of exhilaration produced by the healthful glow of Robert's spirit, began secretly to wish that it might close, and to be permitted to return to his solitary thoughts again. "What can I do for you?"

"Why, nothing," said Robert, looking rather confused, "since all is settled. The fact is, my old friend, as perhaps you have seen, I have very long had an eye upon your sister Rose ; yes, from the time we went together to the old school-house, where she now teaches children like what we were then. The war took me away, and in good time, for I doubt if Rose would ever have cared enough for me to be my wife, if I had stayed at home, a country lout, as I was getting to be, in shirt-sleeves and bare feet. But now, you see, I have come back, and this whole great war, to her woman's heart, is represented in me, and makes me heroic, so to speak, and strange, and yet her old familiar lover. So I found her heart tenderer for me than it was; and, in short, Rose has consented to be my wife, and we mean to be married in a week: my furlough permits little delay."

"You surprise me," said Septimius, who, immersed in his own pursuits, had taken no notice of the growing affection between Robert and his sister. "Do you think it well to snatch this little lull that is allowed you in the wild striving of war to try to make a peaceful home? Shall you like to be summoned from it soon? Shall you be as cheerful among dangers afterwards, when one sword may cut down two happinesses?"

"There is something in what you say, and I have thought of it," said Robert, sighing. "But I can't tell how it is; but there is something in this uncertainty, this peril, this cloud before us, that makes it sweeter to love and to be loved than amid all seeming quiet and serenity. Really, I think, if there were to be no death, the beauty of life would be all tame. So we take our chance, or our dispensation of Providence, and are going to love, and

to be married, just as confidently as if we were sure of living forever."

"Well, old fellow," said Septimius, with more cordiality and outgush of heart than he had felt for a long while, "there is no man whom I should be happier to call brother. Take Rose, and all happiness along with her. She is a good girl, and not in the least like me. May you live out your threescore years and ten, and every one of them be happy."

Little more passed, and Robert Hagburn took his leave with a hearty shake of Septimius's hand, too conscious of his own happiness to be quite sensible how much the latter was self-involved, strange, anxious, separated from healthy life and interests; and Septimius, as soon as Robert had disappeared, locked the door behind him, and proceeded at once to apply the silver key to the lock of the old strong box.

The lock resisted somewhat, being rusty, as might well be supposed after so many years since it was opened; but it finally allowed the key to turn, and Septimius, with a good deal of flutter at his heart, opened the lid. The interior had a very different aspect from that of the exterior; for, whereas the latter looked so old, this, having been kept from the air, looked about as new as when shut up from light and air two centuries ago, less or more. It was lined with ivory, beautifully carved in figures, according to the art which the mediæval people possessed in great perfection; and probably the box had been a lady's jewelcasket formerly, and had glowed with rich lustre and bright colors at former openings. But now there was nothing in it of that kind, — nothing in keeping with those figures carved in the ivory representing some mythical subjects, — nothing but some papers in the bottom of the box written over in an ancient hand, which Septimius at once fancied that he recognized as that of the manuscript and recipe which he had found on the breast of the young soldier. He eagerly seized them, but was infinitely disappointed to find that

they did not seem to refer at all to the subjects treated by the former, but related to pedigrees and genealogies, and were in reference to an English family and some member of it who, two centuries before, had crossed the sea to America, and who, in this way, had sought to preserve his connection with his native stock, so as to be able, perhaps, to prove it for himself or his descendants; and there was reference to documents and records in England in confirmation of the genealogy. Septimius saw that this paper had been drawn up by an ancestor of his own, the unfortunate man who had been hanged for witchcraft; but so earnest had been his expectation of something different, that he flung the old papers down with bitter indifference.

