,” said Topsy, demurely; “Miss Feely says so.”“Don’t you see how much Miss Ophelia has done for you? She says, she has done everything she can think of.”“Lor, yes, mas’r! old missis used to say so, too. She whipped me a heap harder, and used to pull my ha’r, and knock my head agin the door; but it didn’t do me no good! I ’spects if they’s to pull every spear o’ ha’r out o’ my head it wouldn’t do no good neither—I’s so wicked! Laws! I’s nothin’ but a nigger, no ways!”“Well, I shall have to give her up,” said Miss Ophelia; “I can’t have that trouble any longer.”“Well, I’d just like to ask one question,” saidSt.Clare.“What is it?”“Why, if your Gospel is not strong enough to save one heathen child, that you can have at home here, all to yourself, what’s the use of sending one or two poor missionaries off with it among thousands of just such? I suppose this child is about a fair sample of what thousands of your heathen are.”Miss Ophelia did not make an immediate answer; and Eva, who had stood a silent spectator of the scene thus far, made a silent sign to Topsy to follow her. There was a little glass-room at the corner of the verandah, whichSt.Clare used as a sort of reading-room; and Eva and Topsy disappeared into this place.“What’s Eva going about now?” saidSt.Clare; “I mean to see.”And, advancing on tiptoe, he lifted up a curtain that covered the glass-door, and looked in. In a moment, laying his finger on his lips, he made a silent gesture to Miss Ophelia to come and look. There sat the two children on the floor, with their side faces towards them—Topsy with her usual air of careless drollery and unconcern; but, opposite to her, Eva, her whole face fervent with feeling, and tears in her large eyes.“What does make you so bad, Topsy? Why won’t you try and be good? Don’t you loveanybody, Topsy?”“Dun no nothin’ ’bout love; I loves candy and sich, that’s all,” said Topsy.“But you love your father and mother?”“Never had none, ye know. I telled ye that, Miss Eva.”“Oh, I know,” said Eva, sadly; “but hadn’t you any brother, or sister, or aunt, or——”“No, none on ’em—never had nothing nor nobody.”“But, Topsy, if you’d only try to be good, you might——”“Couldn’t never be nothin’ but a nigger, if I was ever so good,” said Topsy. “If I could be skinned, and come white, I’d try then.”“But people can love you, if you are black, Topsy. Miss Ophelia would love you if you were good.”Topsy gave the short, blunt laugh that was her common mode of expressing incredulity.“Don’t you think so?” said Eva.“No; she can’t b’ar me, ’cause I’m a nigger!—she’d’s soon have a toad touch her. There can’t nobody love niggers, and niggers can’t do nothin’. I don’t care,” said Topsy, beginning to whistle.“Oh, Topsy, poor child,Ilove you!” said Eva, with a sudden burst of feeling, and laying her little thin, white hand on Topsy’s shoulder. “I love you because you haven’t had any father, or mother, or friends—because you’ve been a poor, abused child! I love you, and I want you to be good. I am very unwell, Topsy, and I think I sha’n’t live a great while; and it really grieves me to have you be so naughty. I wish you would try to be good for my sake; it’s only a little while I shall be with you.”The round, keen eyes of the black child were overcast with tears; large, bright drops rolled heavily down, one by one, and fell on the little white hand. Yes, in that moment a ray of real belief, a ray of heavenly love, had penetrated the darkness of her heathen soul! She laid her head down between her knees, and wept and sobbed; while the beautiful child, bending over her, looked like the picture of some bright angel stooping to reclaim a sinner.“Poor Topsy!” said Eva, “don’t you know that Jesus loves all alike? He is just as willing to love you as me. He loves you just as I do, only more, because He is better. He will help you to be good, and you can go to heaven at last, and be an angel for ever, just as much as if you were white. Onlythink of it, Topsy,youcan be one of those ’spirits bright’ Uncle Tom sings about.”“Oh, dear Miss Eva! dear Miss Eva!” said the child, “I will try! I will try! I never did care nothin’ about it before.”St.Clare at this moment dropped the curtain. “It puts me in mind of mother,” he said to Miss Ophelia. “It is true what she told me: if we want to give sight to the blind, we must be willing to do as Christ did—call them to us andput our hands on them.”“I’ve always had a prejudice against negroes,” said Miss Ophelia; “and it’s a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me; but I didn’t think she knew it.”“Trust any child to find that out,” saidSt.Clare: “there’s no keeping it from them. But I believe that all the trying in the world to benefit a child, and all the substantial favors you can do them, will never excite one emotion of gratitude while that feeling of repugnance remains in the heart; it’s a queer kind of fact, but so it is.”“I don’t know how I can help it,” said Miss Ophelia; “theyaredisagreeable to me—this child in particular. How can I help feeling so?”