unsightly pile, but to make this sunny spot available for a conservatory. His call on the authorities for such a conservatory was met with derision; how could a delicate plant-house possibly be cared for, even if there were funds to build it? The master's enthusiasm and self-help carried him forward, and a year ago, in the Christmas vacation, putting off the schoolmaster and putting on the workman, he built a conservatory with his own hands, -a conservatory fourteen feet by eighteen, and twelve feet high in the peak. Thus far but one pane of glass has been broken; and as for the plants, they have flourished famously. The girls take the greatest pride in the house, helping to stock it and bringing their ailing plants from home to enjoy it, and so jealous of the good name of the school that it is the rarest thing for a blossom to be plucked. The immediate care is in the hands of the janitor.

One thing leads to another, and to the garden and conservatory has now been added a fountain, with a basin eight by ten feet, in which fish are hatched and reared and their habits closely watched by the girls. In this charming spot the pupils spend their recesses, and often a class is allowed to spend a study hour there. If a girl's head droops or her eye grows dull, she is sent into the garden for a while, and the visit is a wonderful panacea for geometrical headaches, chemical sore throats, or optical aberrations. And as a girl takes a visitor first of all to this favorite resort, it is fair to believe that the memory of most, when it turns to the old schoolhouse in afteryears, will be a fragrant memory.

Shorthand and May an old stenographer Typewriting. come to the defense of many young people who feel rather aggrieved at certain criticisms of their work in an article in The Atlantic for December, 1895 ?

It is true that young shorthand writers have difficulty in reading their own imperfectly made hieroglyphics; but the best stenographers read with facility not only what they themselves write, but each other's notes, unless these are taken at great speed. One of the most rapid congressional reporters has for many years employed in his office two or three ladies to transcribe his notes, and transcription is found a fascinating, not a severe task. Many other experts follow the same method.

As to shading in stenography, there is no need of a marked distinction between light and dark strokes, but the best writers make a difference which their own eyes readily recognize. So, too, the accurate shorthand writer makes his vertical characters perpendicular to the line, even in the most rapid writing; and it almost never occurs that a p can be read for a t, or a b for a d.

Again, the good stenographer invariably begins a paragraph as a paragraph should begin, with the line indented. He makes the long stroke for a period. Proper names simple enough to be written in shorthand he underlines, vocalizes those which might be doubtful, and spells out those which it would be unsafe to trust to phonography. This takes quick thinking? Yes, but the expert is nimble not only with his fingers, but with his brains. In the course of thirty years' experience it has been the good fortune of the writer to know at least a score of the best stenographers in the country. They have all substantially followed these rules, and there are hundreds following them now who read their notes as fluently as most people read longhand.

If an imperfectly educated amanuensis stumbles over her writing, that may not be the fault of any one of the many systems of shorthand; it is the common American habit of "skimping." Because many halfeducated girls have found their way into offices, it is a fallacy to suppose that all amanuenses may be charged with stupidity, ignorance, and inaccuracy in their work.

To test the supposed impossibility of reading a page of this magazine without vowels, paragraphs, periods, or other marks of punctuation, a column of the article in question was copied, eliminating these supposed necessities. This skeleton page was submitted to two intelligent persons, who read it all after a little puzzling. But shorthand is much more easily read, when written correctly, because position implies certain vowels in every case.

As to the assistance of memory, reporting becomes so mechanical that often a speech, a sermon, a long address, may be entirely new to the reporter when he comes to transcribe his notes. It is as though he had never heard a word of it.

Now for typewriting. Within the last fifteen years, hundreds - nay, thousands of

manuscripts have passed through the writer's hands. In the earlier part of that period they were all pen-written, and the work of preparing them for printing was a burden to the flesh and a vexation to the spirit. The majority come now in neat typewritten dress, which is easy to read, and therefore the editing of them requires not one tenth of the time. Yet these are rarely typewritten by the authors themselves. They have been guilty of "the absurdity of entrusting the transcription" to copyists, who, as a rule, have improved on the verbal form of the original manuscripts.

As for the machines, some of them have every punctuation mark (with one trifling exception) used by The Atlantic Monthly. It is, therefore, impossible to sympathize with the writer of the article under review, who says, "What would be my sensations were I obliged to put even this modest article which I am now preparing into the hands of a copyist? All I know is that, until the agony was over, I should not get a single night's sleep." This "modest article," on the contrary, will be handed to one of half a dozen young ladies to copy, any one of whom will return it in such shape that even the critical proof-reader of this most carefully printed magazine will have hardly a change to make. Upbraid those who deserve it, but let it be acknowledged that there are copyists who are a "luxury," and not a "torment."

The Fool in Fiction.

