some reference to a recent English book in which a splenetic free-lance traced nearly every fine line in the Victorian poet back to some classic analogue, Hallam gave me a significant look, and I quickly turned to something else. "I could n't bear for him to see that foolish book," said this tenderest of sons, after the poet had left us.

Tennyson expressed to me his strong repugnance to the scheme of his publishers for bringing out a series of annotated editions of his poems for the undoing of English school-boys. I heartily sympathized with him in this aversion to anything of the kind, and told him that I had never really enjoyed "Paradise Lost" since I had become a man, because of the untold misery I had suffered in having to parse it when a boy, and how I used to swear I 'd never, never look into it again.

I have often thought what a genuine godsend it must have been to a man who was so constantly meditating on the deepest and subtlest problems of life that he was possessed habitually of so keen and delicate a sense of humor in his horae subsicivae. It flavored, indeed, all his familiar talk, unless he were discussing some question to which humor was of necessity foreign, and the playfulness of this great genius with his grandchildren was a lovely thing to see.

Like many other scholarly men, a misprint in his books was to him an annoyance so keen as to seem disproportionate to less delicate and careful craftsmen. I recall with amusement the abysmal groan that Matthew Arnold uttered when I pointed out to him a passage in my favorite "Tristram and Iseult":

Gazing seaward many an hour,
From her lonely shore-built tower,
While the knights are at the war.

The word "knights" was printed "nights"! "Tut, tut!" cried the great poet-critic, raising both hands (a favorite gesture of his). "This is abominable, abominable!"

I told Tennyson of it soon after.

"Oh, that's nothing," he said, chuckling (and Tennyson's chuckle was worth going three thousand miles to hear). "You remember the passage in 'The Princess' in which I compare the Lady Ida and her train of maidens, as they trip across the park, to a herd of lightly stepping does? The lines

run:

and as the leader of the herd That holds a stately fretwork to the sun, And followed up by a hundred airy does.

Well, whether the printer was a cockney or possessed some slight knowledge of natural history, I know not; but in the first (King & Company's) edition 't is printed 'a hundred hairy does."

His defective eyesight was ever an acute annoyance to him, and added greatly to his innate shyness of meeting strangers and going into society. He constantly referred to it, and once said to me: "It led to rather an amusing incident a few years ago. Hallam and I went with Mr. Gladstone as Sir Donald Currie's guests on a cruise in the Pembroke Castle among the Hebrides and thence on to Denmark. While lying in the harbor of Copenhagen we were invited to dine at Fredensborg with the King and Queen of Denmark, and the next day the whole royal party came on board to luncheon. There were the king and queen, 'the princèss,' the czar and czarina, and their attendant ladies and gentlemen. After luncheon 'the princess' asked me to read one of my poems, and some one fetched the book. I sat on a sofa in the smoking-room next 'the princess,' and another lady came and sat beside me on the other side. The czar stood up just in front of me. When I finished reading, this lady said something very civil, and I thought she was Andrew Clark's daughter, so I patted her on the shoulder very affectionately, and said, 'My dear girl, that 's very kind of you, very kind.' I heard the czar chuckling mightily to himself, so I looked more nearly at her, and, God bless me! 't was the czarina herself." I fancy that it was the first time that august lady had been patted on the back and called a "dear girl" since she had left the nursery.

But with all his dislike of society, and despite his grim exterior, he was possessed of that genuine spirit of courtesy which can come only from a thoroughly kind heart. I was strolling slowly with him once on the terrace at Aldworth, during one of my earlier visits, when the first gong sounded for dinner.

"I'm off," I cried, " to get into my clothes." He detained me a moment, saying kindly: "You must excuse my not dressing for dinner. I never dress for anybody. My old friend Argyll was here last week, and I said to him, 'Argyll, I can't dress for you, for I never dress for any one, and if I made an exception and dressed for a duke, my butler would set me down as a snob.' We must keep well with our butlers, you know," he laughed, as I sped away to change. 1 Of Wales.