“Eva does, it seems.”“Well, she’s so loving! After all, though, she’s no more than Christ-like,” said Miss Ophelia: “I wish I were like her. She might teach me a lesson.”“It wouldn’t be the first time a little child had been used to instruct an old disciple, if itwereso,” saidSt.Clare.THE OTHER WORLD.IT lies around us like a cloud,The world we do not see;Yet the sweet closing of an eyeMay bring us there to be.Its gentle breezes fan our cheek,Amid our worldly cares;Its gentle voices whisper love,And mingle with our prayers.Sweet hearts around us throb and beat,Sweet helping hands are stirred;And palpitates the veil between,With breathings almost heard.The silence, awful, sweet, and calm,They have no power to break;For mortal words are not for themTo utter or partake.So thin, so soft, so sweet they glide,So near to press they seem,They lull us gently to our rest,They melt into our dream.And, in the hush of rest they bring,’Tis easy now to see,How lovely and how sweet to passThe hour of death may be;—To close the eye and close the ear,Wrapped in a trance of bliss,And, gently drawn in loving arms,To swoon from that to this:—Scarce knowing if we wake or sleep,Scarce asking where we are,To feel all evil sink away,All sorrow and all care!(‡ decoration)
NOTED WOMEN NOVELISTS.OCTAVE THANET • AMELIA E. BARR • ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS (WARD)JANE GOODWIN AUSTIN • HARRIET BEECHER STOWE • CHAS. EGBERT CRADDOCKMARION HARLAND • FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT • HELEN HUNT JACKSON
NOTED WOMEN NOVELISTS.
OCTAVE THANET • AMELIA E. BARR • ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS (WARD)JANE GOODWIN AUSTIN • HARRIET BEECHER STOWE • CHAS. EGBERT CRADDOCKMARION HARLAND • FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT • HELEN HUNT JACKSON
(‡ decoration)
AUTHOR OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”
FEW names are more indelibly written upon our country’s history than that of Harriet Beecher Stowe. “No book,” says George William Curtis, “was ever more a historical event than ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ... It was the great happiness ofMrs.Stowe not only to have written many delightful books, but to have written one book which will always be famous not only as the most vivid picture of an extinct evil system, but as one of the most powerful influences in overthrowing it.... If all whom she has charmed and quickened should unite to sing her praises, the birds of summer would be outdone.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe was the sixth child of Reverend Lyman Beecher,—the great head of that great family which has left so deep an impress upon the heart and mind of the American people. She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in June, 1811,—just two years before her next younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher. Her father was pastor of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, and her girlhood was passed there and at Hartford, where she attended the excellent seminary kept by her elder sister, Catharine E. Beecher. In 1832 her father accepted a call to the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary, at Cincinnati, and moved thither with his family. Catharine Beecher went also, and established there a new school, under the name of the Western Female Institute, in which Harriet assisted.
In 1833Mrs.Stowe first had the subject of slavery brought to her personal notice by taking a trip across the river from Cincinnati into Kentucky in company with Miss Dutton, one of the associate teachers in the Western Institute. They visited the estate that afterward figured as that ofMr.Shelby, in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and here the young authoress first came into personal contact with the slaves of the South.
Among the professors in Lane Seminary was Calvin E. Stowe, whose wife, a dear friend of Miss Beecher, died soon afterDr.Beecher’s removal to Cincinnati. In 1836 Professor Stowe and Harriet Beecher were married. They were admirably suited to each other. Professor Stowe was a typical man of letters,—a learned, amiable, unpractical philosopher, whose philosophy was like that described by Shakespeare as “an excellent horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.” Her practical ability and cheerful, inspiring courage were the unfailing support of her husband.
The years from 1845 to 1850 were a time of severe trial toMrs.Stowe. She and her husband both suffered from ill health, and the family was separated. Professor Stowe was struggling with poverty, and endeavoring at the same time to lift the Theological Seminary out of financial difficulties. In 1849, while Professor Stowe was ill at a water-cure establishment in Vermont, their youngest child died of cholera, which was then raging in Cincinnati. In 1850 it was decided to remove to Brunswick, Maine, the seat of Bowdoin College, where Professor Stowe was offered a position.
