Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Whoever would read a profound political pamphlet under the guise of a brilliant novel may find it in "Sibyl, or The Two Nations." The gay overture of "The Eve of the Derby," at a London club, with which the curtain rises, contrasts with the evening amusements of the _prolétaire_ in the gin-palaces of Manchester in a more than operatic effectiveness, and yet falls rather below than rises above the sober truth of present history. And we are often tempted to bind up the novel of the dashing Parliamenteer with our copy of "Ivanhoe," that we may thus have, side by side, from the pens of the Right Honorable Benjamin Disraeli and Sir Walter Scott, the beginning and the end of these eight hundred years of struggle between Norman rule and Saxon endurance. For let races and families change as they will, there have ever been in England two nations; and the old debate of Wamba and Gurth in the forest-glade by Rotherwood is illustrated by the unconscious satires of last week's "Punch." In Chartism, Reform-Bills, and Strikes, in the etiquette which guards the Hesperides of West-End society, in the rigid training which stops many an adventurer midway in his career, are written the old characters of the forest-laws of Rufus and the Charter of John. Races and families change, but the distinction endures, is stamped upon all things pertaining to both.

We in America, who boast our descent from this matrimony of Norman and Saxon, claim also that we have blent the features of the two into one homogeneous people. In this country, where the old has become new, and the new is continually losing its raw lustre before the glitter of some fresher splendor, the traces of the contest are all but obliterated. Only our language has come to us with the brand of the fatherland upon it. In our mother-tongue prevails the same principle of dualism, the same conflict of elements, which not all the lethean baptism of the Atlantic could wash out. The two nations of England survive in the two tongues of America.

We beg the reluctant reader not to prematurely pooh-pooh as a "miserable mouse" this conclusion, thinking that we are only serving up again that old story of Wamba and Gurth with an added _sauce-piquante_ from Dean Trench. We admit that we allude to that original composition of English past and present from a Latin and a Teutonic stock. But that is to us not an ultimate, but a primal fact. It is the premise from which we propose to trace out the principle now living and working in our present speech. We commence our history with that strife of the tongues which had at the outset also their battle of Hastings, their field of Sanilac. There began the feud which to-day continues to divide our language, though the descendants of the primitive stocks are inextricably mingled.

For it is as in "Sibyl." That novel showed us the peer's descendants at the workman's forge, while the manufacturer's grandchildren were wearing the ermine and the strawberry-leaves. There is the constant passing to and fro across the one border-line which never changes. Dandy Mick and Devilsdust save a little money and become "respectable." We can follow out their history after Mr. Disraeli leaves them. They marry Harriet and Caroline, and contrive to educate a sharp boy or two, who will rise to become superintendents in the mills and to speculate in cotton-spinning. They in turn send into trade, with far greater advantages, their sons. The new generation, still educating, and, faithful to the original impulse, putting forth its fresh and aspiring tendrils, gets one boy into the church, another at the bar, and keeps a third at the great _Rouge-et-Noir_ table of commerce. Some one of their stakes has a run of luck. Either it is my Lord Eldon who sits on the wool-sack, or the young curate bids his Oxford laurels against a head-mastership of a public school and covers his baldness with a mitre, or Jones Lloyd steps from his back parlor into the carriage which is to take Lord Overstone to the House of Peers. From the day when young Osborne, the bold London 'prentice, leaped into the Thames to fish up thence his master's daughter, and brought back, not only the little lady, but the ducal coronet of Leeds in prospective, to that when Thomas Newcome the elder walked up to the same London that he might earn the "bloody hand" for Sir Brian and Sir Barnes, English life has been full of such gallant achievements.

So it has been with the words these speak. The phrases of the noble Canon Chaucer have fallen to the lips of peasants and grooms, while many a pert Cockney saying has elbowed its sturdy way into her Majesty's High Court of Parliament. Yet still there are two tongues flowing through our daily talk and writing, like the Missouri and Mississippi, with distinct and contrasted currents.

And this appears the more strikingly in this country, where other distinctions are lost. We have an aristocracy of language, whose phrases, like the West-End men of "Sibyl," are effeminate, extravagant, conventional, and prematurely worn-out. These words represent ideas which are theirs only by courtesy and conservatism, like the law-terms of the courts, or the "cant" of certain religious books. We have also a plebeian tongue, whose words are racy, vigorous, and healthy, but which men look askance at, when met in polite usage, in solemn literature, and in sermons. Norman and Saxon are their relative positions, as in the old time when "Ox" was for the serf who drove a-field the living animal, and "Beef" for the baron who ate him; but their lineage is counter-crossed by a hundred, nay, a thousand vicissitudes.