At another time a dog-cart and single groom had been sent to meet me at the station, instead of the carriage with its array of footmen, and he fussed and fumed about it when he found it out, and grumbled at Hallam's explanation that one of the coach-horses had gone lame. Had I been a great nobleman or some famous man, he would n't have "cared tuppence." Much cheap republicanism has been aired in this country about his having accepted a peerage, and I have heard a well-known American, who (as I happen to know) "dearly loves a lord" in his secret heart, declare that he had lost much of his admiration for Tennyson "since he had condescended to take a title." The fact is, as I heard from Tennyson's own lips, that when a peerage was first offered him, he was strongly opposed to accepting it, having thrice before declined a baronetcy, and told Mr. Gladstone that he preferred to remain a simple commoner. But the veteran Prime Minister urged that, as such a signal honor had never before been actually conferred for distinction in literature pure and simple (for Grote had declined the overture, and Macaulay's case was not identical), he owed it to the literary gild to accept this recognition, on the part of the queen and her ministers, of the dignity and worth of letters. When put to him in that light, he felt it his duty to his craft to accept.

When I went down to Aldworth late in August of 1892, on my return from Greece, I at once saw a great change in the dear old man, though he was still cheerful, and when we went every day for our walk, his talk was as full of quips and as entertaining as ever. But his step was feebler, the walks were shorter, the massive brows seemed sunken, and his hearing was noticeably impaired. His dread of meeting strangers was more acute than ever.

The day before I left, Burne-Jones (prince of "good fellows," as he was prince of painters), with his daughter and her husband, Mr. Mackail, whose delightful "Greek Anthology" must be familiar to many of my readers, were to come to luncheon, driving across country from the place they had taken

for the summer. They did not turn up at the hour, and after waiting twenty or thirty minutes, we went in to luncheon.

Hallam always kindly placed me next his father at table, but on that day he had suggested that I should give up my usual seat to Burne-Jones, so that the latter might have more direct talk with the poet. We had not been at the table more than ten minutes when the great hall-bell clanged sharply, and we knew that our guests had arrived. They had lost their way, and we heard their laughing voices explaining their adventures to Hallam, who had gone out into the hall to greet them. As I jumped up from my seat next the old poet to go over to the seat first assigned me, he clutched at my sleeve, and said, with rather a pathetic insistence: "Sit still, sit still; why do you want to leave me?" But I shook my head laughingly and darted around the table to the other side.

I can never forget the day I left Aldworth that fateful year-the last time I ever saw him. I was to go up to London in the afternoon, and we had walked before luncheon and had much talk (his most interesting, touching English smugglers in the "Great French War," I remember), and then after luncheon Hallam and I had gone out on the south terrace for a smoke.

After finishing my cigar, I went up into the library to say good-by. He was sitting near the great south windows reading, wearing his black velvet skullcap, the book held close to his face, just as I had so often seen him. "Well, I'm off," I said cheerily, "and have come to say good-by."

He took my outstretched hand in both of his, I remember noticing at the moment what sinewy, carefully kept hands they were, with long, nervous fingers, -and then he said very gently and sadly: "I am a very old man now. You may never see me again, but always come to us here when you come to England. God bless you!"

Such were the last words I heard fall from the lips of Alfred Tennyson, and the gentle old voice still lingers in my ears as a benediction.

VOL. LXIII.-88.

T was Sunday in Sonora, in the southern mines of California, in the winter of 1853. The camp was so named because of the fact that among the motley crowd that flocked to the rich diggings on Wood's Creek were many Mexicans from the state of Sonora, most of whom were of the very lowest class. The men were gamblers, thieves, and highway robbers; the women were mostly of the kind who consort with such characters. These Mexican Sonorians helped to make Sonora in California a lively place-lively in all manner of wickedness peculiar to a community in which gold-dust was plentiful and good women scarce. The "Long Tom" saloon was the chief resort for gambling, drinking, and kindred vices. Two squares above it was the "Tigre," a fandango-house in which homicides were so frequent that had a week passed without a shooting or stabbing scrape it would have been concluded that Sonora was losing its prestige as a live camp. Other places of like character dotted the town. Every day and night in the week the miners crowded these haunts, and on Sundays they poured in from the hills and gulches until all Sonora was a seething mass of long-bearded, red-shirted men, drinking, gambling, trading, and fighting.

On this particular Sunday the camp was

wild with excitement. Felipe, a Mexican desperado, had killed a policeman named Sheldon, a tall, handsome fellow from Pennsylvania who was ready to drink, joke, or shoot with anybody at the shortest notice. Felipe had stabbed the poor fellow to the heart without a word of warning, in payment of a grudge growing out of Sheldon's interference in an affray at the Tigre in which the treacherous Mexican was a party. Had he killed his man in open and fair fight, the offense would easily have been condoned; but the assassination of the jolly, generous, and popular policeman roused the miners to frenzy. Major Solomon, the sheriff, after an exciting chase, had overtaken and captured the assassin near Big Oak Flat on the Tuolumne River, and was bringing him in for the purpose of lodging him in jail to await his trial for the crime. More than a thousand men, many of them drunk or half drunk, met him as he entered the town, and but for the precautions taken by the officer they would have made short work with Felipe. Bareheaded, with a red sash around his waist, casting quick and malignant glances on either side, he was hurried along the middle of the street, guarded by a posse of twenty men with the sheriff at their head. The mob, yelling like demons, pressed close upon them, but no one dared to break through the line.

