Lippincott\'s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. written by Various
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Various >> Lippincott\'s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873.
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18 LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE
OF
_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.
Vol XII, No. 29.
AUGUST, 1873.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE NEW HYPERION [Illustrated] By EDWARD STRAHAN.
II.--The Two Chickens.
OUR HOME IN THE TYROL [Illustrated] By MARGARET HOWITT.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
ON THE CHURCH STEPS By SARAH C. HALLOWELL.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
INSIDE JAPAN By W.E. GRIFFIS.
JASON'S QUEST By CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
FOREBODINGS.
DEER-PARKS By REGINALD WYNFORD.
RAMBLES AMONG THE FRUITS AND FLOWERS OF THE TROPICS By FANNIE R. FEUDGE.
TWO PAPERS.--I.
A PRINCESS OF THULE By WILLIAM BLACK.
CHAPTER XII.--Transformation.
CHAPTER XIII.--By The Waters Of Babylon.
GOLD By ITA ANIOL PROKOP.
GLIMPSES OF GHOST-LAND By LUCY H. HOOPER.
AFTERNOON By EMMA LAZARUS.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
Washington's Birthplace In 1873 By R.B.E.
Vicissitudes In High Life.
A Glass Of Old Madeira.
At A Matinee: A Monologue. By C.A.D.
NOTES.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Books Received.
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE FLOWERS OF WAR.
THE INVADERS OF ROMIAINVILLE.
STORY OF AN OLD MAN AND AN ELDER.
MERCHANDISE IN THE TEMPLE.
FATHER JOLIET.
THE TWO CHICKENS.
LOVE LEFT ALONE.
"FOND OF CHICKEN."
THE WIFE.
THE LONE CRUSADE.
TENDER CHARITY.
NECESSITY KNOWING LAW.
THE FERRY.
JOVE'S THUNDER.
SCHOOL.
ON WITH THE DANCE!
ENDYMION.
HOW THE MODERN DOG TREATS LAZARUS.
THE LAUGHING LACKEY.
THE PRESENT.
THE CONVALESCENT.
THE DIVIDED BURDEN.
SHARE MY CUP.
BREAKING STONES.
SICKNESS AND COURTSHIP.
THE WAGON.
DINNER-TIME!
FIDELITY.
A LITTLE VISITOR.
FRANCINE.
"DON'T WRING MY HEART!"
VIEW OF TAUFERS VALLEY.
SCHLOSS TAUFERS.
HAPPY SOULS IN PARADISE.
CROSSING THE TORRENT.
THE NEW HYPERION.
FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.
II.--THE TWO CHICKENS.
[Illustration: THE FLOWERS OF WAR.]
"Thou art no less a man because thou wearest no hauberk nor mail sark,
and goest not on horseback after foolish adventures."
So I said, reassuring myself, thirty years ago, when, as Paul Flemming
the Blond, I was meditating the courageous change of cutting off my
soap-locks, burning my edition of Bulwer and giving my satin stocks to
my shoemaker: I mean, when I was growing up--or, in the more beauteous
language of that day, when Flemming was passing into the age of
bronze, and the flowers of Paradise were turning to a sword in his
hands.
Well, I say it again, and I say it with boldness, you can wear a tin
botany-box as bravely as a hauberk, and foolish adventures can be
pursued equally well on foot.
Stout, grizzled and short winded, I am just as nimble as ever in the
pretty exercise of running down an illusion. Yet I must confess, as I
passed the abattoirs of La Villette, whence blue-smocked butcher-boys
were hauling loads of dirty sheepskins, I could not but compare myself
to the honest man mentioned in one of Sardou's comedies: "The good
soul escaped out of a novel of Paul de Kock's, lost in the throng
on the Boulevard Malesherbes, and asking the way to the woods of
Romainville."
[Illustration: THE INVADERS OF ROMIAINVILLE.]
