"Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. LX, No. ccclv, Dec. 1879 (1)": electronic edition

Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1) by Various Vol. LX., No. ccclv, Dec. 1879.

Fortunes of the Bonapartes

About ninety years ago a great trouble, as of a strange and unearthly sunrise, was moving over the face of France. The evils of despotism had grown intolerable precisely at the moment when despotism had grown too weak to defend itself. Aristocratic privilege had attained a development which seems almost incredible, and yet the aristocray had lost all real power in the state. There was a glittering and splendid court, without the means of paying for its expenses. There was a great army, commanded by the most accomplished nobility in the world, and composed of a soldiery the most mutinous in history. The system of taxes was the most onerous ever known, but the treasury was forever empty: the most powerful forcing-pump can do nothing after a vacuum is attainded. During the last two or three reigns the misery of the people had increased in direct proportion with the splendor of the court. Occasional insurrections and riots had been promptly punished by the gallows or a volley of musketry, and the wild people had gone back whipped to their wretchedness. But now all this was changed. A growth of philosophers and lovers of men had arisen, peculiar to the country and the age. An odd sort of cultus—the Religion of Humanity—had taken the place of other forms of worship, and was working singular results. It began among solitary dreamers in squalid garrets, and had at last spread to palaces, and infected thrones. The unhealthy dreams of Rousseau had turned the heads of dukes and princes. The visit of Dr. Franklin to Paris was one long homage of privilege to democracy. These amiable aristocrats, these innocent tyrants, were playing with the lightning, of whose properties they were utterly ignorant. The purest democrat in the cabinet was the King. `It is only you and I,' he said to M. Turgot, `who love the people.' When Joseph II. of Austria visited France, he ws amazed at this delirium. He had democratic tendencies himself, but knew where to draw the line. When his sister, the Queen, wanted him to meet Franklin, he replied: `Madame, the trade I live by is to be a royalist.'

Among the high and the low the age of fable had returned. The aristocracy of birth and of learning had caught from the philosophers the habit of considering the people good and gentle, to whom all things must be yielded. The people had taken philosophy their own way, with a difference, and considered the aristocracy bloody-minded robbers, deserving of pillage and death. Even the Queen and the court loved the people—and the people believed the filthiest calumnies on the Queen and court. But over all, rich and poor alike, there floated this strange dream of a better time which was soon to come. The way in which it was to be realized differed according to the imaginations of individuals and classes. Some believed in an idyllic return of Saturnian reigns. where the only law was to be Liberty, Equality, and Brotherly Love; others, like M. Marat, the farrier of Monseigneur D'Artois, thought the first specific was the taking off of `260,000 aristocrat heads.' The scheme of this great revolution will always remain the warning and the amazement of the world. It pursued its remorseless course without human let or hinderance, and apparently alo without human aid. The loftiest virtue, the most extraordinary talent, produced scarcely any effect upon it. The innocent enthusiasts went softly bleating of Liberty and Fraternity to their doom. The most ferocious scoundrels followed their own victims to the Place de la Révolution. Anarchy raged, all-devouring, until, aliment lacking elsewhere, it turned and devoured itself, and the exhausted and agonized land was ready again for a master. Great thing were certainly accomplished for France in the midst of that terror and destruction. No event in the world's history so dwarfs and belittles all criticim and comment; and the most marvelous thing about it all is that many of the objects seen in the rosy mist of fancy by the dreamers of 1789 have actually come to pass, as the result and consequence of those horrible atrocities which dismayed the world a few years afterward.

The profit to the world at large of this vast upheaval is, however, not the matter which we propose just now to consider, but rather its effect upon the fortunes of a single family of poor estate in Corsica. When the mob burst into the Tuileries on the memorable 10th of August, and the monarchy of France looked its last out of the palace windows before betaking itself to the cruel protection of the Legislature, the eyes of poor Louis XVI. might have beheld in the street, among the crowd of curious spectators, the man for whose advantage the throne of St. Louis was crumbling into dust. He was a captain of artillery, off duty at the moment, who had come to see the riot with those intelligent eyes of his, and whose name was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was rather a fierce patriot too, in those days, and sympathized strongly with the mob, so far as death to tyrants and liberty to the people were concerned. But his love of orderly and efficient fighting was more natural to him than his passion for the people, and when he saw the gallant Swiss of the palace making their brave defense against overpowering numbers, he could not help saying to himself,`If I commanded those fine fellows, I would make short work of all that canaille.' But there was no one to command them, and the monarchy fell to pieces, and the Swiss were murdered, and waited many years for Thorwaldsen and Carlyle to make them immortal. The time came quite soon enough for the artillery officer to justify his confident estimate of himself and a mob of Paris.

The family of Bonapartes were of pure Italian race; there was not a drop of French blood in any of them. Their ancestors had come from the main-land in the early history of Corsica, and their names are found in the remote annals of Ajaccio. Carlo Bonaparte was a poor gentleman of excellent breeding and character, who married in his youth a young and romantic girl named Letizia Ramolino, who followed him in his campaigns up to the moment of the birth of Napoleon. It is impossible to say how much the history of Europe owes to the high heart and indomitable spirit of this soldierly woman. She never relinguished her authority in her family. When all her children were princes and potentates, she was still the severe, stern Madame Mère. The beauty and grace of Josephine Beauharnais never conquered her; the sweet Tyrolese prettiness of Maria Louisa won from her only a sort of contemptuous indulgence. When her mighty son ruled the continent, she was the only human being whose chidings he regarded or endured. She was faithful in her rebukes while the sun shone, and when calamity came, her undaunted spirit was still true and devoted to the fallen. Her provincial habit of economy stood her in good stead in her vigorous old age; she was rich when the Empire had passed away, and her grandchildren needed her aid. It must have been from her that Napoleon took his extraordinary character, for Carlo Bonaparte, though a brave soldier and an ardent patriot in his youth, was of any easy and genial temper, inclined to take the world as he found it, and not to insist too much on having it go in his epecial way. After the cause of Corsican liberty was lost by the success of the French arms, he accepted the situation without regret, and becoming intimate with the conquerors, he placed as many of his family as possible on the French pension list. His sons Napoleon and Louis were given scholarhips at Brienne and at Autun, and his eldest daughter, Élise, entered the royal institution at St. Cyr. While yet in the prime of life, he died of the same deadly disease which was to finish Napoleon's days at St. Helena; and the heroic mother, her responsibilities becoming still heavier by this blow, lived for eight years longer amid the confusion and civil tumult which had become chronic in Corsica; and then, after the capture of the island by the English in 1793, she made her escape with her children to Marseilles, where she lived several years in great penury.

Her family of five sons and three daughters would have been a heavy burden upon her resources if they had been children of the ordinary sort. But the two elder sons rapidly made their way, and always evinced a parental interest in their juniors. The oldest, Joseph, had been educated at the seminary of Autun and the university of Pisa, through the friendly patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The year after the family moved to Marseilles he made a happy and brilliant marriage, gaining the hand of one of the greatest heiresses of the South, Mademoiselle Marie Julie Clary. Her father, whose destiny it was to have two kings for sons-in-law, and to leave behind him for many generations a royal posterity, was a Marseilles merchant. Four years after the wedding of Joseph Bonaparte, a younger sister, Mademoiselle Désirée, was sought in marriage by the dashing and magnificent soldier Bernadotte, who, after serving with distinction under Custine, Kleber, and Bonaparte, had been sent as ambassador to Vienna, and for whom still higher honors were in store—minister, marshall, and King of Sweden. But in spite of Joseph Bonaparte's learning and wealth, and the success of his matrimonial venture, the head of the family was the second son, and all the house acknowledged his supremacy from the first. This is of itself enough to show how powerfully his personality impressed itself upon those around him, for there is no principle more firmly fixed in the minds of the people of Corsic and Southern France than the dignity and authority of the first-born son of the house. No mere material success of a cadet ever disturbs this natural precedence; one of the most touching passages of M. Dandet's great romance is the scene where the millionaire brother acknowledges his allegiance to the worthless vagabond who was born before him. But it does not seem that from early youth any one disputed the claim of Napoleon to be the head of his family; though disobedience sometimes rose to rebellion, it was always felt to be such on both side. He was not, on the whole, an ungentle patriarch to those of his blood; and when they were all young and poor together, he was self-sacrificing, generous, and kind to his brothers and sisters. It was little in the way of money that he could spare from his scanty wages as a subaltern of artillery, but he spared what he could, and where it was possible he spent much of his time with them, and superintended their studies. He was able to give them a good deal of care, for in those years of utter disorganization of society the discipline of the army was shamefully lax, and the young officers spent as much time at home and in their debating clubs as they did at their barracks. Joseph and Lucien were by their age somewhat removed from his active control, but over Louis and Jerome and his sisters he exercised an authority which was justified by his affection and his care. Never was careful training more needed in any family in the world, for every one of these children was to govern remote and distant principalities and kingdoms, and to mingle with the purple-born monarchs of immemorial descent as equals and as superiors.

No family in history was ever raised to such lofty fortunes so suddenly; and few families that ever existed could have sustained themselves at such altitudes with so much of ability, cleverness, and dignity.

The first great opportunity offered to Napoleon Bonaparte was on the 5th of October, called in the fanciful calendar of the Revolution the 13th Vendémiaire—the month of the vintage. He had previously distinguished himself by a remarkable exploit at the siege of Toulon, and had shown great capacity in a short campaign in Piedmont. But achievements like those only commended him to the notice of soldiers. He had now an opportunity to bring artillery into politics, and he did it with terrible effect. The Convention was confronted with the armed mob which had place it in power, and which proposed to direct it, as the Jacobin mobs had directed its predecessors. The moment was critical. The victors of Thermidor would have been outcasts and fugitives in another day, had Barras not thought of his young friend Bonaparte, who `could handle artillery better than any man in France.' Napoleon was in the gallery, and heard his name mentioned, and retired in great disturbance of mind to consider what he should do. Honor or the guillotine was in the throw. By the next sunset he would be either a prisoner condemned to speedy death as a traitor, or a man necessary to the Directory. He decided—as such a man must decide—for action. He instantly dispatched his adjutant, Murat—a young officer who knew how to ride—to Sablon for the artillery. He got there just in time, with not a minute to spare: the sections were on his heels. The guns were posted in the night at every available point, and the next day, after several hour of threatening demonstrations, the contest began, and in an hour the guns of Bonaparte had blown to the four winds a far more formidable attack than any of those before which the monarchy had gone down. The Convention was saved, but the sallow, silent young man whose cannon had made peace in the streets had a claim for salvage which would be presented in due time. This was the true beginning of his career, and also the beginning of the end of the short-lived Republic. Public opinion had risen against the government; the government had blown public opinion in pieces with artillery; and the young man who could handle artillery in that way was sure of his future. When his time should come, he could no doubt serve the government as he had served its assailants.

The flight of the eagle was taken, and there was no longer any check or pause in his career until all was over. His success in Paris gave him access to the best official society, and he there met the lovely and accomplished widow of one Vicomte de Beauharnais, who was one of the brightest ornaments of the Thermidorean circle. His wooing was abrupt and energetic as that of a young lion. The lady of his love was bewildered and alarmed at the violence of his devotion, and by the extraordinary assurance with which he promised her to win glory and power with his sword. She was six year his senior, and naturally distrusted this youthful arrogance. But her indolent creole temperament yielded to his impetuous suit, and Barras's wedding present was the command-in-chief of the Army of Italy. The honey-moon was of the briefest; the wedding was on the 9th of March, and a few days afterward he was at his head-quarters at Nice.