With this aristocracy of speech we are all familiar. We do not mean with the speech of our aristocracy, which is quite another thing, but that which is held appropriate for "great occasions," for public parade, and for pen, ink, and types. It is cherished where all aristocracies flourish best,--in the "rural districts." There is a style and a class of words and phrases belonging to country newspapers, and to the city weeklies which have the largest bucolic circulation, which you detect in the Congressional eloquence of the honorable member for the Fifteenth District, Mass., and in the Common-School Reports of Boston Corner,--a style and words that remind us of the country gentry whose titles date back to the Plantagenets. They look so strangely beside the brisk, dapper curtnesses in which metropolitan journals transact their daily squabbles! We never write one of them out without an involuntary addition of quotation-marks, as a New-Yorker puts to his introduction of his verdant cousin the supplementary, "From the Jerseys." Their etymological Herald's Office is kept by schoolmasters, and especially schoolma'ams, or, in the true heraldic tongue, "Preceptresses of Educational Seminaries." You may find them in Mr. Hobbs, Jr.'s, celebrated tale of "The Bun-Baker of Cos-Cob," or in Bowline's thrilling novelette of "Beauty and Booty, or The Black Buccaneer of the Bermudas." They glitter in the train of "Napoleon and his Marshals," and look down upon us from the heights of "The Sacred Mountains."

Occasionally you will find them degraded from their high estate and fallen among the riff-raff of slang. They become "seedy" words, stripped of their old meaning, mere _chevaliers d'industrie_, yet with something of the air noble about them which distinguishes them from the born "cad." The word "convey" once suffered such eclipse, (we are glad to say it has come up again,) and consorted, unless Falstaff be mistaken, with such low blackguards as "nim" and "cog" and "prig" and similar "flash" terms.

But we do not propose to linger among the "upper-ten" of the dictionaries. The wont of such is to follow the law of hereditary aristocracies: the old blood gets thin, there is no sparkle to the _sangre azul_, the language dies out in poverty. The strong, new, popular word forces its way up, is heard at the bar, gets quoted in the pulpit, slips into the outer ring of good society. King Irving or King Emerson lays his pen across its shoulder and it rises up ennobled, till finally it is accepted of the "Atlantic Monthly," and its court-presentation is complete.

We have thus indicated the nature of the great contest in language between the conventional and the idiomatic. Idioms are just what their name implies. They are the commonalty of language,--private, proletarian words, who do the work, "_dum alteri tulerunt honores_." They come to us from all handiworks and callings, where you will always find them at their posts. Sharp, energetic, incisive, they do the hard labor of speech,--that of carrying heavy loads of thought and shaping new ideas.

We think them vulgar at first, and savoring of the shop; but they are useful and handy, and we cannot do without them. They rivet, they forge, they coin, they "fire up," "brake up," "switch off," "prospect," "shin" for us when we are "short," "post up" our books, and finally ourselves, "strike a lead," "follow a trail," "stand up to the rack," "dicker," "swap," and "peddle." They are "whole teams" beside the "one-horse" vapidities which fail to bear our burdens. The Norman cannot keep down the Saxon. The Saxon finds his Wat Tyler or Jack Cade. Now "Mose" brings his Bowery Boys into our parlor, or Cromwell Judd recruits his Ironsides from the hamlets of the Kennebec.

We declare for the prolétaires. We vote the working-words ticket. We have to plead the cause of American idioms. Some of them have, as we said, good blood in them and can trace their lineage and standing to the English Bible and Book of Common Prayer; others are "new men," born under hedge-rows and left as foundlings at furnace-doors. And before we go farther, we have a brief story to tell in illustration of the two tongues.

A case of assault and battery was tried in a Western court. The plaintiff's counsel informed the jury in his opening, that he was "prepared to prove that the defendant, a steamboat-captain, menaced his client, an English traveller, and put him in bodily fear, commanding him to vacate the avenue of the steamboat with his baggage, or he would precipitate him into the river." The evidence showed that the captain called out,--"Stranger, ef you don't tote your plunder off that gang-plank, I'll spill you in the drink."

We submit that for terseness and vigor the practitioner at the bar of the Ohio had the better of the learned counsel who appeared at the bar of justice, albeit his client was in a Cockney mystification at the address.