Romainville! And hereabouts its tufts of chestnuts should be, or were
wont to be of old. I am in the grimy quarter of Belleville. Scene of
factories, of steam-works and tall bleak mansions as it is to-day,
Belleville was once a jolly country village, separated on its hilltop
from Paris, which basked at its feet like a city millionaire sprawling
before the check apron and leather shoes of a rustic beauty. Inhabited
by its little circle of a few thousand souls, it looked around itself
on its eminence, seeing the vast diorama of the city on one side,
and on the other the Pres-Saint-Gervais, and the woods of Romainville
waving off to the horizon their diminishing crests of green. A jolly
old tavern, the Ile d'Amour, hung out its colored lamps among the
trees, and the orchestra sounded, and the feet of gay young lovers,
who now are skeletons, beat the floor. The street was a bower of
lilacs, and opposite the Ile d'Amour was the village church.
Then the workmen of the Paris suburbs were invaders: they besieged the
village on Sundays in daring swarms, to be beaten back successfully by
the duties of every successive Monday. Now they are fixed there. They
are the colorless inhabitants of these many-storied houses. The town's
long holiday is over. Where the odorous avenues of lilacs stretched
along, affording bouquets for maman and the children and toothpicks
for ferocious young warriors from the garrisons, are odious lengths
of wall. Everything is changed, and from the gardens the grisettes of
Alfred de Musset are with sighing sent. Their haunts are laboratories
now, and the Ile d'Amour is a mayor's office.
I, to whom the beer-scandals of the Rhine and the students' holidays
of the Seine were among the Childe-Harold enormities of a not
over-sinful youth, was sadly disappointed. Thinking of the groves of
an Eden, I ran against the furnaces of a Pandemonium. For a stroll
back toward my adolescence, Belleville was a bad beginning. I
determined to console myself with the green meadows of Saint-Gervais
and the pretty woods of Romainville. Attaining the latter was half
an hour's affair among long walls and melancholy houses: at
Saint-Gervais, a double file of walls and houses--at Romainville,
houses and walls again. In the latter, where formerly there were
scarcely three watches distributed amongst the whole village, I was
incensed to find the shop of a clockmaker: it was somewhat consoling,
though, to find it a clockmaker's of the most pronounced suburban
kind, with pairs of wooden shoes amongst the guard-chains in the
window, and pots of golden mustard ranged alternately with the
antiquated silver turnips.
Before the church I found yet standing a knotty little elder tree, a
bewitched-looking vegetable. A beadle in a blouse, engaged in washing
one of the large altar-candles with soap and water at the public pump,
gave me the following history of the elder tree. I am passionately
fond of legends, and this is one quite hot and fresh, only a hundred
years old. Hear the tale of the elder of Romainville.
The excellent cure of Romainville in the last century was a man of
such a charitable nature that his all was in the hands of the
poor. The grocer of the village, a potentate of terrific powers and
inexorable temper, finally refused to trust him with the supply of
oil necessary for the lamp in the sanctuary. Soon the sacred flame
sputtered, palpitated, flapped miserably over the crusted wick: the
cure, responsible before Heaven for the life of his lamp, tottered
away from the altar with groans of anguish. Arrived in the garden, he
threw himself on his knees, crying _Mea culpa_, and beating his bosom.
The garden contained only medicinal plants, shaded by a linden and an
elder: completely desperate, the unhappy priest fixed his moist eyes
on the latter, when lo! the bark opened, the trunk parted, and a jet
of clear aromatic liquid spouted forth, quite different from any sap
yielded by elder before. It was oil. A miracle!
The report spread. The grocer came and humbly visited the priest in
his garden, his haughty hat, crammed with bills enough to have spread
agony through all the cottages of Romainville, humbly carried between
his legs. He came proposing a little speculation. In exchange for a
single spigot to be inserted in the tree, and the hydraulic rights
going with the same, he offered all the bounties dearest to the
priestly heart--unlimited milk and honey, livers of fat geese and pies
lined with rabbit. The priest, though hungry--hungry with the demoniac
hunger of a fat and paunchy man--turned his back on the tempter.
