to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus, who listened to his story. "Not by Hæmonian hills the Thracian bard, There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation, for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when Napoleon and the moderns generally were born. He said that one day, when the troubles between the Colonies and the mother country first broke out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one Doane, an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said to him, "Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the Colonies to undertake to gain their independence." He remembered well General Washington, and how he rode his horse along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to show us how he looked. "He was a rather large and portly-looking man, a manly and resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his horse.""There, I'll tell you, this was the way with Washington." Then he jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show as if he were waving his hat. Said he, "That was Washington." He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and was much pleased when we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account agreed with the written. "O," he said, "I know, I know! I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide awake, and likes to know everything that's going on. O, I know!" In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of the clam which I had eaten, and I was obliged to confess to our host that I was no tougher than the cat he told of; but he answered, that he was a plainspoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. At any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and I was made quite sick by it for a short time, while he laughed at my expense. I was pleased to read afterward, in Mourt's Relation of the Landing of the Pilgrims in Provincetown Harbor, these words: "We found great muscles (the old editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams) and very fat and full of seapearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick that did eat, as well sailors as passengers, but they were soon well again. It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a similar experience that I was so like them. Moreover, it was a valuable con firmation of their story, and I am prepared now to believe every word of Mourt's Relation. I was also pleased to find that man and the clam lay still at the same angle to one another. But I did not notice sea pearl. Like Cleopatra, I must have swallowed it. I have since dug these clams on a flat in the Bay and observed them. They could squirt full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on the sand. At length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the chimney-corner, took off his stockings and shoes, warmed his feet, and having had his sore leg freshly salved, went off to bed; then the fool made bare his knotty-looking feet and legs, and followed him; and finally the old man exposed his calves also to our gaze. We had never had the good fortune to see an old man's legs before, and were surprised to find them fair and plump as an infant's, and we thought that he took a pride in exhibiting them. He then proceeded to make preparations for retiring, discoursing meanwhile with Panurgic plainness of speech on the ills to which old humanity is subject. We were a rare haul for him. He could commonly get none but ministers to talk to, though sometimes ten of them at once, and he was glad to meet some of the laity at leisure. The evening was not long enough for him. As I had been sick, the old lady asked if I would not go to bed,-it was getting late for old people; but the old man, who had not yet done his stories, said, "You ain't particular, are you?" "O no," said I, "I am in no hurry. I believe I have weathered the Clam cape." "They are good," said he; "I wish I had some of them now." "They never hurt me," said the old lady. "But then you took out the part that killed a cat," said I. At last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, which he promised to resume in the morning. Yet, after all, one of the old ladies who came into our room in the night to fasten the fire-board, which rattled, as she went out took the precaution to fasten us in. Old women are by nature more suspicious than old men. However, the winds howled around the house, and made the fire-boards as well as the casements rattle well that night. It was probably a windy night for any locality, but we could not distinguish the roar which was proper to the ocean from that which was due to the wind alone. The sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant and interesting to those who live near it. When I was leaving the shore at this place the next summer, and had got a quarter of a mile distant, ascending a hill, I was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea, as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that I caught my breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant, and I turned about, expecting to see one of the Atlantic steamers thus far out of her course, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. There was a low bank at the entrance of the Hollow, between me and the ocean, and suspecting that I might have risen into another stratum of air in ascending the hill,which had wafted to me only the ordinary roar of the sea,-I immediately descended again, to see if I lost hearing of it; but, without regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in a minute or two, and yet there was scarcely any wind all the while. The old man said that this was what they called the "rut," a peculiar roar of the sea before the wind changes, which, however, he could not account for. He thought that he could tell all about the weather from the sounds which the sea made. Before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and I ran over to the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean. The old woman of eighty-four winters was already out in the cold morning wind, bareheaded, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up the cow to milk. She got the breakfast with despatch, and without noise or bustle; and meanwhile the