The illustration will serve our turn. It points to a class of phrases which are indigenous to various localities of the land, in which the native thought finds appropriate, bold, and picturesque utterance. And these in time become incorporate into the universal tongue. Of them is the large family of political phrases. These are coined in moments of intense excitement, struck out at white heat, or, to follow our leading metaphor, like the speakers who use them, come upon the stump in their shirt-sleeves. Every campaign gives us a new horde. Some die out at once; others felicitously tickle the public ear and ring far and wide. They "speak for Buncombe," are Barn-Burners, Old Hunkers, Hard Shells, Soft Shells, Log-Rollers, Pipe-Layers, Woolly Heads, Silver Grays, Locofocos, Fire-Eaters, Adamantines, Free Soilers, Freedom Shriekers, Border Ruffians. They spring from a bon-mot or a retort. The log-cabin and hard-cider watchwords were born of a taunt, like the "Gueux" of the Netherlands. The once famous phrase, Gerrymandering, some of our readers may remember. Governor Elbridge Gerry contrived, by a curious arrangement of districts in Massachusetts, to transfer the balance of power to his own party. One of his opponents, poring over the map of the Commonwealth, was struck by the odd look of the geographical lines which thus were drawn, curving in and out among the towns and counties. "It looks," said he, "like a Salamander." "Looks like a _Gerry_-mander!" ejaculated another; and the term stuck long and closely.

Now and then you have the aristocratic and democratic sides of an idea in use at the same time. Those who style themselves "Gentlemen of the Press" are known to the rest of mankind as "Dead Heads,"--being, for paying purposes, literally, _capita mortua_.

So, too, our colleges are provided, over and above the various dead languages of their classic curriculum, with the two tongues. The one serves the young gentlemen, especially in their Sophomoric maturity, with appropriate expressions for their literary exercises and public flights. The other is for their common talk, tells who "flunked" and was "deaded," who "fished" with the tutor, who "cut" prayers, and who was "digging" at home. Each college, from imperial Harvard and lordly Yale to the freshest Western "Institution," whose three professors fondly cultivate the same number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect with its quadrennial changes. The just budded Freshmen of the class of '64 could hardly without help decipher "The Rebelliad," which in the Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day. The good old gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes of the college-speech of their grandsons. Whence come these phrases few can tell. Like witty Dr. S------'s "quotation," which never was anything else, they started in life as sayings, springing full-grown, like Pallas Athene, from the laboring brain of some Olympic Sophister. Here in the quiet of our study in the country, we wonder if the boys continue as in our day to "create a shout," instead of "making a call," upon their lady acquaintances,--if they still use "ponies,"--if they "group," and get, as we did, "parietals" and "publics" for the same.

The police courts contribute their quota. Baggage-smashing, dog-smudging, ring-dropping, watch-stuffing, the patent-safe men, the confidence men, garroters, shysters, policy-dealers, mock-auction Peter Funks, bogus-ticket swindlers, are all terms which have more or less outgrown the bounds of their Alsatia of Thieves' Latin and are known of men.

Even the pulpit, with its staid decorums, has its idioms, which it cannot quite keep to itself. We hear in the religious world of "professors," and "monthly concerts," (which mean praying, and not psalmody,) of "sensation-preaching," (which takes the place of the "painful" preaching of old times,) of "platform-speakers," of "revival-preachers," of "broad pulpits," and "Churches of the Future," of the "Eclipse of Faith" and the "Suspense of Faith," of "liberal" Christians, (with no reference to the contribution-plates,) of "subjective" and "objective" sermons, "Spurgeonisms," and "businessmen's meetings." And we can never think without a smile of that gifted genius, whoever he was, who described a certain public exercise as _"the most eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience."_ He surely created a new and striking idiom.

The boys do, as Young America should, their share. And the sayings of street urchins endure with singular tenacity. Like their sports, which follow laws of their own, uninfluenced by meteorological considerations, tending to the sedentary games of marbles in the cold, chilly spring, and bursting into base-and foot-ball in the midsummer solstice, strict tradition hands down from boy to boy the well-worn talk. There are still "busters," as in our young days, and the ardent youth upon floating cakes of ice "run bendolas" or "kittly-benders," or simply "benders." In different latitudes the phrase varies,--one-half of it going to Plymouth Colony, and the other abiding in Massachusetts Bay. And this tendency to dismember a word is curiously shown in that savory fish which the Indian christened "scup-paug." Eastward he swims as "scup," while at the Manhattan end of the Sound he is fried as "porgie." And apropos of him, let us note a curious instance of the tenacity of associated ideas. The street boys of our day and early home were wont to term the _hetairai_ of the public walks "scup." The young Athenians applied to the classic courtesans the epithet of [Greek: saperdion], the name of a small fish very abundant in the Black Sea. Here now is a bit of slang which may fairly be warranted to keep fresh in any climate.