UNCLE TOM AND HIS BABY.“’Ain’t she a peart young ’un?’”
UNCLE TOM AND HIS BABY.
“’Ain’t she a peart young ’un?’”
The year 1850 is memorable in the history of the conflict with slavery. It was the year of Clay’s compromise measures, as they were called, which sought to satisfy the North by the admission of California as a free State, and to propitiate the South by the notorious “Fugitive Slave Law.” The slave power was at its height, andseemed to hold all things under its feet; yet in truth it had entered upon the last stage of its existence, and the forces were fast gathering for its final overthrow. Professor Cairnes and others said truly, “The Fugitive Slave Law has been to the slave power a questionable gain. Among its first fruits was ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”
The story was begun as a serial in theNational Era, June 5, 1851, and was announced to run for about three months, but it was not completed in that paper until April 1, 1852. It had been contemplated as a mere magazine tale of perhaps a dozen chapters, but once begun it could no more be controlled than the waters of the swollen Mississippi, bursting through a crevasse in its levees. The intense interest excited by the story, the demands made upon the author for more facts, the unmeasured words of encouragement to keep on in her good work that poured in from all sides, and, above all, the ever-growing conviction that she had been intrusted with a great and holy mission, compelled her to keep on until the humble tale had assumed the proportions of a large volume.Mrs.Stowe repeatedly said, “I could not control the story, it wrote itself;” and, “I the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’? No, indeed. The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest of instruments in his hand. To him alone should be given all the praise.”
For the story as a serial the author received $300. In the meantime, however, it had attracted the attention ofMr.John P. Jewett, a Boston publisher, who promptly made overtures for its publication in book form. He offeredMr.andMrs.Stowe a half share in the profits, provided they would share with him the expense of publication. This was refused by the Professor, who said he was altogether too poor to assume any such risk; and the agreement finally made was that the author should receive a ten per cent. royalty upon all sales.
In the meantime the fears of the author as to whether or not her book would be read were quickly dispelled. Three thousand copies were sold the very first day, a second edition was issued the following week, a third a few days later; and within a year one hundred and twenty editions, or over three hundred thousand copies, of the book had been issued and sold in this country. Almost in a day the poor professor’s wife had become the most talked-of woman in the world; her influence for good was spreading to its remotest corners, and henceforth she was to be a public character, whose every movement would be watched with interest, and whose every word would be quoted. The long, weary struggle with poverty was to be hers no longer; for, in seeking to aid the oppressed, she had also so aided herself that within four months from the time her book was published it had yielded her $10,000 in royalties.
In 1852 Professor Stowe received a call to the professorship of Sacred Literature in Andover Theological Seminary, and the family soon removed to their Massachusetts home. They were now relieved from financial pressure; butMrs.Stowe’s health was still delicate; and in 1853 she went with her husband and brother to England, where she received, much to her surprise, a universal welcome. She made many friends among the most distinguished people in Great Britain, and on the continent as well. On her return she wrote the “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and began “Dred, a Tale of the Dismal Swamp.” In fact, her literary career was just beginning. With “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” her powers seemed only to be fairlyawakened. One work after another came in quick succession. For nearly thirty years after the publication of “Uncle Tom,” her pen was never idle. In 1854 she published “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands,” and then, in rapid succession, “The Minister’s Wooing,” “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” “Agnes of Sorrento,” “House and Home Papers,” “Little Foxes,” and “Oldtown Folks.” These, however, are but a small part of her works. Besides more than thirty books, she has written magazine articles, short stories, and sketches almost without number. She has entertained, instructed, and inspired a generation born long after the last slave was made free, and to whom the great question which once convulsed our country is only a name. But her first great work has never been surpassed, and it will never be forgotten.
A SCENE IN UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.Little Eva.—“‘Oh, Uncle Tom! what funny things youaremaking there.’”
A SCENE IN UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.Little Eva.—“‘Oh, Uncle Tom! what funny things youaremaking there.’”
A SCENE IN UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
Little Eva.—“‘Oh, Uncle Tom! what funny things youaremaking there.’”
After the war which accomplished the abolition of slavery,Mrs.Stowe lived in Hartford, Connecticut, in summer, and spent the winters in Florida, where she bought a luxurious home. Her pen was hardly ever idle; and the popularity of her works seemed to steadily increase. She passed away on the1stof July, 1896, amid the surroundings of her quiet, pretty home at Hartford, Connecticut. The whole reading world was moved at the news of her death, and many a chord vibrated at the remembrance of her powerful, and we may even say successful, advocacy of the cause of the slave. The good which “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” achieved can never be estimated, and the noble efforts of its author have been interwoven in the work of the world.
