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to be shot, for the books are charming pure and homely and householdy, yet not effeminate. Critics may sneer as much as they choose: it is such love as Vaughan's that Honorias value. Because a woman's nature is not proof against deterioration, because a large and long-continued infusion of gross blood, and perhaps even the monotonous pressure of rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub off the delicacy of a soul, may change its texture to unnatural coarseness and scatter ashes for beauty, women do exist, victims rather than culprits, coarse against their nature, hard, material, grasping, the saddest sight humanity can see. Such a woman can accept coarse men. They may come courting on all fours, and she will not be shocked. But women in the natural state want men to stand god-like erect, to tread majestically, and live delicately. Women do not often make an ado about this. They talk it over among themselves, and take men as they are. They quietly soften them down, and smooth them out, and polish them up, and make the best of them, and simply and sedulously shut their eyes and make believe there is n't any worst, or reason it away, a great deal more than I should think they would. But if you want to see the qualities that a woman spontaneously loves, the expression, the tone, the bearing that thoroughly satisfies her self-respect, that not only secures her acquiescence, but arouses her enthusiasm and commands her abdication, crucify the flesh, and read Coventry Patmore. Not that he is the world's great poet, nor Arthur Vaughan the ideal man; but this I do mean that the delicacy, the spirituality of his love, the scrupulous respectfulness of his demeanor, his unfeigned inward humility, as far removed from servility on the one side as from assumption on the other, and less the opponent than the offspring of self-respect, his thorough gentleness, guilelessness, deference, his manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such alone, as lead womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roar

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ing, rollicking Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as sharp, as bright as steel, and as "soulless, and you men, whoever, whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves of wire, there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she finds you, but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you. Be not deceived by her placability. "Here he is," she says to herself, "and something must be done about it. ied under Ossa and Pelion somewhere he must be supposed to have a soul, and the sooner he is dug into, the sooner it will be exhumed." So she digs. She would never have made you, nor of her own free-will elected you; but being made, such as you are, and on her hands in one way or another, she carves and chisels, and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue. She may succeed so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great, sad, monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the monument at once of her success and her failure, the object of her compassion, the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form into which her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not of sympathy. Perhaps she loves you with a remorseful, pitying, protesting love, and carries you on her shuddering shoulders to the grave. Probably, as she is good and wise, you will never find it out. A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of your muddy, stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference. "Water 's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a muck-puddle; and all the while the little brook that you patronize when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look down upon always, — the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and orchard and sweet

wild-wood, — singing with the birds and the blooms songs that you cannot hear; but they are heard by the silent stars, singing on and on into a broader and deeper destiny, till it pours, one day, its last earthly note, and becomes forevermore the unutterable sea.

And you are nothing but a ditch.

No, my friend, Lucy will drive with you, and talk to you, and sing your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,-you must bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under. It is not that you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write poetry. That is just as much discrimination as you have. Tell you to be gentle, and you think we want you to dissolve into milk-and-water; tell you to be polite, and you infer hypocrisy; to be neat, and you leap over into dandyism, fancying all the while that bluster is manliness. No, Sir. You may make shoes, you may run engines, you may carry coals; you may blow the huntsman's horn, hurl the base-ball, follow the plough, smite the anvil; your face may be brown, your veins knotted, your hands grimed; and yet you may be a hero. And, on the other hand, you may write verses and be a clown. It is not necessary to feed on ambrosia in order to become divine; nor shall one be accursed, though he drink

of the ninefold Styx. The Israelites ate angels' food in the wilderness, and remained stiff-necked and uncircumcised in

heart and ears. The white water-lily feeds on slime, and unfolds a heavenly glory. Come as the June morning comes. It has not picked its way daintily, passing only among the roses. It has breathed up the whole earth. It has blown through the fields and the barn-yards and all the common places of the land. It has shrunk from nothing. Its purity has breasted and overborne all things, and so mingled and harmonized all that it sweeps around your forehead and sinks into your heart as soft and sweet and pure as the fragrancy of Paradise. So come you, rough from the world's rough work, with all out-door airs blowing around you, and all your earth-smells clinging to you, but with a fine inward grace, so strong, so sweet, so salubrious that it meets and masters all things, blending every faintest or foulest odor of earthliness into the grateful incense of a pure and lofty life.

Thus I read and mused in the soft summer fog, and the first I knew the cars had stopped, I was standing on the platform, and Coventry and his knight were-where? Wandering up and down somewhere among the Berkshire hills. At some junction of roads, I suppose, I left them on the cushion, for I have never beheld them since. Tell me, O ye daughters of Berkshire, have you seen them,a princely pair, sore weary in your mountain-land, but regal still, through all their travel-stain? I pray you, entreat them hospitably, for their mission is "not of an age, but for all time."

GIVE.

"The vine shall give her fruit, and the ground shall give her increase, and the heavens shall give their dew."

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The Deacon's wife's hard face had blazed instantly into passionate scarlet. But I cared not for her, nor for man nor woman. For the words said themselves, and thrilled and sounded fearful to me also; they hurt me; they burnt from my tongue as melted iron might; and, scarcely knowing it, I rose up and emphasized with my forefinger. And her face, at those last four words, turned stony and whity-gray, like a corpse. I thought she would die. Oh, it was awful to think so, and to feel that she deserved it! For I did. I do now. For, reason as I will, I cannot help feeling as if a tinge of the poor helpless child's blood was upon my own garments. I do well to be angry. It is not that I desire any personal revenge. But I have a feeling, pleasure, it is almost all pity and pain, but yet a feeling that sudden death or lingering death would be small satisfaction of justice upon her for what she rendered to another.