But boy-talk is always lively and pointed; not at all precise, but very prone to prosopopeia; ever breaking out of the bounds of legitimate speech to invent new terms of its own. Dr. Busby addresses Brown, Jr., as Brown Secundus, and speaks to him of his "young companions." Brown himself talks of "the chaps," or "the fellows," who in turn know Brown only as Tom Thumb. The power of nicknaming is a school-boy gift, which no discouragement of parents and guardians can crush out, and which displays thoroughly the idiomatic faculty. For a man's name was once _his_, the distinctive mark by which the world got at his identity. Long, Short, White, Black, Greathead, Longshanks, etc., told what a person in the eyes of men the owner presented. The hereditary or aristocratic process has killed this entirely. Men no longer make their names; even the poor foundlings, like Oliver Twist, are christened alphabetically by some Bumble the Beadle. But the nickname restores his lost rights, and takes the man at once out of the _ignoble vulgus_ to give him identity. We recognize this gift and are proud of our nicknames, when we can get them to suit us. Only the sharp judgment of our peers reverses our own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr upon us. The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature. The sponsorial appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or profanely out of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name itself. So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice. But the nickname abides. It has its hold in affection. When the "old boys" come together in Gore Hall at their semi-centennial Commencement, or the "Puds" or "Pores" get together after long absence, it is not to inquire what has become of the Rev. Dr. Heavysterne or his Honor Littleton Coke, but it is, "Who knows where Hockey Jones is?" and "Did Dandy Glover really die in India?" and "Let us go and call upon Old Sykes" or "Old Roots" or "Old Conic-Sections,"--thus meaning to designate Professor----, LL.D., A.A.S., F.R.S., etc. A college president who had no nickname would prove himself, _ipso facto_, unfit for his post. It is only dreadfully affected people who talk of "Tully"; the sensible all cling to the familiar "Chick-Pea" or Cicero, by which the wart-faced orator was distinguished. For it is not the boys only, but all American men, who love nicknames, the idioms of nomenclature. The first thing which is done, after a nominating convention has made its platform and balloted for its candidates, is to discover or invent a nickname: Old Hickory, Tippecanoe, The Little Giant, The Little Magician, The Mill-Boy of the Slashes, Honest John, Harry of the West, Black Dan, Old Buck, Old Rough and Ready. A "good name" is a tower of strength and many votes.

And not only with candidates for office, the spots on whose "white garments" are eagerly sought for and labelled, but in the names of places and classes the principle prevails, the democratic or Saxon tongue gets the advantage. Thus, we have for our states, cities, and ships-of-war the title of fondness which drives out the legal title of ceremony. Are we not "Yankees" to the world, though to the diplomatists "citizens of the United States of America"? We have a Union made up upon the map of Maine, New Hampshire, etc., to California; we have another in the newspapers, composed of the Lumber State, the Granite State, the Green-Mountain State, the Nutmeg State, the Empire State, the Keystone State, the Blue Hen, the Old Dominion, of Hoosiers, Crackers, Suckers, Badgers, Wolverines, the Palmetto State, and Eldorado. We have the Crescent City, the Quaker City, the Empire City, the Forest City, the Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances. We hear of Old Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon, ordered home. Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a new title upon succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins. So indomitable is the Saxon.

We have not done yet with our national idioms. In the seaboard towns nautical phrases make tarry the talk of the people. "Where be you a-cruising to?" asks one Nantucket matron of her gossip. "Sniver-dinner, I'm going to Egypt; Seth B. has brought a letter from Turkey-wowner to Old Nancy." "Dressed-to-death-and-drawers-empty, don't you see we're goin' to have a squall? You had better take in your stu'n'-sails." The good woman was dressed up, intending, "_as soon as ever_ dinner was over," to go, not to the land of the Pharaohs, but to the negro-quarter of the town, with a letter which "Seth B." (her son, thus identified by his middle letter) had brought home from Talcahuana.

For the rural idioms we refer the reader to the late Sylvester Judd's "Margaret" and "Richard Edney," and to the Jack Downing Letters.

The town is not behind the country. For, whatever is the current fancy, pugilism, fire-companies, racing, railway-building, or the opera, its idioms invade the talk. The Almighty Dollar of our worship has more synonymes than the Roman Pantheon had divinities. We are not "well-informed," but "posted" or "posted up." We are not "hospitably entreated" any more, but "put through." We do not "meet with misadventure," but "see the elephant," which we often do through the Hibernian process of "fighting the tiger."

Purists deplore this, but it is inevitable; and if one searches beneath the surface, there is often a curious deposit of meaning, sometimes auriferous enough to repay our use of cradle and rocker. We "panned out," the other day, a phrase which gave us great delight, and which illustrated a fact in New England history worth noting. We were puzzling over the word "socdollager," which Bartlett, we think, defines as "Anything very large and striking,"--_Anglicé_, a "whopper,"--"also a peculiar fish-hook." The word first occurs in print, we believe, in Mr. Cooper's "Home as Found," applied to a patriarch among the white bass of Otsego Lake, which could never be captured. We assumed at once that there was a latent reason for the term, and all at once it flashed upon us that it was a rough fisherman's random-shot at the word "doxology." This, in New England congregations, as all know, was wont to be sung, or "j'ined in," by the whole assembly, and given with particular emphasis, both because its words were familiar to all without book, and because it served instead of the chanted creed of their Anglican forefathers. The last thing, after which nothing could properly follow, the most important and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee Walton the crowning hope of his life,--the big bass, after taking which he might put hook-and-line on the shelf. By a slight transposition, natural enough to untrained organs, "doxology" became "socdollager."