From this time began that marvellous career which seems already fabulous. In a fortnight after crossing the frontier he had won four victories, and conquered Sardinia, and he kept up in the same colossal fashion the series of conquests thus begun. It is to be hoped the world will never see again such a spectacle of prodigious ability. His treachery, his rapacity, his cold-blooded selfishness, his duplicity and cruelty, are as marvellous as his unending success. He treated the Directory with utter contempt, and sent them such loads of treasure that they pardoned his insults. He flattered the prelates of Rome with words which they still quote with pleasure, and he spoke of them at the same time as `babbling dotards.' He never lost an opportunity to laud the Italian pepople in his proclamations; but not content with plundering and betraying them, he called them, in a letter to Talleyrand, `an indolent, superstitious, buffoonish, cowardly population.' What he said in his own speeches and proclamations he admits `is mere romance.' He was utterly cynical in his orders to his officers. When he commanded Pierrée to seize the navy of Venice—a power with which he had no cause of quarrel whatever—he wrote: `Seize everything; but take care to call it always the Venetian navy, and constantly have on your your lips the unity of the two republics!' But he was regal in all his qualities and crimes. When he had established himself at Montebello, near Milan, and Madame Bonaparte had joined him, he kept the greatest court in Europe. Only a year before, he was a poor unfriended officer on the Paris pavement, cramped in his circumtances, uncertain of his livelihood. But even his enemies admit that he kept his court at Milan like a king. He surrounded himself with savans and artists, with generals and beauties. He dined in public, like sovereigns of the ancient régime, and received the homage of the people as if his ancestors had been demigods. He never had to learn the trick of royalty. It was not the ermine or the crown that gave him in after-days his `motions and habitudes kingly.' He was an imperator—a commander—long before the Pope anointed him Emperor of the French.

His interests at home were jealously and intelligently guarded by his brothers Joseph and Lucien, who had become men of importance in the government before his return from Italy; and when he was absent in Egypt it was his brother Joseph who dispatched the wily Greek Bourbaki in hot haste to warn him that the fullnes of time was come for him to make an end of the Directory. The success of the 18th Brumaire was due in great part to the fact that the three allies upon whom he most implicitly counted inside the government were his own brothers, bound to him by every tie of affection and interest. Joseph had declined the mission to Berlin, to remain in Paris as a member of the Council of Five Hundred; Lucien was President of it, and young Louis was also a member. His brothers were his principal go-betweens in that drama of unparalleled treachery by which the Directors were divided and disarmed. On the final day at St. Cloud, when Napoleon had failed in his attempt to intimidate the Assembly, and had been borne fainting from the hall, it was Lucien who, mounting on horseback, presented himself to the troops as the representative of the law, and commanded them to disperse by the bayonet the Assembly he had betrayed. He showed on this occasion far greater courage and presence of mind than Napoleon, and roused the soldiers to enthusiasm by a piece of comedy which now seems absurd enough. He seized a sword, at the end of his harangue, and cried: `I swear to thrust this through the heart of my brother if he should ever strike a blow at the liberties of France.' The soldiers applauded; Murat hurried them forward at a quick step. The drums beat a charge, to drown the voices of the outraged legislators, and the liberties of France were at an end for many long years.

In the recently published memoirs of Madame De Remusat some curious details are given of the social life of the Tuileries after the Bonapartes had taken possession of the palace. It made a singular impression upon this high-born lady —the swarms of uneducated and rough-riding soldiers, mingled with the few noblemen who, like Talleyrand, adhered to the new régime for the place and power it afforded them, and the crowds of pretty women with whom the First Consul loved to be surrounded. Something of this incongruity seems to have struck Napoleon himself. He liked fine dresses for his court and his officers, but was best pleased when he himself was dressed shabbily. He said, one day of ceremony, to Madame De Remusat, `The right to be simply dressed does not belong to everybody.' At another time, while his marshals were squabbling for precedence, he said, `It is very convenient to govern Frenchmen by vanity.' He seemed, then as always, to regard himself as a man apart, not subject to the laws which governed the rest of the human race. After the death of his nephew and presumptive heir, the son of King Louis of Holland, when Talleyrand proposed he should show some signs of mourning, he said, abruptly, `I do not amuse myself by thinking about the dead.' In reply to some remonstrance from his wife about his too open immoralities, he said, with perfect calmness, `I need distractions. I am not a man like other men, for whom laws are made.'

Lucien, with all his adroit devotion, was the only brother of Napoleon who did not become a king. He was, it is true, Minister of the Interior during the early years of the Consulate; but his independence soon embroiled him with the First Consul, and after a short but brilliant service as ambassador and tribune, he married the divorced wife of the great broker Jouberthon, against his brother's positive prohibition, and encountered his bitter and malignant hostility for the rest of his days. He never surrendered his dignity and manhood; and after the Consulate had blossomed into the Empire, and Napoleon was disposing of crowns and thrones among his family with a lavish hand, Lucien alone had the courage to refuse these glittering bribes which were offered as the price of his honor. The Emperor knew his value, and wished to employ him; he offered him a crown—the crown was not specified, but he always had a supply on hand, or made them when he wished—a princely husband for his daughter, and a duchy for his wife if he would divorce her. But Lucien declined; and the Emperor, in a whirling rage, struck his name out of the imperial almanac—`strangering him with his curse.' Misfortune united them only for a moment, after Waterloo, and Lucien, whom the Pope had made Prince of Canino, passed the evening of his life tranquilly in archæological studies in Italy, where he died in 1840, leaving a numerous and amiable family, many members of which became famous in the world of literature and science, and married with members of the highest aristocracy of Italy. The celebrated Madame Ratazzi was his granddaughter; and the shooting by his son Prince Pierre Napoleon of a small and sufficiently worthless journalist named Victor Noir contributed powerfully to shake the popularity of the Bonaparte dynasty in 1870. Pierre afterward went to England, in straitened circumstances, and his wife, the daughter of a blanchisseuse of the St. Antoine quarter, opened a millinery shop in the British capital, not of the first class, where English tradesmen's wives could enjoy the luxury of scolding a princess if their gowns did not fit, which was more than probable.

It may be said that none of the brother were especially happy in their thrones. Joseph had the capacity to make a very repectable king in quiet time. He had a happy gift of pleasing, and sufficient dignity and ease of manner to fulfill with credit and distinction the sort of duties which devolve on kings at ordinary periods. He was the most finished diplomatist of the family, and conducted many difficult negotiations with credit and success. He was the safe and vigilant guardian of his brother's interests in Paris while he was spreading his conquests over the world; and when the Emperor returned from Austerlitz, radiant with the intolerable glory of that prodigious victory, and, as it seemed afterward, with his head a little turned with a success too great for a mortal brain to bear, in the first batch of kings that he made to celebrate his triumph, he gave Joseph the crown of Naples. He went reluctantly to his kingdom, but soon came to like its soft air and pleasant people, and regretted it when two years later, he was forced to leave them to go to Spain. His royal robes were little more than a livery, after all, for he must go wherever his fraternal tyrant bade him, and he went with a heavy heart to take his new post in the monarchy of Pelayo and Isabel the Catholic. It is related that when the brothers stood together at the foot of the grand staircase of the Palace del Oriente, with its massive steps of white and black marble, its balusters adorned with the twined collars of the Golden Fleece, and its alabaster lions guarding the landings, above which flame the frescoes of Giacinto representing the monarchy of Spain rendering homage to Religion, the Emperor laid his conquering hand upon the sculptured mane of one of the lions and cried, in exultation, `At last I hold thee, my Spain!' And then turning to Joseph, he said, in a tone half of pleasantry and half of envy, `My brother, thou wilt be better lodged than I.' It is probable that the Emperor had more gratification in that fleeting moment than his brother during his whole troubled kinghood. Three times in five years he was driven from his rebellious country; and finally, when misfortunes were thickening fast about the imperial standard, he hastened to Paris once more, and offered, in a vain impulse of brotherly affection, to take Napoleon's place as a prisoner—as if the finest cat that ever lived could possibly be mistaken for the royal Bengal tiger! The brothers parted with au revoir en Amérique, and Joseph, under the name of the Comte de Survilliers, sailed for America, where, after years of patient waiting, he heard the fatal new from the African seas that he should never meet again his loving and imperious master and idol. The time he spent in America, partly at Bordentown and partly in the Adirondack woods, was the happiest and most tranquil of his troubled life; but he wearied of its monotony at last, and hearing that the Duke of Reichstadt was rapidly failing in health, he hurried off to Europe again; and after a dozen years more of journeys, and protests, and wrangling, and nerveless intrigues for a cause in which his heart was no longer enlisted, he died in Florence at a good old age.

Still more unhappy was the lot of Louis. In his youth he was a gay and dashing soldier, yet fond of books and the society of women, with tastes and habits that promised happiness. But the baleful shadow of his brother's greatness blasted his life. He was early raised to heights too giddy for him, and he was forced to marry Hortense Beauharnais, for whom he had neither sympathy nor respect. When the crown of Holland was given him, his evil star seemed to culminate, for while the Emperor was making the farewell speech which informed him, with little pretense of concealment, that he was to govern the Dutch as a French satrap rather than as an independent sovereign, the cold eyes of Admiral Verhuel were regarding him, and the injury which was to defile two thrones was already plotted. He endeavored loyally to be a good king to Holland and a good husband to Hortense, but his intentions in either direction met with no appreciation, and it was only after he had lost both wife and crown that he found some measure of comfort in life. He parted finally from Hortense the year before Louis Napoleon was born, and be betook himself to a sentimental sort of literature and philosophy. His first-born son died in infancy. His second son, for the possession of whom he had a bitter litigation with Hortense, died in the bloom of his early manhood at Forli, in Italy, and he had little pleasure in Louis Napoleon, whom he at firt refused to recognize as his son, but whom later he took to his heart with the senile fondness of an unhappy man.

Jerome, the Benjamin of the family, had, first and last, the easiest and most satisfactory life, in spite of the vicissitudes inseparable from a fate so exceptional. He grew to adolescence in the full blaze of his brother's successes, was carefully educated, and became a lieutenant in the navy at seventeen years of age. At nineteen he committed the escapade of marrying Miss Patterson, of Baltimore, and after a year or so of wedded felicity he went home with her, doubtless expecting a wigging from his august elders, but imagining that her beauty and grace would commend his wife to them as soon as she was seen. But they never gave her the opportunity—Madame Mère had already filed her legal protest against the marriage, and Napoleon ordered his sister-in-law back to England without granting her audience. Jerome, like the great Gibbon, sighed as a lover, perhaps, but he obeyed like a son and a soldier, and never saw his young wife again until long years afterward, when, walking in the Pitti gallery with his second spouse, Caroline of Würtemberg, he came across this ghost of his adventurous youth. No words were exchanged between them, and he hurried away from Florence. His obedience was rewarded by rapid and repeated promotions to general, marshal, prince, and finally King of Westphalia, and the heirship of the Empire, although by his will the Emperor changed this arrangement in favor of the children of Hortense. Jerome never took his monarchy very seriously, and annoyed the Emperor by his frivolities at his little capital of Cassel. But on the day of trial he showed good qualities, and after his prowess at Ligny and Waterloo, Napoleon embraced him and said, `My brother, I have learned to know you too late.' His life was a quiet and undistinguished one until the Empire was re-established by his nephew, when he became once more Prince, Imperial Highness, and Marshall of France, and died in state at the Invalides. He was, in spite of his few days of creditable fighting, an unheroic personage. A good deal of romance has been wasted upon his relations with Miss Patterson. There was nothing remarkable in a boy of nineteen making an imprudent marriage, or in being bullied and bribed to desert his wife afterward. Her part of the play was scarcely less sordid. Her recently printed letters show that she married him for his name and rank, and that after he had cast her off she got a divorce, because the attentions she had received from people of rank in England inspired the idea that she might marry advantageously again.

The sisters of Napoleon were too valuable as counters in his game to be allowed to give their hands where they liked. Elise, it is true, chose for herself before his period of omnipotence, and became the wife of young Bacciochi, a poor Corsican officer, who lived to share with her a throne which was scarcely wide enough for two. She was made Princess of Piombino and Lucca, and Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and left a family who afterward held positions at the court of Napoleon III. The life of Pauline, the second sister, if written as only herself or the recording angel might have done it, would probably have surpassed anything that the Sieur De Brantôme has left for the wonder and the scandalized amusement of mankind. While she was yet little more than a child her hand was disputed by Junot, Duphot, Fréron, and Leclerc. She chose the last, and accompanied him to Santo Domingo, undeterred by pestilence and massacres, and after faithfully nursing him through his fatal illness, she brought his remains back to France for burial. She was then taken in hand by her brother, who needed to strengthen his interest in Rome, and married to Prince Camillo Borghese—a union unhappy from the wedding benediction. Perhaps she had loved Leclerc—she certainly adored her brother—but the rest of the world of men, with the exception of poor Borghese, seemed to her alike creatures of her conquest and her insatiable curiosity. She was one of the most beautiful women of her time. She posed to Canova for his `Venus Victrix,' and the great sculptor was reported to have said that, with such models, statues could be made by journeymen. She had many virtues; she was amiable, generous, enlightened, and intelligent; she loved letters and art, and, as Duchess of Guastalla, kept a brilliant and popular court. The ablest politician of the three sisters, and the least personally interesting, was Caroline, who married Murat, and became successively Duchess of Cleves and Queen of Naples. She was splendidly educated, brave as a lioness in battle, and possessed of a singular administrative ability; but she betrayed her brother too readily when fortune frowned, and she married General MacDonald too soon after her husband's tragic death.

