"Your husband?" asked the city

woman.

"He's off fishing mostly. When he comes home, 'tisn't over pleasant, but we don't peck at each other as we used to."

"Why do you stay together?"

669

"'Cause we married for better or worse, we've had the better, and it might be worser than it is, it's weak not to keep a promise. Besides if I left him, folks would talk and p'raps leave their homes for less cause than I have, and then the village would go to the bad. You see marriage is an institution, like the church. You've got to have them both, else things would go to pieces. 'Tain't any use chipping off bits. I didn't begin right, that's all." "Why not?"

669

"'Cause I hadn't growed to see a husband and wife ought to go shares. He had it all, comfort, clothes, food, money, and when I fell sickly and asked for a let-up, he didn't know how to take it. So we got going on one another, when sudden I thought if I wanted to see my children again in the next world, wherever that may be, I'd better put up with things. So I take him easy now; it's heaps better. And I can't say as I want for food. Won't you have a glass of milk?"-and they went up the path to the house. "That's him coming now 'cross the bay," she added, pointing to a distant boat.

"Thank you," said Mrs. Delancey after a while, as she turned to leave.

"Wait a bit," answered the fisherman's wife. "I told you 'cause I knew you when you was a girl,”the lady started "and used to come 'round here. I knew your man, too; he boarded down to my father's, in

right smart man, a kindly gentleman, who did things; he hadn't much gift for talk." Mrs. Delancey flushed.

"Folks said you married him and 'twas heaven for quite a spell. Then I heard tell as how you wanted to keep going like as if you was young, and he was lonesome. I didn't let on I knew you when you got out of the boat, 'cause I hankered to see you ever sence I heard you was at the hotel. All I've got to say is,-it is better to put up with husbands than to get divorces, as you city folks call 'em. I ain't going to take the responsibility of mine, not to mention myself when Judgment Day comes, unless I keep 'round him."

"Are you Bessie Jones, that used to be?" said Mrs. Delancey, slowly.

"I be, and you're Lucy Triscom that was," and the two women shook hands.

"I'll bring my husband to see you some day," said Mrs. Delancey, as they parted.

"Much obleeged, but if it's all the same to you I'd rather you wouldn't."

That night Mrs. Delancey wrote her husband to come to her and then tore up the note and went out sailing again the next day. "Go the other way, towards Grindstone Cove," she bade the skipper.

"Queer how you nervous city folks like coves; kind o' quieting, like headache powders. We 'uns down this way like a stiff blow out to sea; makes you think of hidden troubles."

"Tell me who lives there?" she asked, as they sailed up into a sunny cove, on whose banks was a whitewashed, clapboarded house.

"Chapman's folks; they're a mixedup set; dunno 'zactly who belongs

to who. He done well fishing and treated his wife tol'ble, till some o' your discontented city folks came. along, beg your pardon, ma'am, and made her think she was of more value than she really was, and had a stiffer time than she ought'er, and instead of telling them to mind their own business, she listened, and he took to drinking."

"Why didn't she get divorced?" interrupted the lady.

"We don't do that kind o' thing down here; we grin and bear it."

"She might get separated," urged Mrs. Delancey.

"Thar'd allers be sunthin' to put up with. I don't say men, 'specially husbands, aren't trying, but wimmen are, too."

"But," still urged his companion, "if a man doesn't treat his wife as a gentleman should, if he drinks, beats, scolds her, don't understand her, I'd get divorced a hundred times."

"Look you here, ma'am; you've said too much to let it pass. A man don't drink when his wife likes him. If he beats her, it's her fault for putting up with it; she can stop that without getting divorced. I dunno what you mean about understanding her, women are so mysterious; 'pears to me some on 'em get the sulks just thinking 'bout how bad things are. I grant you, ma'am, thar are some things can't be talked of, if that's what you mean by being a gentleman, that's yer word. Wa'al, we uns down here behave ourselves, and our gals know it when they marry us."

Silence fell between the skipper and Mrs. Delancey, for the wind had sprung up and the sails had to be lowered. As they turned the headland, another house came into view. "And there!" she said, pointing to it.