We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a little way into our native forests. We refer to the prevalent habit of idiomatic speech as a fact that makes part of our literature. It cannot be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided. It is well, of course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our literature past and present will tend. But we hold to no Know-Nothing platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy. As Ruskin says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy. If the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can keep its language from corruption. If its ideas are ignoble, it will turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place. It converts the prince's palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which it tramples. It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its portions apart for holy uses,--at least, by preserving intact the high religious association which rests upon it. The same silver may be moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the madness of the revel. Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness, forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the prurient all things are foul. It was a reverent and a worshipping age that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.

And to return once more to our original illustration. We have the two nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the aspiring, the patrician and the _prolétaire_. The one rules only by right of rule, the other rises only by right of rising. The power of conservatism perishes, when there is no longer anything to keep; the might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is taken away or degraded. So long as the noble is noble and "_noblesse oblige_," so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the whole. If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters, all that is most worthy. Whatever makes the nation's life will make its speech. War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal of its language upon poetry. Agriculture was the Saxon's calling, and he made literature a mirror of the life he led. We in this new land are born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to tell our story. The Herald's College gives precedence to the Patent-Office, and the shepherd's pipe to the steam-whistle. And since all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells upon its barren sea-shore.

MIDSUMMER AND MAY.

[Continued.]

II.

When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about anything to go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals. I cannot say that he did not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not of a self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary, luxurious and accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only through wealth. But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his thirteen years' exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action and freedom and real life. He had been happy in reaching India before his uncle's death, in applying his own clear understanding to the intricate entanglements of the affairs before him, in rescuing his uncle's commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not occurred to him till thrust there by the pressure of circumstances. For the rest, I am not sure that Mr. Raleigh did not find his path suiting him well enough. There was no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think of it. That strange summer, that had flashed into his life like the gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must be forgotten; the forms that had peopled it, in his determination, should become shadows. Valiant vows! Yet there must have come moments, in that long lapse of days and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments and swept imperiously through his memory: nights, when, under the shadow of the Himmaleh, the old passion rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and drowned out forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if checked as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable and full of pain,--warm, wide, Southern nights, when all the stars, great and golden, leaned out of heaven to meet him, and all ripe perfumes, wafted by their own principle of motion, floated in the rich dusk and laden air about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights sought vainly to lend him its calm. Days also must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets? Nor was this regret, that had at last become a part of the man's identity, entirely a selfish one. He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his destiny that a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so it happened that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed man, with the shadow of old and enduring melancholy on his life, but with no certain sorrow there.

In the course of time his business-connections extended themselves; he was associated with other men more intent than he upon their aim; although not wealthy, years might make him so; his name commanded respect. Something of his old indifference lingered about him; it was seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,--the merchants wrapped in snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,--the strange faces, modes, and manners,--the stranger beasts, immense, and alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature. One day all was ready for his departure; and in the clipper ship Osprey, with a cargo for Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell to India.

The Osprey was a swift sailer and handled with consummate skill, so that I shall not venture to say in how few days she had weathered the Cape, and, ploughing up the Atlantic, had passed the Windward Islands, and off the latter had encountered one of the severest gales in Captain Tarbell's remembrance, although he was not new to shipwreck. If Mr. Raleigh had found no time for reflection in the busy current of affairs, when, ceasing to stand aside, he had mingled in the turmoil and become a part of the generations of men, he could not fail to find it in this voyage, not brief at best, and of which every day's progress must assure him anew toward what land and what people he was hastening. Moreover, Fate had woven his lot, it seemed, inextricably among those whom he would shun; for Mr. Laudersdale himself was deeply interested in the Osprey's freight, and it would be incumbent upon him to extend his civilities to Mr. Raleigh. But Mr. Raleigh was not one to be cozened by circumstances more than by men.

The severity of the gale, which they had met some three days since, had entirely abated; the ship was laid to while the slight damage sustained was undergoing repair, and rocked heavily under the gray sky on the long, sullen swell and roll of the grayer waters. Mr. Raleigh had just come upon deck at dawn, where he found every one in unaccountable commotion. "Ship to leeward in distress," was all the answer his inquiries could obtain, while the man on the topmast was making his observations. Mr. Raleigh could see nothing, but every now and then the boom of a gun came faintly over the distance. The report having been made, it was judged expedient to lower a boat and render her such assistance as was possible. Mr. Raleigh never could tell how it came to pass that he found himself one of the volunteers in this dangerous service.