[Illustration: STORY OF AN OLD MAN AND AN ELDER.]
One day a salad, the abstemious relish yielded by his garden herbs,
was set on the table by Jeanneton. At the first mouthful the good cure
made a terrible face--the salad tasted of lamp-oil. The unhappy girl
had filled a cruet with the sacred fluid. From that day the bark
closed and the flow ceased.
There is one of the best oil-stories you ever heard, and one of the
most recent of attested miracles. For my part, I am half sorry it is
so well attested, and that I have the authority of that beadle in the
blouse, who took my little two-franc piece with an expression of much
intelligence. I love the Legend.
[Illustration: MERCHANDISE IN THE TEMPLE.]
The environs of Paris are but chary of Legend. I treasure this
specimen, then, as if it had been a rare flower for my botany-box.
But the botany-box indeed, how heavy it was growing! The umbrella, how
awkward! The sun, how vigorous and ardent! Who ever supposed it could
become so hot by half-past eight in the morning?
[Illustration: FATHER JOLIET.]
Certainly the ruthless box, which seemed to have taken root on my
back, was heavier than it used to be. Had its rotundity developed,
like its master's? I stopped and gathered a flower, meaning to analyze
it at my next resting-place. I opened my box: then indeed I perceived
the secret of its weightiness. It revealed three small rolls of
oatmeal toasted, a little roast chicken, a bit of ham, some mustard
in a cleaned-out inkstand! This now was the treachery of Josephine.
Josephine, who never had the least sympathy for my botanical
researches, and who had small comprehension of the nobler hungers and
thirsts of the scientific soul, had taken it on her to convert my box
into a portable meat-safe!
Bless the old meddler, how I thanked her for her treason! The aspect
of the chicken, in its blistered and varnished brown skin, reminded
me that I was clamorously hungry. Shade of Apicius! is it lawful for
civilized mortals to be so hungry as I was at eight or nine in the
morning?
At last I saw the end of that dusty, featureless street which
stretches from the barrier to the extremity of Romainville. I saw
spreading before me a broad plain, a kind of desert, where, by
carefully keeping my eyes straight ahead, I could avoid the sight of
all houses, walls, human constructions whatever.
My favorite traveler, the celebrated Le Vaillant, to whom I am
indebted for so many facts and data toward my great theory of
Comparative Geography, says that in first reaching the solitudes of
Caffraria he felt himself elated with an unknown joy. No traced road
was before him to dictate his pathway--no city shaded him with its
towers: his fortune depended on his own unaided instincts.
I felt the same delight, the same liberty. Something like the heavy
strap of a slave seemed to break behind me as I found myself quite
clear of the metropolis. Mad schemes of unanticipated journeys danced
through my head; I might amble on to Villemonble, Montfermeil, Raincy,
or even to the Forest of Bondy, so dear to the experimental botanist.
Had I not two days before me ere my compact with Hohenfels at Marly?
And in two days you can go from Paris to Florence. Meantime, from the
effects of famine, my ribs were sinking down upon the pelvic basin of
my frame.
The walk, the open air, the sight of the fowl, whose beak now burned
into my bosom's core, had sharpened my appetite beyond bearing. Yet
how could I eat without some drop of cider or soft white wine to
drink? Besides, slave of convention that I have grown, I no longer
understand the business of eating without its concomitants--a shelter
and something to sit on.
