Hawthorne and His Circle

sciences-Inexhausti

ve of England-"How

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petition-Corporal B

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e so, and no doubt he was glad, after the job was done, that he had done it. And he was greatly helped along by the inexhaustible faith and energy in such matters of his wife; she shrank from no enterprise, and seemed always in precisely the right mood to appreciate whatever she beheld. She could go day after day to a picture-gallery, and stay all day long; she would make herself as familiar with churches, castles, and cathedrals as she was with her own house; she would wander interminably and delightedly about old towns and cities, or gaze with never-waning joy upon lakes and mountains, and my father, accompanying her, was, in a measure, recuperated and strengthened by her enthusiasm. In the end, as is evidenced by Our Old Home and The Marble Faun, he got a good deal out of Europe. On the other hand, he seemed to think himself justified in avoiding persons as much as he decently might, even the most distinguished; and if he had not been a consul, and a writer of books that had been read, I doubt if he would have formed any acquaintances during h

FRANCIS

ldren were made acquainted with the literature of places we were to visit before going there. Thus, before journeying to the Lakes and Scotland, I had by heart a good deal of Wordsworth, Southey, Burns, and Walter Scott, and was able, standing amid the lovely uproar of Lodore, to shout out the story of how the water comes down there; and

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d up into the cave, and, as soon as they had disappeared, I pulled out my line, with a dried-up worm on the hook, and cast it over the side. I wanted to see the cave, but I wanted to catch a fish more. Up to that time, I think, I had caught nothing in all our pilgrimages. If ever Providence is going to give me success (I said to myself, devoutly), let it be now! Accordingly, just before the others came back, I felt a strong pull on my line and hauled i

nd various. They were just large enough to make their ascent seem easy until you undertook it, then those seemingly moderate slopes lengthened out unaccountably. The day we reached the hotel at the base of Helvellyn, I started, nothing doubting, to climb to its summit before supper; the weather was clear, the top looked close at hand, and I felt great surprise that the young gentleman mentioned in Scott's poem ("I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn," etc.) should have allowed himself to be lost. But after a breathless struggle of fifteen or twenty minutes, fin

ked three centuries before; I remember the dark stain on the floor of the dark room in which one of her lovers was slain; I can see the gray towers of Warwick rising above the green trees and reflected in the still water; and, entering the keep of the castle, I behold myself again trying on the ponderous helmet of the gigantic Guy, and climbing into his monstrous porridge-pot. But vain would be the attempt to marshal before my mind's eye the glorious

t low tide the white fringe of the surf could scarcely be descried at their outermost verge, yet within a few hours it would come tumbling back, flowing in between the higher levels, flooding and brimming and overcoming, till it broke at our feet once more. Behind us rose the tumultuous curves and peaks of the Welsh hills; before us, but invisible across the Irish Channel, the black coast of rainy Ireland. One night, during a gale, a ship came ashore, so far out that it still seemed, in the morning, to be at sea, except for its motionlessness, and the drenched and draggled crew came straggling in-or some of them. At Southport the beach was narrower and the little sea-side settlement larger and livelier; a string of sleepy donkeys always waited there, with the rout of ragged and naughty little boys with sticks to thrash them into a pe

ked, shivering boy as the British bathing-woman. There she stands, waist-deep in the swelling brine; she grins and chuckles like an ogress; her red, grasping hands stretch forth like the tentacles of an octopus; she seizes her victim in an irresistible embrace, and with horrid glee plunges him head-under the advancing wave. Ere he can fetch his breath to scream, down again he goes, and yet again. The frigid, heavy water stings his cowering body; he has swallowed quarts of it; his foot has come in contact with a crab or a starfish; before him rolls the tumultuous expanse of desolation, surging forward to take his life; behind him are the rickety steps of the bathing-machine, which, but now a chamber of torture, has become his sole haven of refuge. Buffeted by the billows, he makes shift at last frantically to clamber back into it; he snatches the small, damp towels, and attempts to dry his shivering limbs; his clothes have fallen on the wet floor; he cannot force his blue toes into his oozy socks. At the moment he is attempting to wriggle himself into his trousers the horse is hitched-to again, and the jerky and jolty journey ba