I had joined the crowd, impelled by curi

osity and that mysterious impulse that draws men together when they are in any way excited. As I was borne along with the mob, my attention was arrested by a young Mexican who, standing in his shirt-sleeves in the door of the Tigre, as the crowd was sweeping past, muttered through his clenched teeth:

"Malditas Yankees!" ("Cursed Yankees!") I caught his eye as he spoke, and bracing myself against the pressure of the moving mass, stopped to look at him. I had never before seen such power of malign expression in so young a face. He was but a youth, slender but compactly built, and of fairer skin than is common with Mexicans. The whole countenance expressed malevolence, but his eyes were nature's special label of one of her malignest creations. Only in two other human beings have I ever seen such eyes as those that glared upon me from that doorway. One was Wirsen, the snake-charmer, and the other was Seth Kinman, the old California bear-hunter and Indian-fighter. It was the eye of a wild beast, the baleful glitter you have seen in the eyes of snakes, panthers, catamounts, or other creatures of the reptile or feline kind.

"Who is that young Mexican?" I inquired of Drury Bond, a miner from Dragoon Gulch, as he was brushing past me.

"That is young Tiburcio Vasquez, the cunningest, sauciest little devil you ever saw. He would as soon put a dirk into you as to pare an apple. He is the chap who stabbed big John Davis for rudeness to his sister when he was drunk at the Tigre, one night last winter."

The scowl upon the young desperado's face deepened as the sheriff rode past at the head of his posse.

"Curse him! He shall have a taste of Mexican lead or steel yet!" he ejaculated fiercely.

It was perhaps well for him that this threat was not heard by any one but myself. Burning for vengeance, and inflamed by whisky, that mob was in no humor to be trifled with. The sheriff, a brave and capable man whose service in the Mexican War had won for him his title of major, had incurred the hatred of the lawless element in the mines by unwonted sagacity and energy in dealing with the offenders who had defied or eluded his predecessors. He was a quiet, low-voiced man of easy and even elegant manners, whose coolness, tact, and desperate courage had proved equal to every emergency, and who had made several hair

breadth escapes from death at the hands of these fellows.

I had met the young sister of Vasquez, Anita by name, in the little school that had been opened by my wife in the camp. The pupils were of many nationalities and shades of complexion, but they were molded into delightful unity by the kind, patient, and unselfish little schoolmistress. The Mexican girl was the beauty and pet of the school, having gentle ways, a pretty face, and a voice of remarkable sweetness. At that time social lines were not very rigidly drawn. in Sonora, and little Anita was not held responsible for the wild doings at the Tigre. As she grew in stature and beauty, many were the conjectures as to what would be her fate.

Saved from the mob by the coolness and courage of the sheriff, Felipe was tried, convicted, and hanged according to law; but there was no abatement of crime in Sonora and its vicinity. The highwaymen, or "roadagents," as they were facetiously called, became so daring that they actually robbed the banker D. O. Mills within sight of his banking-house in Columbia, a neighboring camp which was a rival of Sonora both in the laxity of its morals and in the richness of its gold diggings.

It was suspected and whispered among the miners that Vasquez, the young Mexican, had a hand in these robberies, and the Tigre was known to be a favorite resort of a number of desperate characters who lived nobody knew how, coming and going mysteriously between sunset and sunrise.

A robbery and murder of peculiar boldness and atrocity at Algerine Camp, a rich mining district a few miles west of Sonora, roused the whole country round about, and the perpetrators were pursued with such spirit that most of the band, including both Americans and Mexicans, were captured. It was discovered that Vasquez was one of the gang, but he managed to escape. The illfamed dance-house, the Tigre, still kept going, and maintained its evil name, but the sinister face of the precocious young criminal was no more seen in Sonora. Rumor said that he had joined Joaquin Murieta, then at the height of his notoriety as a highwayman. A ranchman affirmed that he had seen him near Knight's Ferry on the Stanislaus River, on the day following a stage robbery near Vallecito. "I know it was Vasquez," he said positively, "for no other human creature ever had two such eyes as his." Murieta's name, at this time, was a terror in Cali