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Her strong, hard, cruel nature fought tigerishly up again from the horrible blow of my news. She was frightened almost to swooning at the thing that I told and my denunciation, and the deep answering stab of her own conscience. But her angry iron will rallied with an effort which must have been an agony; her face became human again, and, looking straight and defiantly at me, she said, yet with difficulty,

"Ah! I'll see if my husband 'll hev sech things said to me! That's all!" And she turned and went straightway out of my house, erect and steady as

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and cried so bitterly, and talked in her strong Corkonian brogue, and rocked herself backwards and forwards, and shook abroad the great lambent banners of her cap-border,—a grotesque old woman, but sacred in her tender motherhood and her great grief. Her first coming was to peddle blackberries in the summer. I asked her if she picked them herself.

"Och thin and shure I've the childher to do that saam," said she. And what wonderful music must the voice of her youth have been! It was deep of intonation and heartfelt,-rich and smooth and thrilling yet, after fifty years of poverty and toil. "And id 's enough of thim that's in id!" she added, with a curious air of satisfaction and reflectiveness.

"How many children have you?" I inquired.

She laughed and blushed, old woman though she was; and pride and deep delight and love shone in her large, clear, gray eyes.

"I've fourteen darlins, thank God. for ivery wan of thim! And it's a purrty parthy they are!"

"Fourteen!" I exclaimed, “how lovely!" I stopped short and blushed. My heart had spoken. "But how ". I stopped again.

The old blackberry-woman answered me with tears and smiles. What a deep, rich, loving heart was covered out of sight in her squalid life! It makes me proud that I felt my heart and my love in some measure like hers; and she saw it, too.

"An' it's yersilf, Ma'm, that has the mother's own heart in yez, to be sure! An' I can see it in your eyes, Ma'm! But it's the thruth it 's mighty scarce intirely! I do be seein' the ladies that's not glad at all for the dear childher that 's sint 'em, and sure it 's sthrange, Ma'm! Indade, it was with the joy I did be cryin' over ivery wan o' me babies; and I could aisy laugh at the pain, Ma'm! And sure now it's cryin' I am betimes because I'll have no more!"

The dear, beautiful, dirty old woman! I cried and laughed with her, and I bought ten times as many blackberries

as I wanted; and Mrs. O'Reilly and I were fast friends.

She and hers, her "ould man,” her sons and her daughters, were thenceforth our ready and devoted retainers, dexterous and efficient in all manner of service, generous in acknowledging any return that we could make them; respectful and self-respectful; true men and women in their place, not unfit for a higher, and showing the same by their demeanor in a low one.

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They came in and went out among us for a long time, in casual -employments, until, with elaborate prefaces and doubtful apologetic circumlocutions, shyly and hesitatingly, Mrs. O'Reilly managed to prefer her petition that her youngest girl, Bridget, by name, there were a few junior boys,- might be taken into my family as a servant. I asked the old woman a few questions about her daughter's experiences and attainments in the household graces and economies; could not remember her; thought I had seen all the "childher"; found that she had been living with Mrs. Deacon Adams, and had not been at my house. It was only for form's sake that I catechized ; Bridget came, of course.

She was such a maiden as her mother must have been, one of Nature's own ladies, but more refined in type, texture, and form, as the American atmosphere and food and life always refine the children of European stock,-slenderer, more delicate, finer of complexion, and with a soft, exquisite sweetness of voice, more thrilling than her mother's, larger and more robust heartfeltness of tone, and with the same, but shyer ways, and swift blushes and smiles. In one thing she differed she was a silent, reticent girl; her tears were not so quick as her mother's, nor her words; she hid her thoughts. She had learned it of us secretive Americans, or had inherited it of her father, a silent, though cheery man.

Her glossy wealth of dark-brown hair, her great brown eyes, long eyelashes, sensitive, delicately cut, mobile red lips, oval face, beautifully formed arms and

hands, and lithe, graceful, lady-like movements, were a sweet household picture, sunshiny with unfailing good-will, and of a dexterous neat-handedness very rare in her people. My husband was looking at her one day, and as she tripped away on some errand he observed,

"She is a graceful little saint. All her attitudes are beatitudes."

Bridget was pure and devout enough for the compliment; and I had not been married so long but that I could excuse the evidence of his observation of another, for the sake of the neatness of his phrase. I should have thought the unconscious child incongruously lovely amongst brooms and dust-pans, pots- and kettles, suds and slops and dishwater, had I not been about as much concerned among them myself.

Bridget had been with me only a day or two, when a friend and fellow-matron, in the course of an afternoon call, apprised me that there were reports that Bridget O'Reilly was a thief,- in fact, that she had been turned away by Mrs. Adams for that very offence, which she told me "out of kindness, and with no desire to injure the girl; but there is so much wickedness among these Irish!" She had heard this tale, through only one person, from Mrs. Adams herself.

This troubled me; yet I should have quickly forgotten it. I met the same story in several other directions within a few days; and now it troubled me more. Women are suspicious creatures. I don't like to confess it, but it is true. Besides, servants do sometimes steal. And little foreign blood of the oppressed nationalities has truth in it, or honesty. Why should it? Why should the subjugated Irish, any more than the Southern slaves, beaten down for centuries by brutal strength, seeking to exterminate their religion and their speech, to terrify them out of intelligence and independence, to crush them into permanent poverty and ignorance, why should they tell the truth or respect property? Falsehood and theft are that cunning which is the natural and necessary weapon of weak

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