THE LITTLE EVANGELIST.
FROM “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”
IT was Sunday afternoon.St.Clare was stretched on a bamboo lounge in the verandah, solacing himself with a cigar. Marie lay reclined on a sofa, opposite the window opening on the verandah, closely secluded under an awning of transparent gauze from the outrages of the mosquitoes, and languidly holding in her hand an elegantly-bound prayer-book. She was holding it because it was Sunday, and she imagined she had been reading it—though, in fact, she had been only taking a succession of short naps with it open in her hand.Miss Ophelia, who, after some rumaging, had hunted up a small Methodist meeting within riding distance, had gone out, with Tom as driver, to attend it, and Eva accompanied them.“I say, Augustine,” said Marie, after dozing awhile, “I must send to the city after my old doctor, Posey; I’m sure I’ve got the complaint of the heart.”“Well; why need you send for him? This doctor that attends Eva seems skillful.”“I would not trust him in a critical case,” said Marie; “and I think I may say mine is becoming so! I’ve been thinking of it these two or three nights past; I have such distressing pains and such strange feelings.”“Oh, Marie, you are blue! I don’t believe it’s heart-complaint.”“I daresayyoudon’t,” said Marie; “I was prepared to expectthat. You can be alarmed enough if Eva coughs, or has the least thing the matter with her; but you never think of me.”“If it’s particularly agreeable to you to have heart-disease, why, I’ll try and maintain you have it,” saidSt.Clare; “I didn’t know it was.”“Well, I only hope you won’t be sorry for this when it’s too late!” said Marie. “But, believe it or not, my distress about Eva, and the exertions I have made with that dear child, have developed what I have long suspected.”What theexertionswere which Marie referred to it would have been difficult to state.St.Clare quietly made this commentary to himself, and went on smoking, like a hard-hearted wretch of a man as he was, till a carriage drove up before the verandah, and Eva and Miss Ophelia alighted.Miss Ophelia marched straight to her own chamber, to put away her bonnet and shawl, as was always her manner, before she spoke a word on any subject; while Eva came atSt.Clare’s call, and was sitting on his knee, giving him an account of the services they had heard.They soon heard loud exclamations from Miss Ophelia’s room (which, like the one in which they were sitting, opened to the verandah), and violent reproof addressed to somebody.“What new witchcraft has Tops been brewing?” askedSt.Clare. “That commotion is of her raising, I’ll be bound!”And in a moment after, Miss Ophelia, in high indignation, came dragging the culprit along.“Come out here, now!” she said. “Iwilltell your master!”“What’s the case now?” asked Augustine.“The case is, that I cannot be plagued with this child any longer! It’s past all bearing; flesh and blood cannot endure it! Here, I locked her up, and gave her a hymn to study and what does she do but spy out where I put my key, and has gone to my bureau and got a bonnet-trimming and cut it all to pieces to make dolls’ jackets! I never saw anything like it in my life.”MISS OPHELIA AND TOPSY.“I cannot be plagued with this child any longer!”“I told you, cousin,” said Marie, “that you’d find out that these creatures can’t be brought up without severity. If I hadmyway, now,” she said, looking reproachfully atSt.Clare, “I’d send that child out and have her thoroughly whipped; I’d have her whipped till she couldn’t stand!”“I don’t doubt it,” saidSt.Clare. “Tell me of the lovely rule of woman! I never saw above a dozen women that wouldn’t half kill a horse, or a servant either, if they had their own way with them—let alone a man.”“There is no use in this shilly-shally way of yours,St.Clare!” said Marie. “Cousin is a woman of sense, and she sees it now as plain as I do.”Miss Ophelia had just the capability of indignationthat belongs to the thorough-paced housekeeper, and this had been pretty actively roused by the artifice and wastefulness of the child; in fact, many of my lady readers must own that they would have felt just so in her circumstances; but Marie’s words went beyond her, and she felt less heat.“I wouldn’t have the child treated so for the world,” she said; “but I am sure, Augustine, I don’t know what to do. I’ve taught and taught, I’ve talked till I’m tired, I’ve whipped her, I’ve punished her in every way I can think of; and still she’s just what she was at first.”“Come here, Tops, you monkey!” saidSt.Clare, calling the child up to him.Topsy came up; her round, hard eyes glittering and blinking with a mixture of apprehensiveness and their usual odd drollery.“What makes you behave so?” saidSt.Clarewho could not help being amused with the child’s expression.“’Spects it’s my wicked heart,” said Topsy, demurely; “Miss Feely says so.”“Don’t you see how much Miss Ophelia has done for you? She says, she has done everything she can think of.”