The plain became wearisome. There are two things the American-born,
however long a resident abroad, never forgives the lack of in
Europe. The first I miss when I am in Paris: it is the perpetual
street-mending of an American town. Here the boulevards, smeared with
asphaltum or bedded with crunched macadam, attain smoothness without
life: you travel on scum. But in the dear old American streets the
epidermis is vital: what strength and mutual reliance in the cobbles
as they stand together in serried ranks, like so many eye-teeth! How
they are perpetually sinking into prodigious ruts, along which the
ponderous drays are forced to dance on one wheel in a paroxysm
of agony and critical equipoise! But the perpetual state of
street-mending, that is the crowning interest. What would I not
sometimes give to exchange the Swiss sweeping-girls, plying their long
brooms desolately in the mud, for the paviors' hammers of America,
which play upon the pebbles like a carillon of muffled bells? As
for the other lack, it is the want of wooden bridges. Far away in my
native meadows gleams the silver Charles: the tramp of horses' hoofs
comes to my ear from the timbers of the bridge. _Here_, with a pelt
and a scramble your bridge is crossed: nothing addresses the heart
from its stony causeway. But the low, arched tubes of wood that span
the streams of my native land are so many bass-viols, sending out
mellow thunders with every passing wagon to blend with the rustling
stream and the sighing woods. Shall I never hear them again?
A reminiscence more than ten years old came to give precision to my
ramblings in the past. Beyond the rustic pathway I was now following I
could perceive the hills of Trou-Vassou. Hereabouts, if memory served
me, I might find a welcome, almost a home, and the clasp of cordial if
humble hands. Here I might find folks who would laugh when I arrived,
and would be glad to share their luncheon with me But--ten years gone
by!
[Illustration: THE TWO CHICKENS.]
This computation chilled my hopes. What family remains ten years in a
spot--above all, a spot on that fluctuating periphery of Paris, where
the mighty capital, year after year, bursts belt after belt? Where
might they have gone? Francine!--Francine must be twenty-two. Married,
of course. Her husband, no doubt, has dragged her off to some
other department. Her parents have followed. March, volunteer, and
disentangle yourself from these profitless speculations!
Ten minutes farther on, in the shade of the fort at Noisy-le-Sec,
I saw a red gable and the sign of a tavern. As a tourist I have a
passion for a cabaret: in practice, I find Vefours to unite perhaps a
greater number of advantages.
[Illustration: LOVE LEFT ALONE.]
Some soldiers of the Fortieth were drinking and laughing in a corner.
I took a table not far off, and drew my cold victuals out of my box of
japanned tin, which they doubtless took for a new form of canteen. The
red-fisted garcon, without waiting for orders, set up before me, like
ten-pins, a castor in wood with two enormous bottles, and a litre of
that rinsing of the vats which, under the name "wine of the country,"
is so distressingly similar in every neighborhood. Resigned to
anything, I was about drawing out my slice of ham, the chicken seeming
to me just there somewhat too proud a bird and out of harmony with the
local color, when my glance met two gray eyes regarding my own in the
highest state of expansion. The lashes, the brows, the hair and the
necklace of short beard were all very thick and quite gray. The face
they garnished was that of the tavern-keeper.
[Illustration: "FOND OF CHICKEN."]
"Why, it is you, after all, Father Joliet!" I said, after a rapid
inspection of his figure.
[Illustration: THE WIFE.]
"Ah, it is Monsieur Flemming, the Americain-flamand!" cried the host,
striking one hand into the other at the imminent risk of breaking his
pipe. In a trice he trundled off my bottle of rinsings, and replaced
it by one of claret with an orange seal, set another glass, and posted
himself in front of me.
I asked the waiter for two plates, and with a slight blush evoked the
chicken from my box. The soldiers of the Fortieth opened a battery of
staring and hungry eyes.
"And how came you here?" asked I of Joliet.
"It is I who am at the head of the hotel," he replied, proudly
pointing out the dimensions of the place by spreading his hands.
"My old establishment has sunk into the fosses of the fort: it was a
transaction between the government and myself."
"And was the transaction a good one for you?"
"Not so bad, not so bad," said he, winking his honest gray eyes with
a world of simple cunning. "It cannot be so very bad, since I owe
nothing on the hotel, and the cellar is full, and I am selling
wholesale and retail."