The marriages of the Bonapartes play an importrant part in the story of their fortunes, and none of them were so signficant and important as those of the Emperor. To one who, like him, looked upon the world as made for him, and upon laws merely as something which were good for him to impose upon others, it must have appeared that his two wives were admirably planned for his use. Josephine de Beauharnais was an ideal wife for a young and rising man of genius. She had everything which would appeal to a fancy like his, at once selfish and passionate. She had beauty, rank, the power of pleasing, and a certain indolent grace that promised an obedience reasonably free from jealousy. Up to the time that he mounted the imperial throne and seated her by his side, she was all that his narrow heart and boundless ambition could desire. But after the marvellous victory of Wagram had opened up to his fevered imagination still wider perspectives of dominion, he looked for another style of wife, and found her in Maria Louisa of Austria. Her blonde beauty, formed of pink and white color and roundly curving lines and the golden floss of a child's hair, appealed strongly to his jaded taste. He was not old, but, as he said to the Directory, `one ages fast upon the field of battle,' and he wanted some such solace as this soft, unintellectual beauty (somebody has called it the Alderney style of prettiness) in his home, if such a word may be used of the Tuileries. Besides, he doubtless felt that an emperor should have an emperor's daughter to wife, and this was a young girl who had a hundred monarchs for her ancestors, and yet she would be gentle and obedient, and not argue with him or answer him, and would give him heirs. He was genuinely attached to her, and if he knew nothing about her, and had no premonition of Count Neipperg, it was all the better for him. She also was quite taken by storm with him, and for a while the novelty of being loved by an ogre—for such she had always considered him—was agreeable to her. But her tumultuous glory was quite too much for the daily food of such a human small being as the Empress, and she was doubtless relieved when the indignant soul left his body at Longwood, and she was free to follow her ignoble little heart and marry Neipperg.

Josephine would have had her revenge if she could have foreseen the course of history for even a few years. It is she, and not the pretty Austrian, who will be known forever as the wife of Napoleon. It is her statue that rises in marble in the public places of Paris. It is her name and those of her children that mark the great avenues of the metropolis—Avenue Joséphine, La Reine Hortense, Boulevard du Prince Eugène. Though she was ousted remorselessly from a throne to make room for Maria Louisa, it was her children—the children of the creole proscript— who should become the tenants of palaces, and not those of her rival. The Duke of Reichstadt was to pass a youth of inglorious pleasure, and was to die before his prime, and leave no son to inherit his claim to empire; while the Beauharnais line was to stretch out like the swarm of kings seen by the Thane of Cawdor in his vision. Eugene, her heroic on, after the fall of the Napoleons, returned to the court of his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria, and became Prince of Eichstädt, Duke of Leuchtenberg, and first nobleman of the kingdom. His daughter, united to the son of Bernadotte, became Queen of Sweden; another became a princess of Hohenzollern, and a third Empress of Brazil. His oldet son won the hand of the Queen of Portugal, and the younger married a daughter of the Czar Nicholas of Russia. And whatever doubt might be thrown on the purity of the Napoleonic descent by which the Emperor Napoleon III. claimed the throne, he was unquestionably the son of Hortense, and was Beauharnais and Tascherla-Pagerie beyond challenge. The grandson of Josephine, Louis Napoleon, ruled France in peace and with a sort of splendor for the space of twenty-two year, while the period of the first Napoleon's reign, counting Consulate and Empire together, was but fifteen—though so powerful was the personal imprint made by the uncle, and so vague was the individual character of the nephew, that the shorter reign seems like an age, and the longer like an episode.

The exiles which followed their respective reigns were singularly in keeping with their different characters. The part of Louis Napoleon's career which followed Sedan was scarcely less happy than that which preceded it. He grew stout at Wilhelmshöhe, and when removed to Chiselhurst he led the tranquil life of a bougeois retired from business, until his peaceful end. But for Napoleon, the imprisonment on that bleak rock in a distant sea was the fitting close of a tragedy more vast than human annals ever before recorded. The great myth ended in darkness and mystery, and the hero, unseen by Europe, preserved to the last the fabulous character with which friend and foe had alike invested him. To the French people he was their Prometheus chained to a thunder-blasted rock on the vague limits of the world, tormented by vultures, but still godlike in his pains. To England he was an enemy of preternatural force and treachery, who could only be kept from harmful activity by the inviolable bars of thousands of miles of sea. His exile and death are therefore among the most picturesque and moving scenes of his history, and the English artist Haydon painted the most fortunate of his portraits in that famous picture which represents the imprisoned conqueror looking out from his rocky realm, with unutterable thoughts, upon the dreadful and implacable sea, which even he could never tame nor conciliate.

For pictures, as for men, there are advantages and disadvantages in being copies. They can never have the fire and spirit, the brilliancy and charm, of the original, but they can be more correct; they can profit by criticism, and avoid the errors of the creating genius. Louis Napoleon came into the world with his work marked out for him—to be as nearly as possible like his uncle in fate and achievements. He had scarcely any natural qualifications for the part; he was of a gentle and dreamy nature, not fitted, one would say, for war or government. But he had his name, his share in the infatuation of France for the Napoleon legend, and an obstinate though quiet will to be Emperor. He studied artillery because his uncle did. He wrote a socialist book because his uncle had written Le Souper de Beaucaire in his youth. He parodied the descent from Elba with the ridiculous attempts of Strasburg and Boulogne. Because his uncle had carried the eagles of France in triumph over three continents, he taught a tame eagle to swoop down on his hat for fresh meat. But he was not always ridiculous in his imitations. He managed his first election as President, in 1848, with admirable skill and cunning. He swore oaths of allegiance with the same imperturbable and treacherous coolness which were so remarkable in the founder of the family. One who reads the story of the 18th Brumaire and the Coup d'Étât of December is startled with the absolute similarity of conditions and processes by which the two usurpers gained the supreme power. There was the same pretense of a conspiracy, the same accusation of the legislature, the same corruption of the army, the same outrage upon the civil authorities; and to make the resemblance still more remarkable, the actor who played the part of first assistant in the treason was in the one case Lucien, and in the other case De Morny. The candid reader must admit that the nephew had bettered his intructions. The Coup d'Étât was a much more perfect and workman-like performance than the 18th Brumaire. The great Napoleon was lamentably weak before the Assembly, and his nephew, hiding himself in the Élysées, and pulling the strings of the plot, made a more satisfactory piece of work than the original which he followed. The wonder is that the same net, spread in the same way, in the sight of the same bird, should have twice secured its prey, unless we conclude that they were both `providential' men, and that France had need of such discipline.

The resemblance in their marriages was not so strong, though in this respect also Napoleon III. pretended to follow copy. Eugénie de Montijo, Countess of Téba, was a beautiful woman of twenty-seven, who had had a youth of vicissitudes, and was well known in many capitals for her beauty, grace, and rank, which, having no fortune to support them, gained her and her mother only the undeserved title of adventuresses. The malice of party has raged fiercely againt this lady's name, but there is not a particle of proof to sustain it. Her ability, her affectionate devotion to the interests of her family, and her religious fervor are, so far as the world knows, as unquestionable as her beauty and her personal charm. No queen in history has better fulfilled a queen's duty as leader of the fashions; and while she reigned, the dress of women was at once beautiful, decent, and convenient. Hers was the prettiest face, the most graceful bearing, the most winning smile, in all that dazzling court of the Tuileries. But he had a Spaniard's love of political intrigue, and an Andalusian's bigotry, and she contributed powerfully to engage her husband in the evil way that led his policy to Rome and his army to Sedan. There is a story told by Arsène Houssaye—certainly no unfriendly chronicler—that at the cabinet council called to decide the question of peace and war, after the final interview of Benedetti with King William at Ems, the peace party carried the day, and the Emperor went to bed. But the Empress, being left behind with the council, won over to her war-like view the gallant De Grammont and the absurd Lebœuf, and reversed the decision, and then went in triumph to the Emperor's chamber, where he was sleeping the sleep of the just, and gained his assent to the fatal declaration which was made next day by the jaunty De Grammont, with his hands in his pockets, and by Ollivier, with his cœur léger.

The Empire attained its most resplendent bloom the year before its fall. In 1869 occurred the centennial anniversary of the birth of Napoleon, and the grand fête of the 15th of August was celebrated that year with extraordinary glare and tinsel. The Champs Élysées were like a region of fairy-land at night. The spouting fountains of the Place de la Concorde, played upon by vari-colored lights, seemed in turn of gold, of diamonds, and of blood, like the legend they were celebrating. The grand sweep of the avenue to the Place de l'Étoile was one sea of glimmering radiance, and the Arch of Triumph at the crest of the hill was transfigured by the magic of lime light into a vast dome of porcelain and mother-of-pearl, a temple standing in the midst of the opulence and art of new Paris, dedicated to the worship of the material splendor of Napoleonism. There were peace and plenty in the land, a submissive majority in the legislature. The old nobility had greatly overcome their hostility, and as for the people, when they were asked if they were content with the Empire, seven millions of them said Yes! Only a year later, the writer of these pages was in Paris on the Fête Napoléon again. There was no celebration of the day. A few servants of the edility were tearing down the pipes and gas-fixtures which had been planned to celebrate the entry of the French army into Berlin. At every corner panic-stricken groups were reading the bulletins, in which a false coloring was given to terrible defeats. A beaten army was rolling back toward Paris, shouting, as beaten armies always shout, `Treason,' and the Emperor, stunned and helpless, abandoning the commamnd to others, was muttering with the iteration of idiocy: `I have been deceived! They also have mitrailleuses!'

A few days later the Empire was at its end. Dr. Evans the famous American dentist, was entertaining some friends at dinner—for one must dine, though kingdoms are crashing like potsherds. A servant enters and announces a lady, who insists on seeing him. He at last rises and goes out, somewhat petulantly, to see this importunate, and when her veil is raised it discloses the beautiful face of the Empress, convulsed with grief and agitation. The mob is in the Tuileries again, after its old habit, and the Empress owes her life to two foreigners—an American, Evans, and an Italian, the Chevalier Nigra. The latter displayed a marvellous presence of mind. On entering a carriage near the Tuileries a street gamin recognized the Empress, and cried, `Voilà l'Impératrice!' Nigra cuffed him and said, `You little scoundrel, I'll teach you to say Vive la Prusse!' Others followed his example, and before the astonished urchin could get his breath and insist on his story, the carriage was out of sight.