“Lor, yes, mas’r! old missis used to say so, too. She whipped me a heap harder, and used to pull my ha’r, and knock my head agin the door; but it didn’t do me no good! I ’spects if they’s to pull every spear o’ ha’r out o’ my head it wouldn’t do no good neither—I’s so wicked! Laws! I’s nothin’ but a nigger, no ways!”“Well, I shall have to give her up,” said Miss Ophelia; “I can’t have that trouble any longer.”“Well, I’d just like to ask one question,” saidSt.Clare.“What is it?”“Why, if your Gospel is not strong enough to save one heathen child, that you can have at home here, all to yourself, what’s the use of sending one or two poor missionaries off with it among thousands of just such? I suppose this child is about a fair sample of what thousands of your heathen are.”Miss Ophelia did not make an immediate answer; and Eva, who had stood a silent spectator of the scene thus far, made a silent sign to Topsy to follow her. There was a little glass-room at the corner of the verandah, whichSt.Clare used as a sort of reading-room; and Eva and Topsy disappeared into this place.“What’s Eva going about now?” saidSt.Clare; “I mean to see.”And, advancing on tiptoe, he lifted up a curtain that covered the glass-door, and looked in. In a moment, laying his finger on his lips, he made a silent gesture to Miss Ophelia to come and look. There sat the two children on the floor, with their side faces towards them—Topsy with her usual air of careless drollery and unconcern; but, opposite to her, Eva, her whole face fervent with feeling, and tears in her large eyes.“What does make you so bad, Topsy? Why won’t you try and be good? Don’t you loveanybody, Topsy?”“Dun no nothin’ ’bout love; I loves candy and sich, that’s all,” said Topsy.“But you love your father and mother?”“Never had none, ye know. I telled ye that, Miss Eva.”“Oh, I know,” said Eva, sadly; “but hadn’t you any brother, or sister, or aunt, or——”“No, none on ’em—never had nothing nor nobody.”“But, Topsy, if you’d only try to be good, you might——”“Couldn’t never be nothin’ but a nigger, if I was ever so good,” said Topsy. “If I could be skinned, and come white, I’d try then.”“But people can love you, if you are black, Topsy. Miss Ophelia would love you if you were good.”Topsy gave the short, blunt laugh that was her common mode of expressing incredulity.“Don’t you think so?” said Eva.“No; she can’t b’ar me, ’cause I’m a nigger!—she’d’s soon have a toad touch her. There can’t nobody love niggers, and niggers can’t do nothin’. I don’t care,” said Topsy, beginning to whistle.“Oh, Topsy, poor child,Ilove you!” said Eva, with a sudden burst of feeling, and laying her little thin, white hand on Topsy’s shoulder. “I love you because you haven’t had any father, or mother, or friends—because you’ve been a poor, abused child! I love you, and I want you to be good. I am very unwell, Topsy, and I think I sha’n’t live a great while; and it really grieves me to have you be so naughty. I wish you would try to be good for my sake; it’s only a little while I shall be with you.”The round, keen eyes of the black child were overcast with tears; large, bright drops rolled heavily down, one by one, and fell on the little white hand. Yes, in that moment a ray of real belief, a ray of heavenly love, had penetrated the darkness of her heathen soul! She laid her head down between her knees, and wept and sobbed; while the beautiful child, bending over her, looked like the picture of some bright angel stooping to reclaim a sinner.“Poor Topsy!” said Eva, “don’t you know that Jesus loves all alike? He is just as willing to love you as me. He loves you just as I do, only more, because He is better. He will help you to be good, and you can go to heaven at last, and be an angel for ever, just as much as if you were white. Onlythink of it, Topsy,youcan be one of those ’spirits bright’ Uncle Tom sings about.”“Oh, dear Miss Eva! dear Miss Eva!” said the child, “I will try! I will try! I never did care nothin’ about it before.”St.Clare at this moment dropped the curtain. “It puts me in mind of mother,” he said to Miss Ophelia. “It is true what she told me: if we want to give sight to the blind, we must be willing to do as Christ did—call them to us andput our hands on them.”“I’ve always had a prejudice against negroes,” said Miss Ophelia; “and it’s a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me; but I didn’t think she knew it.”“Trust any child to find that out,” saidSt.Clare: “there’s no keeping it from them. But I believe that all the trying in the world to benefit a child, and all the substantial favors you can do them, will never excite one emotion of gratitude while that feeling of repugnance remains in the heart; it’s a queer kind of fact, but so it is.”“I don’t know how I can help it,” said Miss Ophelia; “theyaredisagreeable to me—this child in particular. How can I help feeling so?”“Eva does, it seems.”“Well, she’s so loving! After all, though, she’s no more than Christ-like,” said Miss Ophelia: “I wish I were like her. She might teach me a lesson.”“It wouldn’t be the first time a little child had been used to instruct an old disciple, if itwereso,” saidSt.Clare.