Then again he snatched them up, and contemptuously read them, those proofs of descent through generations of esquires and knights, who had been renowned in war; and there seemed, too, to be running through the family a certain tendency to letters, for three were designated as of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge; and against one there was the note, "he that sold himself to Sathan"; and another seemed to have been a follower of Wickliffe; and they had murdered kings, and been beheaded, and banished, and what not; so that the age-long life of this ancient family had not been, after all, a happy or very prosperous one, though they had kept their estate in one or another descendant, since the Conquest. It was not wholly without interest that Septimius saw that this ancient descent, this connection with noble families, and intermarriages with names, some of which he recognized as known in English history, all referred to his own family, and seemed to centre in

himself, the last of a poverty-stricken line, which had dwindled down into obscurity, and into rustic labor and humble toil, reviving in him a little; yet how little, unless he fulfilled his strange purpose! Was it not better worth his while to take this English position here so strangely offered him? He had apparently slain unwittingly the only person who could have contested his rights, the young man who had so strangely brought him the hope of unlimited life at the same time that he was making room for him among his forefathers. What a change in his lot would have been here, for there seemed to be some pretensions to a title, too, from a barony which was floating about and occasionally moving out of abeyancy!

"Perhaps," said Septimius to himself, "I may hereafter think it worth while to assert my claim to these possessions, to this position amid an ancient aristocracy, and try that mode of life for one generation. Yet there is something in my destiny incompatible, of course, with the continued possession of an estate. I must be, of necessity, a wanderer on the face of the earth, changing place at short intervals, disappearing suddenly and entirely; else the foolish, short-lived multitude and mob of mortals will be enraged with one who seems their brother, yet whose countenance will never be furrowed with his age, nor his knees totter, nor his force be abated; their little brevity will be rebuked by his age-long endurance, above whom the oaken roof-tree of a thousand years would crumble, while still he would be hale and strong. So that this house, or any other, would be but a restingplace of a day, and then I must away into another obscurity."

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I

HAVE been distressed, dear Fastidiosus, by your remonstrance concerning the performance at our college at Sweetbrier of a "stage play." You have heard the facts rightly; that it was given under the superintendence of the English professor, the evening before Commencement, "with many of the accessories of a theatre." You urge that it is unprecedented to have at a dignified institution, which aims at a high standard, under the superintendence of a professor, such a performance; that it excites the prejudices of some people against us; and you quote the sharp remarks of "David's Harp," the organ of the Dunkers. You urge that such things can be nothing more than the play of boys and girls, and are something worse than mere waste of time, for they set young people to thinking of the theatre, which is irretrievably sunk and only harmful. In your character of trustee, you are sorry it has been done, and beg that it may not be done again.

I beg you to listen to a patient stating of the case. It is not without precedent. When you were at Worms, in Germany, do you remember in the Luther memorial the superb figure of Reuchlin, on one of the outer corners ? One or two of the statues may be somewhat grander, but no other seemed to me so handsome, as it stood colossal on its pillar, the scholar's gown falling from the stately shoulders, and the face so fine there in the bronze, under the abundant hair and cap. Reuchlin is said to be the proper founder of the German drama. Before his time there had been, to be sure, some performing of miracle-plays, and perhaps things of a different sort. The German literary historians, however, make it an era when Reuchlin came as professor to Heidelberg, and, in 1497, set up a stage, with students for

actors, at the house of Johann, Kämmerer von Dalberg. He wrote his plays in Latin. If you wish, I can send you their titles. Each act, probably, was prefaced by a synopsis in German, and soon translations came into vogue, and were performed as well. On that little strip of level which the crags and the Neckar make so narrow, collected then, as now, a fair concourse of bounding youth. One can easily fancy how, when the prototypes of the trim Burschen of to-day stepped out in their representation, the applause sounded across to the vineyards about the Heiligenberg and Hirschgasse, and how now and then a knight and a dame from the court of the Kurfürst came down the Schlossberg to see it all. What Reuchlin began, came by no means to a speedy end. In the Jesuit seminaries in Germany, in Italy too, and elsewhere, as the Reformation came on, I find the boys were acting plays. This feature in the school was held out as an attraction to win students; and in Prague the fathers themselves wrote dramas to satirize the Protestants, introducing Luther as the comic figure. But what occurred in the Protestant world was more noteworthy. As the choral singing of the schoolboys affected in an important way the development of music, so the schoolplays had much to do with the development of the drama. Read Gervinus to see how for a century or two it was the schools and universities that remained true to a tolerably high standard, while in the world at large all nobler ideals were under eclipse. It was jocund Luther himself who took it under his especial sanction, as he did the fiddle and the dance, in his sweet large-heartedness finding Scriptural precedents for it, and encouraging the youths who came trooping to Wittenberg to relieve their wrestling with Aristotle and