"That's mine and that's my little gal." The lady put up her field glasses to see better, as the skipper waved his hat, and was answered by a fluttering apron. "It's our salute, ma'am. She's most as old as I be, but she'll allers be my little gal. She likes me, and I'm mighty fond of her," and the man's bronzed face took a deeper hue. "Tell me of it. Didn't you ever have any fuss'?"

"We did," and his jaw set. "I'll tell you, 'cause you're in trouble some way, p'raps, beg pardon, ma'am, only you have the looks of it. 'Twas this way. We'd been married a couple o' years or more, and we had our two children and she didn't have any right hard work to do, 'cause I did it, when we took one o' your city artists to board, 'cause he wanted to paint the place. Wa'al, he made her believe she warn't appreciated, that's his word, I ain't likely to forget it, and she got moon-y and to correcting my ways till I jest hadn't the heart to stand it, and I told her so plump, and she said I wasn't as I used to be, and I told her as how I hated to see her getting old 'fore her time, 'cause she used to be so pretty, like as she is now, and she lifted her hand to slap me, like as she never did before, and I put up mine. I never could tell,-I thought on it much,—whether I was going to strike back or jest not let her hit me. Anyway, our palms came flat together like children's slapjack, and she looked all of a sudden so handsome, 'cause she was so angry, that I just gave her a hug and wouldn't let her go till she got through crying, and then she wouldn't let me go till she'd done loving me. And the artist took another tack and skipped."

"Oh, if my husband would only do so!" almost sobbed Mrs. Delancey.

"You mean like that artist," (the skipper swore under his breath), "or like as she and I did? You ain't got any occasion to answer, and I oughter not to have asked you. Likely, ma'am, it's turn and turn about. This time it is he thinks he ain't appreciated, and it sours on him. Don't you set too much on yourself? pardon, ma'am." "He doesn't understand me!" "Very likely not, ma'am. You be hard to understand. 'Pears to me my little gal's loving me helped me to understand her."

IN

N the course of an hour's ramble through the famous Santo Spiritu quarter of Florence, one can hardly fail to come upon the birthplace not only of Italy's great fourteenth century litterateur, Giovanni Boccacio, but also of her equally illustrious fifteenth century astronomer and cosmographer, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli. "Pozzo" in Italian means a well, and this feature of the Toscanelli family name is accounted for on the ground that not far from the ancestral house at the intersection of modern Via Guicciardini and Via de' Velluti there was once a fountain of sweet water, to which the whole city had recourse and which gave its name as well to certain families in the neighborhood

as to the much-traversed street subsequently closed by the enlargement of the Pitti Palace. The year of Paolo's birth was 1397-more than half a century before Christopher Columbus, with whose name his own, by a strange chance, was destined most frequently to be linked, first saw the light in the neighboring citystate of Genoa. The paternal purse was not always well filled, but it permitted the education of the young Florentine at the University of Padua, some time between the years 1414 and 1424, after which he returned to his native city to spend there practically all the remainder of his long life. Already he had won renown as a mathematician, and tradition, tells us that the great Renais

sance architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, humbly acknowledged himself the inferior of the young Paduan graduate and besought him to lend his assistance in preparing the plans for the cupola of the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore. At any rate, certain it is that when one enters the Capello della Groce of the great Cathedral to-day he has pointed out to him by patriotic Florentines an exquisite marble gnomon, which is declared to have been constructed for the church by Toscanelli about the year 1468.

From the outset of his career the ingenious mathematician was favored with the companionship of great minds. It was his fortune to be contemporary with the flower of the house of Medici, and to be patronized successively by Cosimo the Elder, Piero, the gentle Giuliano, and the kind-hearted tyrant, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Leonardo da Vinci, the painter, though really belonging to a younger generation, was another of Toscanelli's brilliant fellow-townsmen and friends-the more congenial because of kindred zeal in the pursuit of mathematics and the sciences. Niccolò Machiavelli and Angiola Poliziano, also of the younger generation, were likewise neighbors and admirers. Leone Battista Alberti, the architect and painter, leaving Bologna soon after Toscanelli left Padua, joined himself in time to the Florentine coterie. Christoforo Landino, tutor of Lorenzo de' Medici and commentator on Dante and Virgil, was still another fifteenth century light of the favored city on the Arno. It is noteworthy that two of Toscanelli's most intimate friends were Germansaliens in blood and speech, but brothers in the fast widening circle

of Renaissance scholarship. These were Johannes Müller, the Königsberg geographer and astronomer, and Nicholas de Cusa, a cardinal of the Church, but none the less a close student of mathematics and science. Toscanelli was essentially a homestayer. It is known that he never set foot outside of Italy, rarely going even so far as Rome. That he was still able to draw the great intellects of his time so closely about him testifies the more convincingly to his widespread fame and the substantial character of his learning.