IT was Sunday afternoon.St.Clare was stretched on a bamboo lounge in the verandah, solacing himself with a cigar. Marie lay reclined on a sofa, opposite the window opening on the verandah, closely secluded under an awning of transparent gauze from the outrages of the mosquitoes, and languidly holding in her hand an elegantly-bound prayer-book. She was holding it because it was Sunday, and she imagined she had been reading it—though, in fact, she had been only taking a succession of short naps with it open in her hand.
Miss Ophelia, who, after some rumaging, had hunted up a small Methodist meeting within riding distance, had gone out, with Tom as driver, to attend it, and Eva accompanied them.
“I say, Augustine,” said Marie, after dozing awhile, “I must send to the city after my old doctor, Posey; I’m sure I’ve got the complaint of the heart.”
“Well; why need you send for him? This doctor that attends Eva seems skillful.”
“I would not trust him in a critical case,” said Marie; “and I think I may say mine is becoming so! I’ve been thinking of it these two or three nights past; I have such distressing pains and such strange feelings.”
“Oh, Marie, you are blue! I don’t believe it’s heart-complaint.”
“I daresayyoudon’t,” said Marie; “I was prepared to expectthat. You can be alarmed enough if Eva coughs, or has the least thing the matter with her; but you never think of me.”
“If it’s particularly agreeable to you to have heart-disease, why, I’ll try and maintain you have it,” saidSt.Clare; “I didn’t know it was.”
“Well, I only hope you won’t be sorry for this when it’s too late!” said Marie. “But, believe it or not, my distress about Eva, and the exertions I have made with that dear child, have developed what I have long suspected.”
What theexertionswere which Marie referred to it would have been difficult to state.St.Clare quietly made this commentary to himself, and went on smoking, like a hard-hearted wretch of a man as he was, till a carriage drove up before the verandah, and Eva and Miss Ophelia alighted.
Miss Ophelia marched straight to her own chamber, to put away her bonnet and shawl, as was always her manner, before she spoke a word on any subject; while Eva came atSt.Clare’s call, and was sitting on his knee, giving him an account of the services they had heard.
They soon heard loud exclamations from Miss Ophelia’s room (which, like the one in which they were sitting, opened to the verandah), and violent reproof addressed to somebody.
“What new witchcraft has Tops been brewing?” askedSt.Clare. “That commotion is of her raising, I’ll be bound!”
And in a moment after, Miss Ophelia, in high indignation, came dragging the culprit along.
“Come out here, now!” she said. “Iwilltell your master!”
“What’s the case now?” asked Augustine.
“The case is, that I cannot be plagued with this child any longer! It’s past all bearing; flesh and blood cannot endure it! Here, I locked her up, and gave her a hymn to study and what does she do but spy out where I put my key, and has gone to my bureau and got a bonnet-trimming and cut it all to pieces to make dolls’ jackets! I never saw anything like it in my life.”
MISS OPHELIA AND TOPSY.“I cannot be plagued with this child any longer!”
MISS OPHELIA AND TOPSY.
“I cannot be plagued with this child any longer!”
“I told you, cousin,” said Marie, “that you’d find out that these creatures can’t be brought up without severity. If I hadmyway, now,” she said, looking reproachfully atSt.Clare, “I’d send that child out and have her thoroughly whipped; I’d have her whipped till she couldn’t stand!”
“I don’t doubt it,” saidSt.Clare. “Tell me of the lovely rule of woman! I never saw above a dozen women that wouldn’t half kill a horse, or a servant either, if they had their own way with them—let alone a man.”