The vanity which a minute since had expanded his hands now got into
his legs, and set them upright under his body. He stood upon them,
his eyes proudly lowered upon the seal of the claret. A pang of envy
actually crossed my mind. I, simple _rentier_, with my two little
establishments pressing more closely upon my resources with every
year's increase of house-rates, how could I look at this glorious
small freeholder without comparisons?
"So, then, Father Joliet," said I, "you are rich?"
"At least I depend no longer on my horse, and that thanks to you and
the government."
"To me! What do you mean?"
"Why, have you forgotten the two chickens?"
[Illustration: THE LONE CRUSADE.]
At the allusion to the chickens we caught each other's eye, and
laughed like a pair of augurs. But the mysterious fowls shall be
explained to the reader.
[Illustration: TENDER CHARITY.]
[Illustration: NECESSITY KNOWING LAW.]
I need not explain that I have cast my lot with the Colonial Americans
of Paris, and taken their color. It is a sweet and luxurious mode of
life. The cooks send round our dinners quite hot, or we have faultless
servants, recommended from one colonist to another: these capital
creatures sometimes become so thoroughly translated into American
that I have known them shift around from flat to flat in colonized
households of the second and third stories without ever touching
French soil for the best part of a lifetime. At our receptions,
dancing-teas and so on we pass our time in not giving offence.
Federals and Confederates, rich cotton-spinners from Rhode Island and
farmers from thousand-acre granges in the West, are obliged to mingle
and please each other. Naturally, we can have no more political
opinions than a looking-glass. We entertain just such views as
_Galignani_ gives us every morning, harmonized with paste from a dozen
newspapers. Our grand national effort, I may say, the common
principle that binds us together as a Colony, is to forget that we
are Americans. We accordingly give our whole intellects to the task of
appearing like Europeans: our women succeed in this particularly well.
Miss Yuba Sequoia Smith, whose father made a fortune in water-rights,
is now afraid to walk a single block without the attendance of a
chambermaid in a white cap, though she came up from California quite
alone by the old Panama route. Everybody agrees that our ladies dress
well. Shall I soon forget how proud Mrs. Aquila Jones was when
a gentleman of the emperor's body-guard took her for Marguerite
Bellanger in the Bois? Our men, not having the culture of costume to
attend to, are perhaps a little in want of a stand-point. Still,
we can play billiards in the Grand Hotel and buy fans at the
Palais Royal. We go out to Saint-Cloud on horseback, we meet at the
minister's; and I contend that there was something conciliatory and
national in a Southern colonel offering to take Bigelow to see
Menken at the Gaite, or when I saw some West Pointers and a nephew of
Beauregard's lighting the pipe of peace at a handsome tobacconist's
in the Rue Saint-Honore. The consciousness that we have no longer a
nationality, and that nobody respects us, adds a singular calm, an
elevation, to our views. Composed as our cherished little society is
of crumbs from every table under heaven, we have succeeded in forming
a way of life where the crusty fortitude and integrity of patriotism
is unnecessary. Our circle is like the green palace of the magpies in
Musset's _Merle Blanc_, and like them we live "de plaisir, d'honneur,
de bavardage, de gloire et de chiffons."
[Illustration: THE FERRY.]
[Illustration: JOVE'S THUNDER.]
I confess that there was a period, between the fresh alacrity of a
stranger's reception in the Colony and the settled habits I have
now fallen into, when I was rather uneasy. A society of migrators, a
system woven upon shooting particles, like a rainbow on the rain,
was odd. Residents of some permanency, like myself, were constantly
forming eternal friendships with people who wrote to them in a month
or two from Egypt. In this way a quantity of my friendships were
miserably lacerated, until I learned by practice just how much
friendship to give. At this period I was much occupied with vain
conciliations, concessions and the reconciling of inconsistencies. A
brave American from the South, an ardent disciple of Calhoun, was a
powerful advocate of State Rights, and advocated them so well that
I was almost convinced; when it appeared one day that the right of
States to individual action was to cease in cases where a living
chattel was to escape from the South to the North.