- If the course of, literary evolution be followed out, it will be found to take its rise in the ballad. That is the form of recital which lends itself best to repetition. The metrical limitations tend to keep the flow of the story within its own banks, as well as to give emphasis to the sharp turns, the rapids, and the waterfalls which distinguish a rivulet from a canal. Recitation leads to acting, and acting expands into dialogue. The Nut-Brown Maid and others which will occur to the lover of ballads are examples of this incipient tendency. Thus the drama is only a ballad in a developed stage.

The novel is the play put into print, with description substituted for action and scenery. This relation is evident, since a ballad may be the theme on which a play is founded, and a play may be converted into a novel. A contributor to The Atlantic in days gone by so treated the farce of Lend

Me Five Shillings, and Maga was kind enough to accept, publish, and pay for the same. There is a retrograding process possible, by which a novel may be dramatized, a drama made into a ballad; but, as a rule, it is not to the benefit of the work. The reader turned hearer resents the playwright's conception. The development on the lines of a true evolution is ever in the search for increase of power. The play has its limitations in the conventionalities of the stage, the capacities of actors, and the necessity of condensation and swift action. There is a division of interest between the drama in itself and the skill used in presenting it. Garrick and Kean are applauded the more the deeper their emphasis of the villainy of Iago and Sir Giles Overreach.

In both the drama and the novel the appeal is to the imagination to produce a temporary illusion. The spectator knows that the stage sword does not pierce or the theatrical goblet intoxicate, and that the spectre vanishes behind the wings o. p., and not into thin air. The reader knows that what he reads is fiction, and that the author has (presumably) the power to shape the catastrophe as he will, to reward virtue and to punish vice, even in utter disregard of the inscrutable laws of real life. The art of the actor and the dramatist, like the art of the novelist and his illustrator, consists in suppressing for the moment the cooler judgment, and giving one over to the spell of the imagination. The power is gained by the combination of two opposing forces, — realism and exaggeration. The artist in a dramatic situation strikes a true chord, and then intensifies it to shut out any other perception. The novelist has the far larger freedom of leading gradually up to the subject, and of describing secret thoughts without the halting aid of soliloquy and the transparent hypocrisy of stage asides.

The true novel, therefore, is a developed and improved drama, and this preface is to lead up to a curious corroboration to be found in the study of literary evolution. Dismissing many of the more recent novels, which have passed on into a state of gelatinous coagulation, or even of fluid decomposition, as the modern stage has declined into mere farce and superficial melodrama, I wish to take two distinctive and first-class representatives of the two phases of development, the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of

Sir Walter Scott. In these there are many points of resemblance, showing this continuity of development, but there is one in particular on which I rest my case. It is that in each is felt the necessity, in order to reach the proper balance of the action, of using the foil of the comic element.

There is required the fool in fiction. This need may be met by the use either of the jester, the clown, the professional merrymaker, or of the butt, the gull, the knave who is to fill the rôle of Sancho Panza to the Don Quixote of tragedy. There is hardly a play of Shakespeare in which this foil is not to be found. Trinculo and Caliban in The Tempest; Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; the clown in Twelfth Night, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek; Falstaff and Justice Shallow, Doctor Caius and Sir Hugh the Welsh parson, in The Merry Wives of Windsor; the clown and Lucio in Measure for Measure; Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing; Puck and Bottom the weaver in Midsummer Night's Dream; Armado and Costard in Love's Labour's Lost; Autolycus in The Winter's Tale; Touchstone in As You Like It; Christopher Sly and Gremio in The Taming of the Shrew; the two Dromios in The Comedy of Errors; Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida; Apemantus in Timon of Athens; Cloten in Cymbeline; the fool and Edgar in King Lear; the porter in Macbeth; Polonius, Osric, and the gravediggers in Hamlet; Roderigo in Othello,these all come to my pen without the necessity of opening the books, and I dare say the reader can fill out the list with others, which space forbids to enumerate.

Turn now to the Waverley series, and take them in their order. Davie Gellatley in Waverley holds the position of the household jester, —"the innocent" who uses the shrewd license of his order, covered by the infirmity behind which he takes refuge. The Baron of Bradwardine belongs to the class of eccentrics whose peculiarities are food for mirth. In Guy Mannering, Dominie Sampson, with his misplaced erudition, absence of mind, and real simplicity, is as marked a comic character and as complete a factor in the story as any of the Shakespearean personages of like position. The Antiquary himself is a creature of the finest comedy; but, putting him aside, in Edie Ochiltree one finds the combination of the best points of Touchstone and Autolycus