“There is no use in this shilly-shally way of yours,St.Clare!” said Marie. “Cousin is a woman of sense, and she sees it now as plain as I do.”
Miss Ophelia had just the capability of indignationthat belongs to the thorough-paced housekeeper, and this had been pretty actively roused by the artifice and wastefulness of the child; in fact, many of my lady readers must own that they would have felt just so in her circumstances; but Marie’s words went beyond her, and she felt less heat.
“I wouldn’t have the child treated so for the world,” she said; “but I am sure, Augustine, I don’t know what to do. I’ve taught and taught, I’ve talked till I’m tired, I’ve whipped her, I’ve punished her in every way I can think of; and still she’s just what she was at first.”
“Come here, Tops, you monkey!” saidSt.Clare, calling the child up to him.
Topsy came up; her round, hard eyes glittering and blinking with a mixture of apprehensiveness and their usual odd drollery.
“What makes you behave so?” saidSt.Clarewho could not help being amused with the child’s expression.
“’Spects it’s my wicked heart,” said Topsy, demurely; “Miss Feely says so.”
“Don’t you see how much Miss Ophelia has done for you? She says, she has done everything she can think of.”
“Lor, yes, mas’r! old missis used to say so, too. She whipped me a heap harder, and used to pull my ha’r, and knock my head agin the door; but it didn’t do me no good! I ’spects if they’s to pull every spear o’ ha’r out o’ my head it wouldn’t do no good neither—I’s so wicked! Laws! I’s nothin’ but a nigger, no ways!”
“Well, I shall have to give her up,” said Miss Ophelia; “I can’t have that trouble any longer.”
“Well, I’d just like to ask one question,” saidSt.Clare.
“What is it?”
“Why, if your Gospel is not strong enough to save one heathen child, that you can have at home here, all to yourself, what’s the use of sending one or two poor missionaries off with it among thousands of just such? I suppose this child is about a fair sample of what thousands of your heathen are.”
Miss Ophelia did not make an immediate answer; and Eva, who had stood a silent spectator of the scene thus far, made a silent sign to Topsy to follow her. There was a little glass-room at the corner of the verandah, whichSt.Clare used as a sort of reading-room; and Eva and Topsy disappeared into this place.
“What’s Eva going about now?” saidSt.Clare; “I mean to see.”
And, advancing on tiptoe, he lifted up a curtain that covered the glass-door, and looked in. In a moment, laying his finger on his lips, he made a silent gesture to Miss Ophelia to come and look. There sat the two children on the floor, with their side faces towards them—Topsy with her usual air of careless drollery and unconcern; but, opposite to her, Eva, her whole face fervent with feeling, and tears in her large eyes.
“What does make you so bad, Topsy? Why won’t you try and be good? Don’t you loveanybody, Topsy?”
“Dun no nothin’ ’bout love; I loves candy and sich, that’s all,” said Topsy.
“But you love your father and mother?”
“Never had none, ye know. I telled ye that, Miss Eva.”
“Oh, I know,” said Eva, sadly; “but hadn’t you any brother, or sister, or aunt, or——”
“No, none on ’em—never had nothing nor nobody.”
“But, Topsy, if you’d only try to be good, you might——”
“Couldn’t never be nothin’ but a nigger, if I was ever so good,” said Topsy. “If I could be skinned, and come white, I’d try then.”
“But people can love you, if you are black, Topsy. Miss Ophelia would love you if you were good.”
Topsy gave the short, blunt laugh that was her common mode of expressing incredulity.
“Don’t you think so?” said Eva.
“No; she can’t b’ar me, ’cause I’m a nigger!—she’d’s soon have a toad touch her. There can’t nobody love niggers, and niggers can’t do nothin’. I don’t care,” said Topsy, beginning to whistle.
“Oh, Topsy, poor child,Ilove you!” said Eva, with a sudden burst of feeling, and laying her little thin, white hand on Topsy’s shoulder. “I love you because you haven’t had any father, or mother, or friends—because you’ve been a poor, abused child! I love you, and I want you to be good. I am very unwell, Topsy, and I think I sha’n’t live a great while; and it really grieves me to have you be so naughty. I wish you would try to be good for my sake; it’s only a little while I shall be with you.”
The round, keen eyes of the black child were overcast with tears; large, bright drops rolled heavily down, one by one, and fell on the little white hand. Yes, in that moment a ray of real belief, a ray of heavenly love, had penetrated the darkness of her heathen soul! She laid her head down between her knees, and wept and sobbed; while the beautiful child, bending over her, looked like the picture of some bright angel stooping to reclaim a sinner.