Napoleon III., in surrendering to the King of Prussia, began his note with the words, `Having been unable to die with my troops.' It is a strange fact that of all this race of warriors, the only one to whom a soldier's death has been allotted was the gentlest of them all, who was slain by savage enemies in a quarrel not his own. Except in its tragic close, his life ran in curious parallelism with that of the Duke of Reichstadt. Both were born in the purple, their advent heralded by the booming of cannon and the flutter of a thousand banners. Both lost in their tender youth father and empire alike; both found in a foreign monarchy the education and practice in arms denied them in France. Both possessed, with their fathers' claims to a chimerical royalty, their mothers' gentleness and grace. Both died in the morning of life, one at twenty-three and the other at twenty-one, having known nothing of the common joys of life. They stand, as Napoleon II. and Napoleon IV., the visionary simulacra of emperors, in a line in which they dreamed of usefulness and glory. The beginning of their lives might well have inspired the envy of the world, and the end claims no sentiment but that of tender pity. Even the soldierly death of poor Prince Louis, the only Bonaparte who has died on the field, had in it nothing glorious. He pined and chafed in inaction at Chiselhurst. His very virtues, his studiousness, his gentle obedience to his mother, though they were the natural expression of his delicate and sensitive nature, seemed to grow irksome even to himself. He felt he must do something to prove that he was a Bonaparte—a man of action and of war. There have been wars enough in Europe of late, but he could not enlist under the flag that pleased him, like any other young soldier of fortune. He must observe all national susceptibilities, because of the great political future before him. At last the victory of Cetywayo at Isandula gave him his opportunity. The doughty savage had no friends whose hostility could embarrass any Emperor of France. Prince Louis says, in a letter recently published, `I took counsel of no one, and came to the decision in forty-eight hour.' The poor lad imagined he was a person of great energy for deciding so important a matter so promptly, and dwells upon it. `Nothing could make me hesitate for a moment—a fact which will not astonish those who know me. But how many people know me?' It is pitiful to see this gentle, tender soul deceiving itself in this way. `I am truly ashamed of having to speak thus of myself,' he continues, `but I desire to dispel the doubts which have on some occasions been manifested concerning the energy of my will......When one belongs to a race of warriors, it is only with the steel in your hand that you can prove what you are.' And so he went away, after seriously making his will, and confessing his little sins, and embracing the mother who loved him. He had letters from the Duke of Cambridge to Lord Chelmsford telling him in effect to let the Prince amuse himself, but not run any risk; and to the common eye his holiday was no more dangerous than a game of polo. But in his first skirmish he fell, hacked to swift death by Zulu spears. The whole world was sorry for him, and England was quite nervous in her grief; and in her eager desire to punish somebody for it, she seems to have made a scape-goat of the young Lieutenant Carey, who, in the hurry of mounting, thought more of his own life and his own mother than he did of the life of Prince Louis and the grief of an empress. Would her Majesty the Queen have been better pleased if, in addition to the Prince, she had lost the whole squad? It appears that she would.

We have two recollections of this unfortunate Prince, to which his cruel fate has given a pathetic significance. One was the opening of the Legislative Body in the year 1866, when the Emperor first associated his son with him officially. The splended Throne-Room of the Louvre was crowded with the most brilliant company of Christendom, with the great officers of state, of the army, and the imperial household. The Emperor entered and took his place on the raised dais; at his left sat the stout Prince Napoleon Jerome, and in an episcopal robe of violet silk the young and Apollo-like ecclesiastic, since Cardinal Bonaparte, son of the Prince of Canino; while on his right sat the little Prince, then ten years of age—as sweet and gentle a child as ever delighted a mother's heart. A year or two afterward, on the reserved terrace of the Tuileries, we saw two boys playing with their velocipedes, and keenly enjoying the air and the exercise. One of them was the Prince Imperial, and the other Don Alfonso of Spain; the former seemed secure in the prospect of the most conspicuous throne in the world, the other had just been driven, finally as it seemed, from a land which had decreed eternal banishment to his race. We can not fathom the immutable will that rules the event of human fortunes; who could have dreamed that in these few years the one of those boys would be lying dead in an African corn field, and the other, we know not how firmly, established in the palace of his ancestors?

The shadow of the imperial crown—of which it is not wise to speak contemptuously, for no one knows in what shock of elements the shadow may become substance—now rests upon the brow of Prince Napoleon (Jerome), who is in many points of view the most interesting and picturesque character of all the Bonapartes. He is the only one with royal blood in his veins, that is to say, with the especial kingly ichor which dates from beyond the culbute générale of 1789. He is the only orator among them all, if we except Lucien. He is a brilliant and able speaker, and his talent was so marked in the Senate that his detractors asked, `Who writes his speeches?' until one day, in a running debate of an hour, which was from its very nature impromptu, he surpassed himself, and unhorsed every assailant. He enjoyed that day his one sweetest taste of popularity. The students of the Latin Quarter crowded to the gates of the Palais Bourbon, and cheered him wildly as he left the hall. He had another oratorical success at the unveiling of the Napoleon statue at Ajaccio in 1865; but the radical sentiments he uttered there were so little to the taste of his imperial cousins that a sharp rebuke from the Emperor's hand appeared in the Moniteur, and the haughty Prince resigned every public function he had held. He played at opposition and liberality from that time forward, and was called in France the Red Prince, until the name was taken by the fiery-whiskered Carl of Prussia. Napoleon Jerome has been a great traveller, also. He has classical tastes, and built in Paris, near the Bal Mabille, a Pompeiian house, a perfect reproduction of a nobleman's town house on the Bay of Naples two thousand years ago. He look wonderfully like his great uncle, only much larger every way, so that Béranger called him `a Napoleon medal dipped in German fat,' and another witty person described him as a Napoleon soufflé He is a man of remarkable energy in speech, and equally remarkable indolence in action. A gentleman who met him with his cousin at a country house in England, several years before the Second Empire, was struck by the contrast between them. Napoleon Jerome talked on every subject which was mentioned with great dash and spirit, while Louis Napoleon sat silent and pulled his mustache. But when the company mounted for the day's hunt, the cousins seemed to change characters. Jerome was the timid, careful, nervous rider, while Louis became a centaur, and cared no more for ditches and fences than for the thistle-down in his path.

An incident is told of the death of the Prince Imperial that gives rise to a long train of memories and suggestions. It is said that his comrades found upon his dead body, stripped of everything else, an amulet in a locket covered with miniatures, which the savages in their superstition had spared, for the Zulus believe that an amulet taken from a slain enemy will bring his fate upon the conqueror. It is understood that this locket contains the Charlemagne relic, famous in the Napoleon annals, which the great Emperor gave to Fastrada his wife a thousand years ago, which Otto III. took from his tomb, and which the city of Aix-la-Chapelle presented to Napoleon, and he in turn gave to his beloved Hortense, Queen of Holland. It was said to possess the magic power of keeping peace in the family, and occasional lapses need not invalidate the claim. Napoleon III., receiving it from his mother, cherished it in exile and captivity, and finally after his grandeur and fall bequeathed it by a special clause in his will to his heir. His unhappy son, inheriting it with the family glories and disasters, wore it to his last fatal field. It would be curious to know if the esprit fort, the rationalist Napoleon Jerome, will now put on this amulet so deeply connected with the history of his family, so closely associated with all its splendors and all its catastrophes.

The New York Cooking School by F. E. Fryatt

In the spring of the year 1873, Miss Juliet Corson, who was at the time secretary of a benevolent institution in this city devoted to teaching women useful occupations, became interested in the question of diverting some of the surplus of female labor into domestic channels. For two years her lessons were given in charitable establishiments. Keenly appreciating the fact that in the profession of cookery might be opened a new and honorable field of labor for women, and hoping by uniting the best foreign methods into one practical intelligible system, variously modified, and promulgated among the people, to introduce a culinary reform in this country that would benefit all, but more especially the working classes, Miss Corson, in the fall of 1876, opened a cooking school in New York, and there gave the first lessons to the wives and daughters of working men in the kind of cookery best adapted to their needs.

In August, 1877, just after the great railroad strike, Miss Corson published for free circulation fifty thousand copies of a pamphlet entitled, `Fifteen-Cent Dinners for Working Men's Families.'

This work was eagerly welcomed by numbers of the class it was intended to benefit, as many as two hundred persons applying for it at her house in a single day; but later Miss Corson was repeatedly threatened and warned to desist from either circulating it or speaking in public, by political demagogues and socialists, who inflamed the minds of the working men by assuring them that the author was in league with the capitalists, and if they listened to her, and learned how to live better on less money, employers would immediately reduce their wages. This influence lasted only for a short period, the common-sense of the laboring-man coming to his rescue. Miss Corson's free lectures are now attended by large and respectful audiences of this class, and she is also in constant receipt of letters of commendation and inquiry from the same source. At the school in St. Mark's Place young women and children from the mission schools were given free lessons in kitchen and dining-room work, the training they received being most admirable and complete. A department devoted to teaching plain cooking to cooks and the daughters and wives of working-men, opened March 13, 1877, was so successful in its results that a number of ladies who had become interested in its progress felt justified in establishing it as a permanent institution. Accordingly it was incorporated in May, 1878, and its guiding spirit is the brave, modest, intelligent woman, the pioneer of culinary reform, since it is to her efforts New York is indebted for this school of model cookery, the benefactor of the working classes, for she teaches them how to make two dishes where formerly they made but one; and the friend of women, for she has shown them the way to a useful and honorable profession.

In no other country in the world is there such an abundance of food, or such a wasteful extravagance, as in our own favored land. Says Miss Corson, in one of her culinary works: `In Europe provinces would live upon what is wasted in towns here,' and it is in this point she hopes to work reform. It may be also said, in no country is there such a variety of food, yet in spite of this fact it is not uncommon to hear a housekeeper exclaim, as if she were at her wits' end, `What shall we have for dinner to-day?—there are only beef, mutton, and pork to choose from, after all.' As if our market were not teeming with everything of the best from `flood and field.'

What are the causes of this too common complaint? The too close adherence to the notions of our ancestors, who laid it down as a rule that only certain cuts and qualities could be used for the `boil, bake—or rather roast—and fry' in their kitchens; the disposition to avoid trouble, as if anything excellent could be arrived at without trouble; and intolerance of innovation in the shape of anything savoring of foreign cookery.

`Come with me to the New York Cooking School to-morrow,' said I, recently, to one of these disconsolate houekeepers. `Miss Corson takes her class to Fulton Market for a marketing lesson. It is the very thing you need. Then, after lunch, attend the cooking lesson, and learn to make a new dish to set before your husband. You will be so delighted, you will join the Ladies' Class at once.'

`How glad I am to know this!' said my friend, brightening up. `I can not tell one piece from another, and that leaves me entirely at the mercy of the butcher. Henry has declared a dozen times that he would have to take the matter in hand himself. In regard to the cooking, I am not so much at a loss. I have managed to learn the standard dishes myself, but one does need more variety than the ordinary routine gives. I'll go, and add some new dishes to my list.'

The course of lessons in the Ladies' Classes has been adapted to the use of those who desire to combine some of the elegancies of artistic cookery with those economical interests which it is the duty of every woman to study, and embraces marketing, cooking, and carving. Lessons on Ladies' Day, and private class instruction where pupils choose bills of fare, pay for materials used, and own finished dishes, and single private lessons, are given, economy in all being inculcated as a virtue.

It was a merry group that picked their way daintily through the market to a poultry stand next morning, headed by Miss Juliet Corson; half a dozen charming young girls chattering and sparkling with the novelty of the trip; and several sedate young housekeepers, fully impressed with their own dignity and the importance of the occasion, among them my young friend.

Some poultry was taken down and laid on the stall. In a twinkling all mirth was hushed, and a dozen heads bent forward in grave attention, as Miss Corson spoke the first words of the lesson.

`Fresh poultry.' said the lady, `may be known by its full bright eyes, pliable feet, and moist skin; the best is plump, fat, and nearly white. The feet and neck of a chicken suitable for broiling are large in proportion to its size; the tip of the breast-bone is soft and easily bent between the fingers.'

As Miss Corson concluded, there was a general putting forth of slender hands to test the youth and tenderness of a pair of fowl brought down for their inspection. The young girls smiled at each other, but a fine judicial expression stole over the countenances of the young matrons, as one of them, pronouncing the pair excellent, bought them, and ordered them to be sent home.

Turkeys, ducks, geese, pigeons, grouse, and other game were then discussed; and then passing on to the vegetable stands, the class was informed concerning roots, tubers, and green vegetables.

`Roots and tubers must be plump, even-sized, with fresh, unshrivelled skins, and are good from ripening time until they begin to sprout. All green vegetables should be very crisp, fresh, and juicy, and are best just before flowering.'

Mushrooms, sweet herbs, okras, chives, cresses, and other products of mother earth claimed successive attention; and then the procession filed away to the meat stalls. As we passed a group of loungers, various comments reached my ear.

`Whatever be those, Bill?' whispered a rough voice, as softly as it could.

`One of yer Sunday schools out for an airin',' replied another, oracularly, its owner a picturesque young fellow in a Turkish fez.

As we assembled around a stall laden with `good store of meats,' most of the young girls wore a puzzled air, but the matrons assumed an impenetrable gravity, which might mean any amount of knowledge, or answer very well to cover its absence.