old man resumed his stories, standing before us, who were sitting, with his back to the chimney, and ejecting his tobacco-juice right and left into the fire behind him, without regard to the various dishes which were there preparing. At breakfast we had eels, buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and tea. The old man talked a steady stream; and when his wife told him he had better eat his breakfast, he said: "Don't hurry me; I have lived too long to be hurried." I ate of the apple-sauce and the doughnuts, which I thought had sustained the least detriment from the old man's shots, but my companion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of the hearth. But on comparing notes afterward, I told him that the buttermilk cake was particularly exposed, and I saw how it suffered repeatedly, and therefore I avoided it; but he declared that, however that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce was seriously injured, and had therefore declined that. After breakfast we looked at his clock, which was out of order, and oiled it with some "hen's grease," for want of sweet oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were not tinkers or pedlers; meanwhile he told a story about visions, which had reference to a crack in the clockcase made by frost one night. He was curious to know to what religious sect we belonged. He said that he had been to hear thirteen kinds. of preaching in one month, when he was young, but he did not join any of them, he stuck to his Bible. There was nothing like any of them in his Bible. While I was shaving in the next room, I heard him ask my companion to what sect he belonged, to which he answered: "O, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood." "What's that?" he asked, "Sons o' Temperance?" Finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was pleased to find that we called by the same name that he did, and paying for our entertainment, we took our departure; but he followed us out of doors, and made us tell him the names of the vegetables which he had raised from seeds that came out of the Franklin. They were cabbage, broccoli, and parsley. As I had asked him the names of so many things, he tried me in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both wild and cultivated. It was about half an acre, which he cultivated wholly himself. Besides the common garden vegetables, there were Yellow-Dock, Lemon Balm, Hyssop, Gill-go-over-the-ground, Mouse-ear, Chick-weed, Roman Wormwood, Elecampane, and other plants. As we stood there, I saw a fish-hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond. แ "There," said I, "he has got a fish." "Well," said the old man, who was looking all the while, but could see nothing, "he didn't dive, he just wet his claws." And, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said that they often do, but he merely stooped low enough to pick him out with his talons; but as he bore his shining prey over the bushes, it fell to the ground, and we did not see that he recovered it. That is not their practice. Thus, having had another crack with the old man, he standing bareheaded under the eaves, he directed us "athwart the fields," and we took to the beach again for another day, it being now late in the morning. It was but a day or two after this that the safe of the Provincetown Bank was broken open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we learned that our hospitable entertainers did at least transiently harbor the suspicion that we were the men. John Jay. BORN in New York, N. Y., 1817. HAPPY RESULTS FROM A POLICY OF JUSTICE. [Address to the Union League Club of New York, 23 June, 1866.] HEN after many weary months, and a sad waste of life and treasure in a vain attempt to escape the issue, our cautious but honest President yielded at last to the absolute necessity of the case and the peremptory demand of the people, and boldly struck at slavery, the European world recognized the truth which should have been told to them from the start, that as the Rebellion was the work of slavery, the war waged for the Constitution and the Union, to be waged successfully, must become a war for freedom. The Proclamation of Emancipation, as our ministers abroad promptly assured us, instantly opened the eyes and touched the liberal heart of Europe. Its people saw that we were fighting their battles-the battle of human rights against the usurpations of a class aristocracy, and from that hour no Government of Europe, however hostile to us, nor any number of such Governments combined, would have dared to brave the moral sentiment of their own people and of the Christian world by intervening in furtherance of a war for slavery. We learned too late that in denying the simple fact that slavery was the cause and object of the Rebellion, and in presumptuously announcing that slavery should continue just the same whether we succeeded or failed, we had played into the hands of our enemies at home, and had enabled our foreign foes to heap upon us insult and wrong and to prolong and intensify the struggle. With the adoption of the policy of justice forced upon the Government by the people, the God of Justice smiled upon our cause, the slaves rallied in defence of their country's flag, and that flag advanced by land and sea, until was accomplished a triumph such as the world had never seen before, and at which it has not yet ceased to wonder. To that triumph, signally postponed until we had inaugurated emancipation as a matter of military necessity, and at the same time of humanity and of right, may be applied with equal truth the solemn reminder of Madison at the close of the war of our Revolution, embodied in the address of the Continental Congress: "Let it ever be remembered that the rights for which we have contended were the rights of human nature." IF John Ross Browne. BORN in Ireland, 1817. DIED at Oakland, Cal., 1875. THE HISTORY OF MY HORSE, SALADIN. [Yusef; or the Journey of the Frangi. 1853.] F there was any one thing in which I was resolved to be particular it was in the matter of horses. Our journey was to be a long one, and experience had taught me that much of the pleasure of travelling on horseback depends upon the qualities of the horse. Yusef had already VOL. VII.-22 |