“Poor Topsy!” said Eva, “don’t you know that Jesus loves all alike? He is just as willing to love you as me. He loves you just as I do, only more, because He is better. He will help you to be good, and you can go to heaven at last, and be an angel for ever, just as much as if you were white. Onlythink of it, Topsy,youcan be one of those ’spirits bright’ Uncle Tom sings about.”
“Oh, dear Miss Eva! dear Miss Eva!” said the child, “I will try! I will try! I never did care nothin’ about it before.”
St.Clare at this moment dropped the curtain. “It puts me in mind of mother,” he said to Miss Ophelia. “It is true what she told me: if we want to give sight to the blind, we must be willing to do as Christ did—call them to us andput our hands on them.”
“I’ve always had a prejudice against negroes,” said Miss Ophelia; “and it’s a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me; but I didn’t think she knew it.”
“Trust any child to find that out,” saidSt.Clare: “there’s no keeping it from them. But I believe that all the trying in the world to benefit a child, and all the substantial favors you can do them, will never excite one emotion of gratitude while that feeling of repugnance remains in the heart; it’s a queer kind of fact, but so it is.”
“I don’t know how I can help it,” said Miss Ophelia; “theyaredisagreeable to me—this child in particular. How can I help feeling so?”
“Eva does, it seems.”
“Well, she’s so loving! After all, though, she’s no more than Christ-like,” said Miss Ophelia: “I wish I were like her. She might teach me a lesson.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a little child had been used to instruct an old disciple, if itwereso,” saidSt.Clare.
THE OTHER WORLD.
IT lies around us like a cloud,The world we do not see;Yet the sweet closing of an eyeMay bring us there to be.Its gentle breezes fan our cheek,Amid our worldly cares;Its gentle voices whisper love,And mingle with our prayers.Sweet hearts around us throb and beat,Sweet helping hands are stirred;And palpitates the veil between,With breathings almost heard.The silence, awful, sweet, and calm,They have no power to break;For mortal words are not for themTo utter or partake.So thin, so soft, so sweet they glide,So near to press they seem,They lull us gently to our rest,They melt into our dream.And, in the hush of rest they bring,’Tis easy now to see,How lovely and how sweet to passThe hour of death may be;—To close the eye and close the ear,Wrapped in a trance of bliss,And, gently drawn in loving arms,To swoon from that to this:—Scarce knowing if we wake or sleep,Scarce asking where we are,To feel all evil sink away,All sorrow and all care!(‡ decoration)
IT lies around us like a cloud,The world we do not see;Yet the sweet closing of an eyeMay bring us there to be.Its gentle breezes fan our cheek,Amid our worldly cares;Its gentle voices whisper love,And mingle with our prayers.Sweet hearts around us throb and beat,Sweet helping hands are stirred;And palpitates the veil between,With breathings almost heard.The silence, awful, sweet, and calm,They have no power to break;For mortal words are not for themTo utter or partake.So thin, so soft, so sweet they glide,So near to press they seem,They lull us gently to our rest,They melt into our dream.And, in the hush of rest they bring,’Tis easy now to see,How lovely and how sweet to passThe hour of death may be;—To close the eye and close the ear,Wrapped in a trance of bliss,And, gently drawn in loving arms,To swoon from that to this:—Scarce knowing if we wake or sleep,Scarce asking where we are,To feel all evil sink away,All sorrow and all care!
T lies around us like a cloud,
The world we do not see;
Yet the sweet closing of an eye
May bring us there to be.
Its gentle breezes fan our cheek,
Amid our worldly cares;
Its gentle voices whisper love,
And mingle with our prayers.
Sweet hearts around us throb and beat,
Sweet helping hands are stirred;
And palpitates the veil between,
With breathings almost heard.
The silence, awful, sweet, and calm,
They have no power to break;
For mortal words are not for them
To utter or partake.
So thin, so soft, so sweet they glide,
So near to press they seem,
They lull us gently to our rest,
They melt into our dream.
And, in the hush of rest they bring,
’Tis easy now to see,
How lovely and how sweet to pass
The hour of death may be;—
To close the eye and close the ear,
Wrapped in a trance of bliss,
And, gently drawn in loving arms,
To swoon from that to this:—
Scarce knowing if we wake or sleep,
Scarce asking where we are,
To feel all evil sink away,
All sorrow and all care!
(‡ decoration)