`I know corned beef when I see it.' said one of the girls, triumphantly, to her neighbor.

`And I know a marrow-bone, girls. But listen: Miss Corson is explaining about beef.'

`Beef should be of a bright red color, well streaked or marked with yellowish fat, and surrounded with a thick outside layer of fat. Good mutton is bright red, with plenty of hard, white fat. Veal and pork should be of a bright flesh-color, with an abundance of hard, white, semi-transparent fat. Lamb of the best kind has delicate rosy meat, and white, almost transparent, fat.

At this point my young housekeeper, to show what she had learned, selected and bought a breast of lamb for her lesson in the afternoon.

At the close of the lesson in meats, the class were led by a circuitous route to the outer fish stalls, upon which were piled heaps of shell, river, lake, and sea fish. The fish arcade, with its tanks of water filled with speckled trout, and its finny treasures of every sort, awakened the liveliest interest in every member of the class.

`Fish, when fresh, have firm flesh, bright, clear eyes, rigid fins, and ruddy gills,' commenced Miss Corson. `Lobsters and crabs must be bright in color and lively in movement, like these.'

As the lesson proceeded, a hundred questions were asked, ill-natured crabs and snappish lobsters were poked at with pencils, stupid clams and reticent oysters were interviewed right merrily, and a vacant-looking cod was invited to tell when he arrived from sea. When we were leaving, a young girl timidly ordered a red snapper for baking, as Lent was near at hand; and we then proceeded up town rejoicing.

After luncheon I escorted my young housekeeper to the Cooking School. It was a pleasant scene into which I ushered her. Fifteen or twenty ladies were seated in rows before a long wooden counter or table, behind which stood Miss Corson, a fine, pleasant-looking lady, engaged in explaining the mysteries of a `consommé à La Royale.' On the right hand a large, brightly polished range, with shining copper saucepans and boilers, from which already issued savory odors. On the left a tall cupboard for dishes, casters, smaller utensil, etc., and near by, on the wall, a blackboard inscribed with the lesson of the day. Two assistants—a clever young man in a white apron, and a bright little girl in a French cap—aid Miss Corson in her demonstrations.

As the lesson proceeded, the clear, concise instructions accompanying it, the exquisite neatness and method of every stage, filled my friend with surprised admiration. When Miss Corson, taking a breast of lamb, deftly boned, trimmed it of superfluous fat, seasoned and spread it with a dressing of bread, chopped onion, and fine herbs, rolled it up and secured it with stout twine, placed it in a saucepan on a bed of celery, carrot, turnip, parsley, and onion cut in small pieces, adding two thin slices of bacon and the juice of a lemon, and covered the whole with boiling water, my young housekeeper clapped her hands mentally, and looking at me with beaming eyes, exclaimed: `I mean to try that dish tomorrow. I am sure it must be delicious, and one can buy that part of lamb or mutton at so much less cost than the loin or hindquarter.'

The next dish was baked red snapper. `An excellent Southern fish, though others may be cooked in the same style,' said Miss Corson, as she scored its sides, and inlaid the cuts with strips of pork, and proceeded to fill its interior with a dressing of soaked bread seasoned with thyme. Like the preceding dish, the fish was laid on a bed of vegetables in a baking-pan, a small dipper of hot water poured in, and the fish placed in the oven.

`Ah, every one knows how to do that—even I do,' whispered my friend, as Miss Corson announced that she was going to prepare a piece of beef for roasting. A new light, however, dawned on her countenance as Miss Corson, after taking the ribs out and securing the meat in place with strong twine, said, `Never use skewers, as they cause the meat juices to escape.' The preparation of `salade à la Romaine' also afforded a bit of valuable information not known to the average American housekeeper. `Never touch lettuce with a knife, as it impairs the flavor and destroys the crispness of the leaf; always tear it apart with the fingers,' said Miss Corson, daintily suiting the action to the words.

A lesson in bechamel and Spanish sauces was then given, followed by `apple méringues' and `kisses' for dessert. The dishes were handed around for inspection, and the session was over. A hum of soft voices mingled with a ripple of low laughter, as the ladies, flocking around the table, delightedly sniffed and tasted the the results of the lesson.

`Have you learned anything, my dear?' said I to my friend, as we passed out to the street.

`I am brimful of ideas, and mean to take a full course of lessons. Ah! how many trials I might have been spared had I learned how to cook and keep house before! But I never dared go near old Violet's kitchen; she would have driven me out with the broom or a carving knife. Ah! there is no monarchy more absolute than a favorite old cook's. Thank Heaven, my Ellen is stupid and good-natured!'

`If she is willing to learn, I would send her to the Cooks' Class at once. There's our Bridget, for example, just as you decribe Ellen. When I proposed to her to take lessons, and decribed what it was like, the honest creature exclaimed:``Faix, ma'am, an' its me that will go to plaze ye; an' if Bridget Ryan don't have the makin's of a fust-class cook afther the tachin', may the divil—savin' your prisince—run away wid her!'' Send Ellen, and give her a trial to-morrow. Bridget is growing such a treasure, one does not mind the cost of teaching at all.'

I dropped in next day upon the Cooks' Class, taking a young friend with me who was about to be married. I met her on my way down town, and in the course of conversation about her future life she told me she intended to save up money to buy a billiard table, remarking, innocently; `It will be such a good thing to keep my husband at home with. You know, if he has the proper sort of amusement at home, he won't go off to clubs, and all that sort of thing.'

`My dear girl,' replied I, `did you ever hear the old saying, ``The way to reach a man is through his stomach''? Learn to be a good economical cook and housekeeper.'

`Why, how can I do that? I have no time, and Ann won't let me put my head in the kitchen.'

`Come with me to the Cooking School: it is the Plain Cooks' Class this afternoon. The instruction is not only for domestics, but for young housewives beginning, or about to begin, married life in comfortable circumtances—for intance, as you and Charlie expect to.'

The room as we entered looked cheerful enough, with its neat table, warm range, and copper utensils sending forth a cloud of fragrant steam. Five or six neatly dressed women sat watching Miss Corson intently, among them Bridget and Ellen, with faces beaming and smiling till they showed rows of teeth as white as the snowy aprons under which their hands were folded. A couple of prettily dressed, sweet-looking girls also listened with great interest to the lesson; and all seemed pleased but one woman, who sat near the table with hands folded on her chest, nose in the air, and a general air of protest about her whole body, that said as plain as words: `I don't belave in none o' your nonsince, I'm here because of the missus. The likes o' ye can't tache me nothin'.'

The first dish was `roast duck and water-cresses.' Directions were given for drawing, trussing, dressing, and roasting. A fowl was then prepared for boiling, with oyster sauce. This was followed by a pair of pigeons, which furnished a boning lesson.

`If a cook,' said Miss Corson, as she prepared the pigeons, `can draw her birds without mangling or soiling them, and then prepare them so as to combine an inviting appearance with an enjoyable flavor, she proves that she has pursued her art with taste and discretion; so it will be well to attend carefully to the intruction given in this lesson.'

Two pigeons were next in order for broiling. These were split down the back, the entrails removed, the birds wiped clean with a damp cloth, and placed in readiness for the gridiron. A fowl was then cut in joints, a lesson in fricassee given, and the class broke up with expressions of admiration for the `nate, tidy body,' the `knowledgeable leddy,' and the `wise young woman,' as they variously called their instructor.

It is generally suppoed that small children, from their volatile temperaments and forgetfulness, can not be taught or trusted with cookery. Miss Corson has proved quite the contrary. Last year she had a class of children from the New York Home for Soldiers' Families; this year ten of them do the entire cooking for the inmates, at least 150, in that institution. In all the classes of the New York Cooking School no pupils are more industrious, helpful, and intelligent than the little children from the mission schools and charitable institutions.

In point of fact, the children's classes are the most charming and useful and important, for the wholeome effect they will have on the strata of society they represent. The artisan course of instruction for these little folks and elder girls comprises the preparation and cooking of simple dishes, setting the table, bringing in the dinner, waiting at table, removing and washing soiled dishes, and regulating kitchen and dining-room.

Let us go and take a peep at the children. A little flock, under the guidance of a kindly matron, is passing down to the basement; we enter with them. How merrily they babble as they divest themselves of hats and shawls! What a ripple and trill of childish laughter as they strive for the first rows of chairs! Listen: a sudden hush, a settling down in seats, and a smoothing of aprons, as Miss Corson appears, and, doffing bonnet and cloak, takes her position behind the table, with a cheery `Good-afternoon, children.'

The lesson of the day, says the black-board, is `Fried Fillets of Flounder,' `Maître d'Hôtel Butter,' `Grilled Fish Bones,' and `Caramel Custards.'

Two or three girls are usually chosen—different ones at each lesson—to assist in making the dishes; so when the material was laid on the table, and the lesson announced, Miss Corson said, `What little girl is anxious to help me cut the fillets?—some one with strong hands.'

A dozen hands were held up at once. Selecting one of the eldest girls, who came around and stood by her side, Miss Corson, taking up a sharp, thin-bladed knife, deftly cut off the whole side piece or fillet of the fish entire, and then handing the knife to the watchful girl at her side, gave minute directions from time to time, which were followed so accurately that the remaining three fillets were soon lying, skin side down, on the counter. Miss Corson, then taking the knife, showed the class how to cut the fillets clean from the skin.

Meanwhile another little girl is called for to make the breading. With flushed cheeks and an air of importance, a little wee thing steps up, seizes the roller, and vigorously rolls the bread-crumbs to powder, beats and egg up with a spoonful of water, and retires. The elder girl, who by this time has prepared the remaining fillets, breads them, dips them in the egg, and in the bread again, and lays them on a dish, in readiness to be fried a delicate brown in smoking-hot lard.

`Now, children, you observe that we have a nice bone left; shall we throw it away, or use it? I think it would be nice grilled. We will take some mustard, salt, pepper, salad-oil, and vinegar—make a paste of them, and spread it over the bone. Then let us broil it on an oiled gridiron, and afterward serve it with sprigs of parsley or slices of lemon. Now, besides the fillets from the fish, we have this, making two delicious dishes where people commonly make but one.'

The children looked very wise, a little hungry for the coming feast, and exceedingly interested. An unusual flutter took place, however, when two little girls were called for to make `lemon custards,' and one to make `Maître d'Hôtel Butter.' All the hands went up at once at the mere mention of custards. The fortunate girls who were chosen marched around behind the counter, and the resigned remainder subsided into placid attention.

One of the little maids beat the eggs lustily, while the other, sweetening and flavoring a quart of milk according to direction, set it on the fire to boil, stirring it carefully; then a sieve was held over the beaten eggs, the milk with its lemon rind and sugar strained therein, then poured into cups, which were placed in a baking pan with hot water surrounding them. The little girl then cautiously slid the pan into the oven, her face aglow with pride in the safe performance of her task. Meanwhile the third little damsel had chopped her parsley, mixed it with an ounce of butter, a tea-spoonful of lemon juice, and a little salt and pepper, after which she retired to her seat, and another small child came forward to drop the fillets in the smoking lard. All the class waited for the lemon custards, casting troubled glances at the clock. As they were slowly drawn forth from the oven and placed upon the table, the lesson concluded, the children crowded around to taste and receive their shares of the finished results of the lesson. Little tin pails popped up mysteriously to receive the well-earned dainties. Hats and shawls were hastily donned, the little ones hurried out of doors, and pausing on the pavement, cooed and fluttered with satisfaction over the contents of their little pails like so many doves in a dovecote pecking corn.

Watching the innocent for a moment, we hurried away, feeling that the New York Cooking School is an institution worthy of good people's patronage and praise, not only for its sending out young housekeepers educated in the economic principles of cookery, but because of the grand work it is doing in teaching the children of the poorer classes.

Will's Will, and His Two Thankgivings by Rose Terry Cooke

`He' got the dreadfulest will, Parson Roberts! I'm e'en-a'most afeard of him ef he says he will do anything, for he'll do it, whether or no; and here I be, a widder, and next to nothin' left in the way of means;' and then the poor little woman burst into tears. Mr. Roberts was a young man, and an honest man, so he did not say anything: his repertory of spiritual consolations was as yet small, and strictly conventional. There was nothing in it fitted to this particular distress of a willful son, which really seemed a greater trouble to Mrs. White than the death of Joel, who had just expired in the lean-to bedroom. Joel had not been a help or a comfort to her for the last ten years. He had at last died `of the tremens,' as she phrased it, and left her with only the little brown house that had three rooms and a loft in it, and a half acre of garden ground.