Unfortunately not one of the many books which he is known to have written on topics pertaining to geography, meteorology and agriculture has survived. We have, however, numerous contemporary references to his character and habits which leave us in no doubt as to the kind of man he actually was. Thus on the day of the great Florentine's death, in 1482, his good friend Bartholomew Fonzio, a professor of Eloquence, wrote in his Annali: "Paul Toscanelli, physician and distinguished philosopher, a great example of virtue, who always walked about with bared head even in the fiercest winter, . . . is dead on May 15, at Florence, his native place, aged eighty-five." Another writer informs us that Toscanelli “lived a life of extreme virtue, having no weight upon his conscience"; and still another, who knew the mathematician well, wrote of "Master Paolo, a Physician, Philosopher, and Astrologer, and a Man of Holy Life." He is declared to have been extremely devout, a lover of the Church, and much given to quiet works of charity-a scholar of the most pronounced type, yet not a recluse; a scientist, but also a man of

the strongest human instincts and sympathies.

Such was the man whom tradition has for more than three centuries represented as having been the real instigator of the Columbian discovery of America. Beginning with the Spaniard Bartholome Las Casas, who wrote his History of the Indies about the middle of the sixteenth century, a long line of historians reaching all the way down to the present have given implicit credence to the story. In one scholarly book we read that "Toscanelli decided the vocation of Columbus." In another we are assured that "Toscanelli led his age to the discovery of the transatlantic lands." A recent American writer declares that "this Florentine doctor was the first to plant in the mind of Columbus his aspirations for the truths of geography." And a brilliant Frenchman would have us believe that "Toscanelli was the inspirer of Columbus in the sense that it was he who at first indirectly, and afterwards directly, suggested to him the possibility of transatlantic navigation, and convinced him of it." During the past three or four years, however, there have arisen in some quarters grave suspicions that this view is simply one more of those strange delusions which insinuate themselves into our body of knowledge and pass unchallenged until some mind keener than the rest comes along to show them up in their true character. The genius of historical criticism is no respecter of traditions. Since the middle of the last century the critical historianthat arch-fiend of manuscripts and texts, heroic but thankless-has gone stalking through the fairy land which the earlier writers of history created for our enjoyment, striking fearlessly right and left, bedimming

haloes, throwing down crowns from their ancient resting places. and crushing treasured traditions at every step.

Thus, the strenuous Romulus and Remus of the story books are shown most likely to have been mere conveniences invented to vivify the humble beginnings of the city on the Tiber. King Alfred may have been guilty of allowing good cakes to be spoiled by the fire, but we are not to attribute to him conduct so unbecoming simply on the strength of the tale of Athelney. The Dighton rock inscription, so long an object of curiosity and awe among antiquarians, has been proved to be the work merely of some Algonquin Indians, not of Phoenicians who in primeval times sailed into Narragansett Bay and up the Taunton River. Oregon was indeed "saved," but not by the famous midwinter pilgrimage of the missionary Marcus Whitman. The cherry tree of the elder Washington went quite unharmed to its natural death. And now, in these latter days, there are those who calmly assure us that the whole story of how Columbus, about the year 1479, wrote to the Florentine geographer Toscanelli to inquire regarding the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward, and of how Toscanelli replied at length in terms which inspirited the Genoese navigator to his great task, is altogether apocryphal. One may well feel that in criticism of the "burned cakes" or the "cherry tree" type the game is not worth the candle. It makes no great difference whether the facts were one way or the other. But manifestly the Columbus-Toscanelli question is of another sort. The whole character of the discovery of America is vitally bound up in it. Neither the work of