the adoring tenderness that I lavished upon that bell-glass and its contents! I got sand and covered the bottom; I found two jagged stones and leaned them against each other on the sand; I gathered fronds of ulva latissima; I persuaded a boatman to bring me a bucket of salt-water from beyond the line of breakers, and I poured it carefully into the jar. During the next twenty-four hours I waited impatiently for the water to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates. I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sa

n the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it might have been

joy was full. This prosperity continued for near a week, during which I remained with my nose against the glass, as the street boys of Liverpool held theirs against the windows of pastry-cooks' shops. At length I noticed an ominous clouding of the water, which, as Mr. Gosse had forewarned me, signified disaster of some sort,

ened to it in my night-gown, and was confronted by a ghastly spectacle. The crabs lay dead on the bottom, stomachs upward; the prawns hung lifeless and white from the rocks; the soldier-crabs were motionl

e. It was not salt-water at all, but had been taken fresh from the cistern. That t

h does not readily grow again. My trust in my fellow-creatures was as shrunken and inan

s not known, I say, that to that circumstance is due my father's description of the only incident which enlivened the way-the tragedy, namely, of the duck family. For it was that tragedy which stood out clearest in my memory, and when I learned, in Concord, that my father was preparing his paper about Old Boston for the Atlantic Monthly, I besought him to insert an account of the episode. The duck and her five ducklings had probably seen the steamer many times before, and had

a virtuoso's collection, and showed us treasures, some of which his predecessor in Mosses from an Old Manse might not have despised. I have never since then heard of his portrait in crayon of the youthful Sterne; it would be worth a good deal to any latter-day publisher of his works in a de luxe edition. As for the green tassel from the bed of Queen Mary, in Holyrood House, there is a passage in my father's description of it in his journal which, out of regard, doubtless, for the feelings of Mr. Porter, he forbore to quote in his published article; but as the good old gentleman (unless he has lived to be more than one hundred and twenty years old) must have gone to the place where treasures are indestructible, I will reproduce it now. "This tassel," says my father, "Mr. Porter told us (with a quiet chuckle and humorous self-gratu

essons at the barracks, in the private quarters of the corporal, where he permitted himself to appear in his shirt-sleeves, already knew. My experience of the British army not being so large as that of some other persons, I am unable to say whether there were many other soldiers in it fit to be compared with Blair; but my acquaintance with mankind in general would lead me to infer that there could not have been then, and that there are still less of such to-day. An army of six-footers like him, with his intelligence, instincts of discipline, capacity and expertness, physical strength and activity, and personal courage, would easily account for more than all of England's warlike renown and success; the puzzle is, how to account for anything but disaster without them-though, to be sure, other armies might be equally lacking in Blairs. He was well educated, modest, and moral; he was a married man, with a wife who was the model of a soldier's consort, and two or three little sons, all of them experts with the foils and the broadsword. It was against the regulations of the service for privates or non-commissioned officers to have families, and, when Blair's connubial condition became known to the authorities, he was degraded in rank from sergeant to corporal, though he wore the Balaklava medal; for he had taken part in that immortal charge, and I only wish I could recall the story of it as he told it to me. His regiment had been under the command of Lord Cardigan-"Black-Bottle Cardigan," as he was nicknamed in the army, on account of the well-known (real or apocryphal) incident. It was my good-fortune, by-the-way, once to see this eminent captain. I was taking my lesson at the barracks, when Blair told me that

mother and sisters to come out and spend a few months with him and his family there. The Lisbon climate was a specific for bronchial disease; my father could complete his term, and we could go to Italy the following year. There was only one objection to this-it involved the parting of my father from my mother, a thing which had never before happened. But it did not take him long to decide that it would be a good thing for her, and, therefore, in the long run, for h