It was a bleak November day, the air sour and dark, the trees leafless, the earth sodden with chill rains, and a dreadful silence and peace settling down on this small shelter by the road-side that had for a week past resounded with shrieks and groans. Mr. Roberts had been sent for at the last moment, with that vague idea of ghostly help at the very extremity that we all feel, whether we believe in it or not; but he had come too late for even an attempt at healing the sin-sick spirit: it had fled far away, and now he stood gazing out of the window at the dreary landscape, listening to the wind that cried in the spout, and the widow's moans in the kitchen, with about as much idea how to exhort the one as the other; but he did the best thing after all; he knelt down at the next chair and prayed fervently for a comfort and help beyond man's power to give, and Mrs. White's soul grew calm with the very lifting of her thoughts into a purer atmosphere. Two days after, the funeral was held. A scant assemblage of neighbors came in to listen to the reading of Scripture and singing, which was purposely made as inappropriate as possible, for to utter that which was really the right thing, as far as honesty went, would have been a gratuitous insult to the living, and useless to the dead; but Mr. Roberts grew fairly eloquent in the fervor of his prayer for the mother and her son, and Will White bent his handsome curly head lower still to hide the real emotion that glittered in his eyes and flushed his face as Mr. Roberts asked the Lord that he might be a help and a stay to the old age and weaknes of his remaining parent. The widow rather resented the terms in which he alluded to her age, for she was `only forty-seven,' as she said to herself, and felt quite competent for all future emergencies if Will would behave himself; but of course this little chagrin could not express itself, and Mr. Roberts never was aware of it; so the prayer did her no special good in its utterance, but it woke up Will to a sense of manliness and responsibility that answered the petition while yet it was spoken.

`I'll do it,' he thought. And when he took his place behind the coffin, with his mother on his arm, there was a look of resolution and courage on his boyish face that struck the few who saw him, though they did not understand it.

`Sakes!' said Mrs. Ellis, under her breath, to another widow who walked with her. `Jest look at Will White! hain't he growed awful old lately?'

`Well, he does appear aged some,' piped Mrs. Crane, feebly; `but it's a good deal for a boy like him to have sech a terrible shiftless pa as his'n was. He's had to buckle to more'n most of 'em, I expect.'

`No, he hain't,' was the sharp response. `He's run wild; she hasn't never had no government at all. He's done what he darn please right along, and he won't never be no good—you see'f he is. She'll slave an' slave for that feller just as she did for Joel, and he'll hev his own way, for all her, till the day after never. I wouldn't stand in her shoes for nothin'. Mercy to me! if it ain't a-nowin'! Come, Miss Crane, hurry up. I can't stay through the prayer; I shall have rheumatiz for certain ef I do.'

And snow it did, bitterly and continuously, all that night and the next day, which was the old and honored festival of New England—Thanksgiving-day.

Will had to shovel a path to the woodpile, and spent the dark cold morning bringing wood into the back shed; for Deacon Peters had sent a load last week to Mrs. White in behalf of the church, and in odd hours Will had sawed and split it. While he put it out of reach of the weather, his mother went about slowly, getting such dinner as she could. In the village, not a mile away, fires were bright, pantries overflowing, families gathering in the old homes, children laughing, tables spread with every homely dainty accordant with the season; but the widow White and Will sat down to a dinner of boiled pork and potatoes, and a pot of sage tea.

They did not say anything to each other while the scanty meal was eaten—it is not New England fashion to be social at meals, and there was nothing to warm their hearts in the poverty and solitude of their condition; and when at last it was over, and the dishes disposed of, Will sat down by the fire and cracked some nuts he had gathered a week before, and picked out the fresh meats for his mother. It was an unusual attention, and his mother thanked him with a tearful sort of smile; but he had lapsed into such a reverie he did not hear her, and she took up her knitting and stared out of the window at the rapid flakes that made a dizzy whirl in upper air, but fell soft as wool upon the shrouded earth, and hid its woes and scars with deep fleeces. The little woman's great soft eyes grew darker as she gazed, her thin lips quivered, and her needles flew: she was looking back into a dreary past, forward into a threatening future. Nominally she believed and trusted in God; but, like a great many of the rest of us, she did not always live up to her profession or intention, and just now her fears hid Him as the snow hid His heavens, and sight got the better of faith decidedly.

`Mother!' said Will.

Mrs. White jumped. She had just seen herself dying in the poor-house, and Will lost at sea; no wonder she started.

`Why, Will, how you start me!' she chirped; but Will did not apologize.

`Mother, we won't ever have such a mean Thanksgiving again, now I tell ye. When I'm ten years older, we'll have as good a dinner as Squire Hall, and we'll have it in a good house too.'

`Oh, William White, how you do talk! Why, we're more'n likely to be in the town-house afore that time comes.'

`Now, mother, you shut up! I tell you, we'll have a good house and a good dinner this day ten years, as sure as I'm alive.'

`But mabbe you'll die, Will.'

`No, I sha'n't. I know I sha'n't. I ain't goin' to make no calculations about that. I've sot my mind on that dinner, and we'll have it.'

`Oh, Will, you're awful presumptuous. You ain't nothin' but a mortal boy, and you're leavin' the Lord out of your calculations entire, seems to me.'

`Spellin'-book says the Lord helps them that helps themselves, and it looks sensible, and I'm a-goin' to try it on.'

`Well, I hope you'll fetch it, dear,' sighed the widow, hopelessly.

`I will,' was the confident answer; and though the widow's soul recoiled from the audacity of the boy's speech, yet its courage thrilled her. She turned away from the storm, lit the tallow candle, and put another stick into the stove—small symptoms of the cheer that was kindled within her; but then the cheer was small and frail, it might not last.

Like many another woman, she had never known more than the surface life of the child she had borne and nursed. Hard work; a husband who abused and impoverished her; a succession of drooping, sickly babies, over whose births she mourned far more than over their deaths; the hourly fight for life that absorbs the poor and suffering—all these had kept her from the close and tender intimacy with her only living child that might have given her a better understanding of the resolution, strength, capacity, and tenderness of the nature that lay hidden under the rude health and undisciplined spirit of a boy who spent most of his time out-of-doors, and was an adept at all the sports and occupations of country boys, and withal a quick scholar at the district school, though hitherto his mischief and merriment had made for him a bad record that overshadowed his good lessons.

But his father's death was a crisis in Will's life; his careless boyhood fell away from him like a masker's mantle, besides that dreadful and disgraceful death-bed, and the deep affection for his mother, that had been only a dormant instinct, sprang into conscious existence and action.

The widow White went to bed that night with more reason for thanksgiving than she was aware of—far more than Judge Hall had, whose only son came home from college ostensibly to keep the holiday, but never went back, having been expelled for the best reasons; more than Mrs. Payne could find for herself in the aspect of her beautiful daughter, who brought home with her from a New York visit an elegant youth in the character of her promised husband, and saw him become wildly drunk at the dinner table; yet both that father and that mother held the Widow White, in the expressive language of Scripture, among those `whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.'

The first fruits of Will's resolve were shown the next morning with commendable promptness; he shouldered his spade, and went into the village to clear paths. It was not a very lucrative piece of work; he got a hot cup of coffee at one place, half a pie at another, a dime here, and a few cents there, till they counted up to twenty-five, and when he came home at night to a supper of cold pork, rye bread, and baked potatoes, he was hungry enough, in spite of the pie and coffee, to enjoy his meal heartily.

This was only the beginning. His quick wit and ingenuity devised plenty of small industries that would pay: in the long winter evenings he carved fairy sets of furniture with his pocket-knife out of red cedar, and sold them in a Dartford toy-shop; he snared partridges, and sent them to the hotels; he caught rabbits in traps, and many a good woman in Crampton was glad to buy those for a pie or stew, and sell her chickens at a profit, instead of eating them. Then when he had made a little money, he invested it in a basket, a bundle of papers, and half a bushel of popping corn, and sold various small wares besides corn and papers on the Dartford trains, driving quite a heavy trade, when the time came, in Christmas greens, for the winter was mild, and severe frosts held off till January, and Will knew well where the ground-pine trailed it verdant wreaths along the hill-side, and the coral pine laid soft fingers on the dead grass. Toward spring he hunted the spicy berries of the winter-green, and sold them in rough baskets of birch bark; and bunches of the first arbutus blossoms brought him a quick return in silver for their fragrant bloom. He not only helped support his mother, who helped herself meantime in doing whatever came to her hand about Crampton—washing, ironing, sewing, or even sick-nursing—but he had laid up ten dollars in the Dartford Dime Savings-Bank by the first of June, and then he obtained steady work.

He was handy and helpful on the train always; more than once he had `spelled' a brakeman who wanted to go home over a train, and with his quick perception he had learned their duties. Now a conductor had been promoted to a longer line and better pay, a brakeman took his place, and the vacancy at the brakes was offered to Will. Steady wages and steady work; this was more than he had hoped for so soon, and he knew well it was worth far more to him than his precarious earnings in the cars, so he jumped at the offer. He was almost sixteen now, large for his age, well built, active, and handsome; even his rough dress and dusty face and hands could not disguise the rich curls, the sparkling eye, the merry laugh, and regular features that made the widow White so proud of her boy. Everybody that worked with him liked him, and he made himself agreeable whenever he came in contact with any of the passengers. Civility, cheerful and helpful, invariably smooths the way of this world, and Will was always ready to help an old lady down the steps, to carry a baby for some tired mother, to take a school-girl's books while she gathered up her skirts daintily to enter the car, or to give some stout old gentleman a lift with his strong young arm. But when Annie Hall began to go to Dartford Seminary, and went in an out daily on Will's train, he began to think he liked to help her better than anybody else, and between the stations cast many a furtive glance through the end window at her, though ordinarily her position only afforded a view of her heavy braids of soft light hair, the slender throat below, and the jaunty hat on top of them.

Now and then, when other girls joined her, she turned about and bewitched him with a view of her soft sad blue eyes, her delicate coloring, and the plaintive smile she affected; for Miss Annie was a sentimental chit, who read mild poetry, cried because tears were so sweet, and talked of an early death as the great blessing to a heart too feeling to endure the toils of life. This was all very well for Judge Hall's daughter, who had never known a want or had a care in her life; and the gentle sadness of spirit which she cherished suited her soft eyes, fair pale face, and pink lips wonderfully, and set a halo round about her in the eyes of Will White, who was working hard for his living, and was merry as a cricket by the fireside.

Will began to look for her with a beating heart, to find things very disagreeable all day if she failed to come, and to hate Saturday as the worst day of the week.

In short, he fell heartily in love before he knew it; and whereas his ambition had hitherto been to be rich, now he wanted also to be distinguished. But could he, a brakeman on this little local road, ever be or do anything that should put him on a level with Squire Hall's daughter? Luckily for him, he had been born in America, and what is the use of a republic if everybody can not be as good as anybody else? He had read all sorts of tales of The Butter Boy of Boston, The Miller's Boy of Maine, The Tanner of Tinkton, and The Hunter Boy of the Prairie, all of whom had been either Governor, Chief Justice, or President, and why should he depair? Had he not in his very early youth been found crying in a corner, and after some persuasion explained his mystic grief by sobbing, `Ow! ow! I've got to grow up to be the President'? To feel the strong necessity of becoming Squire Hall's son-in-law was not as painful a prospect, and seemed no less possible or probable.