[Illustration: SCHOOL.]
In this case the State, in violation of its own
laws unrecognizant of that kind of ownership, was to account for the
property and give it back, in obedience to general Congressional order
and to the most advanced principles of Centralization. Before I
had digested this pill another was administered to me in that
small English section of our circle which gave us much pride and an
occasional son-in-law. This was by no less a person than my dear old
friend Berkley, now grown a ruddy sexagenarian, but still given to
eating breakfast in his bath-tub. The wealthy Englishman, who had
got rich by exporting china ware, was sound on the subject of free
commerce between nations. That any industry, no matter how young might
be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its
prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped
as a fallacy too absurd to be argued. The journals venturing such
an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since
exploded before the whole world. He was still loud in this opinion
when his little book of epigrams, _The Raven of Zurich and Other
Rhymes_, came out, and being bright and saucy was reprinted in
America. The knowledge that he could not tax on a foreign soil his own
ideas, the plastic pottery of his brain, was quite too much for
his mental balance, and he took to inveighing against free trade
in literary manufactures without the slightest perception of
inconsistency, and with all the warmth, if not the eloquence, of Mr.
Dickens on the same theme. The gradual accumulation of subjects like
these--subjects _taboo_ in gentle society--soon made it apparent that
in a Colony of such diverse colors, where every man had a sore spot
or a grievance, and even the Cinderellas had corns in their little
slippers, harmony could only be obtained by keeping to general
considerations of honor, nobility, glory, and the politics of
Beloochistan; on which points we all could agree, and where Mr.
Berkley's witty eloquence was a wonder.
[Illustration: ON WITH THE DANCE!]
It is to my uneasy period, when I was sick with private griefs and
giddy with striving to reconcile incompatibilities, that the episode
of the Chickens belongs. I was looking dissatisfied out of one of
my windows. Hohenfels, disappointed of a promenade by an afternoon
shower, was looking dissatisfied out of the other. Two or three
people, waiting for four o'clock lunch, were lounging about. I had
just remarked, I believe, that I was a melancholy man, for ever
drinking "the sweet wormwood of my sorrows." A dark phantom, like that
of Adamastor, stood up between me and the stars.
"Nonsense, you ingrate!" responded the baron from his niche, "you are
only too happy. You are now in the precise position to define my
old conception of the Lucky Dog. The Lucky Dog, you know, in my
vocabulary, is he who, free from all domestic cares, saunters up and
down his room in gown and slippers, drums on the window of a rainy
afternoon, and, as he stirs his evening fire, snaps his fingers at the
world, saying, 'I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide
for.'"
[Illustration: ENDYMION.]
I replied that I did not willingly give way to grief, but that the
main-spring of my life was broken.
"Did you ever try," spoke up a buxom lady from a sofa--it was the
Frau Kranich, widow of the Frankfort banker, the same who used to give
balls while her husband was drugged to sleep with opium, and now for
a long time in Paris for some interminable settlement with Nathan
Rothschild--"Did you ever try the tonic of a good action? _I_ never
did, but they actually say it rejuvenates one considerably."
I avowed that I had more faith in the study of Geography.
Nevertheless, to oblige her, I would follow any suggestion.
[Illustration: HOW THE MODERN DOG TREATS LAZARUS.]
"Benefit the next person who applies to you."
"Madame, I will obey."
At this moment a wagon of singular appearance drew up before my
windows. I knew it well enough: it was the vehicle of a handy,
convenient man who came along every other morning to pick up odd jobs
from me and my neighbors. He could tinker, carpenter, mend harness:
his wife, seated in the wagon by his side, was good at a button, or
could descend and help Josephine with her ironing. A visit at this
hour, however, was unprecedented.
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