The disabled vessel proved to be a schooner from the West Indies in a sinking condition. A few moments sufficed to relieve a portion of her passengers, sad wretches who for two days had stared death in the face, and they pulled back toward the Osprey. A second and third journey across the waste, and the remaining men prepared to lower the last woman into the boat, when a stout, but extremely pale individual, who could no longer contain his frenzy of fear, clambered down the chains and dropped in her place. There was no time to be lost, and nothing to do but submit; the woman was withdrawn to wait her turn with the captain and crew, and the laden boat again labored back to the ship. Each trip in the heavy sea and the blinding rain occupied no less than a couple of hours, and it was past noon when, uncertain just before if she might yet be there, they again came within sight of the little schooner, slowly and less slowly settling to her doom. As they approached her at last, Mr. Raleigh could plainly detect the young woman standing at a little distance from the anxious group, leaning against the broken mast with crossed arms, and looking out over the weary stretch with pale, grave face and quiet eyes. At the motion of the captain, she stepped forward, bound the ropes about herself, and was swung over the side to await the motion of the boat, as it slid within reach on the top of the long wave, or receded down its shining, slippery hollow. At length one swell brought it nearer, Mr. Raleigh's arms snatched the slight form and drew her half-fainting into the boat, a cloak was tossed after, and one by one the remainder followed; they were all safe, and some beggared. The bows of the schooner already plunged deep down in the gaping gulfs, they pulled bravely away, and were tossed along from billow to billow.

"You are very uncomfortable, Mademoiselle Le Blanc?" asked the rescued captain at once of the young woman, as she sat beside him in the stern-sheets.

"_Moi?_" she replied. "_Mais non, Monsieur._"

Mr. Raleigh wrapped the cloak about her, as she spoke. They were equidistant from the two vessels, neither of which was to be seen, the rain fell fast into the hissing brine, their fate still uncertain. There was something strangely captivating and reassuring in this young girl's equanimity, and he did not cease speculating thereon till they had again reached the Osprey, and she had disappeared below.

By degrees the weather lightened; the Osprey was on the wing again, and a week's continuance of this fair wind would bring them into port. The next day, toward sunset, as Mr. Raleigh turned about in his regular pacing of the deck, he saw at the opposite extremity of the ship the same slight figure dangerously perched upon the taffrail, leaning over, now watching the closing water, and now eagerly shading her eyes with her hand to observe the ship which they spoke, as they lay head to the wind, and for a better view of which she had climbed to this position. It was not Mr. Raleigh's custom to interfere; if people chose to drown themselves, he was not the man to gainsay them; but now, as his walk drew him toward her, it was the most natural thing in the world to pause and say,--

"_Il serait fâcheux, Mademoiselle, lorsqu' on a failli faire naufrage, de se noyer_"--and, in want of a word, Mr. Raleigh ignominiously descended to his vernacular--"with a lee-lurch."

The girl, resting on the palm of one hand, and unsupported otherwise, bestowed upon him no reply, and did not turn her head. Mr. Raleigh looked at her a moment, and then continued his walk. Returning, the thing happened as he had predicted, and, with a little quick cry, Mademoiselle Le Blanc was hanging by her hands among the ropes. Reaching her with a spring, "_Viens, petite!_" he said, and with an effort placed her on her feet again before an alarm could have been given.

"_Ah! mais je crus c'en était fait de moi!_" she exclaimed, drawing in her breath like a sob. In an instant, however, surveying Mr. Raleigh, the slight emotion seemed to yield to one of irritation, that she had been rescued by him; for she murmured quickly, in English, head haughtily thrown back and eyes downcast,--"Monsieur thinks that I owe him much for having saved my life!"

"Mademoiselle best knows its worth," said he, rather amused, and turning away.

The girl was still looking down; now, however, she threw after him a quick glance.

"_Tenez!_" said she, imperiously, and stepping toward him. "You fancy me very ungrateful," she continued, lifting her slender hand, and with the back of it brushing away the floating hair at her temples. "Well, I am not, and at some time it may be that I prove it. I do not like to owe debts; but, since I must, I will not try to cancel them with thanks."

Mr. Raleigh bowed, but said nothing. She seemed to think it necessary to efface any unpleasant impression, and, with a little more animation and a smile, added,--"The Captain Tarbell told me your name, Mr. Raleigh, and that you had not been at home for thirteen years. _Ni moi non plus_,--at least, I suppose it is home where I am going; yet I remember no other than the island and my"--

And here the girl opened her eyes wide, as if determined that they should not fill with tears, and looked out over the blue and sparkling fields around them. There was a piquancy in her accent that made the hearer wish to hear further, and a certain artlessness in her manner not met with recently by him. He moved forward, keeping her beside him.