By the end of his first winter on the train he had opportunity to do the squire service; for Sam Hall, the youth previously mentioned as sent home Thanksgiving-day from college, had carried out his promise of a reckless and evil future, and in some drunken fight in a New York saloon been beaten terribly, and brought home to his father's house in Crampton a mere wreck; fever had set in, and though his injuries were not necessarily fatal, his native constitution was feeble, and the fever took mortal hold of what dissipation and blows had left of it. The widow White was sent for to help nurse poor Sam, for the judge was lame with rheumatism, and Mrs. Hall always delicate. But there were watchers needed, and the young men of Crampton came in for that office, Will White more frequently than any other, for he was so handy, so careful, so tender of the miserable boy's aches and pains, that Sam would have been glad to have him there always, and the judge was grateful in his own pompous way, while Annie condescended to turn her tearful eyes on him with a faint smile whenever they met—a smile that sent Will temporarily into ecstasy, and glorified the cars, the station, the steps, and even the creaking brake-wheel, while it lasted. Certainly Annie did look exquisitely lovely in her rich soft furs and heavy winter garments; a tea-rose could not have showed more fair out of dark folding mosses. But when Sam died, and the touching symbols of grief shrouded her in clinging robes of blackness and gloom, she looked to Will like a real angel, love and pity so transfigured her girlish beauty; and if it had been suggested to this infatuated brakeboy of the road that angels never wore crape and cashmere, he would have indignantly retorted that they ought to.

Judge Hall had solemnly thanked the young man, and liberally paid his mother, thinking—if he thought anything—that his affairs with that family were concluded. Deluded man! the play had but just begun. Will could contain his passion in silence no longer; the opening spring brought Annie to her daily journeys again, temporarily interrupted by Sams's illness and death, and afforded opportunity for a series of small attentions on Will's part, impertinent enough, considering their mutual positions, but chiming so well with Annie's romantic ideas, trained long on a course of flabby novels and weakly as well as weekly story papers, that she accepted them with a blushing condescension pretty enough to see, and maddeningly lovely to Will. Tiny gifts they were that dropped into her lunch basket as she passed him, or were tucked into the strap of her books, which he held while she tripped up the car stepsp—birch-bark boxes filled with winter-green berries or butternut meats; bunches of the pinkest arbutus nestled in the plumes of standing ground-pine; now and then a red Spitzbergen apple carefully preserved in dry straw for this sacred purpose long after apples in general had gone: simple tokens of an admiration that deepened daily, and shone without disguise from Will's handsome eyes whenever Annie caught their glance.

But though he forgot it, there were other Crampton people besides Judge Hall's daughter who came and went on the Dartford train, and among them a maiden cousin of the judge's wife, old Miss Cynthia Swett. Her youth had never been disturbed with love affairs. Proud, poor, and homely besidies, nobody had ever approached her with any pretension of affection or passion, and she had not a spark of sympathy for such weaknesses; but she had very sharp eyes to perceive them, and an equally sharp tongue to interfere. Business—for she was the Crampton milliner—took her in and out to Dartford frequently, and very soon she observed poor Will's devotion to Miss Annie, marked the shy greetings, the gracious response, the berries, flowers, and apples, that she knew Annie never gathered for herself, and with the perseverance of a spider she waited for more positive evidence.

Nor waa Miss Cynthia the only observer. Lovers are like ostriches, which hide their heads in a bush, and think nobody sees them. Will's love was already a matter of jest to his comrades on the train; the conductor smiled grimly when he saw him wait anxiously till the last moment at Crampton Station for the slight figure that lit up his face like a burst of sunshine when it appeared, and more than one frequent passenger exchanged mild jokes about the brakeman's love-making. One day Miss Cynthia chanced to overhear a few remarks of this nature, which made her mistress of the situation. The very next morning she posted over to Judge Hall's, and walked into the sitting-room brimful of portentous news. Now the judge's office opened from this family room, and on a chilly day like this—one of those June days that belie the season—his door was always left open to get the benefit of the wood fire blazing in that sitting-room fire-place; for nothing less than a coal stove warmed the office in winter, which was taken down in summer, of course; but the judge was terribly rheumatic, and loved the dry air of the fire on a damp day, even if it were in August. This Miss Cynthia knew very well, so she did not follow up her cousin to the dairy, or the kitchen, or the garden, as was her wont, but waited patiently for her to appear.

It was not long before Mrs. Hall came in, and Cynthia proceeded to unfold her budget. She sat very near the open door into the office, and the gentle, anxious mother, as soon as she perceived the communication concerned her Annie, rose to shut it.

`Leave that door open!' growled the judge, who sat suspiciously near.

And trembling, Mrs. Hall whispered to Cynthia: `Speak a little lower, Cynthia.'

`Speak a little louder!' thundered the squire. `What are you saying about Annie?'

And nothing daunted, the resolute spinster proceeded to lay before these parents the shocking fact, extenuated, and set down in full malice, that their precious daughter was flirting openly and wickedly with a brakeman on the Dartford train, and that their love passages were the scorn and ridicule of all the passengers, far and near.

The judge was furious, and Mrs. Hall drowned in tears.

`Now, ef I was you—' suggested the spinster.

`Which you ain't,' severely snapped the judge, but to no purpose; she merely resumed the thread of her words like an echo:

`Ef I was you, I wouldn't say nothing to Annie; she's awful romantic, and sentimental, and all that, and it'll only set her on't right off. She's jest the one to keep it up ef she knows you don't favor it none. Ef I was you—'

`You wouldn't be a fool!' growled the judge. `I haven't been married twenty-five years for nothing, Cynthy Swett. I know women-folks by this time.'

`Well, I shouldn't wonder ef you did, judge; but it doos beat all things to think of her takin' up with old Joel White's boy.'

`I dono but what he's a decent-behaved boy,' gently chirped the weeping mother, anxious to excuse Annie. `He was real good to Sam, you know, husband; he set up with him more frequent than anybody.'

`Well, well, that isn't to the purpose, wife. I paid his mother more'n was really reasonable, because of that: we're quits as far as that goes. I won't have him foolin' round Annie, anyway; but I know how to manage it. I don't say but what I'm obleeged to you, Cynthy. I'm glad to know of it, but I can take care of it myself now.' And with a majestic wave of the hand the judge dismissed the subject, and the two `women-folks' retired to discuss it after their own fashion in Mrs. Hall's bedroom.

The judge, it must be owned, went about the matter very cannily. He said nothing, but used his influence among the officials—for he was a director and heavy stockholder on the Eastern Railraod, of which the Crampton and Dartford line was a branch—and in a week or two Will was promoted to the conductorship of a freight train, which never even passed the morning express, or was passed by it.

He was pleased and pained both. His wages were increased, but he could not see Annie; and though he was conscious that thus he made one step toward her, he was actually thrust away from her sweet presence. Only Sundays could he be at home, and the very first Sunday she was not in church. She and her mother had gone to Dartford shopping, Mrs. White said, and staid over to hear a wonderful preacher.

But the second Sunday he found his usually placid mother boiling with indignation. For all his boasted knowledge of women, the squire had not reckoned on Miss Cynthia's tongue, or the power of gossip in a little country village. Filled with a lively view of her own penetration and importance, the spinster had revealed her discovery and her counselling with Judge Hall to at least three dear friends, under vows of secrecy; but each of them found out that the other two knew as much as she, and indignant at Cynthia's want of reticence, concluded not to keep such a general secret any longer; and of course a friend felt it to be a duty that Mrs. White should know why Will had been removed to the freight train, and Annie sent to the boarding-chool, for such Cynthia had been sure would be the next move. And from hand to hand the suggestion had grown into certainty, the school selected, and the date of Annie's departure fixed— all of which would have been as much news to the Hall family as it was to the widow White. But grief and indignation overpowered the poor woman afresh as she poured out the story to Will.

`How could you think on't, William? Why, Squire Hall wouldn't scurce let an angel out o'heaven have his girl. Now did you expect he'd so much as let you look at her?'

Will's face darkened with resolve and a certain righteous anger. `Judge Hall is nothing but a man, anyway, mother. I sha'n't ask him whom I shall marry—not much! This is a free country, if it's anything. And now my mind's made up: I will marry Annie Hall before I die, whether or no.'

`Oh, Will! Will! now don't you be so masterful. Oh dear! I had ought to have broke your will whilst you was a boy, and you'd ha'been spared lots. Dear me!'

`I shouldn't be worth a cent, mother, if I hadn't a will of my own; and as long as I don't set myself to do anything worse than make a good home for you and marry Annie, I don't think you had ought to complain. I haven't forgot about that Thankgiving-day.' And Will laughed out in such a cheery, brave way, his mother almost smiled; but she shook her head withal, for her common-sense stood in the way of her sympathies.

But Will was not to be daunted. He slept precious little that night; his brain was busy with plans for the future. He recognized it as the firt necessity that Annie should not be allowed to forget him. For the present he must keep his situation. Next winter a series of evening schools for adults was to begin in Dartford, and his train brought him there for the night. He must attend these, and work hard to lay the foundation of an education, for the fruit of the tree of knowledge is the hereditary longing of man, and the end of his repose, even unto this day. These two things he was set upon; and ascertaining that Annie was still at home, he rose long before dawn on Monday morning, walked over to Squam Pond, and coming back by early daylight, hung on the side door of Squire Hall's mansion a basket of dripping water-lily buds and leaves, fragrant and pure as the ideal he carried in his heart, and directed on a rude label of bark to Annie. This was the beginning of his siege. Scarcely a week passed but some token of a watchful affection reached the girl, if it was only an exquisite flower from a hot-house, or a bunch of speckless and translucent grapes, for even these small gifts bore heavily on Will's small means, though he grudged nothing to attain his object.

Still, all his efforts might have been useless but for an ally in the enemy's camp he knew nothing of. There is a certain impartiality in gossip that sometimes does duty as a virtue; talk is like air, it goes everywhere, often where it would willingly be kept from going; and in all the buzz and bustle there was in Crampton about Annie's stifled love affair, it was impossible but that something should reach her ears and fire her imagination. To be the heroine of a real romance, with a devoted lover and a cruel father, seemed to her the height of bliss. She did not know how much easier it is to read a three-volume novel than to live one; and it was mightily pleasant to receive these anonymous gifts, knowing perfectly well whom they came from and brood over them with all the romantic fancies and visions of `sweet seventeen.'

It was not quite so agreeable when the judge, going out one morning unusually early, dicovered a bouquet with her name attached hanging to the door-knob, and hurled it, with an ignominous expletive, into the pig-pen across the road—a place of deposit from which she could not rescue even a fragment to weep over. But the angry father `builded better than he knew;' that spark of opposition kindled the tinder ready for conflagration in her girlish heart, and the destroyed bouquet was the first gun fired in a long internecine war. In vain did the judge lie in wait for tokens of communication between the lovers; a quicker wit than his forestalled him. And when, in a fit of desperation, he did at last send Annie away to school, he could not forbid the express company or the mail to carry the constant tokens which kept up her interest in and recollection of the handsome, spirited young fellow who evidently adored her, though afar off.

In the mean time Will improved his opportunities at Dartford; he studied with unflagging zeal; and his naturally quick mind, stimulated by the ardor of passion and the force of that will his mother so lamented, seemed to defy obstacles and literally devour the way. In a year from the time he was made conductor on the freight train he gave up his situation, and went into a physician's office, where what work he did was taken as an equivalent for his board, and he was allowed time to recite in certain classes at the Dartford High School the lessons he learned while he mounted guard in Dr. Hyde's office. Some writing he got to help him along—for the only thing his mother ever had time to teach him was her own fair and even handwriting—and some occasional bits of bracket-sawing fell in his way, so that with his small savings from the wages he had received he kept decently clothed; and when Annie Hall met one day in the streets of Dartford, as she was on her way home from school, a tall, handsome, well-set-up youth, in a suit of light summer clothes, who lifted his hat to her with the grace of a polished gentleman and the devotion of a lover in all his aspect, she blushed up to her eyes, and smiled like an amiable rose-bud. Will had studied manners as well as his school-books, and improved outwardly as well as inwardly thereby, for manners imply a man behind them, though the implication sometimes fails.