In

with a Scotch shrewdness entirely his own. Rob Roy develops a new type in Andrew Fairservice, to say nothing of Wilfred Osbaldistone and Bailie Nicol Jarvie; for Andrew is a fine specimen of the serving-man of comedy. In The Black Dwarf, which is a failure in almost every particular, there is no one who exactly fills the place; but Old Mortality makes up for it in Cuddie Headrigg, who is, perhaps, the most delightful because the most lovable of all his class. The Heart of Mid-Lothian displays the same combination of mental infirmity and wit which belongs to the class, but transfers it to a female in the person of Madge Wildfire. The Bride of Lammermoor gives in Caleb Balderstone a character in every way worthy of the old comedy, and unsurpassed by any we can recall in Shakespeare. The Legend of Montrose has in Allan M'Aulay another instance of the disordered intellect, with gleams of great acuteness breaking through its habitual gloom. But its great and distinguishing character is Dugald Dalgetty, a compound of Falstaff and Falconbridge, yet unlike either. The likeness to both is moral rather than intellectual. The Monastery, the White Lady seems intended to fill the rôles of Ariel and Puck, but the real comic personage is Piercie Shafton. In The Abbot, Adam Woodcock, the falconer, supplies the comic element, slightly but effectively. Ivanhoe, again, has in Wamba the almost perfect type of the clown proper, the jester par excellence of the feudal age, who in wit and shrewdness hardly falls behind Touchstone. Wayland Smith and Flibbertigibbet in partnership form the comic element, the clown, so to speak, of the drama of Kenilworth, in some respects one of the most dramatic of Scott's novels. In The Pirate one has a choice between Claud Halcro, Triptolemus Yellowley, and Jack Bunce, the fantastic follower of Cleveland; while Peveril of the Peak can furnish nothing better than the little dwarf, Sir Geoffrey Hudson, who is a sort of Falstaff seen through an inverted telescope. To make up for this, The Fortunes of Nigel has not only Richie Moniplies, but King James himself, who is not less the fool in history than here the fool in fiction. Quentin Durward offers Le Balafré as well as Le Glorieux, the jester of the Burgundian count. St. Ronan's Well is rather meagre, unless one takes both Captain MacTurk

and the old oddity Touchwood. But Redgauntlet, which, in spite of the critics, has always been a favorite of mine, has the masterly picture of Peter Peebles and also of Wandering Willie, to say nothing of Nanty Ewart. In The Betrothed, Wilkin Flammock is the broad-comedy character, while in the far superior story of The Talisman there is hardly any touch of jest, save in the few sayings of Jonas Schwanker, the court fool of the Archduke of Austria. Woodstock, again, furnishes a capital example in Roger Wildrake, and The Fair Maid of Perth has a truly Shakespearean character in Oliver Proudfute. Anne of Geierstein has a specimen of the dullard in Sigismund; and in Count Robert of Paris, which belongs to the failing period of Sir Walter's power, Sylvan, the ape of Agelastes, marks the fading out of the type.

If the critic of this brief paper will kindly consider the passing mention given above, and recall the characters barely named in it, it may be seen that, broadly classified, the several types which go to form the underplay of the dramas of Shakespeare and of the Elizabethan age are constantly repeated in Scott. They help to carry on the story by their weaknesses, foibles, and eccentricities, and though in many instances not fools, they play the part of the conventional and traditional stage-fool. They make the rollers on which the weightier action of the plot moves. They serve as foils to the loftier and more heroic actors. They are indispensable to the right development of the theme. They are not mere stop-gaps to divert one in the shifting of scenes, or reliefs to the sombre pathos of set speeches and impassioned dialogue. They cannot be cut out and dropped as superfluous. In this the dramatic sympathy of Scott marks the principle of evolution which is here insisted on, and I therefore hold that the true novel is only a further development of the true stage-play. It is a drama addressed to the mind rather than to the eye and ear of the reader. Bernard Bar- - Edward Fitzgerald's letters to

assemble in a barnlike meeting-house on Sunday lived in quaint, old-fashioned houses, I know not how many generations old, and wore the original Quaker dress. One of the women preachers, known in my mother's family as Cousin Rebecca, lived on the hill overlooking Roslyn. Books and papers were scarce in her house, but next to George Fox, William Penn, and Horace Greeley, Bernard Barton was Cousin Rebecca's hero. She not only had Barton's Memoirs, published by his daughter Lucy (the lady who subsequently became the wife of Edward Fitzgerald), but she possessed a costly copy, bound in red morocco, of that elegant edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress about which Charles Lamb teased Barton in the letter beginning, "A splendid edition of 'Bunyan's Pilgrim'! Why, the thought is enough to turn one's moral stomach. His cockle-bat and staff transformed to a smart cock'd beaver and a jemmy cane; his amice grey to the last Regent Street cut; and his painful palmer's pace to the modern swagger. Stop thy friend's sacrilegious hands.... Perhaps you don't know my edition what I had when a child." For this edition Barton wrote a very beautiful sonnet, which I herewith transcribe, as it is not found in his Memoirs, and I never have seen it except in two copies of an edition reprinted in this country by the Presbyterian Board of Publication, dated 1844. One of these belonged to my relative, and the other I chanced upon in the University Library at Lawrence, Kansas. The sonnet reads as follows:

"O! for one bright though momentary glance;
Such as of old in Patmos Isle was given
To him who saw the clouds asunder riven:
And, passing all the splendour of romance,
In glory, and in 'pomp of circumstance: '

The new Jerusalem come down from Heaven:
Or the least measure of that mystic leaven,
Which blessed old Bunyan's visionary trance!
But vain the painter's or the poet's skill,
That heavenly city's glory to declare;
All such can furnish is a vision fair,
And gorgeous; having as its centre still,
His cross who died on Calvary's Holy Hill;
Man's only title to admittance there."

-

Mr. R. H. Stoddard has scarcely done Bernard Barton justice. A few of the sonnets, such as those upon the Howitts and John Evelyn and the one upon Selborne (Gilbert White's village), show much poetical insight, but the letters which Barton inspired Lamb, Edward Fitzgerald, and Southey to write are a precious legacy, which ought to save his name from oblivion. To this Quaker poet

Lamb opened his heart during the melancholy months when Mary had to be sent to an insane asylum; to him Fitzgerald confided his hopes and fears as to whether a painting which he had purchased was a genuine Gainsborough; and Southey wrote, July 9, 1821, the startling sentence, "So Buonaparte is now as dead as Cæsar or Alexander." Thus much of the literary gossip and life of the early part of our century may be found in the letters written to Bernard Barton, the popular Quaker poet, who is but a name in our day to the general reader. A Variegated "Black as a pot! Black as Color Line. a pot!"

"Ah, Lord!" sighed the other, as she gazed mournfully upon her own dark-hued progeny, "wisht I could say 's much fer mine. Think I must 'a' ben cunjered when I married a man black like George, an' now I has this houseful o' nappy-headed chillun. Emma's hair 's that kinky it jus' won't grow long; an' it's goin' to be a mighty big set-back to her when she comes old 'nough to marry."

There is a colored benevolent society in a certain Southern city-doubtless there are associations like it elsewhere- which will not admit to membership any one whose skin is darker than a certain deli

The foregoing dialogue took place between two little colored girls who were loitering on the banquette just outside my parlor window; and it set in motion a long train of thought. I was impressed anew by one of the strongly marked characteristics of the negro race, the way in which the color line is drawn among them, and it struck me as being somewhat surprising that people who write about them usually ignore this trait. The fact is, the white man draws one black color line, but the negro's color line is variegated. Every shade "counts with the latter, and the color question is a fruitful topic for discussion; more frequent, it must be added, among women than among men. Tongues wag excitedly over the comparative "brightness" of Molly's and Juley Ann's complexion; hard words, and even blows, are often the outcome of such arguments. Naturally, the "brighter" is to say, the whiter - the complexion, the more superior and aristocratic does its owner consider herself; while "coal-black Rose" is literally and metaphorically in outer darkness. To have hair "as straight as a poker" and a skin light enough to freckle is to be an object of envy to those less blessed.

66

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'My daughter Calline is the freckledest thing ever you see," said one colored mother proudly to another. "Why, even to her eyelids is freckled. An' as fer her hair, you could n't curl it to save you."

thing of a misalliance when a yellow girl marries a black man. One tawny mother absolutely refused to let her daughter wed the man of her choice. "I don't want to have nothin' to do with dark-colored folks more 'n passin' the time o' day with 'em," remarked this stern parent. "I don't like 'em near me." But love laughs at such parental decisions, and the daughter settled the matter by eloping. In one respect she was fortunate; for her husband's relatives looked up to her as to a superior being. As one of her friends expressed it: "Ab's folks makes a perfec' treasure o' Jinny. They think she's just let down" (that is, descended, as an angel might, from heaven to earth), "because she's lighter 'n what they are."

"Nigger," of course, as a word typifying the deepest blackness, is an old-established taunt. But the black people know how to defend themselves. Yellow Clementine remarks of some passer-by: "Ain't she black, though! She don't look like nothin' in the world but the stump of a tree that's been burnt down. If I was black like that, I'd ask some one to give me a dost o' poison." Whereat black Nancy retorts: "Don't you be so stuck up about bein' bright-complected. The white in you is what the white folks would n't have. I'm a nation; you 're nothin'!" Certainly, the handsome black woman, with her fine, robust figure and splendid teeth, did more resemble a "nation" than the yellow girl, who was frail in physique, with a sickly looking complexion and discolored teeth.

One dark-brown girl, of unusual intelligence and industry, was frequently heard asseverating with much emphasis, "Thank