"Then you are not French," he said.

"I? Oh, no,--nor Creole. I was born in America; but I have always lived with mamma on the plantation; _et maintenant, il y a six mois qu'elle est morte!_"

Here she looked away again. Mr. Raleigh's glance followed hers, and, returning, she met it bent kindly and with a certain grave interest upon her. She appeared to feel reassured, somewhat protected by one so much her elder.

"I am going now to my father," she said, "and to my other mother."

"A second marriage," thought Mr. Raleigh, "and before the orphan's crapes are"--Then, fearful lest she should read his thought, he added,--"And how do you speak such perfect English?"

"Oh, my father came to see us every other year, and I have written home twice a week since I was a little child. Mamma, too, spoke as much English as French."

"I have not been in America for a long time," said Mr. Raleigh, after a few steps. "But I do not doubt that you will find enjoyment there. It will be new: womanhood will have little like youth for you; but, in every event, it is well to add to our experience, you know."

"What is it like, Sir? But I know! Rows of houses, very counterparts of rows of houses, and they of rows of houses yet beyond. Just the toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks"--

"Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide, possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble of Paros, and gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure."

"It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one," said she, dreamily. "_Mais non, je m'y perds_. Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New York avenues lined with them."

"No; the houses there are palaces."

"I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace," she answered, with a light tinkling laugh. "That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!"

"Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?" said Mr. Raleigh.

"At home," she replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds. _Ainsi soit il!_" she added, and shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.

"You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be obliged to wear the shroud."

"Not long, to be sure, at first. We go to freeze in the country, a place with distant hills of blue ice, my old nurse told me,--old Ursule. Oh, Sir, she was drowned! I saw the very wave that swept her off!"

"That was your servant?"

"Yes."

"Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you. She was tall and large?"

"_Oui_."

"Her name was Ursule?"

"_Oui! je dis que oui!_"

Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness. "She is below, then," he said,--"not drowned. There is Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds, will you take this young lady to her servant, Ursule, the woman you rescued?"

And Mademoiselle Le Blanc disappeared under that gentleman's escort.

The ordinary restraints of social life not obtaining so much on board ship as elsewhere, Mr. Raleigh saw his acquaintance with the pale young stranger fast ripening into friendliness. It was an agreeable variation from the monotonous routine of his voyage, and he felt that it was not unpleasant to her. Indeed, with that childlike simplicity that was her first characteristic, she never saw him without seeking him, and every morning and every evening it became their habit to pace the deck together. Sunrise and twilight began to be the hours with which he associated her; and it was strange, that, coming, as she did, out of the full blaze of tropical suns, she yet seemed a creature that had taken life from the fresh, cool, dewy hours, and that must fairly dissolve beneath the sky of noon. She puzzled him, too, and he found singular contradictions in her: to-night, sweetness itself,--to-morrow, petulant as a spoiled child. She had all a child's curiosity, too; and he amused himself by seeing, at one time, with what novelty his adventures struck her, when, at another, he would have fancied she had always held Taj and Himmaleh in her garden. Now and then, excited, perhaps, by emulation and wonder, her natural joyousness broke through the usually sad and quiet demeanor; and she related to him, with dramatic _abandon_, scenes of her gay and innocent island-life, so that he fancied there was not an emotion in her experience hidden from his knowledge, till, all-unaware, he tripped over one reserve and another, that made her, for the moment, as mysterious a being as any of those court-ladies of ancient _régimes_, in whose lives there were strange _lacunae_, and spaces of shadow. And a peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of finding him in the same mood in which she had left him,--as some bright wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, without thinking how lately it had begun or how soon it must cease, he yielded himself to its presence. At one hour she seemed to him an impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident of his companionship was extremely fortunate,--at another hour, a woman too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that in all his years he had really known but two women, and one of these had not spent a week in his memory.

Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck, one evening, and, wrapping a soft, thick mantle round her, looked about for a minute, shaded her eyes from the sunset, meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one, spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh, where he leaned over the ship's side.

"_Voici ma capote!_" said she, before he was aware of her approach. "_Ciel! qu'il fait frais!_"

"We have changed our skies," said Mr. Raleigh, looking up.

"It is not necessary that you should tell me that!" she replied. "I shiver all the time. I shall become a little iceberg, for the sake of floating down to melt off Martinique!"

"Warm yourself now in the sunset; such a blaze was kindled for the purpose."

"Whenever I see a sunset, I find it to be a splendid fact, _une jouissance vraie, Monsieur_, to think that men can paint,--that these shades, which are spontaneous in the heavens, and fleeting, can be rivalled by us and made permanent,--that man is more potent than light."