But however strong a will may be, or however eager a lover's wishes, time does not speed the faster or delay the longer for wish or will: peace is for the heart that can steady its own beats to the great pendulum, not for that which throbs fast with fever or lags heavily with pain. The slow years went on, and at last Will had studied and slaved enough to get into the Dartford Medical College as a student, paying his way partly by certain services in and about the building. He loved the profession he had chosen, and bent all his soul to acquiring it. The professors regarded him with favor, for he evidently was in earnest. If they had known how he longed sometimes to join the other students in their frolics and wild exploits, those grave faces would have darkened. Will was a boy at heart still, and ready for fun as the wildest of his companions, but his strong resolution held him with iron bands to the work he had set his life on. Success meant Annie for his wife, and a home for his mother; it was not to be perilled for an impulse of the moment or a passing gratification. So he studied on, and by dint of applying his native common-sense to the theories of the books and lectures through which he plodded, he learned far more than the rest of his class, and in three year was installed once more in Dr. Hyde's office, as his assistant. Five times Thanksgiving had come and gone since the sad day he had made that promise to his mother, and he seemed little nearer its fulfillment; but he did not despair, and suddenly the sky brightened for him. An elder brother of Dr. Hyde had long ago gone to California, and acquiring a fortune, had settled in one of the southern towns, and made for himself a beautiful and luxurious home. The doctor had always wanted to visit him, but never found the time; and about six months after Will came to help him, a letter from one of his nieces arrived, saying that her father had been seized with paralysis, and though he had rallied from the first shock, life seemed so insecure to him he must see his brother as soon as possible. So Dr. Hyde, who was a childless widower, made his few arrangements rapidly, put his practice into Will's hands, and obeyed the summons.

This was indeed a stroke of fortune. Dr. White had made already a favorable impression in Dartford, and when on one or two occasions of grave importance the celebrated Dr. Packard, of New York, was called to counsel with him, he expressed himself with great urbanity, and strong approbation of Dr. White's treatment of the cases, adding that he himself could have done no more. This, indeed, was a feather in Will's cap, and did him more good than a year's experience with the rather distrustful clients among those left to his care. He took courage, and whatever time his practice left him he devoted still to study, for which Dr. Hyde's fine library offered him every facility.

In the mean time Annie Hall had grown up into a beautiful young woman, and plenty of lovers `cam down the glen;' but to each and all she turned a deaf ear. If she was romantic, her heart was faithful; and though she would not own even to herself where its constancy belonged, she still felt very positively that no other man moved or interested her; and though Judge Hall sometimes wondered what made his little girl so very fastidious, he did not want to lose her, and she had her own way in peace. Through all these years the slight and nameless tokens of remembrance had never ceased; no festival of the year was unmarked by them, and never a Thanksgiving passed without Will White's appearance in the village church, beside his mother, and one deep bow and eloquent look always awaited Annie at the church door. The judge never went to church on Thanksgiving-day, and Cynthia invariably spent it in Dartford, so Annie had her bit of romance in peace.

But it was not always to be so. The judge was seized with a severe attack of pneumonia the winter after Dr. Hyde left Dartford, and as the Crampton doctor was helpless with a broken leg, Dr. Hyde was sent for, and his substitute, Dr. White, came instead. Judge Hall was too ill to recognize him, and Mrs. Hall too glad to have a doctor at all, to think of past misfortunes; and Annie received him with a blush that was exquisite, and a smile radiant enough to illuminate any man's soul. Will went about his task with skill and energy. The judge was very ill indeed, and for several days hung between life and death; but at last the balance turned toward this world, and, weak as a baby, the pompous old man crept back into life by the slowest progress; but it meant living, and that was enough. Mrs. Hall blessed the doctor over and over, and cried herself into joyful hysterics. Annie went up to him with both hands out, and a face speaking far more than her words.

`I don't know how to thank you, Dr. White,' she said, softly.

`Shall I tell you?' significantly inquired the doctor.

Annie did not answer, but I am inclined to think he took her silence for consent, since half an hour afterward Miss Cynthia, who had arrived in the nick of time to soothe and scold away Mrs. Hall's hysterics, burst into the library, when that congenial task was over, to find Annie, and found her, indeed, with her head on Dr. White's shoulder, and his arm about her waist.

`For mercy's sakes!' she screamed, and fled, slamming the door behind her.

Annie laughed, and Will whistled; they were both aware of an enemy, but did not care to acknowledge it.

The judge recovered well enough now without further need of a doctor; but as soon as he was about again, Miss Cynthia felt it her duty to tell him of her new discovery. He had almost forgotten Will White in the last few years, but now he was furious: to think this `fellow' should not only have been his physician, taking advantage of his unconscious condition to establish himself there, but that he should actually have had the impudence to make love to Annie, and she the audacity to accept it—this was more than flesh and blood could bear! He stormed at his wife, and raged at Annie. Mrs. Hall cried, of course; but Annie stood still, calm, though very pale, and looked straight in his face. This was too much; he could not bear it.

`Do you hear me, miss?' he roared. `I forbid you to speak to that fellow again! Marry him, indeed! indeed you won't!'

`I shall,' said Annie, tranquilly.

The judge turned purple. If a pin on his table had peeked up in his face, and gone off like a pistol, he would not have been more astounded; never before had his will been defied by anybody. `Wh-wh-what do you mean, you little hussy?' he stammered, fairly choked with fury.

`Just what I said, father. I have promised Will White to marry him, and I mean to keep my promise.'

The judge swore a loud and mighty oath: it was not his habit, and Annie was both shocked and startled. He saw it in her start of surprise and look of dismay, and went on. `Don't you dare to look at him, again, much less to—' His head began to swim, and his sight grew dark; he fell to the floor insnsible.

When he awoke, the scene was changed; he lay on his own bed, weak as a man could be, unable to lift hand or foot, even to fully open the lids from under which he peered doubtfully about him. Annie and Dr. White stood by a little table, the doctor dropping some medicine, and Annie looking on. Presently she spoke, in a guarded voice; but the judge heard her.

`Will he live?' she said.

The doctor looked up at her tenderly. `Yes, dear, he will get over this attack, at least, and he may live for years; but he will have to be careful: apoplexy is not a matter to trifle with.'

`But I am so glad he is better!' earnestly answered the girl.

`And so am I, Annie. I want him to like me, you know.'

The judge could not believe his ears; for years he had hated this young fellow—whenever he happened to think of him, that is; within a few weeks past he was conscious that his most fervent wish had been to get him out of the way in some manner—neither death nor exile would have been objectionable—and yet the man wanted him to live, and had been doing his best to save him from death. The judge shut his eyes, and feebly meditated this matter, but he said nothing. `Night brings counsel,' says the proverb; and so may sickness, for it has the night's silence and leisure for thought.

When the judge got better, and crept about with a staff, he found he had learned a lesson from the death so closely faced. He did not say anything to Annie, but it was significant that he kept silence. Mrs. Hall could not understand it, and Cynthia said `he'd got a warnin'.' Perhaps she was right: he had certainly got an enlightening, if nothing more; and Annie, who daily expected he would resume the conversation so sadly interrupted, began to wonder if the fit had really erased from his memory the passion and fury which had brought it on. But they all misunderstood him; he was chewing a cud of bitter thought and fancy all this time. To have been on the edge of death is to see things differently after we return from that low brink. Judge Hall had learned there to respect the calm judgment and strong character of his daughter's lover. He knew well what an advantage Will White might take any day of Annie's very willful nature—a nature hitherto dormant because never thwarted, but which he himself had discovered only of late. He could see that this young man had worked himself into a position where he would soon be independent. He knew, too, that his own days were numbered: another shock of apoplexy would be his death-signal; and the judge took such counsel with his own heart as drove him to read his Bible with different eyes from those that had made its perusal a mere ceremonial observance before.

A year went on now in quiet. Will was not yet ready to take Annie away from her home, but letters went constantly back and forth between them. The judge grew more and more gentle and gracious from week to week. Annie loved him as never before, and Mrs. Hall gazed at him with a mild and tearful awe that found broken expression to Miss Cynthia:

`He's a-ripenin' for heaven, Cynthy, he is. He's a changed man. Why, he's jest like a cosset lamb about the house; he don't take me to do as he used to—not once in a week.'

`Well, I told ye he'd got a warnin'. Folks that is so masterful as he was has to get a good knock 'most always before they die. I dono but what the judge was a Christian before now; he was a profesor, I know, but he didn't seem to be no great fist at it; didn't make a business on't, so to speak. But now he's seen his latter end clus to, as you may say, and it's quite affectin' to him. I shouldn't wonder but what he's experienced religion over agin.'

`Dear me! I do hope he ain't a-goin' to die jest as he gits real pleasant to live with,' quavered Mrs. Hall.

`Law sakes, Sophrony! why don't you take it t'other eend fust? Folks ain't noway fit for the next world ef they ain't fit for this—leastways not for the heavenly part on't. I should think, now, you'd have rec'lected his immortal soul fust thing.'

Mrs. Hall sighed, self-convicted. Poor little woman, her first natural thought had been of the years she had been in bondage through fear, and the sad recall of what might have been had the judge been kinder and more reasonable. She could not excuse herself to her own simple, humble soul; so she let Cynthia bristle up with her superior spiritaul consciousness, and said no more.

When Dr. Hyde had been away almost two years, he wrote home to say that his brother, after lingering beyond any precedent, had at last died, his wife having preceded him to the grave but a few weeks, and both had extracted from the doctor a promise that he would stay with his four young nieces, and manage their large property for them till their marriages should take place. Dr. Hyde had already laid by a snug little sum in the Dartford Bank for his old age, his brother left him as much more, safely invested, and the good-will of his practice and his comfortable old house were worth something besides, so that he had no need to work at his profession any longer. His ties in Dartford were few and slight; he had already learned to love his nieces, and to feel at home with them. He wrote to offer Will his house and practice on terms that were reasonable enough, and only demanded partial payments year by year. There was no doubt in Dr. White's mind that he ought to accept this offer; and when another year of patient economy and steady work had passed by, he was able to send even a larger sum to Dr. Hyde than he had promised, and to keep half of the house, which hitherto he had leased to two families, and install his mother as houekeeper.

It wanted now a year of the ten he had promised himself to achieve a home. He had succeeded beyond his hopes. But before Thanksgiving-day came he was called again to Crampton. Judge Hall was stricken once more with apoplexy. This time he rallied more slowly than before, and Will spent his Thankgiving away from his mother for the first time in years, watching the faint spark of life flicker, tremble, gather strength, and at last burn up again in this old man's bosom. The judge returned to this world's affairs more humble and grateful than ever. He knew his time was short; and a month after, sitting by his bedroon fire, the wreck of his old pompous, dogmatic, ruddy self, he called Annie, in a broken whisper. She dropped her work, and came.

`Annie,' he said, feebly, `you've been a good, patient girl; but I don't suppose you've given up that fellow?'

`No, father.'

`Well, you haven't fretted and pestered me a bit; and I'm free to say I think better of him than I did. If you will have him, why I don't say but what I'm willing now.'

Annie bent over and kissed him tenderly. She could not say anything.

`But, Annie,' the judge went on, `don't never set up your will against his as you have against mine. If you do, I tell ye you'll come to grief: his is the biggest; he's rightly named.'

`Perhaps I sha'nt want to,' laughed Annie, shyly.

`Don't lot on that: you're a woman, and they all want their way, from Eve down,' muttered the old man with gentle sarcasm.

`Then I'll make his way my way, daddy, and we shall both be suited.'

`Hm!' said the judge, contemptuously.

But he did not live to see it. The Will that orders us all, even our willfulness and our resolves, sent the third and last summons before spring ripened into summer, and the judge was gathered to his fathers.

When the tenth Thanksgiving after that solitary feast in the kitchen came about, Will White, his mother, his wife, and his wife's mother were seated around the table in Judge Hall's dining-room, for the house belonged now to Annie, and Will had taken the Crampton doctor's place, as the judge's money was enough to set them far above want, and Annie loved her old home too well to leave it, besides which Dr. Grey had six children and an ailing wife, and was glad enough to exchange Crampton for Dartford.

The dinner was abundant and elegant, but, with a touch of unconscious poetry, the widow White had placed before Will a covered dish; he lifted the lid, and saw before him a piece of boiled salt pork and a few potatoes.

Will's eyes dimmed as he looked from the dish to his mother.

`I told you so, mother!' he said, with a thrill in his voice.

`Oh, my dear! my dear! 'twa'n't all your will, Will; don't lot on it: the Lord helped you, my son, or you wouldn't have been here to-day.'

`The Lord helps those that help themselves, mother,' said Will, reverently; and then he bent his head and gave fervent thanks to Him who had worked it in him both to will and to do, and given them all such great cause to keep this second Thankgiving.