"But you are all wrong in your _jouissance_."

She pouted her lip, and hung over the side in an attitude that it seemed he had seen a hundred times before.

"That sunset, with all its breadth and splendor, is contained in every pencil of light."

She glanced up and laughed.

"Oh, yes! a part of its possibilities. Which proves?"--

"That color is an attribute of light and an achievement of man."

"Cà et là,
Toute la journée,
Le vent vain va
En sa tournée,"

hummed the girl, with a careless dismissal of the subject.

Mr. Raleigh shut up the note-book in which he had been writing, and restored it to his pocket. She turned about and broke off her song.

"There is the moon on the other side," she said, "floating up like a great bubble of light. She and the sun are the scales of a balance, I think; as one ascends, the other sinks."

"There is a richness in the atmosphere, when sunset melts into moonrise, that makes one fancy it enveloping the earth like the bloom on a plum."

"And see how it has powdered the sea! The waters look like the wings of the _papillon bleu_."

"It seems that you love the sea."

"Oh, certainly. I have thought that we islanders were like those Chinese who live in great _tanka_-boats on the rivers; only our boat rides at anchor. To climb up on the highest land, and see yourself girt with fields of azure enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent as a gem,--that makes one feel strong in isolation, and produces keen races. Don't you think so?"

"I think that isolation causes either vivid characteristics or idiocy, seldom strong or healthy ones; and I do not value race."

"Because you came from America!"--with an air of disgust,--"where there is yet no race, and the population is still too fluctuating for the mould of one."

"I come from India, where, if anywhere, there is race."

"But, pshaw! that was not what we were talking about."

"No, Mademoiselle, we were speaking of an element even more fluctuating than American population."

"Of course I love the sea; but if the sea loves me, it is the way a cat loves the mouse."

"It is always putting up a hand to snatch you?"

"I suppose I am sent to Nineveh and persist in shipping for Tarshish. I never enter a boat without an accident. The Belle Voyageuse met shipwreck, and I on board. That was anticipated, though, by all the world; for the night before we set sail,--it was a very murk, hot night, --we were all called out to see the likeness of a large merchantman transfigured in flames upon the sky,--spars and ropes and hull one net and glare of fire."

"A mirage, probably, from some burning ship at sea."

"No, I would rather think it supernatural. Oh, it was frightful! Rather superb, though, to think of such a spectral craft rising to warn us with ghostly flames that the old Belle Voyageuse was riddled with rats!"

"Did it burn blue?" asked Mr. Raleigh.

"Oh, if you're going to make fun of me, I'll tell you nothing more!"

As she spoke, Capua, who had considered himself, during the many years of wandering, both guiding and folding star to his master, came up, with his eyes rolling fearfully in a lively expansion of countenance, and muttered a few words in Mr. Raleigh's ear, lifting both hands in comical consternation the while.

"Excuse me a moment," said Mr. Raleigh, following him, and, meeting Captain Tarbell at the companion-way, the three descended together.

Mr. Raleigh was absent some fifteen minutes, at the end of that time rejoining Mademoiselle Le Blanc.

"I did not mean to make fun of you," said he, resuming the conversation as if there had been no interruption. "I was watching the foam the Osprey makes in her speed, which certainly burns blue. See the flashing sparks! now that all the red fades from the west, they glow in the moon like broken amethysts."

"What did you mean, then?" she asked, pettishly.

"Oh, I wished to see if the idea of a burning ship was so terrifying."

"Terrifying? No; I have no fear; I never was afraid. But it must, in reality, be dreadful. I cannot think of anything else so appalling."

"Not at all timid?"

"Mamma used to say, those that know nothing fear nothing."

"Eminently your case. Then you cannot imagine a situation in which you would lose self-possession?"

"Scarcely. Isn't it people of the finest organization, comprehensive, large-souled, that are capable of the extremes either of courage or fear? Now I am limited, so that, without rash daring or pale panic, I can generally preserve equilibrium."

"How do you know all this of yourself?" he asked, with an amused air.

"_Il se présentait des occasions_," she replied, briefly.

"So I presumed," said he. "Ah? They have thrown out the log. See, we make progress. If this breeze holds!"

"You are impatient, Mr. Raleigh. You have dear friends at home, whom you wish to see, who wish to see you?"

"No," he replied, with a certain bitterness in his tone. "There is no one to whom I hasten, no one who waits to receive me."

"No one? But that is terrible! Then why should you wish to hasten? For me, I would always be willing to loiter along, to postpone home indefinitely."

"That is very generous, Mademoiselle."

"Mr. Raleigh"--

"Well?"

"I wish--please--you must not say Mademoiselle. Nobody will address me so, shortly. Give me my name,--call me Marguerite. _Je vous en prie_."